aweet grande Macgt - eT OO fae exbies- Ff 4 ~ Sunday, April 9, 1989 — North Si-cve News ONE OF the most delicious reads I’ve had in years is Brian Faweett’s mischievous, profound, and exhilaratingly bleak Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. Faweett is a West Coast writer whom I don’t happen to have met, but who speaks tc my condition, causing many. large bells to ring. There is some really depressingly funny stuff about the local scene, especially a piece called The Ker- risdale Mission for Destitute Pro- fessionals, about a scam by a former bureaucrat to use his knowledge of the delivery side of the urban social planning devel- opment system ‘‘to house unfor- tunate victims of societal up- date...who slip beneath the nor- mative lifestyle habits and habitua- tions of the middle class life.”’ The book includes a wonderfully outrageous conversation with Malcolm Lowry on Gabriola Island, Lowry having come back from the dead to tell Fawcett that he only stayed on Gabriola less than a day before heading back to Dollarton, never mind what it says in October Ferry to Gabriola. This isn’t too outlandish, rela- tively speaking, since in another chapter Fawcett has Marshall McLuhan riding on an obstreperous camel alongside Saul of Tarsus — later Saint Paul — on the road to Damascus. In the course of a discussion about a new sect growing around the memory of one of the more in- teresting of the many recently- crucified messiahs, McLuhan slips the idea to Paul — a brilliant ad- ministrator and entrepreneur — of using Jesus’ pronouncements to set up a central committee as a cor- porate religious body and franchise out the conversion system without expenditure of power or funds. Paul, dazzled, has a vision... A unique characteristic of Faweett's book is that he writes the “‘subtext’’ across the bottoms of the pages, where you would nor- mally find the footnotes, a brilliant way of forcing you to keep turning back and looking down to be sure what he’s really on about. It is in this section that I found the notion that rang the biggest bell of all. Fawcett describes himself, as a western Canadian, as PLEASE HELP | mae! If you witnessed my 4 year old twins and | get thrown on a #239 Park Royal bus at Marine Drive and McKay in North Van- couver on February 48, 1989 at approx- imately 3:40 p.m. 4 please call Vicki af § S 736-0431. : DON’T SMOKE 2 “‘colonial — perhaps the only kind left.”’ Most Third World countries to- day are nominally self-governing, if still economically dependent and deepiy in debt, but here, it’s dif- ferent, he argues. F. awcett’s belief is that the modern communications network in fact destroys the identity of those it is supposed to serve by reducing everything to the level of a mass commodity, and in that sense it leaves us all ‘Cambodianized’ intellectually, emotionally, and morally.”’ ERE Te “*F grew up and still live in the Canadian West, which has always had a Third World economy,”’ Fawcett writes. ‘(For many years, being a North American nation of mainly Northern European descent has inasked the nature of our economy from us, but now that is changing as the rich gravy the con- tinent has been stewing in for the last century thins. “If you look carefully, the pat- terns of industria} and human de- velopment here are those of the Third World, The resources are carelessly removed, the profits ex- tracted and removed to distant locations... The natural environ- ment has been exploited brutally, and without serious attempts to regenerate those resources that are renewable. “Now, the middle classes are beginning to split into the familiar hierarchies of those political tyrannies that characterize the up- per echelons of the Third World: a curiously educated and increasing- ly poverty-stricken intellectual class, and a wealthy and arrogant upper middle class that has no in- tellectual interests and prefers to forgo the social and political responsibilities of citizenship for expensive European automobiles, opulent homes loaded with security devices, and a carefully depoliticized personal life circling between resort travel, recreational drugs, personal physical fitness, and exotic cuisine consumed in cl- egant restaurants.”” Whew! Fawcett’s main point is that the Global Village and what happened in Cambodia are linked. In Cam- bodia, the Khmer Rouge tried to wipe out the present entirely, ex- cept for items like radio, which ‘ike television...serves up and supports illiteracy. At the same time, it lends itself to centralized dissemination of information. “The technologies the Khmer Rouge retained are curiously typi- cal of modern post-industrial civi- lization’s preoccupation with disposable commodities, and with the kind of cybernetic and ad- ministrative efficiencies that lead to generic information and com- modities,’’ Photographs of mass murder victims were kept to ‘‘pro- ve’’ their guilt, and plastic garbage bags, tied around the head, were employed to suffocate people. The relationship of this to tele- vision? Faweett's belief is that the modern communications network in fact destroys the identity of those it is supposed to serve by reducing everything to the fevel of amass commodity, and in that sense it leaves us all ‘“‘Cambo- dianized"’ intellectually, emo- tionally and morally. As I said, bleak stuff. But it made me squirm and itch, and that’s what a great book is sup- posed to do. This is a journey to the heart of darkness in the cathode tube® Sons of Scotland Benevolent Association District No. 16 Presents GRANT FRAZER and STUART ANDERSON SCOTLAND SINGS Tuesday, April 18, 1989 - 8:00 p.m. NOGRTH VAN CENTENNIAL THEATRE 2300 Lonsdale Avenue NOrth Vancouver, B.C. Tickets: $10.00 Certified General Accountant . INCOME TAX PROTECT YOUR INVESTMENT Protect your car with the most advanced security system available any- where. For a FREE, no obligation demonstration contact THE ULTIMATE ALARM CO, | (North Shore Division) 922-4774 J.W. 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