Topic: Culture & Society

When Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada for sixteen and a half years, died on September 28th of last year, I was more disappointed than surprised that his passing received scant attention from the American media. After all, it'd been more than sixteen years since he'd left the stage of international politics and very few of his policies had directly affected the United States. But having lived under Trudeau's government for nearly five years, I know that we have lost one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century.

The Canada that Trudeau inherited was deeply divided over the issue of language and culture. The French speaking people of Canada had long complained that the country's English speaking majority was slowly destroying their heritage, and a movement was afoot to split Quebec from the rest of Canada. When Trudeau, a French-Canadian, took office in 1968, one of his first accomplishments was the passing of the Official Languages Act, which made Canada a bilingual country. The law was unpopular in English speaking Canada and did little to appease the French, who saw it as a Band-Aid approach.

The other night as I watched Anna and the King on TV, I remembered that the movie had received horrible reviews in 1999, the year of its release. I wondered about that, because I was enjoying the film. Certainly, it was no masterpiece, but it wasn't worthy of the scathing reviews I remembered. After the film ended, I went online and looked-up Roger Ebert's original review, since I usually agree with him.

Back in 1970, I sold my first news story. A Bible thumping and violent loony had invaded an Eastern Orthodox church that served the gay and lesbian community in Hollywood, California. As he spouted a sermon of hellfire and the hate of God, he destroyed an altar and assaulted the priest before making a getaway. As luck would have it, I was next door at the time. I called the Los Angeles Free Press, introduced myself to editor Chris Van Ness and told him what had happened before asking if I could write the story. He gave me the go-ahead, and the following Tuesday my byline appeared in 100,000 copies in newsstands throughout the LA basin. The following week, I picked-up a check for twenty-five dollars. I had finally made it. I was a paid writer.

Like his name, Maury Maverick Jr. was a maverick. In fact, he came by his name honestly. His great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Maverick, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, was a rancher who refused to brand his cattle. After that, all unbranded cows came to be known as mavericks, a term that quickly came to be used to describe non-conforming people as well.

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Maury Maverick Jr.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in "ESP Magazine," an entertainment weekly published in Greensboro, N.C. on April 2, 2003, just as the war in Iraq was beginning.

"Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia."

Eerie, isn't it, how George Orwell's novel seems much more relevant now, 19 years after it's self-proclaimed due date of 1984, than ever. Last year we were at war against Osama bin Laden, with our government's propaganda machine working overtime to convince us that the Al-Qada leader had been public enemy number one practically forever. Now we fight Saddam Hussein, and are reminded that this tyrant has been our chief nemesis, also practically forever. In case we notice this obvious inconsistency, the officials at MiniTrue, the Ministry of Truth, imply that Hussein and bin Laden are actually the same person.

America is now fighting two separate wars, yet our leaders are trying their best to convince us that these two actions are actually one. Because the war on terrorism is obviously necessary, the Bush administration is trying it's best to convince us, and the rest of the world, that the war against Iraq is part and parcel with our efforts against Al Qaeda and Hamas, by playing on our fears of "dirty" bombs going off on crowded streets, of anthrax again infecting us through the mail, or of nerve agents being released in our subways.

Back in the ‘60s, there was a common belief among the more cosmic hippies that the social historians had it wrong when they said that we humans elevated ourselves from primitive status some seven to ten thousand years ago and began slowly working towards the eventual goal of creating the U.S. Constitution, Ford automobiles and the Windows operating system. According to this theory, humans had developed a highly advanced technological society in the past, long before the dawn of known pre-history, but had somehow managed to destroy their civilization by misusing their technology.

The Sphinx stands guard over the Pyramids at Giza. How old is it really?

Numerology is the study of the numbers that effect us at all times during the course of our lives. These numbers can be understood and explained through the images of the Tarot cards. During the week after the death the Princess of Wales, I began to look at the numbers concerning both her life and her death. What I found was very interesting, not only because of what it told me about the princess, but because of what it told me about humanity in the 1990s.

Welcome to The Twilight Zone of the North Carolina legal system.

It’s a Friday night and you and your best friend are hanging out at your house. Since both of you have already seen this week’s episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and you don’t have enough money to go out, you decide to fill the time by playing with the new deck of Tarot cards that you purchased the day before at Border’s.

During the social revolution that was synonymous with the sixties, perhaps nothing was more controversial than the rise of black militancy. This is a history that is rapidly becoming forgotten, as roughly half of the population was not yet alive during during the height of the “Black Power” movement. School textbooks have given them scant reason to realize that this movement grew out of peaceful attempts to bring integration to the South, and simple equality to the rest of America.