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Currently viewing articles tagged with Personal Dimension.
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Red in Winnipeg’s North End
In a fascinating memoir, the American award-winning and once blacklisted film writer, Walter Bernstein, warns about the dangers of looking back by reminding us of what happened to Lot’s wife: she turned into a pillar of salt. So, if perchance that happens to me, all I can ask is that you throw a little of that salt over your left shoulder.
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Harold Innis: An Intellectual at the Edge of Empire
Harold Innis died in 1952, more than a half century ago. He was never a man of the Left; in the 1930s he labeled the CCFers “hot gospellers.” Do we really have anything to learn from him now?
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How I Became a True Radical
I was 19 years old in September, 1967, when my new husband and I got into his funky old Volvo fastback, the one that looked like a late-forties Ford, hooked it up to a U-Haul trailer, drove from Toronto to Chicago and set up housekeeping. We rented a modest apartment, an English basement as they called it, in Hyde Park, the University of Chicago neighbourhood on the city’s South Side. Though our street and a few others where students lived were down at heel, generally speaking Hyde Park was a place of gracious homes, commodious apartment buildings, green lawns and the graceful, gothic buildings of the campus itself. Bruce was on a graduate scholarship, and he’d chosen the University of Chicago over Harvard and Columbia. He was 24, and well travelled. He knew New York and the American northeast well. He wanted to get a sense of the American heartland before he settled down to life and a career in Toronto. Besides, this was the land of Studs Terkel.
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How I Became A Left Canadian Nationalist
I spent my childhood on a mixed family farm helping raise chickens, cows, barley, wheat and pigs, but I grew up feeling like the black sheep. Growing up the unconsciously progressive child of staunch conservatives — so staunch, my mother currently works for the Fraser Institute — I always felt as though maybe something was wrong with me. My parents often couldn’t help but agree. “The things we thought would upset you didn’t upset you,” they’ve since told me. “But things that we didn’t think would matter made you get upset.”
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The Greatest Canadian Shit-Disturber
My family came from Eastern Europe, part of the large immigration in the early 1900s — poor, largely peasant Jews escaping the pogroms of the Tsarist Russian Empire. I was born in 1944 in the so-called Jewish ghetto in downtown Montréal. My early years were spent in the St. Urbain Street neighbourhood immortalized in Mordecai Richler’s biting and hilarious novels.
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Fanning the Flames
“Hey, where’s the Russian flag?”
Windsor’s Labour Day march, 1957, and I was three years old. Marchers carried flags of Canada, England, the United States. I rambunctiously blurted out the question above as my parents tried to hush me up. I had no idea there was a Cold War. In my child’s mind, Russia helped win the war against the bad Nazis. “We were Russian! Weren’t we the good guys, too? Wasn’t the flag with the hammer and sickle a good flag?”
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