Dark Side of the Atlantic

Chris Turner’s “The New Grand Tour” (May) was a caricature of yuppie Europhilia — The bread is just so much better in Berlin — rather than the “ideas” piece billed on the cover. No one needs to be reminded that Europe is a more sustainable society than ours. Even if they did, a policy- or economics-focused piece would have worked better than a gushing travelogue.

Next time Turner’s eco-conscience perks up, he might forgo the eco-tour and instead devote his energy to the single most important environmental policy issue in Canada: the carbon tax.

Padraic Ryan
Toronto, ON

Chris Turner’s feature was a waste of space: few elected officials or corporate decision-makers in Canada would even understand it. Never in our history have we been so bereft of morally courageous leadership. Tax reduction dominates the national discourse, and our leaders tend to deride any initiative that might make Canada a real contributor to global change. The ideas Turner describes could only take root elsewhere, in places where people have a stronger sense of their obligations to the wider world.

By all means, take the New Grand Tour. But don’t expect anything to change back home.

John Butcher
Ottawa, ON

Telling Stories

When a novel is published, it has to make its own way in the world, so under normal circumstances I wouldn’t respond to a review. Nonetheless, I’d like to address Jeet Heer’s misapprehensions about my attitudes toward World War II, as they relate to my novel Therefore Choose (“The Walrus Reads,” May).

In The Mind and Its Stories, a study of cross-cultural narratives, Patrick Colm Hogan argues that stories in which good defeats evil often include an “epilogue of suffering”: after the killing, the victors experience guilt for their own cruelty and empathy for the vanquished. History makes it clear that the Allied victory over the Nazis was the defeat of a hideous evil; in my novel, I combined a story of conflict against evil with a love story, another universal narrative.

Halfway through my novel, and three weeks before the end of the war, George Smith, a British artillery officer, visits Belsen concentration camp as his unit advances through Germany. At the war’s end, his unit reaches Bremen, destroyed by British bombing, where George finds “images of Bremen’s ruin alternated with images of the barbed wire and corpses of Belsen.” Heer claims that I see a “glib moral equivalence” between the crimes of the Nazis and the actions of the Allies. I do not. I based the scenes at the end of the war on the epilogue of suffering.

Keith Oatley
Toronto, ON

Casting Aspersions

As someone who has recently self-diagnosed as having Asperger’s, I found Kim Pittaway’s “Confidence Game” (May) quite upsetting.

I have spent the better part of my life trying to figure out why I am so different from almost everyone I meet. Psychiatrists have mislabelled me add, ocd, or “physiologically and emotionally hypersensitive, eccentric, and ego-centric enough that the eccentricity doesn’t bother you, but otherwise fine” — an actual quote, and basically a diagnosis of Asperger’s. When I finally came across the Wikipedia page on the disorder, it was like finding the Holy Grail, and I immediately took steps to have an official diagnosis performed. After all that work, to be lumped in with con artists was quite frustrating — another perfect example of neurotypicals misunderstanding us.

I take particular exception to the placement of Anthony Easton’s comment that some Aspies “have no social skills because [they] fucking play fourteen hours of World of Warcraft a day.” It’s not what Easton is saying that upsets me; spending this much time on one pursuit is characteristic of Asperger’s, after all. Rather, I object to the way Pittaway used this quote to support the idea that a self-diagnosis is a cop-out.

But the article’s conclusion — “Just because you’re Aspie doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole,” also care of Easton — took the cake. Many Aspies have been so persecuted that they have given up on trying to integrate into society. Does this make them assholes? All in all, the piece was a sensationalist, misleading piece of crap. I am appalled that you published it, and you should be ashamed.

David Morrissey
Toronto, ON

A Lada Nonsense

In his Editor’s Note (May), John Macfarlane wrote that the Soviet automobile industry started “from scratch... yielding the unremarkable Lada.” In fact, the Lada’s biggest problem was that the Soviets did not start from scratch. Their Lada was a licensed Russian adaptation of the Fiat 124, marketed in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Not a bad car in its time — superior, at least, to the Vauxhall Viva, the Ford Pinto, and the Chevrolet Vega — but not especially worth emulating.

The Lada was fairly successful to begin with, selling well when it reached Canada in the late ’70s. During the ’80s, however, it was marketed alongside the newest generation of small front-wheel drive North American and Japanese cars. In the end, given its dated technology, it had only one option: ruinous price competition. The rest is junkyard history.

No, the Soviets did not start from scratch. Rather, they chose the wrong product to replicate, unlike the Chinese, whom Macfarlane praises in his editorial. But one wonders whether a frozen-in-time Volvo will become China’s Lada over the next decade.

Keith Bricknell
Toronto, ON

Gross Inclusion

I am a new subscriber and find the quality of prose in The Walrus to be superior to that of most magazines. That said, I found “The Walrus Presents” in the April issue disgusting, with no redeeming social or political value — and I am a liberal Liberal. I was even more offended by the May edition of the comic. I find it strange that a magazine that champions good writing could be so distasteful.

Terry Foster
Kelowna, BC