Apple Pie Politics

When my son began to speak actual words, one of the phrases that he repeated a lot was “no apple pie.” Several times a day, he’d go into the kitchen to assess the apple pie situation and then find his mom or myself to let us know that there was a serious lack of apple pie. We expected a different response when Rie would bake an apple pie for him, but he stuck to his guns in asserting that, whatever we thought that pastry was, it was “no apple pie.”

Seeing the media from two different national elections - Canada’s recently completed one and the seemingly endlessly upcoming American one - I couldn’t help thinking that my son would be a hell of a politician. Judging by the ads, the debates and the admittedly small amount of the election content I’ve been able to stomach, the primary skill required for politics is assertion. You must be able to repeat an assertive statement no matter what the particular facts of the situation.

I’m oversimplifying a bit, but the Canadian election can essentially be boiled down to the Progressive Conservatives asserting that Justin Trudeau wasn’t ready to take the helm and Justin Trudeau asserting that he was ready. Or, in my son’s worldview, the PC’s insisted there was no apple pie when Trudeau said there clearly was apple pie. In this case, Trudeau’s assertions won out and Canada has a new Liberal government after around a decade of the PCs in power.

The United States doesn’t yet have the clear apple pie vs. no apple pie messaging yet, but there are some definite messages that potential presidential candidates are leaning towards. Donald Trump, who is in the lead for the Republicans, seems to be tacking towards “America sucks, but I can make it great again” while Hillary Clinton, leading the Democrats, is going with “America is pretty good now, but I can make it better.” Now, you can say a lot about these two as people and candidates - Trump is a narcissist whose polling success is clearly from going after the lowest common denominator and Clinton is clearly leaning heavily on her husband and Mr. Obama for political cred - but at least their messaging is about the country they are hoping to represent.

The Canadian election was less about the nation and more about whether or not Trudeau was ready to give Canada its first political dynasty. From a strategic communications standpoint, this framed the election as Trudeau’s to lose. He had one overall “issue” to address and it wasn’t even one where an objective answer was possible. Enough people agreed that there was apple pie, and a new government formed.

With Trump and Clinton there is a similar lack of objective evidence for either assertion, but it opens the door to a more meaningful and interesting debate. Is America sucking right now or is it good with the potential to get better? Obviously your own personal situation is going to influence how you answer that question and ultimately how you vote.

Modern communications is all about boiling the complex down to a few key messages that you repeat, repeat and repeat some more. There is still room for thoughtful analysis in the long form magazine-style interviews and some journalistic channels, but most of the content we see are soundbytes. And maybe this is a demand driven problem. Maybe we want politics to be simple. Maybe all we want our politicians to be assertive and on message.

The risk is that we are quickly approaching a point where the key messages and polish allow someone to walk in with an undisclosed policy platform that - if properly explored - is not what the majority actually want. I don’t have a solution. I don’t think media will ever revert back to long form journalism when listicles are so much more clickable.

I don’t think politicians will ever again drop those polished facades when in front of a camera and talk about what they actually think and feel. But I have been wrong a great many times in my life. That said, my money is on there being many more “no apple pie” elections in the years to come.

Surviving In The Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Economy

Between AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and more movies than you can fit on a hard-drive, most of us feel well-educated when it comes to surviving ravenous hordes of flesh-eating undead. This article, however, won’t focus on how to get through those frightening moments when your chainsaw runs out of gas or you’re down to your last bullet. Instead, we’ll look at how to make the best choices, both for survival and your future career path in the zombie economy.

Welcome to the True Knowledge Economy

One thing that will help you thrive in the zombie economy – aside from quick legs and a strong stomach – is a longer term perspective. This will be vital in the first months when people are hoarding, rioting and looting. Very likely, someone bigger and stronger than you is going to get most of the good guns. The problem with guns, is that bullets are bound to be scarce one day. Instead of following the crowd to the gun shops, take a moment and analyze the situation according to the utility and scarcity of items. The wisest decision is to focus on items that are common enough to be carried by many stores and give the maximum utility for their weight.

Everyone’s list will be a little different, but here are some items that are likely to come in handy and that you won’t have to kill anyone to collect:

• Camping gear, including a tent, sleeping bag, crank-up lights and warm, durable clothing. Most people will be fortifying their homes, you need to be ready for when gas and electricity service no longer works.
• Tools, including axes and knives. Guns and bullets are great if you can get them, but it is harder to make your own bullets than it is to sharpen and mend basic tools. 
• Books on gardening, medicine (especially herbs), basic carpentry and trapping or hunting. Society is likely going to slip back a few centuries as zombies take their toll on the infrastructure, so it is best to bone up on how things used to be done whenever you have a spare moment. 

Now that you have what you need, it is time to run for your life.

Real Estate Tips during the Zombie Plague

People equal zombies and then more zombies as they bite people. So rather than joining massive groups that are bound to form around people with weapons, it is a good idea to look for an area with few people, fertile land and perhaps a mid-sized town nearby. If you can find an unoccupied farm with a well and a fence, then you can attempt to bunker down, but tying yourself to real estate will likely be a very dangerous decision in the short-term because the groups with guns will quickly realize that large groups need more food. And food is easier to take than grow.

The best location may be the one that is most difficult to stumble upon. Then you can set about building a minimal dwelling and securing food, supplies and seeds to bring back. Once you have an isolated area set-up, you can start looking into getting some tenants and establishing a new career beyond foraging for food and braining adventurous zombies with a hand-axe.

Building a Post-Apocalyptic Career

The key to any successful business is people – preferably people who will not murder you in your sleep for a laugh. By scouting out into the surrounding areas, you’ll likely find pockets of escapees like yourself. You can start rebuilding and securing a human settlement by smart recruiting of smaller groups. At this point, although still a threat, the zombie hordes are probably less of a threat than your hideout in the mountains being discovered and overrun.

Once you start building up a community, however, you’ll have to put some thought into what your role in this mini-society will be. You two basic choices:

• Install yourself as a ruler. This has some attractions, such as absolute power, but it comes with risks. You’ll always have to promote people in trios – two can conspire easily, but a third will usually taddle – and you will always face the chance of a shift in the political situation proving to be fatal.
• Avoid real power, but become indispensable. Using your secret stashes of knowledge and the fact you were a founder of the settlement, you can probably establish yourself as a village elder. This means you can act as an adviser to the ruler, president, council or whatever decision making apparatus is established.

Beyond the Zombie Plague

Hopefully a couple winters will clear out or at least confine zombies to the more southern climates, so a time will come when you’ll have to consider whether it is time for your settlement to establish a fiefdom or build up defenses against raiders or even try to reclaim an abandoned city. Although it may take awhile, with luck you’ll be putting down your axe and settling into a home with electricity and running water to enjoy your retirement.

Is Anpanman Going to Be Ok?

I worry about Anpanman a lot these days. Anpanman is a popular show for children that we get on the TV Japan channel and I get to see a lot of it because my son is currently a fan. All I can say is that Japanese children’s television is deeply concerning.

With Anpanman, my concerns are largely metaphysical. Anpanman is a bit like Superman, if Superman had a removable head made of pastries and sweet bean filling. Anpanman can fly, he is incredibly strong and he goes around helping people and punching out bad guys. This is all great stuff. I hope that Aito grows up incredibly strong with the ability to fly, help people and punch out bad guys, so there are many lessons that he can pick up from Anpanman.

Unfortunately, like Superman and kryptonite, Anpanman has a weakness - the fact that his head is basically dough and sweet beans. If his head gets dented, dirty, wet, or fed to hungry animals (as sometimes happens), Anpanman’s power wanes. The solution for Anpanman is to replace his head with an entirely new head. This brings him back to full power and allows him to “An-punch” his enemies so hard that they disappear over the horizon.

What I wonder, though, is whether or not Anpanman is actually Anpanman anymore after switching heads. Sure, we think that Anpanman is the same person because he does and says the same things, but isn’t it also possible that Jam Ojisan, Anpanman’s creator, is baking a new individual with each head? Could we be seeing the death of a hero every time Anpanman’s head gets changed?

Besides the existentially terrifying question of the disposable hero heads, there is the change that would have on the show itself. If each head is a different hero, then Anpanman’s nemesis, Baikinman, doesn’t actually fail each episode. In fact, he’s slowly working his way through all of the potential Anpanmans until the day when Jam Ojisan runs out of sweet beans and flour.

Of course, it would be easy to chalk up my worries about Anpanman to Japanese cartoons being quirky, but I’ve realized that it has nothing to do with Japan. Thomas the Tank Engine, another of my son’s favorites, also contains some big questions. Sir Topham Hat can’t go one episode without mentioning that all the train’s should be “really useful engines.” In fact, most of the episodes are about the trains competing to be more useful or agonizing about not being useful enough. The question I have is what exactly are the engines so scared of? What did Sir Topham Hat do to inspire that kind of fear? What happens to the engines that don’t measure up?

Now, you might say I am reading too much into both these shows - and you’d be right. I have a lot of spare time to think while watching these shows. Anpanman and Thomas tend to be a bit formulaic in the plot department. It’s almost like they were written for kids. As a person in an international marriage, I am all for understanding and appreciation between cultures. And one thing I think we can agree on is that children’s shows are crazy in any culture.

The Things You Forget: Japan Five Years Later

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Japan. I lived and worked in Japan as an ESL teacher from 2003-2009, but since then we (I met my wife in Japan) hadn’t returned. From the time we touched down in Narita, it felt like we were enacting the Japanese folktale, Urashima Taro. In the folktale, Urashima Taro returns from the ocean to find decades passed while he partied in the undersea kingdom and the world moved on. It really felt like decades passed while we were away rather than a few years, but I think it is just the things you forget when you aren’t in a country day in and day out.

For sure, some things are different. For example, Tokyo station has touch panel vending machines now, street lights have gotten slimmer and you can finally pay with a credit card in most large stores. However, there are all sorts of things that must have once been familiar and now seem strange and new. The counters and tables all felt a few inches too low, the airport and bullet trains were unbelievably clean, and the average combini (convenience store, but so different from Canada’s version) held all the products a person could possibly need in their daily lives. Even the cars were surprising as there seemed to be an endless selection of makes, models and colors.

One thing I was shocked to have forgotten was the natural beauty of Japan. It is easy to think of Tokyo as being Japan concentrated down into a single city of skyscrapers and concrete, but outside of Tokyo Japan is a country of mountains, oceans, fields and rivers. In Alberta, we can drive 600 kilometers in any direction without a huge change in the countryside. In Japan, 600 kilometers takes you from Ueno station in Tokyo to the snow covered forests of Aomori. For such a small country, Japan packs in a lot of scenery.

There were many other moments of rediscovery, including the quality of the food, the high-level of service, the mild weather, and the weight of history and culture in Japan. There are many things I wish I could bring back with me to Canada, and also some things I wish I could export to Japan. I wish my Japanese friends took more of a Canadian approach to work and took all the holidays they were entitled too. I wish Canadian restaurants could offer the service and food quality you get in Japan.

I guess I really wish I could live in a Canadianized Japan or Japanized Canada, but that’s not how the world works. That said, every time we travel to Japan or a Japanese person comes to Canada, you can’t help but take a piece of that culture with you. Piece by piece, the connection is built between both cultures. Sure, you can forget the little things like the spotless bathrooms and the talking ATMs, but the truly important things like respect and appreciation of nature stay with you forever.

The Challenges of Flying With Children: Babies Are Just As Bad As Pipebombs

When you have a child, you become part of a tribe of sorts. There are things that you discuss only with other parents – and usually only after the two beers you can fit in after your children's bedtime at 8pm and your own at 9:45pm (wild times, I know). These are things that seem frankly criminal when you write them down, like how sleepless nights you fantasized about leaving your screaming and crying child on a stranger's porch (I am not a monster - I would have at least rang the doorbell.). I've now added another story to this cache of dark humor: air travel.

Flying with a child of any age is challenging. Hell, flying as an adult is no great shakes. It seems like planes are being designed to pack the maximum amount of people in the minimum amount of comfort. The economics of airlines dictates that planes are not airworthy until passengers are skin-to-skin with the strangers sitting next to them. This type of thing, plus the fact that a plane is really a metal tube held up by a suspension of belief in gravity, used to make me dread flying.

Now, I have so many more things dread as a parent flying with my child. The first major change between your old travel habits and your family travel habits is the amount of baggage you require. Aito is around 20 pounds and, if packed properly, fits on my lap. Despite the relatively compact nature of my son, he requires another 80 pounds of luggage, not including the baby carry on with diapers, wipes, snacks and clothes, as well as the significant portion of our own carry on given over to his books, toys and eating utensils. My wife and I must have looked like especially put upon pack animals pushing the six check in bags, the three carry on, and our son through the airport.

Thankfully, we were able to check everything and then quickly breeze through security riding on the backs of understanding unicorns. I am, of course, joking. The Edmonton Airport Security – the alert and tireless force that let a passenger fly after taking away his pipe bomb in 2014  – were very concerned about the baby bag. As well they should be.

After all, how could they be sure that the baby we had with us was in fact ours? More importantly, did he pack that bag himself? So the stalwarts of airport security had my wife – who I suspect has radicalized over the course of our marriage – rummage through the bag to pull out the suspicious object. This was, of course, wipes. After opening the potentially lethal package for the security officer, we were allowed to keep our wipes. We cackled manically. Our plan worked. We were now free to commit acts of extreme hygiene at 30,000 feet.

Although we did not, in fact, have a bomb or any act of terror planned for the long flight to Japan, we did feel like terrorists. People boarding the plane flinched at the sight of an infant, anticipating 10 hours of uninterrupted crying. It was my first time flying with a child and, aside from the metric ton of luggage, I had prepared as I usually did – I brought a book.

....

Sorry, I had to take a moment there to let the laughter pass. As you more experienced parents will know, a book is a bit ambitious for in-flight entertainment. I did not do enough reading on the plane to finish a postcard, let alone a book. What was I doing for 10 hours? My wife and I were both providing non-stop entertainment, snacks and soothing to the volatile and sleepless infant we had smuggled aboard. In retrospect, I owe an apology to the Edmonton airport security. They should have tasered us at the check-in counter.