On vernacular “ethnic” foods and my problem with “authenticity,” with some insults directed at Japan.

I’ve been seeing inspiration for lots of stuff today, including a manuscript that I’d been trying to wrap up this week (sounding like a proverbial broken record here, I know, forgive me, future self), and it occurred to me that a blog post might clear the ol’ writer’s block. And then I had a BLOGGING writer’s block, which is like, I don’t know, getting an injury while stretching for a workout. No, that makes no sense. I mean that blogging is supposed to impel my creativity and to be my “fun” writing outlet, one not encumbered by having to do real research or literature reviews, but sometimes it feels every bit as burdensome as “work.” Having to be creative in public is daunting, even if only 47 people (self not included) actually ever read this.

But anyway, I fell on a topic over lunch, and of course decided to make lunch my topic and build on that. See, I had a spectacular and obscenely huge donair from Sammy’s, which is a couple of blocks east of my house at 1235 17th Avenue in the retail level of an apartment building. Sammy and his wife are from Egypt but the food they serve isn’t really Egyptian but is what Canadian consumers in these parts have come to expect from “shawarme” (that’s how they spell it; shawarma is from the Arabic شاورما‎ and can be transliterated into many spellings) places; in Sammy’s case, that means chicken, beef and lamb shawarma and beef donair. Now, any meat-on-a-spit sandwich can be called a “donair,” but in Canada, whole, un-ground meat is used for “shawarma” and “donair” refers only to those sandwiches containing a mixture of finely ground meat, bread crumbs and seasoning that is very much like the meat used in American “gyros.” Toppings here are normally lettuce (which I hate), tomatoes, pickled cabbage, pickled hot peppers, picked cukes, sometimes pickled turnips, and  parsley, and then the sauces. Sammy’s offers garlic, sweet (“sweet sauce” is a uniquely Canadian ingredient in the donair world; it’s made from condensed milk, sugar and vinegar and is a lot better than it sounds), hot, a sort of thin tzatziki, and tahini. I get sweet, garlic, tzatziki and hot and it is a huge pile of mess to eat. It is served on Lebanese style pita (not Greek style) and is crisped up after construction in a panini press; unlike gyros, the bread is not grilled on a burger grill before assembling.

Donair is not done this way in other parts of the world and thanks to Rick Steve’s Greece travelogue I caught a few weeks ago I also know that the US style of gyro isn’t traditional Greek either, because what he purchased was made with spit-roasted pork, not beef or lamb and looked killer good. Now, in Germany I practically overdosed on the amazing version of “Döner Kebap” served by swarthy Turkish gents there and it’s in some ways drastically different from that served here. Most different, I’d say, is the bread. Instead of pita, a German-Turkish style Döner is served on bread that I’d describe as Armenian bread, the kind you see in huge sheets at Persian markets, and it’s fluffy compared to pita and it gets crispy and mmmmm so good in a sandwich press. The meat LOOKS sort of like our donair meat but it’s always (in my experience) either chicken or veal and not always or often ground. Toppings are yogurt, herb and hot sauces (hot I do not like, it’s very floral tasting and to my taste it’s distracting) and veg toppings include fresh, not pickled, cabbage. The whole affair is more than delicious and I’d love to have the style here, though I do love our Alberta version too. Now this is the thing: The Döner they serve in, say, Berlin is nothing (so I’ve heard) like what one would find in Turkey proper; the German version is a vernacular transformation, an evolution, of the food. So is what we consume in Canada. So is the American spin on gyros. And I am here to declare that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. Part of what is fascinating about travel is not only to taste local dishes but also to see how “local” has transformed imports from other parts of the world. So when I travel I love to taste how locals interpret and modify “Chinese,” for example. And I am always fascinated by how well (or poorly) they might manage “authentic” foods despite not having the proper ethnic credentials, as when I have a really good Thai curry or a really good butter chicken (and I know, butter chicken is probably inauthentic too) at, say, a non-Thai or non-Indian pub. It’s neat and is part of what makes life so damn enjoyable.

So there are different, radically different, spins on many examples of ethnic foods co-opted and altered and made local, around the world, but some examples stand out as massive shape-shifters. Most obvious among these are the huge array of versions of “Chinese” food, but there are others: Donair has been discussed, as has Indian; other examples are the many versions of “pizza” as well as regional spins on what do put on and do with pasta around the world; another would be the more recent and bewildering- I would say “mesmerizing”- growth in rococo sushi, with sushi bars serving creations that would never be seen in Japan and that purists decry for inauthenticity.

I have a huge problem with the matter of Japan here. I know that it’s not the only culture that would complain about its being watered down or altered outside its borders (well, with respect to sushi and to a much lesser extent other of its cuisines). One hears all the time from Chinese and non-Chinese about how such-and-such a dish isn’t “really Chinese,” for example, and how “Indian” food in the UK is almost always prepared by Bangladeshis, but the most screeching heights of this sort of xenophobia (yes, XENOPHOBIA) that I’ve seen is around sushi, and the xenophobes are almost never actual Japanese people. They are rather Japanophiles, almost always American or Canadian men with an obvious fetish for Japanese women, they spend time travelling or teaching English in Japan and return with the most enraging and haughty, disproportionate obsession with all things Japanese and they decry any sushiya that isn’t Japanese-run, and they snicker at what hoi polloi are eating, reminding the lowly non-Japan-visiting, non-Japanese-girlfriend-having locals that “it’s so much better in Japan,” “this i the sort of thing they serve in Japan,” or my pet peeve, “they don’t eat maki like those in Japan.” Okay, I have no problem with pursuing authenticity if it somehow enhances one’s dining experience, and this is (for me) key around issues of table comportment and etiquette. I am really obnoxious about getting people to eat Thai and Vietnamese curries with SPOONS not only because that’s how Thai people eat curries but because in eating curry the right way you actually get to EAT it. Thais don’t use chopsticks for curry because it’s impossible to eat a wet curry with chopsticks. Same thing with eating sushi with one’s fingers: It’s not only perfectly proper; it’s also a superb way to EAT and enjoy the food. So I am not a non-stickler. The problem with the Japan worshipers is that their take on Japan is usually nothing but abeyance to and wholesale acceptance of Japan’s cultural myths of superiority- the same set of myths that made it acceptable for Japan to slaughter millions of Chinese civilians during WWII. I love lots of things Japanese but will not honour creepy, outdated and dangerous notions of cultural superiority and will (for example) eschew vernacular spins on sushi, like huge maki, SOLELY because they don’t abide by Japanese tradition.

Fuck Japanese tradition. My concern is that my food taste good. I’m not going to turn down a donair because they’re not served this way in Egypt. I didn’t refuse to let Brian take me to a Chinese resto in Tobago because the food was modified drastically to suit the tastes of Tobagonians. I am not going to go to fucking JAPAN and not eat pizza with whole garlic cloves or squid on it because that’s not how pizza is done in Italy! And I am sure as hell not going to refuse the out-of-this-world good “w-crunch spicy roll”at El’s Japanese Fusion (my fave sushiya in Calgary) because chef Mike is Korean or because, for Christ’s sake, “they don’t serve rolls like that in Japan.” Arguments like those are the racist remnants of a society that, for all its delights, is xenophobic as part of its essence. I won’t be moved by those arguments and neither should you.

[cough] Blog [cough]. Also, [blog] cough [blog].

I hate it when people use that “[cough] word [cough]” construction when they’re trying to be clever, like writing something like “I hate bad reality tv [cough] Big Brother [cough].” You’ve never seen it? I have. Anyway, today’s post title is a little riff on it AND a reference to this damned cough (and associated sputum-iness) that I’ve been enduring for about a week and a half now. I caught this bug from Brian, who started to get sick right after I came home from Seattle, so I can look at him and see that a week from now (I started getting it about a week after he did, see), I’ll be not a whole hell of a lot better. In fact we seem about “even” in the cough arena, waking up hacking like mad. Is this H1N1? Could be, though neither of us had much in the way of fever and neither had any real nausea or diarrhea (these are apparently more common with H1N1 than with most seasonal flu), but we HAVE had massive, just massive, amounts of coughing and lots of wet coughing at that. Nothing like a “cold.” First couple days saw us both with wracking body aches too, which is of course more like flu. But it’s too late to test for it and in any case Alberta Health is saying that even if we feel we might have it, and this is good advice, if we’re not experiencing high fever or respiratory distress, no need to tax the system. Brian and I are both pretty much able to be out of the public realm, he because he works at home most of the time, and me because I don’t teach summers. Anyway, hopefully by my next post I’ll be back to normal, or close to it. Meantime: COUGH.

So I’ve been delinquent in the blogosphere of late; most of this is because I’ve been sick and not up to it, but a lot of this is due to my “where do I start?” feeling. I mean, so many things, personal and political, are upsetting me these days and I could write forever about them.

Personal? More online harassment. I’ve come to realise something, and this goes without saying and is a complete “I told you so” thing, so don’t tell me so, but I really wish I’d done a better job of masking my identity sometimes. Online, I mean. This is the thing: People know who I am. I use my real name all over the place, or I link to this blog in which I make zero effort to hide who I am, and the people who hate me–and gosh, there are lots of them–use this against me. They attack me and are themselves anonymous. Now, I had the happy occasion to find out the real name of the person who was leaving tons of hateful messages in my comments here; I say “happy,” because it wasn’t anybody I knew, no disgruntled former student or anything like that, just some unattractive, bespectacled nebbish who never learned how to turn his privacy settings on for his facebook account. Seeing the person behind that campaign rendered him harmless, and so I decided to try the same course of action (meaning to use my internet sleuthing skills) to find another, more recent hater, somebody who has been trolling comments of mine on skyscraperpage and skyscrapercity for about a year and a half, mocking my use of the term “cappo” for “cappuccino” or “resto” for “restaurant,” and yes, he REALLY HATED that I used these terms.

He took this vocabulary, which is nothing but convenient foodie shorthand for crappy foodie typists like me, to mean that I am arrogant and pretentious. And he found my blog to be, surprise, indulgent and just a terrible read. And he let everybody know it and proffered links to this blog to show the world what an arrogant bore I am. And he posted links to my youtube videos, the ones where I make espressos with my Leva, to point out what an obsessive and pretentious person I am. And he did this under the guise of three separate identities, so it could look as if it was more than just him (and this very angry misfit from Thunder Bay) ganging up on me. This went on all over the net, I found by searching his username. There were people on “british expats” being apprised of what a horrible “arrogant pretentious” person I am. A site devoted to reviews of Toronto escorts–yes, a whore review site–had entries where he joked about what a pretentious arrogant coffee person I am. I had to find out who this person was, to render him as harmless as I had done with that stalker from last fall. But no happy ending here, because as it turned out, this troll was one of Brian’s best friends, somebody who had been close enough to him (and, I thought, to us) to have attended our wedding, in Ottawa. Yes, somebody I know quite well. This hurt, it hurt badly enough to prevent me from sleeping for two straight nights, it ended one of Brian’s oldest friendships, and all because this guy couldn’t bring himself not only to bring these issues up with me directly if they offended him so much, but also to stop a campaign–no other way to describe it–against me, with stabbing comments peppered all over SSP and SSC about “I’m enjoying a cappo at a third-wave coffeehouse, wink wink, that’s what that PRETENTIOUS John Manzo would say, LOL,”  after I messaged him privately begging him to stop. The guy set up fake accounts for the sole purpose of harassing me. And while he’s acknowledged what he’s done, I don’t understand why, and I can say, claiming the status of morally superior here, that  I would NEVER do this to one of my friends’ spouses. It’s horrible and there can be no happy ending.

Lesson here? I am very good at finding people. Sometimes, I guess, I’d rather not know the truth. But you mess with me “anonymously,” and I find you. I found the student who was sending me gay-bashing emails a few years ago and it almost cost him his degree. I found my expletive-filled comments stalker. I found Brian’s ex-friend. I never do this anonymous cowardice and anybody who does should be ashamed.

Public? Oy, where to start? We got gay rights formally and explicitly added to our provincial human rights code in Alberta, 14 years after the federal government “wrote it in” following the famous “Vriend” decision. And to appease the PC party’s hard right–specifically, to appease the very hard-right Ted Morton, so he won’t jump ship and run for head of the ultra-right Wild Rose Alliance–they included a provision to allow parents to remove their kids from school when the curriculum addressed issues relating to religion, sexuality or sexual orientation. Okay, parents ALREADY had that right. Parents had the right to enrol their kids in Catholic or Christian or any other religious schools, as well as to educate them at home. What happens now is that if kids are exposed to the knowledge that same-sex couples can legally marry–and THIS is the point that gives Morton a religious hissy fit, let’s be frank–then, get this, the teacher can be brought before a human rights tribunal! It’s so twisted. So if Johnny calls Joey a “faggot,” the teacher can’t use the insult as an object lesson about tolerance and difference, because they didn’t get prior approval for it, and you know that radical right-wing nutbar terrorists like Focus on the Family are just champing at the bit to bring cases forth to scare those liberal-loving teachers. It’s sick and makes me so, so ashamed to be Albertan.

Other political stuff: Certain groups seem to be falling over one another to castigate the progressive members of Calgary city council these days, with the guns aimed at John Mar, Joe Ceci and especially Druh Farrell, because they actually believe that moving this city forward and making it a place to LIVE with public life and public amenities and curbside recycling, finally and thank God, is not in line with “taxpayers’ interests,” when we already pay the lowest property taxes in the entire country. There are too many people in this city whose interests are nothing but selfish and suburban and this backlash is really getting tiresome. All these people care about are car-friendly policies and screwing anything and anyone progressive: No funding for transit, no parks, no recycling, no high-density housing, nothing but wide-lot suburban me-me-me-me-me-ME. They are a cancer in every city and unfortunately for a unicity like Calgary, the suburbanites share the same municipality as we live in and we have to appease them. They choose unsustainable lifestyles and then complain because Calgary Transit won’t pick them up at their front door, tranport them to work, feed them and wipe their fat suburban asses. You want a better commute? LIVE CLOSER TO YOUR WORK. And don’t give me this “the inner city is too expensive” bull. Nothing is free, but when we moved to Calgary the inner city was a ridiculous bargain and near the best schools in the city to boot. I could go on and on but that’ll do. Somebody has to scream on OUR side, the RIGHT side, and I’m about to start it.

My “debate” with Jeffrey Simpson

Remember when Dubya came to Calgary on March 17, and that imbecilic parrot at the Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson, wrote, “There he was, in perhaps the only city in Canada that would have him”? Okay, the man said “perhaps,” but to today’s topic: Toronto is hosting George W Bush. Yes, with Bill Clinton, but that’s not the point. Clinton has spoken in Calgary, twice since I’ve lived here. The fucking Dalai Lama is coming to Calgary. So I don’t give a rat’s ass whom W is sharing the stage with, how his talk is organized, under what guise, or even how many people are protesting. None of this matters, because Simpson and his ilk didn’t care about any of these details for Calgary- especially the fact that this was not “Calgary” bringing him here, but our Chamber of Commerce. So NOTHING gets Toronto off the hook for this, because NOTHING was offered to give any sort of perspective on his trip here (including, for example, the fact that there was EXACTLY as little support for Bush in Calgary prior to his 2004 election as there was in Toronto, and less than in places like Man-Sask and the Maritimes). So I wrote this email to Jeffrey Simpson:

So Calgary was the only city that would have Bush? Your beloved
Toronto is hosting the war criminal now- so where’s your apology?
We’ll love to see it.

John Manzo
Calgary

And, to my suprise, he replied:

As I don’t live in Toronto it’s not beloved of me and never has been. Shake off your prejudices. That anyone would pay Bush is a terrible indictment of them wherever they are.

Oh, the irony. Yes, he’s telling me that I have “prejudices” for, I guess, assuming that he has a thing for Toronto, making himself look willfully ignorant and utterly missing the point. So I replied:

Please don’t arrogate to lecture me on “prejudices” when you wrote
what you wrote about Calgary, castigating the country’s third most
diverse city because some morons at our Chamber of Commerce decided it
would be a coup to bring that war criminal here.

I love Toronto, it was the first city I emigrated to (from the US, in
2000) and would never stereotype the entire city based on the decision
of whoever organised this fiasco to bring Bush there. You, on the
other hand, are all too happy to stereotype Calgary and Calgarians on
that basis- so which of us is “prejudiced”?

And he issues his one-word zinger back:

Baloney.

No idea what’s “baloney” in my email, but I tried again:

You’re right, my mistake, I emigrated in 1997 (to Toronto) and moved
to Calgary in 2000. I do get befuddled sometimes.

I wish you’d had the perspective–and the bizarre thing is that you
SHOULD have the perspective–to write a book about “Maple Leaf
Americans” like me, but I guess that task falls to somebody else.

jm

This last bit was a reference to a book he wrote a few years back called Star Spangled Canadians about how much Canada sucks ass and how they were departing in droves, droves I tells ya, to the US, all as part of a fabrication that the Globe was married to (but has since dropped, as facts got in the way and even they could not maintain the myth) that they referred to as our “brain drain.” Canada was then and is still, by far, a net importer of brains but that sort of fact doesn’t sell papers as much as pessimistic navel-gazing. But that sort of self-hate was soooo 1998; bashing Alberta is the new M.O. of Simpson and here we are. And no, he didn’t reply to my last email.

To the present: classes over, papers to be marked, big final exam tomorrow night and all ducks appear to be in a row for it, spring has ABSOLUTELY sprung, Flames are 1-2 in playoffs vs Chicago but hope is still around after two close Chicago wins and a convincing victory by the good guys at the Dome yesterday (game 4 tonight will tell the story), and Vancouver swept St Louis for a very impressive entry into round two- congrats, Canucks.

Hell week

15 days has been, if I’m not mistaken, the longest absence I’ve taken from this blog since I started it. I guess this reflects that I’ve been busy (which I have been- lots of meetings and committee work this time of year, not to mention home-related matters which I’ll get to in a moment); but part is also that I’m pretty down after a string of crap.  Not that you care. But I do, and since this blog is as much a personal journal as a public site, I want to remember some of this, so here goes:

1. I had my eyes examined last Friday (March 13, and wow, I didn’t even think about how this whole downward spiral started that day) and it was very frustrating. Showed up right on time and there was only one person at the optical shop, who had (apparently) to attend to a constant stream of “do these look good on me?” tire-kickers before my exam. Eye exams should take priority, and I was getting a migraine trying to understand how she was supposed to give me the gentle attention I deserved- remember, this was my visit to get fucking BIFOCALS- when she’s also trying to run the boutique. That settled down when another employee showed up but as expected my vision has gone in the crapper. As well, they could do nothing about a painful and recurring sty on my right lower lid so I had to get a referral (and got it immediately, so that was good) to an opthalmologist. With the humourous warning that he’s “older than dirt.” And would be slicing my eyelid open. Joy.

2. Anyway, I get home from that experience to see a note from the city attached to our front door. Ah, methinks, something about the new recycling containers. Nope- those don’t come to Bankview until after March 23. This was a warning that we had 24 hours to remove the buildup of ice on our front walk “to bare pavement.” And this was really what got to me and what has me feeling like I have a curse following me. See, I am super conscientious about snow shovelling. And I complain, including calls to the city, about people who aren’t, at least when they’re on a dangerous (steep) lot and they never shovel. These calls are almost always for naught. But we slip up- due to physics and nature, not because we don’t shovel- and we get nailed to the wall for it. So a lot of the rest of the day is attempting to remove the ice with a softball bat and a snow shovel. Next day I buy an edger (no ice scrapers in stock, not at Canadian Tyre at least) and a bag of ice melt. It looks great now, thanks to a lot of painful labour, but the fact that we got picked on when there are walks like ours EVERYWHERE given the time of year, physics, and the very bad winter we’ve had, and I can just wail and say “why me?”

3. It gets worse now. We have a wooden fence along the east side of our property separating us from the alleyway and the assorted pieces of human garbage who use it for a walkway even though there are perfectly nice sidewalks parallel to the alley on both 14A and 14 Streets. But it’s easier to smoke crack in the lane, I guess. Anyway, we have this fence, and I’m happy to say that UNTIL FRIDAY it had never been graffiti-marred… well there was this tiny “CRON” somebody wrote in red but it was barely visible and we ignored it, mostly. Well, Friday night some shithead used black spray paint to scrawl “GET KRANKED” on the fence, about 2′ high and maybe 12′ wide. Here is the artwork:

It’s not even interesting, nothing like the pretty brushwork flowers you see everywhere or a nice tag. It’s also HUGE and is the ultimate act of ass-holism, at the very least because this is our HOME. The social contract that says “commercial or public properties only” looks over.  So I call the city and find that I have 24 hours to cover the thing up- or, that’s right, I’m in  violation of a bylaw. I did paint over it but the combo of chipping ice and painting with a tiny brush borrowed from a neighbour (with paint that’s a shade too dark but it was the closest I could find in our store of old paints) meant I was sore for days. Still am, sort of.

4. The shitstorm doesn’t stop there. As the national and local media could not stop reminding me, America’s own war criminal, Dubya, was in town on Tuesday to give a speech thanks to the efforts of our Chamber of Commerce.  WHY DID THEY DO THIS? It makes us look like a bunch of yokels (and evil yokels at that) and even with protests the only image the rest of the country gets is, as the G&M’s Jeffrey Simpson said, “Calgary is the only city that would have him.” This is patently untrue- it would be easy enough to get 2000 Bush sycophants in, say, Missisauga, Edmonton, or hell in Vancouver, but the damage is done and we look like a city of right wing assholes yet again.

5. Last thing: I was walking down 4th St SW yesterday, coming back from my eye treatment at the hands of an 82-year-old opthalmologist who diagnosed my “sty” as in fact an infected oil gland, not a sty (which involves an eyelash follicle, not a sebaceous gland). It was not inflamed yesterday so not big enough to cut the lid open and, as he put it, “scoop it out,” so I got an injection of an antibiotic in some sort of solution that allows for slow release subcutaneously, the “cutaneous” part being of course my eyelid. So I get an injection THERE. It was torture and terrifying. But it was over, and I had lunch at Towa Sushi on 4th; I had not been there in a couple of years because they stopped serving lunch early in the boom when staffing became impossible. Not so now, lunch served T-F, and I have to say: pricey but very, very good. ANYway, I walked by a certain resto and see, for the umpteenth time, a man who appears to be an owner or manager or something and another man sitting in the table closest to the window, smoking. Overflowing ashtray on the table. ILLEGAL. Smoking is VERBOTEN and I have seen this, exactly this thing, at this resto many times. I get fed up and say to a pair of pedestrians (lesbian couple with a baby in a stroller), “Do you see this?! They’re smoking! I’m sick of this! I’m reporting them to the city.” They look at me like I’m nuts, which I am, but I’m also pissed off and in no mood to put up with this entitled bullshit since these jerkoffs have been skirting the smoking ban for months like this. So I call 311, and while I’m on my mobile one of the guys comes out, straining to get my attention. When he does he tells me that (1) they’re closed (as in, not open for lunch); (2) as such it’s legal for them to smoke and (3) I should mind my own damn business. Okay, I don’t get to finish my call to 311 so I call the province’s tobacco act hotline and clarify if what this moron said was true. IT IS NOT.  A business is a business and employees may NOT use a resto as their personal smoking lounge when business hours are over- and this wasn’t in the kitchen or some office; it was in the fucking dining room. They do this every day there- in fact I walked by today and there was the idiot and there was the ashtray, front table, big as you please. So I called 311 back and made my formal complaint, and hopefully, unless my karma is seriously broken, they have been contacted by bylaw. And fined. I’m in no mood to see people skirting a law that’s been in effect for almost 2 years now.

Rant over- but uh oh…

6. Winter storm warning now. 15-20 cm of wet snow tomorrow morning. Sigh.

If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead, so… make it bleed.

It’s been 35 days since the last murder in Calgary. Calgary is a city of 1,042,000 people.

You’d think that this extended period of relative calm (“relative” since it’s not as if some incompetent gangsters haven’t tried to kill each other- in fact there was a bona-fide, if brief, gunfight in Chinatown a few weeks ago, and shots fired at a car on the Deerfoot yesterday) might merit mention in the news- I mean, if CRIME grabs the headlines, then NOT CRIME should be an even better thing to tell people about.

Nope. Newspapers have no interest in appeasing fears, because “news” is “crime news” even in the midst of what are (1) FALLING crime rates (in Canada at least), including murder rates, and (2) rates of urban crime that are among the lowest in the world, and absolutely lower than those in urban settings in the US; which is important, because part of our moral panic around crime stems from too much exposure to US media and too much acceptance of a mythic, nonexistent connection between their urban experience and ours here in Canada.

News outlets hate lulls like this. HATE them. So it was with glee, I’m sure, that the always-reliable Calgary Herald managed this bit of fear-mongering in regard to that Deerfoot shooting:

Another chapter in an escalating war between two rival gangs unfolded Saturday night in a drive-by shooting on Deerfoot Trail that has prompted police to warn those in any relationship with gang members are at risk of becoming victims.

Several shots were fired from a dark-coloured car into an SUV as the two vehicles headed north on Deerfoot Trail near the Calf Robe Bridge around 9:45 p.m. Saturday. A man and a woman in the SUV were struck by the bullets, while a third person escaped unscathed, said Acting Staff Sgt. Gord Eiriksson of the organized crime operations centre.

The driver continued on to a hospital where the pair have been receiving treatment. Neither of their injuries are life-threatening, Eiriksson said.

Confirming the two victims are known to police and the organized crime section, Eiriksson said the targeted shooting is gang-related and part of the escalating feud between two gangs that have been locked in combat for years.

The growing war has reached the point that anyone involved with gang members is in danger, Eiriksson said.

“These two groups have escalated to the point now that if you are a member of one of these two gangs, if you’re an associate, if you’re a girlfriend, if you happen to be in the same vehicle with members from these two groups, you are at risk of being a victim of a shooting or a homicide,” he said.

“I don’t know how much more plain we can be about that.”

Already, the war has claimed the lives of more than a dozen people, he added.

The fear for police is that it will reach a point where an innocent victim will be killed.

“When things like this happen — an opportunity arises — they decide to initiate a shooting, then we’re all at risk,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s going to stop.”

The fact that this latest shooting occurred as the vehicles were driving on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city shows the gangs’ disregard for public safety, he added.

I can’t dispute any of the facts of the matter here, and of course shooting guns on an incredibly busy stretch of freeway (Deerfoot Trail is a stretch of Alberta Highway 2 that’s Calgary’s version of the 401 or, say, I-80/94 etc. in the Chicago area) demands police response. What I am so tired of is not just the panic-inducement but also the sheer uselessness of this report. Yes, it’s news and yes it’s bad news. But warning people to avoid gangs? You might get SHOT AT? Does Sgt Eiricksson really think any prospective gangbanger or the stupid, stupid girls attracted to that sort of human detritus are really going to change their minds/tastes based on his interview with the Herald?

Second… a battle between two gangs? No kidding? And after making the odd decision to mention (and enshrine) the ongoing disputes between the FOB and FK groups in Calgary, you’re now keeping these a secret? What is the public supposed to take away from any of this?

Ah yes, of course. The fear. The fear and the blood-lust and the “our damn justice system” and the pessimism and the “this goddamn city is going to hell” and the “Calgary is a murder-happy shithole” and all the racism, add that to the top of the pile. But so what- crime IS out of control, so who cares about “sensitivity” and who cares how this message is couched?

This is the thing. The “crime wave” is a media invention and it’s fueled by alarmist, inflammatory reporting (this isn’t unique, at all, to Calgary as any CRITICAL self-aware reader of that rag known as the Toronto Star should know, but I live here, not in Toronto) that has ZERO offer of perspective and ZERO effort to GAIN perspective. And when you’re talking about things like “crime rates” and you’re describing a situation as “gang warfare,” you NEED perspective.

So here’s some perspective for ya.

Calgary had a murder rate of 3.14 per 100,000 persons last year. That was 4th highest among “major” (500,000 or greater CMA population) Canadian cities last year. Highest among “majors” was Winnipeg. Among all cities? Saskatoon. That 3.14 was fully 70% higher than the national murder rate. Nothing to be proud of there.

But I like my perspective a little more expansive and like to look to the US for it, since I’m American (still) and since the perspective it offers is terrifying and fascinating and very, very instructive.

Calgary’s rate was 3.14- let’s say 3- per 100,000. 4th worst in Canada. Real hell-hole. Did any US cities fare worse- I mean, if we’re in the midst of a gang war (and with 30 murders so far in 2008 we might top last year’s rate, I must add)… so we must be on par with other gang-war-addled cities, right?

No. Not even close. Here are some cities that had murder rates higher than Calgary’s last year, and what those rates were (again, the rate is the number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants- it’s standardized, in other words, so population differences are accounted for):

New Orleans: 95
Gary: 73
Camden: 53
Youngstown: 52
Detroit: 46
Baltimore: 45
St Louis: 40
Birmingham: 38
Newark: 37
My home town of Hammond, Indiana: 19.

I could go on and on… and on and on and on and on. You can get your own perspective here. Among US cities of 250,000 or more, among which there are 70, only TWO had murder rates lower than Calgary’s last year: Honolulu, and Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. SIXTY-EIGHT had rates of 3 or higher- some, as you can see, many, many times higher. The murder rate in New Orleans was THIRTY TIMES- that’s 3000%- higher than Calgary’s.

But, the haters reply, things are so much worse here than they used to be!

No. The murder rate peaked here in 1992. 1992, with a rate of about 5 per 100,000, back when this city was still a backwater of homophobia (the first attempt at a gay pride parade was only in 1991, remember), where “diversity” was still a dirty word, where none of the purported causes of our current ineffectual and pathetic “gang war” (hear that, Lee Richardson?) were extant. Times were WORSE then for everyone but the hicks. But what was “better,” in Calgary and elsewhere, was that “bleeding” didn’t always entail “leading.”

Those days are over.