NATURE WITHOUT NURTURE - "You mean men".

Marching on: February, Suicide Month in Toronto is happily over and we survived only to be reminded in the immortal words of Tennessee via Blanche DuBois “don't hang back with the brutes”.

The brutes have been out there in full cinematic force: Daniel Day-Lewis in Let There Be Blood, the inhabitants of No Country for Old Men, Viggo's Russian Mafioso.

Oh yes, and there will be more blood, to flow. It is ever thus, the anointment of blood, oil and water – not mixing, just coagulating to choke us in these last days of Pomp(ei)osity! What struck me about the movies was the total lack of nurture that existed in the lives of these doomed and dooming men, none of whom one would want to meet in a dark alley or even in bright sunlight for that matter. In the Coen brothers masterpiece, I wondered if Javier's downfall happened: slight spoiler alert: (accident) because he didn't do what the victim/heroine girl said he didn't have to do...my feeling was he spared her and that signified a change in him that affected his radar – as the cowboys say: Stay Hungry.

Perhaps more upsetting is our own real life brutes: ah yes, censorship has reared its ugly head again just as our World is opening up – imagine: Hot at it in their underhanded way, Straussian neo-conservatism: (it's for our own good) want to be sure that the government doesn't fund anything offensive, and Heritage Canada will be the judge of that.

We can only guess at what is happening behind the scenes and in the small print that we are not privy to. We have seen the damage done as the Christian soldiers march onwards and backwards, while we cry: "let there be light", and we can only hope that our present bastion of free speech and fine mature work can overwhelm the childish and reprehensibly threatening grown men and women who think they have the right to decide what is offensive and what isn't...how offensive is that!

Just as our movie business is gaining in international presence and what we have to say in our very own idiosyncratic way is making new strides in the World, The born-again Neo-Cons come along and crush it all with the incense of denial and the smothering righteousness of dirty-minded duality.

We know that people LIE when they are indulging in the same duality that allowed the Nazis' to be good husbands and fathers or at least animal and music loving culturists while exterminating vast amounts of human kind as vermin. (And of course we realize in some milieus it is still a crime not to be tall, blond and blue eyed – this, mandated from a short dark man). Let us not linger longer with these diaTRIBES: let us be mature – we've been here long enough to know better, let poor Blanche emerge from her incarceration in the Looney bin, guilty of nothing more than heightened sensitivity and poverty and shame and guilt..let us point our finger at the real 'crazies'.

The Vikings, a bllooddy, thirsty lot were apparently the genesis of Den Land and Eng Land, born side by side, but neither must cross the line. They must stay on their side of the line. This reminds me of a story my old friend (well he was in his nineties) Marcus Adeney told me of a time when he was visiting an Aunt in England and every day would go to a place in the woods where two ant hills resided peacefully side by side. He experimented to see what would happen if he shifted one ant hill a touch closer to the other. He carefully did so over several days and when the black ants became aware of the increasing millimeters of the red ant colony, they attacked in full force and decimated the whole community. Territorial self preservation activated by seeming invasion of space. We experience it all the time, we all know the feeling when a person gets too close when they are talking to you, gets in your face, or the one who takes up too much space.

The fight for god-given land, which is the greatest marketplace of all, though the Indians said “you can't own the land” has been the property and currency of much war..the Middle East standing as a horrible reminder of escalation and agony for all the inhabitants which ever side they are on.

Bush says he is just a “simple president” as opposed to what some have termed “simple-minded”. “It's simple” he says, he's “on the defensive” - “we gotta be in the League, otherwise we're in a political fetal position”. Interesting choice of words Buddy Boy, now that you appear to be choosing your own words according to some notion that they make sense: “Our philosophy won and it's going to win again” What philosophy is that? That America right or wrong are the good guys”? “Success is paramount if democracy is to take hold” Try strangle-hold from the man who entered the presidency in a bogus election. The gist of his discourse: we changed the law, so now what we did that was illegal is legal. It's that simple, sports fans, you just have to change the law, back to the old ball game. And our Canada, led by Steven Harper, another born again aspires to be in that League of American Super heroes, and take us down that tired territorial garden path.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Emperor is naked, the Commander-in Chief 'starkers'; Liberal is not a dirty word, the conservatives are not conservative, they are reactionary, the born-agains are not Christian in the true sense of the Jewish Rabbi Christ's teachings. The Censors have the dirty minds and we are in a dangerous place in time - the brutes are gaining more and more power to crush the common peoples, corporations reign tax exempt, and greed continues to prove that the desire to receive for yourself alone is a downward spiral that gathers all up in the vortex of it's death-wake.

The cult of celebrity, the lives of the rich and famous, and the competition to join, are all a smoke screen dating back to the beginning of time when un-nurtured nature wrecked havoc. Yet, Humanity's harrowing existence continues to give us great movies and the Earth, polluted and ravaged as it is, is still generous to a fault and affords us great joy though Dr. Strangelove still rides the rails, an A bomb between his legs, now he's fueled by Viagra... the dinosaurs dance of death, for the old men who have no country is to take us out with them, to push that button, drop that bomb, go nuclear, because human kind is not always to be trusted as Diogenes knew only too well and Alan Price reiterated: "the only honest man he's seen was standing there in tears".

Yet let us take heart because Oprah is glorifying GOOD Deeds, albeit as a competition but kindness as the Talmud says, one should act with, as each person is negotiating their own journey through his veil of tears and finally in the immortal words of Gandhi: "Be the change you want to see in the World" I want to see the smart people smarten up, put their neurosis and fear aside and take the power. As Mr. Adeney posited: “War is an agreement”.

I saw Tracey Erin Smith's wonderful one woman show The Burning Bush, the story of a rabbinical student, rejected, who finds real spirituality doing a pole dance and who ends her show by asking the audience to join in on "I ain't going to study war no more" Hi(s)Story Channel be damned..it's time for the go round to stop and the merry to start..we still have a beautiful planet, we have enough food and comfort for all, yes brother hates brother and the holy land is holier than thou and damage is done daily fellowman and woman to fellow, but its like looking a gift horse in the face not to work with what we've got.

It all begins with a child saying the Emperor is naked, the Censor complicit and the war of the worlds an economic field day..why are the corps and the rich tax-exempt while the welfare Mothers are called onto their dirty or non existent carpets for draining the system? a mere drop in the proverbial bucket as Alec Guiness so aptly put it in Bridge on The River Quai: “those mean men” and the legacy of sex without intimacy, a form of violence.

It is not surprising that there is no sexual activity in Let there Be Blood, only the sado-masochistic relationship between Daniel Plainview's greedy capitalism and his nemesis preacher, Eli's religious fervour – as they engage in humiliating each other. Day-Lewis' only gentleness is towards the children, only where he can control. The sex supplied by Viggo's long legged battle to the death is purient naked violence. We've come a long way since Straw Dogs shocked and excited the World with the rape scene that became a sex scene. Or have we? This years movie anti-heroes are essentially sexless narcissists living on the most materialistic plain (view) of existenze! Classic cases and we still live with these archetypes. In the excellent new show at Can Stage STUFF HAPPENS, David Hare has laid out the journey America in her super powerfulness travelled from 9/11 to Iraq..led by a Commander in Chief who believes God put him in the White House because the people didn't and who has smirked his way through his reign of terror-mongering, exacerbating and escalating the lucrative business of war.

The Emperor is naked and the fashion designers are selling us a bill of goods that we pay through the teeth for as we run to stand in line for the latest ....