2008 Woodie Awards
As new as the terrain of Facebook social advocacy may seem, a movement that has seeped out of its online confines, dented local newspapers with letters to the editor and entered local conversation with startling regularity is certainly a force to be reckoned with.
Should the arts be publicly funded?
Crystal carefully sculpts an argument: In a democratic country, political mandates concerning promotion and funding of the arts should ideally be based on what citizens want. Although not everybody is informed enough to actually divvy up financial allocation, Canadian citizens have repeatedly supported the general idea of public funding of the arts (just one of many statistics: 85 per cent "agree that governments should provide support for arts and culture," according to Decima Research for the Department of Canadian Heritage).
If I was so inclined, this column could abuse the government. It could articulate the most distasteful opinions around; it could even call for a collective uprising against the authorities-and no one could do anything about it. I can say pretty much whatever I want, because that is part of what being a Canadian is about.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic Jazz age novel This Side of Paradise, the young Amory Blaine, his friend Alec and Alec's young female companion are holed up in an Atlantic City hotel, as detectives search floor by floor, looking for an unmarried couple seen entering the hotel.
I spend a great deal of time contemplating the modern human condition-what's wrong with it and how it could be improved. One conclusion I've come to-greatly confirmed for me by Carl Honoré's book In Praise of Slowness-is that a lot of our culture's stress on "speed" is unnecessary.
In between calling the President of the United States a "donkey" and Spain's former Prime Minister a "fascist," Venezuela's abrasive President Hugo Chávez still finds time to continue his assault on private business in his oil-rich nation. After being re-elected last year, Chávez turned his attention to advancing his program of nationalization.
