Spank Out Part 1

The latest video from IGE Talks has been posted on line and you can access it here. A chance to see and hear me and some of my friends talking about non-violent parenting.

Previous episodes are also available as you scroll down the page.

Deconstructing Boortz

I got up early this morning and saw that someone had posted a Neal Boortz column to my radical-middle email list about Barack Obama. I was struck by Boortz' inane take on the issues and it prompted this response from me. "DRB" refers to the person who sent the column to the list:

> Neal Boortz--The High Priest of the Church of the Painful Truth:

I have very little exposure to Neal Boortz - mainly just reading the quotes that DRB attaches to his emails. Nothing I've read or heard about him generates my interest to learn more about him. But I gave this column a look.

Is he writing to be funny then? The obvious intent to create a defense against any and all critiques of racism comes through pretty clearly, but I'm trying to figure out how much he wants to be taken seriously as a thinker or a political commentator. Because to me, his analysis is shallow and painfully simplistic. So I guess he's got the "painful" part right in his self-anointed priesthood.

> This one is rather fun to watch.

First tip-off that he's just clowning right there. What's "fun" about it? If he's genuinely concerned about the risks of seeing someone get elected who he thinks is unqualified then "fun" isn't really the word I'd expect him to use. But if he's decided that he's out to exploit resentment and cynicism among his base audience while cracking jokes and pulling rhetorical stunts along the way, then I suppose the current election drama between Clinton and Obama suits his purposes
just fine.

> In case you haven't noticed, the
> Democrat Party is slowly figuring out that things aren't looking all
> that well for the November election ... at least as far as the White
> House is concerned.

Obviously the risk of dividing the party and the on-going tensions between the two leading candidates are pretty unusual at this stage of the game. The "slowly figuring out" has been going on pretty much since Super Tuesday (early February) when Obama held his own, Hillary failed to land the knockout blow that she'd been told to expect by her advisors, and the eventual endgame became more difficult to envision. So I already see Boortz as dishonest in his description of what's happening.

> Their messiah has turned out to be somewhat of a
> false prophet. Don't you just hate it when things turn out that way?

The Obama/Messiah meme is, in my opinion, corny and never seemed particularly wise for his supporters to perpetuate, since it was so easily punctured - he is human. But it's out there so I understand Boortz' choice to invoke it here.

> Oh how the Democrats swooned over the "Change We Can Believe in"
> signs. All of these people fainting at Obama rallies were certainly
> heralding wonderful times to come.

There are a lot of people ready to move as quickly as possible into the post-Bush era, and don't see a second Clinton era as the preferred destination.

> Somehow they failed to notice
> that in din of those huge Obama crowds nothing meaningful was being
> said by the candidate.

That's just plain insulting. If Obama said nothing meaningful, who did, in Boortz' opinion? Ron Paul, I guess.

> Nobody bothered to check the resume closely.
> Accomplishments?

Was Boortz asking or insinuating similar questions about G.W. Bush's lack of accomplishments? I will let DRB do the research on that, but I doubt it.

> None, really. About the best thing ObamaManiacs could point to was
> that he managed to get elected to the Senate. Wow! What a big deal
> that was!

I've never once read or heard an Obama supporter claim that his election to the Senate was a major achievement. It obviously put him in position to make a serious run as a candidate. But his appeal has always been based on ideas and approach, the way he communicates to the audience. That's pretty much what presidential politics is about in this era - the symbolism and personality of the person who sits in the Oval Office. When Bush was popular, it was based on what people
saw him as or projected onto him. His current all-time low level of popularity now is based partly on his calamitous track record, but also on the way he has come to symbolize failure, incompetence and rigid obstinacy in his handling of presidential responsibilities.

Obama's appeal is based on his personality, life experience, perspective on issues and in many ways his clear contrast to what we've had to live with during this Bush presidency. Just as Bush's
appeal was based on his contrast to what Clinton had come to symbolize at the end of his term.

> He ran against a Democrat in the primary who
> self-destructed in a sex and domestic scandal. Then his chief
> Republican rival pulled the same stunt. The Republicans had to go
> out of state to find Alan Keys to put up a fight against Obama, and
> there was never a chance.

Right, whatever. Boortz probably supported Alan Keyes anyway...

> Now the layers start to get peeled back. That glossy onion doesn't
> look so good underneath. We find Obama spending 20 years in the pews
> of a church where the America-hating pastor preaches the Marxist
> gospel of Black Liberation Theology. We find his friendship with
> "just some guy who lives in my neighborhood." "Some guy" who is an
> unrepentant bomb-thrower from the Vietnam War days. "Some Guy" who
> says he has no regrets, and in fact wishes he could have done more.
> We learn that what Barack says before an gathering of San Francisco
> liberals is not what he says to the masses at his campaign
> appearances. In other words ... the going has become rough.

OK, it's rough. There's more to those issues than what Boortz chooses to highlight but I see that he's writing to a constituency that isn't necessarily interested in taking a closer look so I will move along myself.

> And what do the Obama campaign and the Democrats do when the going
> gets rough for their candidate? Well ... they can't really return
> him to the candidate store. Not going to work. Democrats absolutely
> depend on the black vote to carry these elections, and they know
> that if they admit a mistake and run back into Hillary's arms enough
> of these black voters will stay home on election day to make the
> presidency a lost cause. Nope -- Hillary isn't the answer.

Obviously she's not the answer or she would have won more primaries, delegates, votes, etc. She has huge obstacles and at a root level just does not appeal at all to a great many voters. She has enough clout and fund-raising ability etc. to hang on for a long time, and she's driven enough to want to take every possible chance at becoming the nominee, because being a Democrat is still the strongest hand to play in 2008 for someone aspiring to the presidency. She doesn't want to
wait four more years, but if McCain is elected, she might stand a chance. If Obama's elected, it's basically over for her, seems to me anyway.

The difference at this point in each party's nomination process is that Romney played it conventionally by dropping out when he did, in the interest of helping the GOP out in its uphill battle. He also had bigger problems to deal with, electorally, than Clinton. McCain benefits right now because he appeals to the tradition of white guys with military background as president and the potential for his rival to lose support due to party infighting. But he's still a rather weak and unattractive candidate in the current political environment.

> They're now going to have to stick with Obama. So ... a strategy is
> needed! Something needs to be done to shield
> Obama from the rightful consequences of his past and present
> associations and his uber-liberal approach to big government.
>
> The solution? Oh come on, you're telling me you don't really know?
> The solution --- the shield --- is Obama's color!

Insinuated like a true ignoramus.

> So stand by friends. This election is going to be about race and
> racism. The left and their fellow travelers in the media are going
> to use the tried and true weapon of playing the race card to shield
> their candidate.

Boortz is using the tried and true weapon of exaggerating the extent to which race is mentioned by his opponents and trivializing the problem of racism to shield himself from having to explain all the racist innuendo that follows.

> John McCain speaks in Mississippi? Racism. Civil
> rights workers were killed in Mississippi, you know.

I don't get what he's trying to say here. Was McCain accused of racism for making a speech in MS? I haven't heard about it. Boortz seems to appeal to the irrational or non-existent here.

> You don't like
> Jeremiah Wrights exhortations for God to damn America? You're
> racist. You just don't like the black church.

Does Boortz actually have a position regarding racism? Does Boortz agree that racism is a problem currently in the USA, or did racism ever exist, in his view? I think it would be helpful to know what he says for himself on the topic before taking his critique of "crying wolf" racism seriously.

I just found this on his website FAQ:

http://boortz.com/more/faq.html

People often call you a racist. Are you?

Hell, who doesn't get called a racist from time to time? It's the
all-purpose weapon to be used against any person who doesn't toe the
leftist line on matters of race. Ninety-nine percent of the people who
throw charges of racism around can't even define the term. Simply put
– racism is the belief in the inherent, genetic superiority of one
race over another, and the corresponding belief in the right of the
superior race to dominate the inferior one. People often get racism
mixed up with bigotry or prejudice. We need to get our terminology
straightened out. We obviously have racial problems that need solving.
The first step in solving a problem is to identify it. If we keep
miss-identifying bigotry and prejudice as racism we'll never make any
headway. By the way, I do freely admit to being a "culturalist." This,
of course, drives the multicultural crowd absolutely nuts.

You're very offensive and insensitive sometimes.

Really? So is life. Deal with it.
(end of quote)

That's just about the last thing he has to say in the FAQ statement. Doesn't really deal with the topic of racism at all. Offers no hint of how he would address the "racial problems that need solving" and reduces racism down to a narrow, technical, ideological definition with few if any real-life implications for those who have to endure racial discrimination or its after-effects. And then that last line. I'm completely unimpressed. What a smug little twerp.

> In fact ... it has gone further than that already. Listen -- and you
> don't have to listen carefully -- and you're
> going to hear more and more people saying that if you don't support
> Barack the one and only reason would be that you just don't like
> black people.

More idiocy. That's not at all what one will hear in the media or on the blogs. Boortz is manufacturing a complete straw-man here and fluffing the egos of his fan base.

> Let's work on that white guilt! If they can't talk you into
> voting for Barack on the issues, (in other words, if you aren't an
> anti-capitalist Marxist), then we'll get you to vote for him out of
> a sense of guilt. This is what you owe for 400 years of slavery.

Lame, stupid, pathetic. No one argues for their candidate like that. I have friends, family members and colleagues who support Obama, Clinton, McCain, Paul, McKinney and Nader. Nobody makes such shallow, manipulative claims when arguing on behalf of their preferred
candidate. All Boortz seems intent on doing here is creating an easy-to-disrespect lampoon of Obama supporters. I'm beginning to feel like I've spent too much time deconstructing this text because it's basically hollow at its core, but it's early on a Saturday morning, I guess I have nothing better to do before I go work out at the gym.

> Yesterday the theme on so many newscasts was "Are Americans ready to
> vote for a black candidate for President." Fair question.

What happened yesterday? This question has been asked ever since Obama emerged as a leading candidate.

> I just
> wonder why we've never heard these same people ask "Are Detroit's
> voters ready to put a black man in the mayor's office." Oh, wait a
> minute. That would be a racist question, wouldn't it?

I don't get at all what Boortz is implying here. The clear inference is that, again, he really doesn't know what makes a question or an act "racist." Detroit has elected several black mayors over the years. Whenever a non-white, non-male candidate is elected for the first time to a particular office, the question will be asked. The current one is pretty deeply involved in scandal right now and deserves to be tossed out of office from what I can tell.

> See how this is going to work?

No, Boortz has only created confusion on my part about what he's really afraid might happen here. My hunch is that he would like to see Obama get elected as it would produce endless fodder for his commentaries and broadcasts. :o)

> From now on it the Democrats will cloak Barack Obama in a mantle of
> black immunity.

Silly. There are still a lot of Democrats who are trying to take Obama down whichever way they can because they want to get Hillary nominated.

> Any criticism of him or his policies, his friends,
> his philosophy ... racist.

This blowhard needs to produce some quotes to back up his extravagant and deluded projections. Obama has already been subject to lots of criticism on all these levels - who out there is saying it's all based on racist hostility to him? Show me a quote, a video clip, a website. Anything.

> For many voters this is going to
> backfire. People who otherwise might be favorably disposed toward
> voting for Obama are going to wonder what four years would be like
> with race warlords screaming racism every time Republicans in the
> congress opposed the next great idea for expanding government and
> curtailing freedoms.

So this is where Boortz finally shows his hand. He's basically trying to inject doubts in the minds of readers who might support Obama - he wants them to fear the consequences of Obama's success and maybe raise self-conscious anxiety that they are voting for him based on guilt and
manipulation... in other words, applying a veneer of shame to overlay whatever more positive views one might have of Barack Obama as a candidate and potential leader of this country.

OK, my morning textual analysis is done. Time to go burn some calories!

I'm a U of M Dad

Julie, Derek and I spent Saturday in Ann Arbor MI. Derek's been admitted into the University of Michigan School of Engineering and it's a pretty big deal for our family.

The university put on a "Spring Welcome Day" that started at 8:30 a.m. We launched out of our home near Grand Rapids and drove thru the dark rainy morning for a couple of hours, a route that will become increasingly familiar in years ahead. We were greeted very warmly by a whole host of maize-and-blue clad people - faculty, students, staff... I dunno who all these people were but they'd all been bitten pretty hard by the "GO BLUE" bug and they were seriously intent on passing the virus on to us.

And we are glad recipients.

So we walked out of the parking ramp and followed the signs to the Michigan Union, a grand historic old building where John F. Kennedy once stood and announced his vision of the Peace Corps, in December 1960, after he'd won the presidential election but before he took the oath of office. We went upstairs and enjoyed a very tasty breakfast, then we went and heard a talk by U of M President Mary Sue Coleman, who is one of the most highly compensated and well-known university presidents in the country, though I have no idea why she stands out among that elite company. She seems like a nice person.

We got swept up in some rah-rah boosterism as the stage swarmed with students and alumni singing the U of M fight song!

Then we got on a bus and went on a tour of the North Campus (which is where Engineering students go.) The University continues to grow and North Campus is where all the expansion takes place - it's a mile or two up the road from the Central Campus which is of course where all the old landmark buildings are found. I like the look and feel of the North Campus. A lot of sleek modern new stuff has gone up there in recent years, alongside the more ordinary-feeling cinderblock buildings that were erected in the 1970s when the University started developing that new parcel of land.

Our morning was spent traipsing around various buildings getting little hints and peeks of what it's like to live there as a full-time student. Since it was Saturday, things aren't quite as busy as they would be during the week, but we got a pretty good look. The first thing we did was sit in on a panel of engineering students who talked at length about their own experience and took lots of questions from the incoming freshmen and parents who had gathered for the purpose of getting familiar with this vaunted old university. I was truly impressed by the enthusiasm and ebullience of the young people who sat there facing us and telling us about what life at the school had been like for them. Some were just finishing up their first year, one was on the verge of graduation, some had transferred in from other schools. The panelists and the incoming students came from a lot of different places - most were from Michigan but there were quite a few from down south, out west and elsewhere.

After a pretty thorough time of back and forth interaction, it was time for the tour to commence, so we got walked around and saw a lot of buildings and stuff. We saw workshops, exhibits and dorms. Here are some photos.















This collage shows you some of the sights and the cool things they work on, like jet engines, solar powered cars, human-powered submarines, rockets, humungous computer banks, etc.


A slice of the very first computer ever built, the original ENIAC, powered by all those transistor tubes that are now so easily outperformed by tiny little chips that can't even cover the tip of my pinkie.


Derek and me, standing in front of some crazy experimental airplane.

The afternoon session brought us back to the Michigan Union where we got a lot more information on financial aid, housing, student life, and all that. It was cool. We wrote a check for $200 and that sealed the deal - Derek is going to enroll at the University of Michigan this fall!

Pierrot le Fou

I just finished watching Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou and want to capture some of the impressions it left on me.

Plot synopsis: Ferdinand, a man in his late 20s/early 30s sits in his bathtub reading about the late career of the painter Velazquez who stopped depicting objects and just began working in color and the space around them. He reads this stuff to his daughter while his wife scolds him and hurries him along to attend a boring social function. A friend of the couple brings his "niece" along who babysits their children while they are away. However, the niece is really the friend's paramour who also happens to be a lover from Ferdinand's past.

They go to the party where Godard makes fun of consumerist society. The guests are all speaking the language of TV commercials except for one, who happens to be American film director Samuel Fuller. He and Ferdinand have a brief conversation about "what is cinema" and Fuller tells him it is a battlefield where emotion and action collide. Ferdinand proceeds to other guests and blows smoke on their banal conversations. Finally he loses his patience and flings handfuls of cake at the guests.

He leaves with his friend's Lincoln Continental and drives back home where he re-connects with Marianne Renoir, the babysitter. He decides to take her back to her apartment which is loaded up with paintings by Picasso and works of pop art. On the drive from his house to her place, he confides in her and they rekindle their relationship which had lain dormant for five years. Ferdinand learns that Marianne has become involved with some shady characters, smugglers and gun-runners. There's a dead body laying on her bed. Their mutual friend returns to the apartment (maybe it was his, I don't know) and Marianne hits him over the head with a champagne bottle. Ferdinand and Marianne make their escape though they are close to broke. She was looking for some money but wasn't able to find it. They take a car and make their getaway and begin checking the newspapers to see if the police are on their tail.

They steal cars and through a series of comical capers make their way to the French Riviera. All along the way, Ferdinand offers frequent and pleasantly deep ruminations on his experience of life and the meaning (or lack thereof) he finds in it all. He drops all kinds of literary references throughout the film and eventually begins to keep a journal which is shown in extreme close-up throughout the remainder of the film. It's in Godard's own hand. The middle stretch of the film basically just shows Ferdinand (or Pierrot, as Marianne calls him at particularly poignant moments of insight and decision) and his companion galavanting around the sunny French coastline. They travel about in various vehicles - cars, boats, tractors - or just run around on foot, wading through streams, strolling on the beach, basking in the sun, doing nothing in particular. These scenes are marvelous to me. They depict a fantasy that I'm sure many of us have entertained, of just hitting the eject button from our ordinary lives and taking off with a breezy attractive companion to simply enjoy life on the simplest and freest of terms.

Of course, the film can't just settle down depicting an idyll. Eventually Marianne's criminal accomplices catch up with her and introduce new complications into their spree. There's a matter of some missing money that needs to be tracked down - a double cross of some sort is set up, the details of which aren't really all that important, but it turns out that Marianne has been stringing Ferdinand along for a bit and Ferdinand/Pierrot is left standing on the dock as she and her real lover sail away to an island, with the money.

Ferdinand mopes around for a bit, but then goes after her, tracks them down on the island and winds up shooting them both. She lives just long enough for them to have one last face-to-face encounter but then she dies. Ferdinand, despondent, wraps sticks of dynamite around his head. He lights the fuse, but then thinks better of it and you see his hands trying to extinguish the flame. But it's too late and he blows up. The camera pans from the hilltop where the explosion took place to a flat horizon of see and sky, quoting lines from Rimbaud as the picture fades to black.

So that's what happens, but it's how the story is told and the focal points of the script, soundtrack and camera that really set the film off. The color is bright and bold, utilizing a palette of clear primary colors - particularly blue and red, with some strategically placed yellow at different times, with clear white backgrounds much of the time. Details from various paintings are intercut to great effect. The music on the soundtrack drops in and out abruptly. Characters stare into the camera and numerous ironic reminders that we are watching a movie pop up. This film was made in 1965 and should rightly be seen as one of the earliest works of cinematic postmodernism. Godard also introduces themes that make the film relevant to issues on our minds today - the Vietnam War (as it applies to Iraq), Middle East terrorism, enhanced interrogation techniques, consumerist culture as mentioned earlier.

The lead actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, bring enormous charm and vitality to their roles. Karina in particular is simply delightful - she sings, she frolics, she banters with Pierrot and keeps her feminine mystery intact, never revealing all that much of what goes on at her deeper levels, but keeping me interested to learn just a little bit more...And she's so sexy in her 60s pop wardrobe!

So many scenes in this film resonate with what I'm thinking and feeling these days... not that I'm about to go running off with the babysitter or anything like that! But Ferdinand's journaling and reflective exploration of life through experience really connects with me. Here's a link to a good essay on the movie that cuts much deeper and with more insight than I can muster.

The Boondocks

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been reading through my collection of "Boondocks" books, which collect the illustrated thoughts and adventures of Huey Freeman, a displaced kid who moved with his brother Riley from inner-city Chicago to a fictional suburban address of "Timid Deer Lane" where they live with their granddad.

The Boondocks is now defunct as a comic strip, and I think our culture is the worse off for it. I wish cartoonist Aaron McGruder was still producing daily strips on this year's presidential race, for instance. But I gues he's moved on to other things and I guess I can't blame him. From the late 90s until 2006, The Boondocks provided a sharp satirical commentary on American society. But McGruder eventually wore down under the pressure of meeting the tight and demanding deadlines that come with producing a daily comic. He also ran into a lot of resistance and generated controversy as his candid style, affinity for radical political statements and use of common street language offended various sensibilities in the post 9/11 era. McGruder took his popular franchise into the world of animated TV programming and had a pretty successful run which has now extended into a second season on the Cartoon Network. I've watched a few episodes and I have to say that I like the comics better.

The last Boondocks compilation, titled "All The Rage," fell into my hands at a used book rack right around the time that the controversies surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright were getting full play in the media. At the time (which now seems more distantly past to me than it really ought) it seemed fortuitous and that's why I promised on this blog to post on it as part of a series I had in mind on insights into the black experience in America. I felt that it would be helpful to understand the context in which Rev. Wright said what he did, and The Boondocks puts a lot of that "black anger" in a humorous light that seeks to neither apologize for or defend the perspectives. It just portrays them honestly and with a punchiness that confirms to me that I'm receiving someone's vividly experienced truth, even if it challenges and undercuts much of what I've known in my own life.

So I'm dutifully going about completing the series even though I feel like I'm not really prepared to do the Boondocks adequate service in this write-up. The inspirational moment has passed me by. But I've still enjoyed the time spent reading through "All The Rage." It's more than just a collection of strips - since it was released after the comic's run had already concluded, it's an elegy of sorts that collects numerous transcripts of interviews that McGruder gave over the course of its existence. He also provides a lot of commentary on strips that generated significant controvery. So rather than try to summarize McGruder's commentary in my own words, I'll just offer this quote from an interview he gave to Salon.com in December 2001, where he bravely and presciently called into question so many of the assumptions that ran rampant at that time about President Bush and his response to the attacks of Sept. 11. Maybe this will pique your own curiosity to visit the Boondocks website, pick up one of the books or otherwise take a closer look at what he has to say. (Yes he is blunt in expressing his views.)

There are few wars where innocent people don't die.

I don't know why this had to become a war. A war on whom? This feels like the war on drugs. When does it end? When you declare war on Japan or Germany, you know you can stop when those countries are flattened. When you declare war against the word "terrorism," when is that over? What does that mean? Stopping terrorism is like stopping rape or burglary, it's an individual action. Anyone with a gun can go out and commit an act of terrorism, even without a political affiliation. It never ends. So it's like the war on drugs, and what has that accomplished? Not a goddamn thing but a whole lot of black men in jail for nonviolent crimes, millions of dollars spent and nothing else. And that's what the war on terrorism is going to do -- we're going to lose countless amounts of money, people are going to die and get locked up, but that's it. There's going to be no good coming out of it. We're going to lose our civil rights, and they're going to be gone forever.

You don't buy the argument that the curtailing of certain civil
liberties is temporary, that it's been necessary in previous wars, and that eventually those rights will be restored?

It's not temporary. Once you give up rights, they're not going to give them back.
This is a war that will never end. When are they going to say they've defeated
terrorism? No one is stupid enough to say that. Because then when something
blows up, they look like dickheads. They can never again come out and say
America is safe. They'd be idiots if they did. So given that they've set the
situation up as a war they can't win, they're never giving the rights back.
Literally, someone will have to be elected who doesn't agree with this shit and
gives us our rights back. Someone, I don't know who, will have to get into power
and say, "You know, this was all bullshit, and we're changing the laws."

What do you think we'll have to go through for that to happen?

America will really have to understand how corrupt its system is, and they'll have to get so fed up that they're ready to make change. And I don't think that'll
happen because the media are so in line with the government and so invested in
the status quo. We have, essentially, a worthless democracy. I hate to sound so
extreme, but things are that bad. There's nothing we have to share with the rest
of the world. We don't even have one man, one vote. And we have so much legal
corruption in our political system that no one even thinks about it anymore.

You say that, but would you want to live anywhere else?

I tell you what, I visited Canada, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. This idea that there's no better place in the world to live, I don't buy that. The reality is this: Me, I'm comfortable. I make a lot of money. So I can say, America is OK, up until
the point that the LAPD pulls me over and knocks out some teeth on some
bullshit. That happens enough to black men that it's a legitimate concern for
me. So I have to ask, even with my money, even though I've worked the American
dream pretty well, is this really the best place for me to be? I don't know
that's true. When you have money, anyplace is good. I could go to South Africa
with what I'm making right now and live like a multimillionaire just off the
currency exchange. I could live real well in a lot of different places. If
you're broke, a lot of places suck. If you're broke in America or Brazil, it
sucks.

Are you seriously considering that, or just talking? The reason I ask is that prior to Bush being elected, a lot of Hollywood types were talking about how they were going to move to Europe if Bush won and they're all still here.

You know, they're Hollywood types, fuck 'em. They're irrelevant to the conversation. Yes, I have thought about leaving. Right now, I can't even find the time to get an apartment in L.A. So when my life settles, and I have to think about where I'm going to raise my kids, when I have them, Canada will be the first place I look. I've never had the opportunity to go overseas because I was broke up until a couple of years ago. Now that I have money, I have to find time to really see the rest of the world. I can't say this is the best place on earth because I haven't been enough places. But I know that in Toronto and Vancouver there are all the comforts of America, and yet there's a difference in the people, and I had health care. When I visited Canada, I didn't have health care here. I go there, I have health insurance. And the air was cleaner -- sparkling, even in downtown Toronto. People say Canada's just like America. No! I'm out of the country, and you know what? It ain't bad.