George Case's Blog, page 7

Years ago a buddy of mine saw some members of Aerosmith strolling through a Vancouver mall.  They were easy to spot in the crowds, he related, as they were the only forty-something men dressed and coiffed as teenagers. More poetically, in his great Rolling Stones bio Symphony For the Devil, Philip Norman watched the band […]

Very shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the reaction of hundreds of millions of onlookers divided into two broad camps, which have scarcely agreed on any other issue in the more than twenty years since.  One type of response came from established politicians, popular historians, veterans’ organizations, and a surprising number of erstwhile […]

For centuries, philosophers have sought to answer the question, “What is truth?”  Now we know.  Thanks to Canada’s annual Truth and Reconciliation holiday and the online Truth Social network, truth is whatever the Canadian Aboriginal lobby and Donald Trump say it is.  Seriously, the last couple of decades have seen capital-T Truth transformed from abstract […]

For sheer attention-getting impact in the field of book publishing, it’s hard to imagine a punchier title than that of Elijah Wald’s 2009 entry, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll – the real point of the work, however, is in the subheading: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. Fab fans looking for a […]

In cities across Canada on September 20 of this year, crowds participated in gatherings billed as a 1 Million March 4 Children, in the name of opposing what organizers termed “LGBT indoctrination” in the country’s schools.  The numbers were considerably less than one million people, and local demonstrations drew counter-protests by LGBTQ activists; there were some […]

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Monica Lewinsky scandal that consumed the second term of Bill Clinton’s US presidency.  While Clinton’s brief affair with the twenty-four-year-old White House intern ended in 1997, it came to light in early 1998 and was the dominant news story of the next several months, from the earliest […]

As an amateur artist and a straight male, I’ve always had a soft spot, as it were, for pin-up illustration. There are the classic Esquire and Playboy renderings of George Petty and Alberto Vargas, the quaint garage-calendar cheesecake of Gil Elvgren, and the delectable nose art emblazoned on World War II aircraft. There’s the inspired […]

Someone should give Anthony Rota a history lesson. He’s the Member of Parliament for North Bay Ontario, and up until recently Speaker of the House of Commons, who last week introduced his constituent, 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, as a “Ukrainian-Canadian war veteran” and a “Canadian hero,” in the Parliamentary gallery during a state visit from Ukrainian […]

Stephen King’s 1977 classic The Shining, which I’ve reread every few years since 1980, retains my vote as the writer’s masterpiece.  I’m hardly alone here, but such has been King’s output over a nearly fifty-year career that this, only his third published novel, has sometimes been overshadowed by the sheer abundance of his other work. […]

One useful description of today’s cultural fragmentation is the term epistemic crisis, which numerous observers have invoked to sum up the disbelief millions of people harbor towards each other’s truths. When no authority – no public official, no media outlet, no system of knowledge – is universally accepted as neutral or objective, we are surely […]