Sharon contributes to the ongoing inter-faith dialogue

As a strategy to dispute the notion that Islam is inherently a violent religion, the current one is singularly abysmal. So in the spirit of inter-faith dialogue, I’d like to offer some helpful suggestions to my Islamist friends.

For one thing, you’ll want to ease up a little on the nun-killing. Killing pious old ladies, you see, always looks bad. Then, if you’re truly bent on demonstrating the intrinsic peaceableness of your religion and its tolerant inclusiveness of others, you’ll probably want to lay off of the firebombing of their places of worship in places as diverse as Iraq, the Palestinian territories, and Nigeria, cease calls for the assassination of their leaders, and keep the violent protests to the barest minimum. Oh, and it would help to demonstrate the falsifiability of the proposition “Islam is a religion of peace – discuss” if forced conversions of abductees weren’t such a prominent feature of its practice. Basically, proceed along the assumption that, when calling for religious tolerance, it is helpful to demonstrate your commitment to it by, say, not attempting to eradicate the religions of others.

You would hardly think advance planning required to orchestrate a “Day of Rage” for the adherents of a religion whose extremists seem more than capable of spontaneous incitement to violence. They’re rather self-motivating in that respect, not generally needing much in the way of whipping up to find themselves in a state of fury, you could say. Far from requiring the scheduling of a designated holiday to generate it, rage is the one thing that’s not in short supply in jihadi circles these days. Personally, I’d have recommended something more along the lines of an “Extended Period of Anger Management” instead, but that’s just me.

The correct response to a meditative discursion on the respective roles of faith and reason in the modern world containing a six century old quote by a dusty and long dead Byzantine emperor, if deemed to be offensive, is not a campaign of violence and intimidation conducted by the barely literate. The reaction is such that even those who wouldn’t know the Emperor of Byzantium from a papal discourse from a hole in the wall are led to admire the old boy’s perspicacity and wonder if he was on to something.

We’re often reminded of the great flowering of Islam circa the European Dark Ages that brought us innovations like the translated works of the ancient Greeks, the spectacle, and algebra (thanks for that). But a thousand odd years later, it’s time to wonder if perhaps we’re not resting on our laurels a little. I don’t mean to be hasty or anything, but it’s time to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and stop basking in our former glory.

Shhh… It's a conspiracy, and you're invited

People commemorated the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in manifold ways.

Some lit candles. Some observed a moment of silence. Some held inter-faith vigils. Others took the occasion to rehash some of their favorite 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Come again?

While it may sound bizarre and, frankly, downright delusional to you and me, informed citizens of the world, apparently there are swarms of people who believe that, in no particular order:

1. The Bush administration did it.
2. The CIA did it.
3. The Mossad did it.
4. The Illuminati did it.
5. Green-speckled fin-shaped alien life forms from another galaxy did it.

(Note: Options are not mutually exclusive.)

Aside from everything else, you would think that the mere fact of these tinfoil hat types going about the place freely, spouting all sorts of rubbish accusing their government of the cold-hearted murder of its own people without any apparent fear of that same government, would cause some cognitive dissonance. But no, there they are posing for cameras and chatting it up with the media and proudly flaunting “911 truth” T-shirts, just like in that episode of the Simpsons where Homer wears a cap that reads WPP – short for Witness Protection Program.

Perhaps my favorite 9/11 conspiracy theory is the one about the 4000 Jews not showing up to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks.

I’ve always wondered how that one was supposed to work. For one thing, how was the call to stay home supposed to have been transmitted? By way of Zionist decoder rings, one presumes, after a quick consultation with the International Zionist Registry to see who qualifies? What level of Jewish parentage is deemed sufficient to merit a warning? If your half-brother on your mother’s uncle’s side is married to a proctologist, would that count? Oy, the logistics!

Besides, anyone who knows anything at all about Jewish people knows that we can’t keep a secret. The only thing a Jew loves more than argumentation is gossip. A real Jew does not make your fancy distinctions between his business and other people’s business. Before there was instantaneous transmission of digital data over electrical wires, there were Jews. Now imagine 4000 Jews keeping mum about a secret so pivotal, so historical, so epic, that, if known, would entitle the bearer of it to dine out on the strength of this story alone for years to come. You see what I mean? The thing refutes itself.

Imagine Shlomo is at home on September 10 when his phone rings.

Mysterious Man: Shlomo, is that you?
Shlomo: Listen, I told you I’m not interested. Will you leave me alone now? I just got the kids to sleep.
MM: Shlomo, don’t go to work tomorrow.
Shlomo: What’s that? Speak up! You think it’s so quiet here I can hear you whisper? What are you, some kind of pervert? Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Go find some other feygeleh to bother.

And the first thing Shlomo would do after hanging up the phone is call his family and friends to tell them about it. “Would you believe? I got this shmuck on the phone, tells me take the day off. So I says, what am I? Made out of money? You think I’m a man of leisure, can afford to sit home all day?”

You get the idea.

I know that this whole idea of a shadowy and sinister cabal of powerful Zionists is enjoying something of a resurgence these days. Over in the Arab world, the idea is so much in vogue that during prime-time Ramadan in 2002, viewers throughout the region were treated to a lavish Egyptian 30-part dramatization of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the notorious, turn-of-the-last-century, anti-Semitic czarist forgery that even the Russians don’t believe anymore. It proved such a winning formula that the Syrians followed suit with their own 29-part dramatization shortly thereafter.

This is all very much in line with the thinking of attendees at the 2002 Organization of the Islamic Conference, who gave Malaysia’s then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad a standing ovation for a speech during which he stated that “Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” Just yesterday, Sudan’s president claimed that protests against the genocide of its population in Darfur were “invariably organized by Zionist Jewish organizations”, and that any attempts to inject a peacekeeping force into the country would be interpreted as doing Israel’s bidding.

In a sign of the times, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is severely restricted in its European birthplace, but is a runaway bestseller in Turkey and the Arab world (not otherwise known for a voracious consumption of literature). Other anti-Semitic myths by and large eschewed by their Christian originators, such as the infamous blood libel, have been enthusiastically embraced by a new generation of Muslim youths. And do I even need to get into Holocaust denial?

When not plotting spectacular attacks against their own civilians, Jews and their American lackeys keep busy cooking up AIDS, prostitution, tsunamis, earthquakes, and avian flu. While these last are universally unsavory activities, not so the 9/11 attacks, which Muslims in the Palestinian territories and many European countries marked by celebrating in the streets. It has always struck me as peculiarly ironic that the demographic group whose members greeted the attacks of 9/11 with unmitigated joy is also most likely to believe them a Jewish/American plot. Does that make them, ipso facto, supporters of the Mossad and CIA? Or do people eventually just get used to harboring these kinds of internal contradictions without feeling any particular need to resolve them?

We’re often reminded about the world’s 1.2 billion Moslems, usually with the implicit threat of the harm that could result should we incur their wrath (cf. Danish cartoon controversy). [Editor’s note: These numbers have recently swelled to 1.5 billion in the aftermath of Pope Benedict’s comments. The following calculations use the conservative figure.] By way of comparison, the world’s Jewish population is estimated at about 12 million. Math aficionados among you will no doubt have already calculated that this represents 1% of the global Muslim population.

Statistically, then, this means that for every 100 Muslims suffering under the yoke of Jewish domination, there is a single Jewish puppet-master overseeing their subjugation. No matter how highly you may think of Jewish accomplishments in the arts and sciences, or how overrepresented in the political establishment, there’s no getting over that it’s a pretty tall order.

And that is, of course, to neglect the fact that most Jews in the media tend to be outspoken leftists, of whom Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now are only a few examples. You’d also have to ignore stridently anti-Israel Jewish intellectuals like Noam Chomsky. Not to mention that Jews who are prominent in so-called human rights organizations, like Philip Roth of Human Rights Watch or Adam Shapiro of the International Solidarity Movement, tend to be disproportionately critical of Israel. (Shapiro, for example, led a team of “activists” to be used as human shields during the recent war in Lebanon, apparently convinced that the entire population of South Lebanon was insufficient for the purpose. I’d like to see this contingent traipse into Haifa and openly dare Nasrallah to harm them. No, that trick only works when the opposing side has some humanitarian feeling.)

I must say, for a people who are frequently accused of dominating world media, we Jews are not doing a very good job. Take Israel’s recent conflicts in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, for example. If Zionists are really bent on world domination, then, in light of much of the reporting we’ve seen, we’d have to be abysmally incompetent at it. I’ll venture to guess that someone over at World Zionist Conspiracy headquarters is going to get the sack. I’m much mistaken if heads aren’t rolling there as we speak.

We can conclude that the whole Jewish-domination-of-the-world theory has some glaring holes in it. For one thing, this was the theory in vogue at a time when Jews were being herded into cattle cars to be incinerated in Nazi concentration camps. Throughout history, the perception of Jewish domination is usually directly correlated with periods of their most acute vulnerability.

It brings to mind that old WWII-era joke. Two Jews are riding on a train when one of them notices the other is reading Der Sturmer. Outraged, he cries out, “Moshe, are you out of your mind? Why are you reading this Nazi rag?”

Moshe replies, “I used to read the Jewish newspaper, but what did I find? Jewish-owned businesses closed down and looted, Jews persecuted and attacked, Jewish women and children murdered. So depressing! I felt terrible! But in Der Sturmer, I read that Jews own the banks, Jews control the media, Jews are rich and powerful, Jews run the world. You know how good this makes me feel?”

These days, when neo-Nazi Web site StormFront rails against Israeli oppression of the Palestinians and leftist Indymedia debates whether Judaism, not Zionism, is in fact a form of racism (to cite just two examples I encountered while writing this), when David Duke lauds Cindy Sheehan, when hard right meets hard left in anti-Israel unity – well, maybe it’s time to take a page from Moshe, and tune in to a little Arab TV.

RIP, Anastasia DeSousa

For 18-year old Dawson College student Anastasia DeSousa, yesterday began as a regular day at school. But by 1:30 in the afternoon, she would have been shot by a gunman on a rampage, along with 20 others.

The other 20 wounded would survive the day.

I am haunted by the image of Anastasia’s family, frantic with worry, searching Montreal-area hospitals for their daughter and unable to find her. They were certain they’d seen her on TV being carried into an ambulance with a wound in her arm. They asked Bell Canada to trace the whereabouts of her cell phone; the carrier reported that the phone was in the building and had changed locations three times that afternoon.

At various times throughout the day, reporters interviewed her mother and aunt and chronicled their mounting concern. They wouldn’t find out the truth until after 9 pm – that Anastasia lay dead at the scene of the crime.

I feel for all the young students who had to flee in panic for their lives, many of whom sustained serious injuries. But I weep for the DeSousa family, as much for their loss as for the manner of it.

A Dawson student called a Montreal radio station earlier in the day and described how a badly wounded girl lay shaking between her and her friend James.

When the gunman trained his weapon on James and told him to check if there were police nearby, James pleaded to bring the wounded girl to safety. According to the witness, the gunman asked, “Is she dead?”

James felt for the girl’s pulse and replied that she was still alive. Chillingly, according to the caller’s account, the gunman said, “Not anymore,” and pumped several more bullets into the girl’s body.

I don’t have any reason to doubt the caller’s veracity, but I don’t know if the story is true. And I don’t know if the wounded girl in question was indeed Anastasia. Another witness described seeing the lifeless body of a girl with long, curly brown hair, but wasn’t sure if she was still alive. I have no reason to connect the girl with the long, curly hair to Anastasia. I don’t even know what she looked like. But all the same, I can’t stop speculating.

And yet, in all the tales of horror and panic, a few stand out and comfort me.

A 16-year old girl recounts trying to find her mother and sister in the shopping plaza attached to the college. They had gone to the bathroom when reports of the attacks began circulating in the mall. She ran to find them, and when a man tried to grab her arm, probably to lead her out of danger, she ruefully recalls punching him in the face.

A Dawson student worried about his brother, also a student at the college, was relieved to discover that his brother had chosen that day to play hooky.

A female student who found herself in the college atrium when the gunman entered and began shooting remembers a fellow student turning to her and saying, reassuringly, “Don’t worry, it will be OK.” Another female student, unaware of the cause of the pandemonium, found her arm yanked by a visiting student from another college, who pushed her to the elevator where they descended to a safer location.

One young woman told reporters that she would continue to attend Dawson as usual, because life must go on and she needed an education.

I like to think that I too would exhibit an admirable coolness and presence of mind, ushering people to safety while murmuring words of encouragement. But the truth is, I am more likely to be found cowering under a desk screaming repeatedly, “We're all going to die!” So I find these vignettes of spunk and sense and serendipity oddly reassuring. They demonstrate that, like the student said, life goes on.

Just not for Anastasia DeSousa.

All information, except where indicated, courtesy of the Montreal Gazette's superb coverage of this tragedy.

Memo to self: While you were away

If you’ve been reading my blog regularly – which I’m sure you have, because I can sense you’re a person of impeccable taste – then it will not have escaped you that I spent last week in NY.

As a result, I was a little less well-informed than usual. For one thing, I only had access to Russian-language newspapers at Alexei’s mother’s place. She listened to talk radio a lot, but as that too was in Russian I had to rely on Alexei’s distinctly uninspired translations to learn the news of the day.

But it has come to my attention that, in what will surely be ranked as one of History’s Worst Ideas, comparable only to the flat-earth fiasco and staring directly at solar eclipses, Jack Layton has suggested – apparently with a straight face – that the increasingly brutal death toll inflicted on Canadian soldiers by the Taliban has somehow made it an enticing negotiating partner.

Someone – I forget exactly who, but, well, someone smart – wondered just how those negotiations would go. Do we allow them to stone adulterers only, and not homosexuals? (If so, does that mean we can send Svend as part of the negotiating team?) Do we offer to allow them to kill only a certain percentage of us? I picture it going something like this:

Chief Negotiator Layton: 20 percent. You can kill 20 percent and no more.
Mullah Whosis: 40. I won’t go lower.
CNL: 30. And I’ll make sure it’s a nice diverse mix.
MW: Throw in Svend and it’s a deal.

A pro-NDP site crowed that even Churchill had negotiated with Hitler, as if this were some kind of definitive rhetorical triumph. I’m not sure where the NDP gets their sources, but every hitherto unrevealed document I’ve unearthed indicates that they’re talking out of their hats – that is to say, utterly mistaken. But in general it’s true that Hitler was amenable to negotiation, signing a cornucopia of treaties: the Munich Agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Release of Liability Waiver – oh wait, that was me. And look how well those went. It wasn’t so much that Hitler was bashful about signing on the dotted line as that, having done so, he gaily went about violating them before the ink was yet dry.

The pacts, in any event, did have some benefits. Only thing is, they accrued entirely to Hitler. They bought him needed time and cover with which to flesh out his schemes for world domination, and it gave his enemies a sense of security that couldn’t be falser. Just ask Stalin how he felt about that pact when the Nazis were marching on the road to Moscow. Not too good, I’m thinking. Probably a little green about the gills. A biography of Stalin chronicles him sinking into a three-day depression over the big betrayal by his buddy Adolf.

At the time, indeed, it was more difficult to discern Hitler’s true motivations than it is now to discern the Taliban’s, which makes the whole idea that much less excusable. This is, after all, the group that allowed numerous terrorist attacks against American interests to be launched from its soil, including those of 9/11. Even Hitler didn’t need to overrun half of Europe before it became clear he wasn’t the most desirable negotiating partner.

And I’m not sure how the idea gained currency that if our soldiers become engaged in anything resembling actual combat, then the mission must be aborted immediately. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a standing army if the signal for their retreat is bloodshed. If Canadian values are so little worth upholding that we cannot shed Canadian blood in their defense, then surely we deserve defeat.

Sadly, by the side of the other proposals proffered by the bright minds at last week’s NDP youth convention in Montreal (a sampling: “WHEREAS the core NDP principles are Appeasement, Anti-Americanism, and a discredited Socialism”), Layton’s idea starts to look like the eminently reasonable proposition of a seasoned statesman.

Which brings to two the total number of wreckages I missed last week in my home town – the other being the damage wreaked by a Molotov cocktail thrown through the entrance of a Jewish boys’ school in Outremont.

This is all too reminiscent of the firebombing in 2002 of another Montreal-area Jewish school, the United Talmud Torah in Saint Laurent, which happens to be my own alma mater. In fact, my niece and nephew attended the school (or rather, the attached high school) at the time the firebombing occurred. Strangely, both attacks targeted not synagogues, the symbols of Jewish religious faith, but the places where Jewish children learn. Have Canadian Jewish children become a new front in the “war on terror”?

I wonder if it’s significant that both major attacks on Canadian Jewish scholastic institutions took place in Montreal.

The attack on the Taldos Yakov Yosef boys’ school follows a heated debate about anti-Semitism in Quebec sparked by this article by Barbara Kay of the National Post, penned in response to the massive pro-Hezbollah rally (let’s call it what it is, shall we?) that took place last month and was attended by a number of prominent Quebec politicians. Federal and provincial, federalist and separatist – and a number of permutations thereof – they united across the political divide to speak as one against Israel, alongside the supporters of terror. No wonder, in such a climate, that anti-Jewish extremists feel emboldened to carry out terror attacks against Jewish institutions.

Sure, we had some shocked denunciations by political figures. Much more hearteningly, Monday’s Montreal Gazette featured a full-page ad by a group called FAST: Fighting Anti-Semitism Together, a coalition of non-Jewish Canadian leaders standing up against anti-Semitism in Canada. It’s comforting to know there are people who actually like us.

Perhaps one day, an arrest will be made in the Taldos Yakov Yosef firebombing case. And just maybe, when the culprit’s identity is made public, Jack Layton will propose negotiating with him.

I remember Joseph Ryan Allen

Written in collaboration with Project 2,996, a tribute to the victims of 9/11.



Five years ago today, Joseph Ryan Allen, born February 6, 1962, went to work as usual at the Cantor Fitzgerald offices in the World Trade Center, where he worked as a bond broker.

A picture of him at the time shows a handsome man with a winning smile and movie-star good looks. And, in fact, Joe (as he was known to his friends) lived in Los Angeles for seven years trying to make it as an actor, finally moving back to New York where he would eventually come to work for Cantor Fitzgerald. On September 11, 2005, the friends he had made in Los Angeles would hold a memorial service in his honor.

He came from a large, close-knit family. He had three older brothers, Mike, John, and Kevin, and a younger sister, Jennifer, who relied on Joe for emotional support during their mother’s terminal struggle with cancer. Their mother, who succumbed in 2000, would never know the pain of outliving her son; nor would their father, who predeceased him.

Friends described him as a sociable fellow, a bon vivant who enjoyed wine, women, and good company, but who was always available to talk about matters of a more intimate nature when you needed him. Friends called him “lively, tempestuous, sensitive, randy, fearless, able to sniff out BS in a heartbeat and unable to abide same… a traveler, a lover of exotic women, cared deeply for his family, loved to get a few drinks in him... in short - a vibrant soul.” He would always be there with “the perfect advice, no matter the time of day.”

As a youth, he was a sportsman and an athlete, with infectious good humor and optimism. Friends remember spending countless hours with Joe laughing, playing touch football, whiffle ball, basketball, and, memorably, Strat-O-Matic baseball at the Allen house in Yonkers. His brother and sister would later establish the Joseph Ryan Allen Memorial Award for baseball in his name at Columbia University.

A friend who went to Fordham Prep school in Bronxville with Joe, and later to Fordham University, remembers him as a popular guy, a huge Earth, Wind & Fire fan who would spontaneously burst out singing the tunes of his favorite band. A former roommate from his days in Los Angeles remembers, years later, Joe dancing in the hallway to Earth, Wind & Fire – a moment that cemented their friendship.

A former female neighbor paints a picture of a man with infallible courtesy, someone who would hold the door open for you or get your luggage, but never in an uncomfortable, overly familiar way. He was unfailingly polite, even when inconvenienced. “Joe would come across the hall in his plaid bathrobe and slippers and ask us to turn down the stereo. ‘It's the bass. If you could just turn down the bass.’ He was never angry about it, which always made me feel terrible for keeping him awake.”

Joe loved to travel; he toured France in 1999, visiting WWII landing sites and museums in Normandy, and returned with his girlfriend to Paris where, typically, he got to know her family over cigars and wine at dinner.

Joe was a joker, a guy who loved people. The wife of a Cantor Fitzgerald colleague who perished with Joe on September 11 recounts how, two years earlier, Joe and her husband John embarked together on “the famous weight loss contest”. Joe would call her at home and quiz her on what John ate for dinner and the length of his workouts, and they would laugh about it together.

Joe had that unique ability to make friends easily and retain them for life. Friends describe someone you could pick up the threads with after years of losing touch, someone who made you feel every time you saw him that “it was as if we hung out all the time”, as “one of those friends that I know that we would have picked up on our last conversation just where we left off”, someone you never forgot.

A New York Times profile of him after his death quoted his best friend Robert from fourth grade as saying, “He would be depressed because other people around him had problems; they weren't his problems… He was one of those friends you speak to four or five times a day. He left a tremendous void in a lot of people's lives.” Joe was at the same time compassionate and charismatic, easygoing, affable, outspoken, and loyal to friends and family. Even distant acquaintances who didn’t know him well noted his regard for family.

Two weeks before 9/11, Joe attended a friend’s bachelor party in Myrtle Beach. Surrounded by friends, they spent five days playing golf, smoking cigars, and hanging out in the Jacuzzi drinking and telling jokes. He told a friend, “Life doesn’t get any better than this.”

On that sunny morning five years ago, his family received a call from Joe, trapped in the towers, reassuring them that he was OK and was trying to escape. It would be the last time they ever heard from him.

Joe was a family-oriented man who, at the time of his death at the age of 39, hadn’t yet started a family of his own, and was looking to settle down. But his legacy lives on. A nephew, Joseph Allen, born on April 25, 2002, was named after an uncle he’d never meet. His sister Jennifer also named her son after Joe. She describes Ryan Joseph as being much like his uncle, flirtatious and endearingly mischievous.

I never met you, Joseph Ryan Allen, but I will remember you always. May you rest in peace.

Only in NY

Only in NY are playgrounds surrounded by barbed wire fence.

Only in NY can you watch a uniformed officer and a plainclothes officer escort a guy off in handcuffs. (Honest!)

Only in NY do residents need to call ahead an hour in advance to get their car out of the garage, as my friend, a resident of Chelsea, told me.

Only in NY do two beams of light, originating at the spot where the twin towers once stood, extend heavenward.

Sharon Visits NY - Episode 4: The Return

Note: This article is available for a limited time in MP3 format. Click here to download.

Whenever I return home to Quebec, I am struck afresh by the unwarranted level of government intrusion into everyday life.

Quebec is hardly a bastion of unfettered capitalism. It is a province that legislates the height, width, and placement of English lettering on commercial signs (half the size of French indoors, banned outdoors), weekend shopping hours (until 5pm – just when I’m getting warmed up), number of grocery store employees allowed on the floor after 5pm on weekends (4), and the color of margarine (white). No aspect of commercial intercourse, it seems, is too trivial for the Quebec government to attempt to regulate. As a result (or maybe the cause), Quebec is the most highly-taxed jurisdiction in North America.

Some of the legislation is downright Byzantine. Apostrophes are illegal on outdoor signs, but pictures of naked ladies are perfectly alright. Children can attend an English school only if one parent has been schooled in English in Quebec, but not if they’re recent immigrants who’ve attended British boarding schools all their lives and can’t speak a word of French. Public English schools in Quebec are part of the awkwardly named “English Montreal School Board” because for some reason “Montreal English School Board” was deemed too controversial. Having the word “Stop” on stop signs is acceptable only in designated bilingual municipalities, where it must be accompanied by the twice as prominent “Arrêt”.

Quebecers must buy their alcohol from stores run by a state monopoly, except for designated cheap wines of unspecified vintage that can be sold in grocery and convenience stores. In fact, Quebec has nationalized the liquor commission, the hydro-electric utility, and a provincial pension fund known for its ruinous investments.

When purchasing a good or service in Quebec, keep in mind that the provincial sales tax is applied to the federally taxed amount, and not to the original sale price. (That’s a tax on a tax.) Uniquely in Quebec, residents must file separate income tax returns to both federal and provincial agencies. In fact, for many federal government agencies, such as Immigration and Revenue, Quebecers fund a parallel provincial bureaucracy.

And yet with the exception of the Maritime provinces, Quebec has the highest unemployment rate in all of Canada. Despite an abundance of natural resources that makes Quebec a net exporter of hydro-electric power, Quebec is still a have-not province, receiving more from federal coffers than it contributes in a complex system of transfer payments. Its vaunted system of $7-a-day universal daycare has waiting lists so long you need to register your child several years before conception.

Right. Now where was I?

Oh yes. For many of these reasons, I prefer to do my shopping over the border. Just a two-hour drive away in Burlington, VT, which has a population of 600,000 (of which I believe 100,000 are cows), you can find three massive 24-hour grocery stores. We’re talking aisles of just cereal here. Cereal! In all of Greater Montreal, with a population of 3.5+ million (I get confused about the exact number what with the forced municipal mergers and all), there is, I think… one?

In Massachusetts, which residents laughably call Taxachusetts (try Quebec, folks), clothes and shoes under the amount of $180 are not taxed. Any amount over $180 is taxed at a pitiful 5%. This means that you can buy a pair of Pradas for $200 and pay $1 in tax. (Example for illustrative purposes only. If you happen to find a pair at that price, regardless of tax rate, get one in a size 6 and I’ll reimburse you.) Now this is what I call an enlightened policy!

Don’t get me wrong. I love all those pricey little French boutiques in Montreal with snotty sales staff who studiously avoid greeting you and act horribly inconvenienced if you ask the way to the dressing room. For one thing, it helps to keep my ego in check. But when I am in the mood for courteous service, customer choice, and sheer variety at unbeatable prices, I prefer to shop America.

Like most Jewish women, shopping elicits in me feats of Herculean strength. Weight that I struggle to lift at the gym I sling back effortlessly when in the form of shopping bags sporting the logos of my favorite stores. I become anesthetized to physical discomfort. I’ve always suspected that if I were to be shot in the leg while shopping, I would feel a momentary twinge, shrug, and limp on to examine the cleaning products in aisle 4. Eucalyptus mint-scented window cleaner – now that’s progress.

If on the way back from New York to Montreal you take Exit 16 off the I-87, you will find yourself at Woodbury Commons, a kind of shopping wonderland comprising 220 premium outlet stores. And if you happen to get so caught up that you leave a little later than anticipated, make sure to fuel up on gas before you get on your way, because, as we discovered, there are no service stations open after 10pm for an 88-mile stretch along the Adirondacks. Even in New York, capitalism isn’t perfect.

Sharon Visits NY - Episode 3: Jewtopia

It’s amazing how quickly Alexei took to driving in New York. Driving in Manhattan, as you know, is not for the faint of heart. When you change lanes, other drivers will not wave you in pleasantly, preferring instead to express themselves with other, less courteous hand gestures. They will make frequent and jarring use of the horn at every perceived infraction, such as lingering for a fraction of a second when the light turns green. Taxicab drivers in Manhattan are an especially hardscrabble bunch, with a dour outlook on life that is relieved only by the exhilaration of regularly inviting its termination by reckless driving. Many New York taxicabs sport reinforced bumpers in what I took to be a kind of arms race.

Alexei, usually a calm, unruffled personality who rebukes me for using the horn except in the direst of emergencies, seemed to thrill to the challenge. Before my eyes, he underwent an astonishing metamorphosis. He would weave in and out of traffic at high speeds with a feverish glint in his eye. At intersections, he would slow down just enough to tempt pedestrians to step off the curb, and then plow right through. His whole attitude towards other drivers changed from one of regarding them as unavoidable nuisances to embracing them as essential set-pieces for the showcase of his dexterity. As a passenger, I coped best by busying myself with the logistics of the drive, such as shuffling CDs and adjusting the GPS.

Our mornings were pretty leisurely. By the time I’d pattered over to the kitchen bleary-eyed to boil water for tea, Alexei’s mother had already taken a long stroll along the boardwalk and prepared a wide array of foods, including vegetarian delights like kasha, carrot patties, vegetarian borsht, and sautéed cauliflower for me, and pierogies and the like for the meat-eaters.

We’d spend the afternoons with Alexei’s mother and often his nephew, usually running errands and, on one occasion, dropping in unannounced and unexpected on a distant aunt, who lived with her husband in a once imposing 1920s-era building in Brooklyn that smelled strongly of burnt cabbage. Judging by the rather animated exchanges in Russian that ensued, our hostess did not think much of this casual style of intercourse. However, she graciously overlooked the manner of our coming, as well as the grave defect of my not speaking Russian, and spent much of the time pushing food on us. On such occasions, I sit for the most part with a smile affixed to my face as people converse rapidly in Russian all around me, occasionally speaking the universal language of admiration at photos of the granchildren and making exaggerated noises of appreciation over the food.

On Tuesday evening, we saw the off-Broadway play Jewtopia. We were seated front-row center, knees squished up to the stage, so close that I had stage fright before the performance. Not being exactly inconspicuous, I worried that I might not enjoy the play and that I’d throw the actors off by yawning uncontrollably, but as it turns out I needn’t have worried because I spent most of the performance guffawing loudly.

Jewtopia is about a gentile who wants to marry a Jewish woman so that he’ll never have to make another decision again, and the Jewish friend who helps him. In one particularly funny-because-it’s-true scene that had tears streaming down my face, the friend coaches him in Jewish restaurant etiquette. (When seated, complain about the draft and ask to change tables. When ordering, alter the menu item so that it no longer resembles the original in any particular. And the cardinal rule of Jewish dining – ask for the dressing on the side.) I have always maintained that we are not so much the chosen people as the choosy people. It’s part of our rich cultural heritage.

After the show, Brian Fogel, one of the playwrights, came onstage to promote the eponymous companion book Jewtopia, due to be released in bookstores sometime “between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur”. (Don’t let the fact that customers who ordered this item also bought Barry Manilow and Billy Joel CDs throw you off.) He read some passages aloud to great hilarity. And I vowed that, if I survived the drive home, I would buy us a copy.

Interlude: My stuff

For many years, I have resisted burning entreaties to divulge the contents of my purse. A woman’s secret chamber, I reasoned. Her inviolate sanctum, never willingly to be revealed to a single soul.

But finally today, I yield. Shlemazl wants to know what I’m packing, and I’ve engaged to answer this pressing question.

Your woman-about-town changes purses fairly frequently, reflecting costume changes, seasonal shifts in fashion, and alignment of stars. But, when carried by yours truly, they will likely contain some variation of the following.



Reading more or less from left to right, then, we have:

• Cosmetic bag: The JAP first-aid kit.
• Wallet: The hub of my financial activity. Currently stores mostly receipts.
• Shout wipes: In no way indicative of my propensity to spill stuff on myself.
• Band-aids: Because you never know when you can acquire a festering wound.
• Nail file: Essential grooming tool.
• Individually wrapped Lactaid tablets: Because I don’t tolerate lactose. I just won’t stand for it. (With credit to Seinfeld.)
• Chewing gum: For tangy citrus breath.
• Pocket PC: I would happily implant it in my body were it surgically feasible.
• Hand cream: A girl can never be too moisturized. Besides, there’s so much harsh hand soap out there.
• Phone: Ah. This one merits a longer explanation. Having obtained a 3-year commitment from me under the false pretense that it would support OBEX object push, enabling me to complete the circle between phone, Pocket PC (see above) and laptop, thus uniting my happy family of Bluetooth devices, it turns out that Telus has crippled the Bluetooth functionality on its phones so that essentially the only thing it’s good for is communication with a Bluetooth headset. In fact, I’m not sure why I most hate this phone: the crippled Bluetooth, or its propensity to die after about 15 minutes of talk time.
• Keys: Car, house, safety deposit box, and a perpetually unlocked desk drawer at work.
• Pen: An old-fashioned implement, but I’m a traditional sort of gal.

Your turn.

1. Suzanne
2. Doug
3. Steve
4. hunter
5. Paul
6. Jeff, the token liberal (don't sign the petition, whatever you do)
7. Winston
   
8. TrustOnlyMulder
9. Allan
   

Sharon Visits NY - Episode 2: Mamma Mia

Alexei’s mother is a redoubtable woman with a limited command of English, but as it far surpasses my command of Russian, a large part of our communication consists of her hovering over me wordlessly with various dishes in the hopes of tempting my recalcitrant appetite. She did, however, give me to understand that my consumption of food contrasted unfavorably with that of a bird, something she was sure would adversely affect my chances of bearing her a grandchild.

The language barrier has led to a little awkwardness in the past. Once, Alexei’s aunt, patting my head affectionately, told me in halting English, “You are a nice girl.” I, thinking to dazzle her with my mastery of the language and at the same time return the compliment, replied, “You are a nice babushka,” using the Russian word for grandmother. She seemed to take this with equanimity, but Alexei later explained that in the vernacular, my compliment roughly translated to, “You are a nice old lady,” which didn’t strike quite the note of flattery that I had been aiming for.

Alexei and I spent the bulk of the day with his mother, except for a stroll along the boardwalk near Alexei’s mother’s place in Staten Island, where we were staying. Alexei’s idea of a walk is to amble along at a relaxed pace suitable for someone with a wooden leg. As we walked, we were overtaken by a steady stream of the elderly and people on crutches hobbling past.

Photo of Brighton Beach showing its main street with subway tracks running above it. Every now and then, you hear a great rumbling sound as a train passes overhead, silencing all conversation.

After a stop in Brighton Beach, a mostly Russian-speaking area of Brooklyn, we all headed into Manhattan to catch the Broadway musical Mamma Mia.

Exchanges between Alexei’s mother and me have an air of old-world-meets-new about them. At a café before the show, she declined my offer of tomato eggplant soup on the grounds that she had borscht at home. She was similarly unimpressed with my field green salad with asparagus and sprouts, wondering at my eating what she termed “grass”.

With time to spare, we walked along Times Square for a bit. Alexei’s mother has a disconcerting habit of advancing boldly into intersections with all the brazen self-assurance of one driving a tank. This was the subject of some rather heated exchanges in Russian between Alexei and his mother.

Massive JDate ad in Times Square reads “Why Is This Site Different From All Other Sites?”

Mamma Mia is a play about a girl’s quest to find her real father on the eve of her wedding, set to the music of Abba. It’s been running so long on Broadway that if the plot was true to elapsed time the bride would have been celebrating the birth of her first grandchild by now.

The play’s conclusions – that fathers are to some extent extraneous, and that the institution of marriage is, while not wholly antiquated, unsuitable for persons of tender years who are better off cohabiting – is not likely to endear it to the family values crowd, but the singing and dancing was decent and the Abba score was terrific.

One of the many 9/11 conspiracy stickers dotting Manhattan (click for close-up)

Somewhere in the middle of the first act, I was struck by the observation that, with the exception of two of the more mature leading ladies, there was a lot of overhanging fat among the female members of the cast. It appears that sometime in the last twenty years the requirement was waived for female dancers in a Broadway production to be fit and slim (although not, spectacularly, for the male half of the production). Maybe it sounds petty, but having shelled out roughly $400 to attend this extravaganza, I felt entitled to a cellulite-free evening.

I also couldn’t help but notice that the bride’s beauty regimen on her wedding day consisted of her mother brushing her hair in what was clearly a poignant moment, and then spreading the wedding dress open on the floor so that she could step into it. For my wedding, it took a virtual army of dressmakers, colorists, stylists, makeup artists, and sisters to groom me to a point where I could be deemed sufficiently presentable.

And then, as we left the theater, it occurred to me that there was something else glaringly absent from the wedding – the bride’s mother-in-law.

Sharon Visits NY - Episode 1: The Drive

Readers sometimes write me, “Lighten up a little! It’s all terrorism all the time over here. Why can’t you write about something frivolous, like music or fashion?”

Well, they don’t actually write that. But that is primarily because 1) I don’t have readers and 2) my blog doesn’t exactly attract the fun crowd. (You know who you are!)

In an effort to drum up traffic and appeal to as broad an audience as possible, we are launching a new series this week called “Meet the Inmates”. (After much deliberation by the editorial board here at Sharon’s Asylum, we shelved the idea of “Topless Tuesdays”.) Those of you who think this more light-hearted drivel should be quarantined onto a new blog, a sort of Sharon’s Asylum spin-off, let us know.

So without further ado, we present you “Sharon Visits NY – Episode 1: The Drive”. (Disclaimer: The events decribed herein took place on Sunday, but our access to Internet this week is a little spotty.)

Those who know me will tell you that I am a gizmo geek, a gadget freak. This means that I spend much of any drive rotating car chargers for various electronic devices. In fact, there was scarcely a moment during the entire trip to New York when some battery-operated device was not having its charge restored.

Possibly the ultimate in gizmos is the GPS navigation system. When I ask, “Where are we?” the correct answer is not, “Corner of Maple and Pine,” but rather, “Latitude 3.2876945W and longitude 6.8347959N, at an altitude of 6.2734 meters above sea level.” The GPS navigation system will not nag you or berate you for taking the wrong turn. The GPS navigation system will not say, in an accusatory tone, “I told you to turn left 3 lights ago! Why don’t you ever listen to me? Now we’re going to be 15 minutes late for Aunt Estelle’s dinner party!” It will maintain an air of unflappable calm, recalculate a new set of directions, and continue to issue instructions mildly. Its other main purpose is to plot the known locations of all Cheesecake Factory restaurants along the drive.

When we got to US Customs, the officer asked us some pointed questions about the monitor in the trunk that Alexei intended as a hand-me-down for his nephew, who lives with Alexei’s mother in New York. Now, I hold no truck with Customs agents, particularly Canadian ones. I see them as nosy and officious persons who can’t simply take a hint and leave it at that. I resent their unwarranted intrusion into my private life. If my own husband is not privy to the details of my personal expenditures, why, I reason, should I share them with a complete stranger? I feel strongly that what I choose to bring or not bring into my own country, including recently purchased clothing and footwear concealed on my person, is nobody’s business.

Right past the border is a town called “Chazy Sciota”, which I misread as “Crazy Sciota”, leading me to momentarily envision the place as the favored hangout of some whacked out mafia guy. After that, it was pretty much all sloping valleys and gently rolling hills – so pleasantly pastoral a vista, in fact, that I promptly fell asleep looking at it.

You will have gathered by this that I am not the most stimulating of traveling companions. The drive from Montreal to New York is about 6½ hours, of which I usually spend about 6¼ fast asleep. My contributions to the general conviviality tend to come in the form of lolling my head from side to side slack-jawed, occasionally producing a sudden startled jerk. On planes, I am usually sleeping soundly by take-off. I suspect, however, that Alexei prefers it this way, as it enables him to drive at a faster clip that he would if I were wakefully alert by his side.

My slumber was punctuated by a stop at a rest area to use the facilities, of which I will only say that I have decidedly first-world notions of hygiene that, regretfully, do not seem to be shared by the caretakers of the site. I had almost nodded off again when a sudden exclamation of distress from Alexei roused me to wakefulness. Briefly, it appeared that we were in the middle of nowhere and the gas light indicator had just gone on.

After a short pause to verify using the GPS that the nearest gas station was impossibly far away in the opposite direction, I seized the opportunity to sketch out, in my best supportive tone, a happy and carefree alternate existence where Alexei would regularly check the gas gauge in a manner befitting a responsible driver, and we would stop to fill up at a quarter tank.

We were, however, pleasantly surprised to discover that the gas warning indicator means that you actually have a good 30 miles of anxious driving through winding mountain roads to the nearest gas station from the moment it lights up, with time to idle while some honest old son of the soil helpfully gives you a precise description of all gas stations within a 10-mile radius.

Marital harmony thus restored, we continued on our way. Five minutes later, I was fast asleep.

Fear factor

You could make the case that the Iraq war was not prosecuted with the kind of icy efficiency we’d have liked. Or rather, the war was. It was the peace that wasn’t.

To be fair, we’re just not ruthless enough anymore to repel these kinds of brutal, bloodthirsty insurgents.

For one thing, we’re much too soft-hearted and fair-minded to crack down as forcefully as we need to. We’re just not that keen on shedding our blood in the service of shedding that of others. You could say that life, both our own and others’, has almost become too precious.

I mean, imagine Attila leading his hordes of Huns into Europe. There are the Saxons or Visigoths or what-have-you at their backs, letting out bloodthirsty battle cries and wielding the very latest in mace technology. Had Attila at this stage paused to address the troops with, “Team, I take this occasion to remind you that we will not tolerate this habit of sticking our enemies’ heads on pikes and lobbing them into towns. For one thing, it’s not hygienic. For another, it’s hardly the sort of behavior that wins you hearts and minds around here. So from now on, any piked heads, and I’ll be instituting a full inquiry,” well, hardly the sort of thing to stir the old intestinal fortitude.

Or imagine that Genghis Khan had had to contend with a bunch of scribes embedded with the Hordes, busily dashing off reports back home about civilian casualties, or a lot of fish-eyed human rights NGOs cataloguing every little rape and pillage. Would have diminished his effectiveness somewhat, not to mention put a bit of a dent in the Mongol national sport of bride-kidnapping. No, these leaders understood too well the power of fear to subdue one’s opponents.

Life was a good deal cheaper then. People did not expect to lead long, glorious lives, much less wind them up comfortably playing shuffleboard at a Florida retirement home. As a man, you’d stand a good chance of being captured in battle or as a result of some private feud, and ending your life watching your appendages be parted from their body. You’d have a better chance than not of perishing in some spectacularly gruesome way. As a woman, you’d know better than to insist too strongly on consensual sex and reproductive rights, and at some point, maybe after seeing a few of your offspring perish in infancy, you’d succumb yourself during childbirth. If you were a Mongolian woman circa the Khan era, you might not even be considered important enough to warrant your own name.

The historical biographies dating from this period are mainly of persons of quality, or alternately, persons of low birth who, by virtue of dispatching their opponents unreservedly, rose to a position from where they could continue doing so in grandeur. And in fairness, it can’t have been exactly restful to know that at any given moment there were a whole lot of people whose hopes and dreams for the future hinged on your absence from it. To really get ahead and stay ahead in those days, you’d have to be willing to be pretty ruthless. You wouldn’t be showing quite the proper spirit of initiative if you did not apply yourself diligently to the task of ridding the environs of your enemies. Nowadays, it’s considered a bit cheap to assassinate your opponent’s character. In those days, you would assassinate his person, and expect people to look on it tolerantly.

When you weren’t succumbing to your fellow man, you’d be succumbing to your fellow germs. This was an age where dental (not to mention personal) hygiene did not enjoy quite the same widespread currency that it does now. This would be unpleasant to yourself, as you would be prone to suffering from the toothache, but also to others, who wouldn’t want to lean in too closely when you spoke, particularly if you were given to enunciating your “h”s, as in “halitosis”. This was an age without acetaminophen or anesthetic or antibiotics, so if you found yourself obliged to, say, lop off a gangrenous limb, the thing would be pretty much touch-and-go.

It can’t have been all unremitting misery. But I suspect that for gently bred persons like you and me, it wouldn’t have been tolerable at all.

Let’s face it, they don’t make us hard and toughened like they used to. We’re just not scary anymore. That’s one thing going for the jihadis – they got scimitar, and they’re not afraid to use it, particularly on your fleshy infidel neck. Those beheading videos are simply an updated version of the heads-on-pikes tactic that worked to such effect for our ancestors. These guys aren’t hampered by undue concern at how the whole brutality thing will affect them at the polls. Your jihadi is not whiling his time conducting heated debates over whether targeting infidels for murder constitutes harmful racial profiling. He is not lying awake nights troubled by whether the kidnapping of infidels constitutes unlawful detainment. And he is by and large unconcerned over whether the killing, execution-style, of suspected “collaborators” is a violation of their rights of association. He knows that endless wrangling over points of procedure is just not going to strike fear into anybody’s heart, and fear is his principal weapon.

So when I say that we here in the West have gotten a little pansy-ish, I don’t entirely intend it as a criticism. You see, nobody resembles that timorous garden flower more, dear reader, than your not-so-intrepid blogger. It’s all very nice and well for me to exhort us all to a spot of spine-stiffening, but if I were given discretionary power over the military budget, I’d start off by buying me a few pairs of Manolo Blahniks. Wearing too-high heels is pretty much where I draw the line at physical discomfort. I just haven’t got the stamens for it.