It started as the sound of rustling underbrush behind the heavily wooded Salt Spring Island hillside where I live. It’s not a deer, I thought. It’s not a cougar. Way too noisy. It must be people. Now it’s highly unusual, you understand, to hear people in this neck of the woods. There are miles of uninhabited bush behind our cabin; I refer to it as supernatural nowhere BC. If Walden had a bush, this would be it.

Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, located 35 minutes by ferry from Vancouver Island and three hours from Vancouver, has a population of 10,000 people spread out among 182 square kilometres of lakes and woods with most of the population concentrated near the bustling town of Ganges. The South End, where I live with my sweetie and son, is far from Ganges and “the last of lawless Salt Spring,” as a friend of mine puts it. For me it symbolizes what west coast life ultimately represents: freedom, a chance to live off the grid as I have done all my adult life, grow vegetables in a Mediterranean climate—and now, continue to do so with my family and create a home.

So when I looked out from the cabin we have rented for three years and saw two men in bright orange work vests pounding stakes into the ground, I was surprised to say the least. A “rich American” had bought the property adjoining our place, one explained, sight unseen, online. These surveyors had been hired to drive a stake into the ground every five feet across five acres of land to mark Mr. Cyber-American’s property line.

The next day I came back, ripped out every single stake and chopped it up for kindling. I left the ones painted white and pounded them deep into mother earth with my sledge.

Salt Spring Island was originally claimed as Coast Salish territory, and still is. Property lines have no place here—it’s all stolen land. No, really. First Nations here never signed treaties surrendering land. Any pacts the natives signed were friendship pacts. To the colonizers they were legally binding documents, and often land deeds.

At the top of Cyber-American’s place is a midden, a garbage dump of bones and shells indicating habitation by First Nations. The Cowichan people have been coming here for more than 5,000 years, collecting oysters and clams, harvesting plants and hunting wildlife. In the 19th century, African Americans came to Salt Spring escaping slavery, and a little later Hawaiians travelled here as shipmates with the Hudson Bay Company and decided to stay. Now I’m adding to the midden heap.

During the early years of transition, nobody questioned citizenship. Even today what does it really matter—we’re all global citizens right? But to understand here, you have to live here in relationship to the land and its people, develop an understanding of its ecology and the effect it has on you. It’s what makes us so damn weird out west. We love the land. A case of nimbyism? Hardly. I don’t own this backyard.

So, yes, ripping out those stakes was incredibly therapeutic. It also, I discovered later, placed me within an intriguing subset of public opinion. It’s the subject of Environics cofounder and social scientist Michael Adams’s Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values (Penguin Canada). Canadians are actually becoming ever more different than Americans. The book is based on interviews with 14,000 Canadians and Americans over a 10-year period and two years’ worth of analysis of trends in more than 100 key indicators of social and cultural values.

Nowhere are these differences more apparent than in British Columbia. Of 16 North American geographic regions, British Columbia is the least driven with consumerism, and the most interested in life’s nonmaterial rewards. The United States, Adams points out, is “lacking in ecological values,” which indicates a detachment from the land. Ecological fatalism is up in the US, he adds, while empathy for your neighbour is way down.

“The whole island is being bought by Americans,” the surveyor working on the property next door—a longtime Salt Spring resident—points out. He should know, they are employing him. Finding out the numbers to support such a comment, however, is a lot more difficult. As of January 1, new provisions in the Privacy Act make it impossible to find out the nationalities of landowners in Canada.

But after talking to a number of real estate agents, one gets a pretty good idea about who is buying property—not only on Salt Spring Island, but on the rest of the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island as well. One Salt Spring realtor told me that one-third of all waterfront property on Salt Spring is owned by Americans, and there are areas of Salt Spring that are 50 percent American-owned.

On neighbouring Mayne Island, one sale out of 40 went to an American three years ago. Over the past year, one in five properties that sold went to an American. On Salt Spring Island, the buyers are the big-money kind. Goldie Hawn, Al Pacino and Robin Williams own places but don’t live in them. People who don’t have to think twice about the price of a home are driving up land prices. In the past three years housing prices on Salt Spring have increased by half.

There are three types of US real estate refugees: those who immigrate here and gain citizenship, those who seek citizenship but are denied it, and those who simply want real estate holdings here. It is the latter that make up the bulk of purchasers here. “They disapprove of American foreign policy and the current Bush administration, they fear that in America they will be under terrorist attack and they want to have Canada as a safe place to retreat to in the event of such an attack,” says Jan MacPherson, another Salt Spring realtor.

A few days before the border-stake incident, I saw a Humvee with Oregon license plates at the recycling depot. So I was in a certain frame of mind, let’s say, when I chopped up the stakes. While considering my feelings and discussing them with friends, an intriguing bumper sticker started showing up on vans, island beaters, road signs and hydro poles: “USA Out of Iraq and The Gulf Islands.” Apparently I wasn’t alone in my thoughts.

To be fair, the American migration is part of a larger trend of gentrification on the islands. In the 1960s and ‘70s, young people moved here searching for a simpler way of life. The hippie dream was alive and well and the growing conditions for marijuana perfect for a down payment. Today, back-to-the-land has been replaced by back-to-the-bland, comfortable middle-aged city-dwellers investing in country property (preferably on the waterfront) where they can develop estates for weekends and holiday retreats. Here it isn’t often a case of trying to live off the land; more often it’s living off stock options in an expensive second home with a hobby garden and an electric fence.

“I’d like to see an economy where people who are investing their lives here have the opportunity to buy property,” says Ellen Garvie, a community development consultant. Garvie suggests that back to nature at $500-per-square-foot properties such as the one built by Randy Bachman of BTO and the Guess Who (which reportedly employed 400 people) are not sustainable. The effect of
the value of the house outweighs the short-term employment opportunities it provides. And the people who work on the house won’t be able to afford to buy property here.

The island has a zero vacancy rate for renters, and as Garvie notes (and I have experienced) there’s a shocking decrepitude to places available for rent. The last place we rented was 400 square feet, with no tub, for $750 a month and the landlord and his barking dog Bubba adding to the midden pile outside our door.

In the 1996 federal census, 17 percent of locals reported earning gross personal incomes below the federal low-income cut-off level of $14,473 for a single person and $27,235 for a four-person household. Almost half the households on Salt Spring enjoy an income of less than $30,000, with 30 percent of households surviving on less than $20,000. Can one experience “the good life” under such conditions?

To make sure the good life remains accessible to longtime residents, a few have gathered together to form the Salt Spring Island Coalition, whose goal is to develop an independent political entity—an Island State—to ensure a sustainable community. According to Eric Booth, who was born and raised on Salt Spring Island and has raised two children here, chances are that only one or two percent of the 100 children graduating from high school each year on Salt Spring today will be able to remain here and raise their own kids.

Booth, who worked as a real estate agent on the island for close to a decade, bases this statement on the fact that there are only 6,500 subdividable lots on Salt Spring Island, which can support a population of 15,000 to 18,000 people. “After that, the population of Salt Spring will have maxed out,” he says. “There will be no more land available to build. Once that happens the price of real estate here will go through the roof.”

But you can’t stop people from wanting to come here, can you?

“Oh but you can,” says Booth. “What is the current immigration criteria for coming to Salt Spring now? If you have the money you can come. What definition of citizenship is that? If Salt Spring were to become an Island Nation like the Isle of Mann or the Channel Islands we could define what criteria make for a citizen. In the future the people who contribute to the uniqueness of Salt Spring, the artists and craftspersons, the musicians and farmers, won’t be able to afford to live here. Then the Island will be only for the rich. We can insure that there will always be room for a culturally diverse population if we define it by our citizenship.”

Prince Edward Island has taken one small step in that direction. Property owners who were born outside its boundaries pay double the property tax of the indigenous population.

“People who come here from out of country don’t make the same connections to community in most cases,” says Garvie, “If you are younger and raise your children here, you can put a face to the community and invest energy into it. It is in your best interest.”

Four cedars, each at least 500 years old, have already been chopped down on my neighbour’s property. Cedars my two-year-old son and I have placed our hands upon countless times, But it cuts deeper than that. There is now a daily assault of chainsaws outside our rented home. It truly does feel like an American invasion. In just weeks the ecosystem here has been reduced from a relatively undisturbed 10,000 years of post-glacial forest life to a redneck mud pit of man conquering trees. (I have a chainsaw; I cut down four trees a year for firewood. This is not about raving environmentalism.)

The bush is abuzz with the sounds of building another weekend retreat for Americans. And with the silence goes the idea of living on the land and raising your kids here. And, of course, for my sweetie, son and I the question remains where to go next? With all the US immigration headed this way I hear there are some great real estate bargains just south of the border.

Grant Shilling is the author of The Cedar Surf: An Informal History of Surfing in British Columbia. Shilling was the editor and publisher of The GIG, an eclectic news-paper that served the coastal communities of BC. His surf drama “Tough City” is to be produced by True West Films. Shilling surfs a longboard dubbed “The Muff.” He is a lot of fun at parties.

One cannot argue with photographs, and that is the inherent problem of the medium. A photograph is often viewed as exactly what it represents—a destroyed building, a dead child. It can scream, but it rarely speaks or engages us like the written or spoken word. In capturing death it is the apparent duty of most photographs to leave us “speechless.”

In 1862, Civil War photographer Mathew Brady became the first to cross the death barrier when he displayed his collection of photographs, “The Dead of Antietam.” His images of Confederate casualties set the standard for all reactions to atrocity photos to come—moral outrage at the invasion of death’s privacy, and at the stunning indictment of war.

As Susan Sontag wrote in her 1972 treatise On Photography, the reactions are suspect and limited because “a capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex…. It needs to gather unlimited amounts of information.” While one would assume that these images could change history and sway public opinion, Sontag concludes to the contrary: “the attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion.”

In light of the last 30 years of—not entirely annoying—postmodern theory, Sontag’s strident criticism now seems as artificially old-timey as boudoir photography. It is true that before calculated shock wears off, new images are presented to us—often before we can engage with the photograph. But to assume that taking and looking at photos only leaves us with a sense of immobility is to assume that we have no active relationship with photographic images. Sontag’s belief that one can never understand and connect with photographs, again, informs much of her recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others. Yet the problem with trying to locate a morality within the aesthetics of photography is that photography has no aesthetics. A picture’s power (and secret) never resides in the focus of its content, but rather in questions of why the photo was taken and what the relationship between photographer and subject is. We take photos to remember (and is there anything we forget more than death?) but Sontag felt that “our oppressive sense of transience of everything is more acute since the camera gave us the means to ‘fix’ the fleeting moment.”

In contrast, the late critic Roland Barthes was fascinated by these questions. Like Sontag, he found attempts by photographers to aestheticize their work (“classic” composition, ironic whimsy, exploiting grain and materiality) to be vulgar but despite this, he saw in a photograph’s unintended, discrete elements, the power to convey mortality with great lucidity. He called this detail in a photograph “the punctum”; in literal terms, a detail that pierced him when viewing. With the unaesthetic snapshot being the only kind of photograph to consistently capture the popular imagination, history has borne out Barthes’ theory. Without the bluff and hustle of clumsy aesthetics, snapshots can only speak the truth of photography’s covert mission—the containment and neutralizing of death.

Many war photographs are snapshots. Most are not. Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuc fleeing her village after a US napalm attack is a snapshot and perhaps singular in its intensity. In the photo, a group of fleeing children is centered by the naked, burnt Kim Phuc, her face expressing an unknowable suffering. In the background, the satanic cloud of napalm is a grey haze. Following the children, three soldiers gesture—implying everything from practiced calm to numb shock. Their suffering too, is unknowable. Were we ever meant to see this photograph?

War, by its very nature, is spectacle—a grand staged execution—and staged photos are often the only images we are allowed to see. Another photo from the Vietnam War—Eddie Adams’s photo of an executioner’s bullet as it strikes a still-standing prisoner on the street in Saigon—was staged. The bullet is real, the corpse is real but the execution was moved outside for the benefit of the press. Its formal posing ultimately disturbs more than the before-death gaze on the prisoner’s face.

Thirty years and a change of location later, the photos taken by the 320th and 372nd Battalion of Military Police stationed at Abu Ghraib are, like all unforgettable photographs, snapshots. The chill at first glance is what most would assume is the ultimate evidence of a battered country’s degradation but what stops the heart cold is beyond the photographs’ focal points of shamed bodies. Why did they casually document these acts? Officials have claimed that the photos were taken in order to intimidate other prisoners; the suggestion of which serves to normalize the photos as elements of proper war spectacle. But what of the look of glee on the prison guards’ faces while committing acts of sadism informed as much by high school hazing as by the CIA handbook? Are they not similar to looks on Cancun vacationers’ faces, caught in a saucy tableau by the camera’s flash? A not unlikely comparison as the battalions have been distanced from the “regular” army in the press. They are a reserve unit, untrained and drawn from common fields like data processing and the service industry. The purpose of these images is, under closer scrutiny, the same purpose behind vacation photos—proof of adventure and dominance over an exotic locale. If these images were, as they were purported to be, created to intimidate, do they continue to intimidate us as spectators? Even with the arrangement and posing they are snapshots, and as snapshots they only reveal an impotent, banal evil.

Brian Joseph Davis is a photo-based artist searching for a less problematic medium.

Sit and spin The decision to disseminate their music on record is not a move of vinyl snobs, but of men who hold strong to their artistic ideals. Both are creative forces of nature with successful careers outside of the band, Biesinger as a freelance illustrator for local and national publications and Anderson as a playwright and theatre director.

“The way I get music and the way I understand it is through the filter of a very bad record player in my bedroom. If we made something that I couldn’t play on that, it would just feel weird,” explains Biesinger. Anderson adds that people who are excited about a lollipop-red 45 “will probably also understand what we are trying to do artistically.”

Get your gay on! What they do has, so far, brought gayness and queerness to the forefront of Edmonton’s independent music scene, with their single reaching number two on campus radio two weeks after its release. Good news for the duo, who strive to circulate their music and lyrics to as much of the homosexual population as possible—especially those young kids stuck in the judgmental small towns that populate Alberta’s landscape. Their message to fans is simple: “You can do this; it’s so easy. And if you don’t want to do this now, then come and dance.”

Socialist party Biesinger, the straight-guy socialist with a 1962 Harmony H-75 guitar, sings most of the songs. Anderson—“the homo-socialist with entitlement issues” and drummer who doesn’t do fills—was adamant about this set-up from the band’s inception.

Jokes aside, the band has devoted many hours of careful thought and negotiation to the level of “gayness” they wish to communicate. In Biesinger’s opinion, his mouth, when singing, is “a federal entity, and [he] and Trevor are but provinces” in the collective band experience. “Butt Provinces!” Anderson shouts, delighted.

Butts will shake in eastern Canada in August when the Struts go on tour with another two-man Edmonton garage-rock band, Whitey Houston. Remember: the drummer likes boys, the singer likes Marx, and both agree: “Zero pretensions—just shake your bum.”

Hear the band on newmusiccanada.com or get more information at fifteen.ca.

Vespa Nation

La dolce Vespa, icon of chic Euro-style and Mod subculture, has motored back to Canada after an 18-year absence. The federal government banned the stylish scooter in 1986 because Piaggio, its Italian manufacturer, failed to meet toughening emission regulations. Its reappearance this past May was due to the diligent pestering of Piaggio by Morey Chaplick, president of the Toronto-based Canadian Scooter Corp.

Chaplick persuaded the innovators of Italian transport that there is a market for Vespas in Canada—our burgeoning urban areas are already home to thousands of devotees of vintage Vespas. And the machines themselves have come a long way. The new line includes a much more environmentally sound four-stroke-engine model, and even the two-stroke-engine model now complies with California emission standards, the toughest in North America.

Piaggio began manufacturing Vespas in 1946 to provide sturdy, inexpensive mobility to Italians on war-ravaged roads in a post-WWII economy. The Vespa has remained popular in Europe due to soaring gas prices, narrow streets and traffic congestion that have made the freedom of the compact, wasp-like scooter a common alternative on arrondissements, stradas and caminos. The Vespa ET4 costs around $5,400 and carries a 150cc four-stoke engine, while the ET2 costs closer to $4,000 and has a 50cc two-stroke engine.

Gridlock: The nimble Vespa measures a slight 1.7 metres in length and a little over half a metre in width. The average city parking space, measuring six metres in length and 2.7 metres in width, can accommodate about 10 Vespas. And you could fit 86 Vespas into the 25 parking spaces that line the length of the average city block on each side.

Fuel Efficiency: If Vespas made up 15 percent of vehicles on Canadian roads, and they were driven 15 kilometres a day, drivers would save more than 91 million litres of gas each month. The average four-door passenger vehicle uses anywhere from 7.89 litres per 100 kilometres to 17.20 litres per kilometre, while the Vespa ET2 uses 3.6 and the Vespa ET4 uses 5.6.

Pocket Change: With today’s gas prices hovering around 90 cents a litre, it costs about $8 to fill the nine-litre Vespa tank. Driving 15 kilometres a day at 90 cents a litre would cost 62 cents a day. If you were willing to bundle up and ride your Vespa nine months out of the year (taking a break for only the three worst winter months), you’d spend a total of $156.24 on gas. Insurance: For the average cost of insuring one car for a year you could insure six Vespas. In major urban areas, insurance rates range from $1,400 to $2,800 per year for a car. Vespas, considered less hazardous on the roads, can be insured for a mere $300 to $400 a year. By Jackie Wallace

Unread Menace
Though some call us a Communist publication, apparently This Magazine is not Communist enough for the Chinese government, according to a 2002 study by a pair of Harvard Law School researchers. Try to look up www.thismagazine.ca in China, and all you’ll see is an error page. Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman tested 200,000 websites and found that 50,000 offering information about politics, education, health and entertainment—as well as some 3,000 sites from Taiwan—were inaccessible on proxy servers in China because of longstanding policies of the ruling Communist Party. For a complete list of blocked sites, check out cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/ By Jenn Hardy

Split On Svend-Gate
When Svend Robinson revealed in April that he had pocketed a pricey antique diamond ring, conservatives were gleeful with schadenfreude, and progressives scratched their heads and wondered what had possessed their fallen hero. Even the experts seem divided about Svend-gate, with opinions almost as polar as Stephen Harper’s and Jack Layton’s.

“There are a lot of different ways to snap, and shoplifting is quite a common one in my experience,” explains therapist and recovered shoplifter Terry Shulman, who runs www.shopliftersanonymous.com. It’s not just a way to get free stuff. Those who shoplift for psychological reasons, he points out, often discard the stolen items soon after the deed is done. “With politicians, it’s hard to say whether it’s pure ego, or if they feel over-extended,” Shulman says. “Politicians are for helping people, that’s their job. That’s really an awesome responsibility, and their own needs may become sublimated.” He explains that many people, including him, have shoplifted as a way to compensate for feeling that they have sacrificed or over-extended themselves.

Toronto psychiatrist Dr. Mark Berber rejects this theory as applied to politicians. “Politicians are very well-supported—they have large staffs and lots of holidays,” he says. “I think sometimes celebrities and politicians may think that at some level they are above the law.” Shulman and Berber also have differing perspectives on Robinson’s case in particular. “When he said ‘I’ve failed,’ that tells me that he was putting a lot of pressure on himself to have this perfect image,” Shulman says. Berber takes a less sympathetic view, emphasizing the importance of knowing the sequence of events in Robinson’s case. “It’s been reported that he was looking at rings beforehand, and if that’s the case this becomes more complex, more pre-meditated,” he says.

Shulman sees the antique ring in question as symbolic. He says the ring represents commitment issues, and antiques represent a longing for times of old. Berber laughs when asked if he reads anything into the ring. “Let’s not get into Freudian issues now.” By Annette Bourdeau

Martin Bucks Wheat Agreement
The potential conflicts of interest involving Paul Martin’s ties to Canada Steamship Lines (CSL) are unlikely to go away soon. Martin owned the private company throughout his tenure as finance minister, keeping it in a blind trust while nonetheless getting briefed on the company’s affairs. During the debate over the Kyoto Protocol to address global climate change, many speculated that Martin’s ties to CSL, which is a major shipper of coal, was the root cause of his wavering support for the agreement.

CSL’s grain shipping business may also be a factor in Canada’s failure to ratify the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. The protocol, finalized at a 2000 conference in Montreal, aims to protect against the risks posed by importing genetically engineered (GE) organisms. Once released into the environment, GE organisms can become a permanent fixture, contaminating domestic plant species. Canada signed the Biosafety Protocol in 2001, and the agreement came into force last September. Ninety countries, including Mexico, Japan and all members of the European Union, have ratified it. Even China has stated that it will ratify in the near future. Yet Canada is still dithering.

The biotech industry, worried about provisions in the accord requiring imports of GE products to be labelled as such, has aggressively lobbied against ratification. Pro
-biotech bureaucrats have put forward an ever-changing list of reasons for Canada’s failure to sign on. The latest justification, according to top officials on the file from various departments, is the effects the agreement will have on the grain shipping industry. And one of Canada’s top grain shippers is CSL.

In a September 2003, memo obtained under access to information, Stephen Yarrow, a director at the Canada Food Inspection Agency, stated that bureaucrats are still examining the pros and cons of ratification. “Specifically, this analysis is focussing on the potential impacts on the Canadian grain handling and shipping industries.” At parliamentary hearings this past March, lead bureaucrats from Agriculture Canada and Environment Canada confirmed that shipping industry concerns are the “principle point” hampering Canada’s ratification.

There is no direct evidence that Martin intervened to discourage Canada’s ratification of the protocol. However, his ties to CSL are widely known within government, and many bureaucrats, who already have a cozy relationship with biotech companies that are against the agreement, may be raising the shipping concern as a way of cowing others within government who support ratification.

As a result, so long as shipping concerns remain the primary justification for failing to ratify the Biosafety Protocol, Martin’s ties to that industry may cause some to question why Canada is opting out of a widely supported international agreement. Ottawa Report: By Aaron Freeman

Where a stone wall once shielded the dark fortress of the former Provincial Lunatic Asylum at 999 Queen Street West in Toronto, a low black-iron picket fence grazes the perimeter of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), the largest facility of its kind in Canada. Inside, paintings of landscapes and dreamscapes deck the concrete walls, all works signed by patients. Around the bend and inside the windowless Training Room A, one man blinks as he speaks, one fidgets with his feet, and another stutters out a story—but one is acting. Some have previous training in theatre, most are unemployed, but all share a background in therapy, playing the real life role of mental health patient in the Workman Theatre Project (WTP), a professional, not-for-profit theatre company that draws from the talent of current and former patients.

Sporting chunky black-rimmed glasses and a notepad, Katherine Ashby, an actress and improv teacher of 15 years, motions for the group to begin a game called “What are you doing?” One member calls out the action and another steps in to demonstrate, prompting a series of scenes involving swimming, blowing up frogs and giving birth to a Sasquatch. A voice shouts for the next member to act as if he’s walking through a park. John, a middle-aged man labelled manic-depressive, picks up his knees and marches on the spot.

“John, don’t act like you’re going for a walk,” Ashby critiques. “Go for a walk.”

Ashby teaches her students to let go of labels and release themselves from the script that prevents them from taking risks. Like mental illness, improv involves the mind and body. With that, John smirks, strolls to the exit, walks out and lightly slams the door behind him. The audience laughs. About 30 years ago, John was a patient at the Clark Institute of Psychiatry, now affiliated with CAMH, and at other times he was homeless in Yorkville, writing and selling poetry in cafés to buy food. He has been a member of WTP for eight years and an employee for seven years, hired to clean the facilities. He says he seeks joy in improv, rather than therapy.

“I would connect improvisation in theatre with improvisation in life,” says Dr. Steve Levine, a professor at York University who teaches psychotherapy and the arts. “We suffer when we have no room to move, no free play in a restricted situation. Improvisation teaches us that we can always find a solution, even when the situation itself doesn’t seem to offer one.”

Levine says play naturally relaxes and frees people, providing a healthy distance from problems. Through play, he teaches that, “the artist is moved to create as a way of responding to the world,” performing spontaneous dialogue, gestures and scenes, which in turn affect how others will receive and react to the information.

For instance, in a game called “Finish the sentence” WTP members are instructed to complete their partner’s statement, an exercise that tests both listening skills and creativity. What they concoct is a little bit of both. “Last week…” “…My mother told me to fuck off.” “Fence posts and cabbage…” “…Make me want to puke.”

“Improvisation is about playing the game,” says Levine. “expanding a tight existence and conditioned lifestyle by letting go of preconceptions.” To the members of WTP, improv is more than 12 steps to becoming sober or 12 steps to becoming famous: They learn real life skills through improvisational theatre. And it all starts with “shut up and listen,” says Ashby.

For four years, Ashby has taught improv to current and former mental health patients at WTP. She has also taught seniors in Ryerson University’s Act II program and she helped launch the youth program at Second City, a comedy club and training facility that jump-started the careers of Mike Myers, John Candy and Dan Akroyd. Ashby believes improv can benefit everyone. “You can teach the young, the elderly and the insane,” she says, then quickly corrects herself. “I mean those who seek therapy.”

Ashby came to work for WTP as an experienced improv instructor with little to no experience in therapy, except as a patient. But WTP has never been about therapeutic intervention. “This is a training centre,” she says. “Not therapy.” Its purpose is to make audiences aware of mental health issues and stereotypes, and provide its members with professional training in theatre, visual arts and creative writing. And if members discover a talent, make a friend or laugh more than before they enrolled, then WTP has served its purpose. “They don’t know they’re getting medicine,” she says, “because they’re having so much fun.”

WTP is named after Joseph Workman, the superintendent of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum in the late 1800s, who believed in “moral therapy” or rather, fresh air, cleanliness, good diet and natural healing. Workman brought compassion to how mental health is perceived by the public. Just as Lisa Brown, a former psychiatric nurse at CAMH, has brought compassion to WTP. Brown founded WTP in the early ’90s and has acted as the company’s artistic producer ever since, helping the company to gain international recognition. One of the company’s previous stage productions includes Joy, a musical about depression.

Before CAMH, French philospher Michel Foucault’s theory of social control reigned over not only prisons but psychiatric institutions. Their purpose, he believed, was to isolate and control the socially undesirable. There was also the idea of the docile body, whereby people in authority could measure, manipulate and control weaker individuals.

Improv isn’t designed to measure class systems, psychiatric medications or social labels. And because of this freedom students act less inhibited and less concerned with public acceptance. Because of Ashby’s training in theatre not therapy, she was nervous to start her first improv class at WTP, enough so that one member tried to make her feel comfortable by sharing his own anxieties. “I left my job at a juice factory,” he told her. “I couldn’t concentrate.”

One in eight Canadians is hospitalized for mental illness at least once in a lifetime, more than cancer and heart disease. A person can break every bone in his or her body and return to work with no problem, Ashby says, but if he or she leaves for mental health reasons co-workers fear the person will snap at any moment. The members of WTP are stronger than most simply because they’ve confronted such problems. They’ve lived through unemployment, poverty, family dysfunction and death, drug addictions, psychiatric labels like manic-depressive disorder, as well as social labels like crazy.

Ashby asks the group to line up against the wall facing the audience. Two by two, members interact in improvised scenes. Rob—fidgety, round, bald and jovial—calls freeze and steps in to the scene with Jody, a wirey middle-aged woman wearing a faded ballcap and square-framed glasses. They resume their roles. “The sky is blue,” Jody hollars, waving her finger at the ceiling. “It’s blue,” says Rob in a monotone voice. Ashby cuts in, provides feedback, and the scene ends. Rob first sought therapy because he lacked relationships. At WTP, improv provides a social atmosphere that feeds on group dynamics as well as individual creativity.

“
By pretending to be something you’re not, you’re still pulling from yourself,” he says.

Ashby always encourages WTP members to bring their moods and emotions. It’s the range of emotions that makes people and role-playing interesting. “If you’re a person who’s only ever on one note all the time you can be a great actor,” she says, “but these guys have so many keys on the piano to play on.” There’s always the pressure to happy, she adds, despite happieness being listed in psychology textbooks as a temporary state. “I want them to have fun with the emotions that they can.”

Martin, a slender man with a tidy mustache, is a former alcoholic and patient at the Clark Institute of Psychiatry. He has been in improv for three years and says it helps him, first and foremost, because it gets him out of the house. “80 per cent of success is showing up,” he says.

Ashby asks the group to sit in a circle and share what they’ve done in the past week. One man blinks as he speaks, revealing to the group that he fasted the day before Ramadan. Rob fidgets with his feet and coyly tosses out a knock-knock joke. And John says, “I lllearned ttto ssstop stttuddering.” But everyone knows he’s acting.

Every year as another school term ground to a close and the spring air hinted at the summer to come, our negotiations would begin in earnest. Like many liberal-minded parents, mine believed the modern family should behave as a model democracy. I knew better, though. Our annual discussions were less like the equitable entente of two elected powers, and more the kangaroo courtship of a peace treaty foisted upon a bitter, humbled nation. It was 1919 all over again and I was the crestfallen Kaiser. But the stakes were far greater than rejigged borders and post-war reparations: We were deciding where I’d go to summer camp, and that road could only lead to trouble and tears.

In Canada, summer camp ranks in our national iconography somewhere between the Last Spike and the ’72 Summit Series. Decades out of short pants, CEOs and middle-aged memoirists still get misty eyed at the mention of their golden summers along Lake Wannagoupchuk: learning the J-stroke, communing with nature, losing their virginity. It was in the hot kiln of camp that the mushy clay of youth was finally forged into rigid citizens of the world.

Trading freely in this coming-of-age myth, Canada’s two happiest campers happen to be Americans. After boyhood summers in Algonquin Park, Motor City refugees Michael Budman and Don Green recycled nostalgia for ersatz camp life back to the country that had taught it to them and built the lucrative Roots empire on the embers of their Camp Tawakwa weenie roasts.

For Canada’s vast middle class, summer camp has long held a similar aspirational mystique: one part rite of passage, one part finishing school. And so it was with my parents. My mother is a retired grade-school teacher, with a devout faith in the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bookshelves alchemy of eternal education. Public schooling was fine for the fundamentals. But if your kid hoped to get ahead, there was still some extra-curricular spit polishing to do.

And so, as we negotiated my summer itinerary, my parents would present a catalogue of camps that held forth the evangelical possibilities of secular self-improvement. First, they would suggest I be shipped off to a remote Quebecois village for French immersion camp. A shy anglo kid from the deep suburbs of Ottawa, I would exercise my one veto. After that, a compromise camp would be imposed.

I did my first tour of duty at an arts-and-crafts day camp. The counsellors may have oversold the market prospects of the glue-glitter-and-macaroni medium in which we laboured, but it seemed harmless enough. The next year, though, I was drafted into Sports Camp, where more urgent physical pursuits were supposed to firm up my frail body and confidence. They did neither. Instead, before a jury of truculent peers, the succession of phys-ed ordeals only provoked one empty epiphany: Not only was I inept at all the major status-building school sports, such as soccer and softball, but I discovered I was hopeless at the obscure ones, too, like fencing, squash and archery. I could no longer even pretend that I might be an undiscovered prodigy at some arcane but noble sport. I’d botched them all.

If Sports Camp proved a bust, Computer Camp wasn’t much better. This was during the dawn of the personal computer, so the camp was equipped with only enough low-grade machines to occupy a handful of budding Bill Gateses at a time. I sat in an underlit classroom, learning to touch type, soldering circuit boards and mastering Boolean logic. Whenever our counsellors thought we looked too sallow and listless, they shuttled us to a nearby roller disco for “exercise.”

Since then, high-tech camps have become more sophisticated. Today’s kids can be nerded through a summer of digital filmmaking or video-game design. But I can’t read their glossy brochures without thinking of my own season soldering in the dark. If nothing else, Computer Camp taught me early that behind the gilded promise of the Information Age lay a thousand digital drudge jobs—for which I was amply trained.

The low point, though, was a summer stint at an institution that I will call (if only to protect the innocent from their own repressed memories) Camp Sylvania. Located on the bucolic grounds of the city’s most exclusive boys’ college, Camp Sylvania promised a rounded curriculum of physical and mental endeavours, including the prep-school privilege of private tennis lessons. This was the place, my parents felt, where I might get a toe up the social bunk ladder. Camp Sylvania, though, never lived up to its hoity-toity billing. The counsellors were absentee landlords, and aside from the school’s cavernous gym, the hallowed halls of academe were locked away from the summer herds. The only experience that resembled a tennis lesson was when our stewards reluctantly handed out racquets, like rifles to a troop of reserves, and let us hatchet a few balls for an afternoon.

Mostly, I spent my tenure on my back, staring at the sky. A bullet-faced fellow camper was so bored that he passed his free time between activities by pinning me to the grass, with his knees on my shoulders. He didn’t torment me. He rarely even spoke. “Isn’t there something else you’d rather be doing?” I’d ask after a half-hour of his silent treatment. Eventually, I just accepted my predicament.

This, then, seemed the experience of regimented leisure distilled to its metaphorical essence. To paraphrase George Orwell (and anyone who dreamed up Big Brother must have done time at self-improvement school), “If you want a picture of camp, imagine a sneaker stamping on a human face—for a whole summer.”

Months later, a package arrived from Camp Sylvania. I slit the cardboard sleeve, and a vinyl 45 rolled out. I placed it on my father’s turntable and heard an oom-pah-ing tune followed by a tinny choir of kids’ voices: “I love to go a wandering/ Along a mountain track/ And as I go I love to sing/ My knapsack on my back…” Where the familiar chorus should begin, they hollered instead: “Sylvan-yee! Sylvan-yah! Sylvan-yah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Who were these true believers yodeling their fatuous ode to our slovenly camp? Where was the recording studio in which they’d been sequestered to tout their lies? This was propaganda of the vilest sort.

My mother just smiled: “It sounds like you had a wonderful summer.”

“All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice,” Susan Sontag wrote in her famous essay about an entirely different notion of camp. “Nothing in nature can be campy…. Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban. Yet, they often have a serenity—or a naiveté—which is the equivalent of pastoral. A great deal of Camp suggests Empson’s phrase, ‘urban pastoral.’”

My final summer-camp experience was a last-ditch effort to convert me to the Canadian creed of the urban pastoral. Maybe I’d just attended the wrong camps. Maybe I could make others’ experiences more uplifting than my own. And so I was enrolled in Leadership-in-Training, a touchy-feely boot camp for the awkward youth of socially conscious parents. We performed trust-bridging exercises, learned non-competitive games, talked about our feelings and the “meaning of leadership” among a circle of strangers. Its mid-’80s methods echoed the banal “team-building&rdquo
; ethos metastasizing through the cubicles of corporate North America, and it wasn’t exactly how a hormonally flustered 15-year-old hoped to spend his summer.

In the final two weeks, we had to put our training into practice. I was assigned to intern as a counsellor at the same recreational centre whose Sports Camp had doused my dreams of being an Olympic épéeist. I vowed that my charges would fare better. Then I met Kirby the Camper.

Kirby was a flame-haired dervish with the restless imagination of a comic-book super-villain. “Every summer, I pick one counsellor,” he told me, “and I make his life hell.” I’d been selected. But if Kirby hoped to break me with his anarchic mischief, I intended to break him, too, with my Zen-like patience.

We fought to a draw and a grudging respect by the camp’s final hurrah. For Sleep-Out Night, campers pitched tents in a wooded grove behind the rec centre—bordered by a shopping mall, a Revenue Canada tower and a hectic intersection. Here, counsellors tried to recreate the bonfire bonhomie of the more expensive cottage-country programs they’d rather be working at. I suspected Kirby would view this exercise in faux wilderness with his usual cynicism, but he seemed uncharacteristically excited about Sleep-Out Night. After the sun dropped, I found out why.

“Okay, now’s the time we go see the bums,” he said. At every Sleep-Out Night, Kirby explained, he’d steal away from the campsite, descend a nearby pedestrian underpass and hang out with the homeless men who kipped there. This, for Kirby, was an authentic adventure—the real face of the urban pastoral.

I was tempted. But then my leadership training kicked in. We couldn’t possibly do that, I insisted. It was too dangerous. It was against the rules. It would flunk me out of Leadership Camp. “Don’t you want to sit around the fire?” I asked. “We’ll be toasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories and…” I couldn’t believe what I was saying.

Kirby’s face shaded from disappointment to contempt. We both knew I was feeding him the same bogus camp song I’d been forced to listen to myselfevery summer. All that was missing was the Roots sweatshirts and the oom-pahband and that frantic chorus of campers pretending to have the time of their lives.

David Leach is an instructor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Victoria; he is the former managing editor of Explore magazine.

IDEA MAN

It always makes me wild with rage when the complexities of a federal election are idiotically reduced to a single issue for voters. The major parties, and the mainstream media, seem to assume that people have the attention span of three-year-olds.

Then along comes Jack Layton’s Speaking Out: Ideas That Work for Canadians, explaining multi-faceted, economically sound solutions to our biggest problems: health care, hydro, tuition, industries, you name it.

While Layton can’t help but write from the perspective of the leader of the NDP, this book is not the NDP Orange Book. It’s not a list of Layton’s own ideas and accomplishments or a collection of essays. Nor is it an elegant piece of persuasive writing.

What it is, however, is a list of “best practices,” independent of any particular party, taken from home and abroad. The barrage of ideas can, at times, be overwhelming. Doubtless, many will dismiss these ideas as naïve or simple. But, their simplicity is their strength. Regardless of political affiliation, Canadians owe it to themselves to read this book.

Although a former academic, Layton wisely combines the research and analytical skills of his political science PhD with the hands-on community approach of his political experience. The ideas aren’t full-length studies, backed by statistics, but they are considered and convincing: for example, ordinary people can understand how a “green car” industrial strategy brought together such seemingly odd bedfellows as Layton, the Canadian Auto Workers union, Greenpeace and an MP from Windsor. How money spent on health promotion can have a bigger payoff than money spent on treatment. Or how investing in affordable housing will save us money.

God forbid, long-term planning? Optimism? Faith in the powers of ordinary people? This guy can’t be a politician.
— Sue McCluskey

•

I know you are but what am I? by Heather Birrell (Coach House Books)FICTION

Time and again in this nine-story collection, Birrell weaves patterns of flashbacks, walk-on characters, best-ever similes (an airplane window like an eyelid), and—most importantly—struggling, complicated protagonists. This creates little universes that are both vast and intimate. “Not Quite Casablanca” and “Congratulations, Really” are particularly wonderful. Too often, though, there is a paragraph near the end in which the protagonist ruminates over the diverse threads that have made up the story, reminding readers that they’ve been reading a story, an artifice, all along. Even so, I will read this book again, and soon; Birrell has a talent matched by few others for tapping the rich details of our experience. (A note to the designer: the book’s cover does it a disservice.)
—Adam Lewis Schroeder

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig (Penguin Press)NON-FICTION

Every movement needs an inspirational figure, someone able to both set the terms of debate and lead by example. The “free culture” movement has found its leader in the unlikely person of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. He has been arguing for years that the internet is on its way to becoming the most highly regulated place on Earth. In his new book, Lessig takes on “Big Copyright,” the system of cultural ownership that has given copyright-rich corporations an unprecedented degree of control over popular culture. The copyright wars are shaping up as the civil rights issue of this decade, and Lawrence Lessig is the one setting the agenda.
—Andrew Potter

Viral Suite by Mari-Lou Rowley (Anvil Press)POETRY

It is rare to see science and poetry mixed as seamlessly as they are in Mari-Lou Rowley’s Viral Suite, but not surprising for Rowley, a science and technology writer. The linguistic gymnastics and energy of the verse is at its best when she combines the world of physics, mathematics and molecular biology with real physicality; as in the third section, “Elucidata.” Visceral gems such as “Sex in Space Time” allow language and image to do their work without interference from the empirical voice, “For the same reason the earth revolves around/ the sun, a hand falling through any arc of/ air will choose the swelling mass of thigh/ over nothing, for warmth/ for meaning.”
—Rajinderpal S. Pal

Sue McCluskey is a writer, editor and country and western musician. She blushes easily.

Andrew Potter belongs to the public domain. He teaches philosophy at Trent university and is at work co-writing a book with Joseph Heath on the counterculture and mass society.

He may refer to them as “funny books,” but Ho Che Anderson views comics as a serious, socially redeeming art. The Toronto cartoonist has authored a number of intriguing titles in the past decade, but none so potent as KING, a graphic novel trilogy chronicling the life of Martin Luther King Jr. The three volumes, which appeared between 1993 and 2003, were commissioned by Seattle-based publisher Fantagraphics. Dark, moody and not always flattering of its subject, Anderson’s interpretive biography was hailed as “rare and vital” by time.com. The 34-year-old artist will release another Fantagraphics book, a supernatural thriller called Scream Queen, next spring, and is currently seeking a publisher for Corporate World, a graphic novel he describes as “a sci-fi blaxploitation action-adventure epic.”

How politically motivated were your parents?

My mother not so much; my father very much so. Anybody who names his son after Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara has obviously got politics very much at the centre of his psyche. It’s tempting to say he was militantly black, but that’s not how I see it. He was never anti-white, by any means. He was always very much pro-black, like, “Please, let’s bring ourselves up beyond the level we’re at.” For a lot of years, that was something I kind of rebelled against—being overtly politically active. But it filters through in the stuff that I do, whether or not I want it to.

How would you characterize your own political drive?

It only goes as far as my work. I’ve thought about hands-on activism in the past, but it’s just not me. I admire people who get out and protest and speak out. I admire them more than anybody. But it’s not really part of my makeup. So the only way I can tackle this stuff is through the stories that I tell. That being said, black people have a certain burden put on them right from the start. Just by virtue of living on this continent, you have to be political. It’s just unavoidable. I’ve always sort of resented that. I’ve always sort of wished that I could be granted the freedom to be as irrelevant and superficial as the rest of society, if that’s how I choose to live my life. But that’s never really been much of an option.

In the first volume of KING, you wrote that you didn’t want to be known as the chronicler of black rage in comics. At the same time, you said that you’re driven to tell black stories. Do you see that as a contradiction?

Actually, I do think it’s a bit of a contradiction. Part of me feels like white folks have the opportunity to tell their stories all the time, and it’s accepted. I sort of feel like there’s enough white people out there telling their stories, and I’m not really sure why I should have to tell their stories as well.

How much has racial equality progressed since King’s death?

The same problems that existed historically are still there to a large extent. I think inherently there is systemic racism at play. It’s built into the very framework of this society. I think it’s possible to get beyond it at some point, but I don’t fully see that it has happened today. Just because you see Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell in the White House, do not assume that all is right with the world and equality has been achieved.

Andre Mayer is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in Toronto Life, The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Magazine and eye Weekly. As yet, he has no books to plug.

A few days after Cinar co-founder Micheline Charest died while undergoing her “spring lift,” I received a brochure in the mail for the third-annual New You consumer trade show, designed to inform the masses about medical cosmetic augmentation. Intrigued, I immediately cleared my schedule. In a world where everything is for sale, including enhancement of every imagining, I wanted to see who would actually attend such a trade show this far north of the Hollywood Hills.

When the time comes, the New You show gives the normally stodgy Metro Toronto Convention Centre a facelift of its own, transforming it into a mecca of the aesthetically enhancing. Exhibitors run the gamut from Botox purveyors to plain old wrinkle cream manufacturers and even a lonely looking fudge salesman. Much to my surprise, Pamela Anderson clones are in the minority; most of the visitors who shelled out $12 to interact with plastic surgeons and dermatologists are average-looking businesswomen and soccer moms, many with husbands and kids in tow.

Demonstration stages flank the exhibition hall, with the Botox stage garnering the most attention from curious onlookers. Speakers wrap up their presentations with injection demonstrations simulcast on two large screens anchoring the stage to give the crowd a clearer, if more unsettling, view.

Downstairs, seminars provide a quieter setting to learn about advancements in cosmetic surgery. Dr. Peter Adamson’s “Are You a Good Candidate for Plastic Surgery?” is one of the biggest draws. A plastic surgeon with a clinic in Toronto’s Yorkville, Adamson looks like a cross between Jack Layton and Steve Martin. He tells the crowd that cosmetic surgery can’t remove every imperfection, make you physiologically younger or fix interpersonal problems. It’s important, he emphasizes, to go under the knife with more reasonable expectations. “My name’s Jack, not Jesus,” he quips.

Adamson says you can expect surgery to improve specific imperfections, decrease the visible signs of aging and improve your self-esteem, not make you look like a supermodel. He says many of his clients undergo surgery to gain an advantage in business. One client is the chairman of a large corporation who was tired of having the young guys at the boardroom table regard him as the old lion, so he had an eyelift.

Adamson has some clients on hand to provide testimonials, including Maria, an attractive twenty-something who had rhinoplasty to minimize her “Greek nose.” Maria’s father is against cosmetic surgery, so she had the operation on the sly. It wasn’t easy, as she lives with her parents. But, apparently, dad still hasn’t noticed, which is remarkable because the difference between the before and after shots is quite obvious. It isn’t that Maria is any prettier after the surgery, but her most prominent feature in the before photos is her nose, while in the after shots her eyes are the first thing you notice. “You really see a good rhinoplasty in the eyes,” Adamson remarks.

As I leave the trade show, I begin to wonder if there’s something wrong with me for slowly embracing my own big schnoz. The convention has more of a PTA meeting feeling to it than the scene out of The Stepford Wives I had expected. There are no rich and famous people (unless you count Joan Rivers and Carla Collins), just average folks looking to buy back some of their youthfulness to stay afloat in our age-phobic society. I shudder and make a mental note to move someplace where aging is embraced and big noses add character. Does such a place even exist anymore?

Annette Bourdeau is a graduate of Ryerson university’s magazine journalism program and a former This Magazine intern.

On my way to last season’s final NASCAR race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, coming over a rise on I-85 on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, I saw what appeared to be a huge, low-rent subdivision made up of very small, tacky homes stretching as far as the eye could see. It turned out to be one of several RV parking lots for the race that night. It was as though a temporary town had sprung up around Lowe’s Speedway. There were 170,000 people attending the race that night—approximately the total attendance for an average pro football, hockey, baseball and basketball game combined—and you could fit a couple of SkyDomes into the track complex. Which suddenly made real what I’d heard about NASCAR racing—it’s the number one spectator sport in the United States, and the number two television sport behind NFL football. Officials claim it has 72 million fans throughout the world, although most of them seem to be in the closet outside of the American South.

NASCAR racing is about regionalism, consumerism and the worship of technology. It’s wrestling as designed by MIT, set in the land of Dixie. Spectators arrived carrying their own coolers to keep on ice the two dozen cans of beer you’re permitted to bring into the racetrack. Many were wearing T-shirts—for some reason it’s part of NASCAR culture to hack off the sleeves—depicting their favorite driver, or a favorite slogan. (I saw several that read: “Beeriodic Table of Elements” and one that read “Gun control means using both hands.”)

This is the crowd that Democratic pollster Celinda Lake first identified as “NASCAR dads” two years ago. As a means of reliably identifying a target group, the term is about as useful “soccer mom” (another mythical creature conjured up by pollsters and aggrandized by dime store pundits). But no matter, by this year’s presidential race the NASCAR dads—blue-collar men who respond to values and trigger issues more than party loyalties—have become the swing voting bloc du jour. When he was riding high, Howard Dean declared that he wanted “to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.” This strategy of appealing to the South led to a comical debate about “Bubba-ness” in which some candidates invoked politically correct responses and others jumped on the bandwagon, trying to “out-Bubba” Dean.

Deep in the land of Bubba, outside the track entrance, is what looks like a carnival midway. Almost every big-time driver has at least one trailer that converts into a store selling souvenirs, and outside the track about two dozen of them were doing brisk business. (There were two trailers alone selling merchandise relating to the late Dale Earnhardt. By dying in a fiery crash in 2001, in a car outfitted with substandard safety equipment that NASCAR officials ignored at risk of offending the sport’s biggest attraction, Earnhardt has attained sainthood in NASCAR culture.)

Inside, there’s plenty more merchandise to buy, plus an assortment of food popular at NASCAR races—deep-fried twinkies, chili dogs, pulled-pork sandwiches, fries in two-quart cardboard containers. When I first came into the stadium itself, heading for my seat in Row 7 of the Fourth Turn Terrace—“the crashes happen right on this turn,” one young man, with an accent as thick as corn syrup, excitedly told me—I was struck by dozens of people gnawing on what has to be the oddest snack I’ve ever seen at any sporting event— turkey legs the size of my hand and wrist, juices dripping onto the concrete between their legs. (Among the merchandise, I found a four-inch-high Lowe’s Motor Speedway “Racin’ Bubbas” bobblehead doll in the form of a tubby, smiling race fan holding a turkey leg.)

NASCAR (short for National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing) is even more pointless live than it is on TV, where at least you have the benefit of play-by-play announcers. Of course, many fans wore headphones that were, in some cases, just ear protectors like those that construction workers wear, but more often they were radios tuned into the race commentary and, in some cases, they were scanners allowing fans to listen to the largely unintelligible conversations between the crew chief in the pit and the driver of their favorite car.

In what’s called the Inner Circle—the approximately six acres within the 1.5-mile oval track—there is the garage and pit area plus the official’s tower. Then there are two huge areas reserved for campers and motor homes. People arrive as early as a week before the race to settle in and party until race night. During the race itself, while 40 high-performance cars roar around the track at upward of 200 miles per hour, making a non-stop concussive assault of sound, fans sit on top of their RVs in the inner circle. Many have strung patio lanterns or Christmas lights, and most sit with their backs to the track, wearing headphones and watching on TVs the race that is happening directly behind them. (Outside, in the sprawling parking areas, some people become so absorbed in the tailgate parties that they never make it into the track.)

The origin of NASCAR culture is stock car racing, which developed as a sport in the mountains and foothills of the Southern Appalachians after the Second World War as cars became widely available in the rural South. For many young people, it represented progress in the modern world, as well as a way of escaping the family farm or a dead-end job at the local mill. When Tom Wolfe profiled Junior Johnson for a 1965 Esquire article called “The Last American Hero,” Johnson was already a legend. Like many of the early stock car pioneers, he’d honed his racing skills running moonshine. (Closest to Johnson in celebrity was the family dynasty of Tim, Bob and Fonty Flock, who worked for their uncle, Peachtree Williams, one of the biggest bootleggers in Georgia.) In the beginning, stock cars were Fords, Chevrolets and Dodges right off the showroom floor, then souped up by kids who knew that if you could do 115 miles per hour in second gear, you could outrun the county cops. Today’s NASCAR cars may look like ground-hugging, highly modified Thunderbirds, Monte Carlos and Grand Prix, but in fact they’re one-off technological marvels, mutant cars without any factory parts on them.

At the track, I saw quite a few men who might be NASCAR dads, but does this supposedly powerful voting bloc really exist? Statistics show that women make up about 40 per cent of the sport’s fan base, and I saw a lot of women of all ages—NASCAR moms?—that night. On any given weekend, the largest TV markets for NASCAR races are New York and Los Angeles, not the South. Furthermore, a CBS poll of NASCAR dads found that only 41 per cent of them were fans of NASCAR. (It may not matter. Recently, pollsters and pundits have identified a new swing voting group: single women, dubbed Sex and the City voters.)

Besides, the whole NASCAR dad phenomenon is more interesting for what it says about the culture of the South. In the past dozen years, the governing bodies of NASCAR racing have relentlessly tried to take the sport mainstream, skillfully marketing its rebel image and developing stars by encouraging drivers with outrageous, larger-than-life personalities to be themselves. At Lowe’s Speedway that night, hot-headed Tony Stewart won the race. He’s the Liam Gallagher of NASCAR, having shoved one photographer and punched another one, and can usually
be counted on for a few derogatory remarks about fellow competitors. Stewart ended his victory lap by driving his orange, Number 20, Home Depot Chev into the winner’s circle and revving it backward and forward for several minutes, tearing up the manicured grass and sending divots flying 25 feet into the air. With the crowd on its feet, cheering wildly (and, not infrequently, drunkenly), he then drove onto the track and did a kind of four-wheeled interpretive dance, the Chev boogalooing from side to side, the tires burning so much rubber that eventually, like an illusionist’s trick, it disappeared inside a thick column of acrid, black smoke that billowed into the night air.

Which seemed to say everything about the sport—and the culture. At a time when the new South has become suburban and middle class, filled with tidy industries and mobile workers with accents developed far from the Mason-Dixon Line, NASCAR racing celebrates excess and a kind of give-’em-hell, good ol’ boy swagger that the South never fully outgrew, and is proud of it.

David Hayes is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written four non-fiction books as well as scores of articles and reviews for major publications, such as Saturday Night, Report On Business, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times Magazine, Toro, Toronto Life and National Post Business.