Wednesday, March 11, 1992 - Noith Shore News - 25

Lifestyles of the smug and befuddled

Brian the Rude takes a ride through the Global Village

John Moore
BOOK REVIEW

Ususual Circumstances, Inter-
esting Times and Other Im-
polite Interventions. Brian
Fawcett. New Star Books.
$14.95

Vv HATEVER HAP. -
. PENED to the
Global Village?

‘When Marshall McLuhan coin-
ed the term for decades ago, the
‘village’ notion conjured up a
decentralized, informa-
tion-enriched ‘Paradise where phi-
lesophes-citizens of the near-future
New Renaissance would stroll the
fields and forests or a humanized
cityscape with shoulder-holstered
celluiar phones and knapsack
lap-tops, their Walkmans exuding
Beethoven’s Sixth or Vivaldi’s The
Four Seasons as they mulled the
fine print of the Meaning of Life.

-Instead we got a Global Ghetto
based on lowest common
denominator Nielsen ratings,
where disenfranchised Third —
World majorities watch Lifestyles
of the Rich and Famous between

clips of their own revolutions tim- *

ed to. coincide with the satellite
‘windows’ of cynical war-junkie
journalists.
“We in the privileged First World,
. Meanwhile, succumb to a con-
_ -sumerist cargo-culture whose
Acropolis is 2 strip-mall consisting *

“ofa 24-hour convenience store, a
. .: take-out pizza counter and a video

~- rental out!et..
“. As Spanish philosopher Jose
_ Ortega y Gasset predicted, daia-
*. overload’ has produced not
Renaissance people, but their an-

“|: tithesis: the intellectual barbarians

’ pursuing specialist agendas that

have nothing to do with Truth,
Knowledge or the Meaning of tife,
but a lot to do with tenure and a
new Volvo or BMW.

!f the above observations cause
you to renew the Valium scrip or
reach for the Absolut bottle, don’t
buy, borrow or read this collection
of essays, reviews and rants by
Brian Fawcett.

Never mind that he’s the most
important writer in Canada today,
possibly on the planet, one of the
few who dare to have a contem-
porary global vision when most ar-
tists have abrogated their public
responsibilities and dived under
the esthetic coverlets of
‘apolitical’ beds.

Brian The Impolite rides into the
Global Village from the steppe of
Northern 8.C., torching academ-
ic-dominated Canlit and its legion
of sycophants, tossing Alice Munro

Woe

to the troops while tethering
Margaret Aiwood to his tent-pole
for further consideration, skewer-
ing “Safety Nazis’ who
substitute ‘‘correct con-
sumerism”’ for real politics, impal-
ing professionalism, hypocrisy and
general bogosity at every turn.
Intellectually ambidextrous, he
slashes the befuddled Left as sav-
agely as the smug resurgent Right.
Destined to be remembered in
post-Apocalypse legend as Brian
ihe Rude (since Canadians almost
never are), Fawcett spent more
than a decade as an urban planner
while playing at being a poet, thus
acquiring a culturai overview that
can take you from the general to
the particular faster than a Kendo
master can give you a headache.
Perversely, he practises what he
preaches.
His previous books, Cambodia:

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A Bock For People Who Find
Television Too Slow, and Public
Eye: An investigation Into The
Disappearance Of The World, are
both attempts to bring writing out
of the 19th century to confront its
contemporary rivals, commercials
and rock video, ‘“‘mano a mano.”

Unfortunately, both are proba-
bly doomed te be cult classics and
underground best-sellers read only
by the already converted, when
they should, like these painfully
penetrating essays, be read by
everyone.

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