This Magazine articles from March 2000

This Magazine archives from March 2000

What goes up -- (plunging stock prices should serve as a lesson in economic fundamentals to investors).
March 1, 2000... WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE. NOT ONLY HAS the longest and mightiest bull market in history created trillions of dollars in stock value over the past dozen years, but this frothy vat of goodness has been spooned out to more people than ever...

Dow Jones Industrials (the value of stock indices in measuring market performance is debatable).
March 1, 2000... Though beloved of newspaper editors, the Dow Jones Industrial Average--supposedly an index of "average" share prices--gets little respect from Wall Street insiders. Forbes called it "a completely useless, misleading index of market...

Faux fighters (several recent major films portray individuals rejecting the blandishments of consumerism and in revolt against bourgeois society).
March 1, 2000... AM I GOING COLOUR-BLIND, OR HAS Hollywood gone Red? It seems every movie I went to last fall, fleeing the drudgery of my waitressing job, delved into just the issues I had gone to the cinema to escape. Worker alienation got top billing in films...

Death before taxes! (the De-Tax Group claims common law should protect tax-evaders from prosecution).
March 1, 2000... FOR TWO YEARS NOW, THE CANADIAN De-Tax Group has been pitching the curious notion that federal income tax is a fraud. Founded in Vancouver by a trio who call themselves Byrun Fox, Sir Lawrence Leupol and Bruce Stellar, the De-Tax Group believes...

No drain, no gain (the free exchange of talent between Canada and the U.S. has benefited both countries at different times).
March 1, 2000... LIKE HARSH WINTERS, THE "BRAIN DRAIN" is Canada's age-old problem. In 1930, historian A.M. Lower lamented in the pages of Queen's Quarterly that well-educated Canadians were flocking to America. More recently, The Globe and Mail and National...

Velvet Elvis revolution (the Czech Republic hastens to transform itself into a materialist Western-style society).
March 1, 2000... PRAGUE, THE CZECH REPUBLIC: A giant poster in a realtor's window paints the picture of success: a smiling stick-figure woman and her stick-figure man standing in front of their very own single-family house and its accompanying garage. It's an...

Message in a bottle (the selection of Anheuser-Busch Breweries as a sponsor for U.S. presidential election debates sets an intriguing precedent).
March 1, 2000... WHEN ANHEUSER-BUSCH COMPANIES, INC. announced earlier this year that it had been selected as a sponsor of the U.S. presidential debates, bells may have gone off in a few heads. Here's one letter that Canada's Chief Electoral Officer could have...

Made in Canada: from a mining operation in the Philippines to a destructive dam in Colombia, Canadian projects are ... causing havoc overseas ...
March 1, 2000... IN EARLY DECEMBER, KIMY PERNIA Domico left his home on the banks of the Sinnu river in a forested region of Colombia and made a long journey to chilly Ottawa. He came to tell the Canadian government that his people, the Embera Katio, who have...

Welcome to Hellmouth: from Buffy the vampire slayer to the girls of The craft, today's toughest screen heroes are turbo-powered teens ...
March 1, 2000... YOU MAY ALREADY KNOW BUFFY SUMMERS. She lives in Sunnydale, a Southern California town that rests upon a Hellmouth, a portal through which demons enter from their dimension into our world. Buffy is The Chosen One, pre-ordained to defend mankind...

Going, going, gone: protests and media coverage have recently brought the sale of Ontario landmarks ... into public view ...
March 1, 2000... LATE LAST YEAR, THE ONTARIO REALTY Corporation (ORC), the real-estate arm of the provincial government, staged a showy press conference on the rooftop of a Toronto building. Chris Hodgson, a former realtor and developer who currently runs...

This land is whose land? On the surface, Victor Buffalo v. the Queen is a dispute over mismanaged oil money ...
March 1, 2000... I'M SITTING IN A CALGARY COURTROOM looking on with disbelief at what is happening. No fewer than six lawyers are bickering back and forth, representing three different parties. There's oil multinational Chevron Resources, several Cree Indian...

Who stole Canadian history? Canadian history ... is now today's ... concern. Just why are Canada's corporate giants ... promoting the subject?
March 1, 2000... WHEN THE TORONTO FOUR SEASONS HOTEL OPENED IN YORKVILLE IN 1971, the ghosts of the rebels of 1837, who used to ride through the area on their way to Montgomery's tavern, were thought to be displeased with the not-so-subtle scenery change. It...

God save the Queen (amen): when punk rockers The Sex Pistols sang those words, they were delivering a scathing rant ...
March 1, 2000... IMAGINE PUNK ROCK CIRCA 1977 AND you'll probably retrieve a burned-into-the-synapses image of a nihilistic teenager with a safety-pinned army jacket, ripped jeans and coloured hair, who's poised to spit in your face. Spin the knob to 2000 and...

Aeroplane bones.
March 1, 2000... LIKE Gavin at four stood by like an intern at my father's side, while the man requested tools and glue, paper towels and tiny screws, or another peek at the instruction sheet translated into seven languages with equal lack of clarity. My...

Swallowing clouds: an anthology of Chinese-Canadian poetry.
March 1, 2000... The breathless time just before the annual Spring Book Blitz is the perfect time to catch up on the forgotten treasures of the previous Autumn Book Blitz, and to dandle some early, seasonally unaffected little midwinter lambs on your knee. ...

Song of the vulgar starling.
March 1, 2000... The breathless time just before the annual Spring Book Blitz is the perfect time to catch up on the forgotten treasures of the previous Autumn Book Blitz, and to dandle some early, seasonally unaffected little midwinter lambs on your knee. ...

Foodculture: tasting identities and geographies in art.
March 1, 2000... The breathless time just before the annual Spring Book Blitz is the perfect time to catch up on the forgotten treasures of the previous Autumn Book Blitz, and to dandle some early, seasonally unaffected little midwinter lambs on your knee. ...

Music (Don Ritter finds elephants have ears for music).
March 1, 2000... DON RITTER has a glamorous life. He grew up on a farm in southern Alberta, but now lives in New York; his girlfriends always seem to speak English as a second language; and he is forever jetting off to a Tokyo or Berlin gallery to set up one of...

Class-consciousness-in-a-box (the shipping container facilitates the operations of international capitalism).
March 1, 2000... KARL MARX MAY NOT HAVE BEEN RIGHT IN THE 19TH and 20th centuries, but it looks as though he is getting righter all the time. Marx, of course, predicted that in an industrial society, the workers would get poorer, the capitalist employers would...