My conspiracy

It's what they tell you every time - that it's different, that the polic really are following them, that the government really did set them up. I get them every single week, and you can't hope to ever explain to them that the police aren't there, and that the government couldn't really give a damn.

Up and then down, and the back up again. To the right, slowly, and then back to the left again, tracing a slight, airborne pattern that you can barely see, and can never hope to comprehend.
It is spring again, finally, and although there may be snow a few more times, it is certainly every bit of spring. You can see it nowhere more clearly than in the tone of the sunlight: lying on a bed with the sun crossing you in bars, you can watch a fleck of dust — so small it can truly be called a mote — make its meandering, stumbling route from nowhere to nowhere else.
Searching for purpose
It’s comforting, somehow, to imagine that there’s a great purpose in that fleck, to think that it is part of a bigger whole, of some sort of overarching and complicated pattern, out of which spins something close to divine order.
But boy it’s hard to do that. Far easier to accept what is obvious: that the storm windows still leak air currents, that the furnace has clicked on, or that the sun has created its own tiny atmospherics inside the confines of your room.
The problem is that one has majesty and purpose, and the other has only the sheer and placid blindness of chance.
Maybe that’s why no one ever wants to believe they are simply the victims of bad luck, and why it is they have to feel that they are the victims of great plans and conspiracies.
Regular event
It is practically a weekly occurrence in the media: someone will call on the phone, or come to the front desk, to outline how it is that they believe that the government or the courts has built a great conspiracy against them. The proof is often discrete at best: the tone of people’s voices, the ease with which a complaint is dismissed. Sometimes, people go to great lengths to document their mistreatment — sometimes, there are pages of notes, the dates and times for telephone calls, and careful notations about the callers’ tone and exasperation.
And the fact is that sometimes all of it is true; sometimes, governments do conspire, often by piling cover over cover over cover, building a nacre of guile that’s as hard and smooth and self-protective as a pearl. But that is the most rare of exceptions.
Most times, though, it’s nothing of the kind. People believe that slights are all the more significant because they are the people the slights have happened to — what they don’t realize is that administrations are big, sloppy machines that hand out as many slights as they do solutions. And most times, conspiracies are nothing more than the bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then dealing with a government that has the means and the will to hide its faults by simply doing nothing at all.
The problem is that governments are not so carefully drawn, so tightly controlled, that it can even build and manage one great conspiracy, let alone many at the same time.
That’s the sad and honest truth — but it’s also a truth that many people just can’t bring themselves to believe. No one wants to believe they are the victims of what one writer once called a confederacy of dunces — somehow, just falling into that sort of hole makes you seem in some way to blame.
Governments do roll right over people and trample their rights — but they do that far more often by accident and sins of omission, and far less by malice and commission.
But that’s not a message that many people are willing to hear.
Why? Because no one wants to believe that their lives could be as inconsequential as an errant mote of dust.
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Good Friday

It's Good Friday, and one of the few days in the year that a Newfoundland daily newspaper doesn't publish. Thing is, I'm still contacted by readers with questions about our ongoing dispute with the mayor of St. John's, and about our use of particular letters to the editor. I'm cell-phoned up, and I know my desk editors will phone me this afternoon. Last week, at a meeting of managing editors in Halifax, I said I could remember a time when, once you were on the road, the only way the paper could reach you was to leave a message at your hotel. Then my cellphone rang. In the run of three hours, every managing editor there - 11 in all - took at least one telephone call. Editing a newspaper has turned into a seven-day-a-week job, and I'm sure not one of us actually noticed it happening.

Unreported Violence

It's a shame that police departments generally downplay violence in the home.

There is, near Avondale, a two-litre Frosty Friends ice cream tub,
filled to the top with water and dead flowers.
It’s hard to make out what kind of flowers the dead blooms used to be —
they are submerged and decomposing. There are four fabric flowers
standing in the same dirty water, two red roses, two cream, and they
look forlorn and forgotten, left out in the middle of a hard-packed
parking lot for cars parked while their owners head to St. John’s for
work.
The ice cream tub has a strange sort of dignity: on a Sunday afternoon,
there are two pickup trucks left in the lot, and nothing else. The ice
cream tub is far enough out into the lot that it must occasionally be
in the way, but no one has picked it up and thrown it into the straggly
spruce and bog that backs onto the lot, and no one has carried it down
to the river that jets under the road and thrown it in, so that the tub
and its chosen cargo can speed down on the rushing water to the sea.
At least, not yet.
There’s no note or marking to say why the flowers are there, but you
can make an educated guess what they are a memorial for: two bodies
were found in a pickup truck parked on the lot not that long ago,
marking the fourth case in just over a year where two people have died
in this province in cases that the police almost immediately had
nothing to say about.
Four cases, right across the province, involving eight dead, four cases
that look — from the outside — suspiciously as if domestic violence was
involved.
To be clear here — eight people are dead. It’s a number worth thinking
about, especially given the intense media examination surrounding the
discovery of eight dead bodies in a farmer’s field near London, Ont.
Handled differently
If nothing else, it brings into sharp relief the different way
different kinds of homicide are treated.
In all of the Newfoundland and Labrador cases, the police have
basically said that they are not looking for any other suspects. Just
the way police use the term “no foul play is suspected” to tell the
media about suicides, they use not looking for suspects to indicate
that the deaths were either double suicides or murder suicides — or
perhaps even an accidental death followed by a suicide.
Perhaps you can look at these cases and claim it’s just the law of
averages, that there are a certain number of cases where
murder-suicides occur in any jurisdiction, and our numbers are just
coincidentally high right now, making up for years where the statistics
might have been lower.
But you wonder if, with such a concentration of deaths — and with the
near-silence around them — whether someone with the power to do so
might wake up one morning and suggest a public inquiry is needed to
look at all eight deaths, if for no other reason than to see if there
is some root cause that has brought so many families so much tragedy.
We don’t need any more ice cream tub memorials.
Questions left unanswered
Perhaps what we need is some clear and honest answers, as painful as it
is undoubtably going to be for the family members left behind.
If the ice cream tub had been thrown into the river, it would have spun
down on the spring flood to join into another flushed and swollen
river, and from there, to the two-lane highway bridge where the river
meets the sea. If the tub stayed upright, it and the flowers would have
swept past five sea ducks bobbing in a fan-shaped formation where the
fresh water mixes with salt, and swiftly out into Conception Bay, just
another handful of trash.
Then, it would be quickly forgotten — but not any more quickly than the
event it marks has clearly been.
Russell Wangersky is the editor of The Telegram. He can be reached by
e-mail at rwanger@thetelegram.com.
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Good morning

I'm a journalist with 20 years in the business, almost all of it in Newfoundland and Labrador. My work has appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country, to a variety of responses. I am currently editor of the St. John's Telegram, and I write two columns and six editorials per week. I plan to put up some of my work here, along with other comments about provincial and national issues - the opinions expressed are my own, and not those of my employers.

Russell Wangersky

Saturday's Editorial

They are preternaturally ugly little creatures, with their stalked and plastic-looking eyes and their five pairs of gangly and reaching legs. A boatload of them has - to the uninitiated - the frightening horror-show look of a Stephen King novel, or the otherworldliness of science-fiction villains. They reach and pluck and tumble over each other, awkward and ungainly out of the water, and they can give you the crawly feeling of reaching into a tool box and finding large spiders before you find your tools.
But to those who know them well, having a hold filled with iced snow crab - slowly blowing their thoughtful shiny spit-bubbles - was something akin to having a hold full of money.
The important word in the above sentence is the word "was."
Wednesday night, crab fishermen got word of a decision many expected, but that everyone dreaded. In addition to reduced quotas and, in some areas, a shorter fishing season as well, fishermen found out what the opening price was going to be for snow crab - a lowly $1.05 per pound.
Crab is the species that has been the undisputed king of this province’s fishing industry for the past few years, but this year’s opening price is the lowest price offered for crab since 1998.
The price has to move, if for no other reason than the endless equation of supply and demand - at this price, few fishermen can effectively supply the market. Caught between high costs - including the ever-rising cost of fuel and insurance - and low returns, a crab price of $1.05 per pound is the kind of price that may mean fishermen will have to keep their boats tied up. If enough do, the supply of crab will shorten enough for prices to rise.
Except for one little problem.
The head of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers union, Earle McCurdy, says the price, which will remain in place at least until April 22, could drive fishermen out of business. Why? Because fishermen may have no choice but to fish, because sitting at the dock means huge investments in vessels and gear, with their financing costs mounting by the minute.
It has other implications as well, not the least of those on the economy of rural Newfoundland and Labrador. If fishermen stay ashore, plant workers won’t get the weeks they need to get through the winter. If fishermen wait for better prices - especially those in areas with already-shortened seasons - plants will face a glut of crab, and plant workers will still be short the number of weeks they need.
It’s a problem with serious ramifications - and the problem is that, in the fishery, it has always been thus. When we’ve had fish, we haven’t had good prices. When we’ve had good prices, we haven’t had fish.
Crab has been the only fishery - except for one brief point with shrimp - where an astute fisherman, armed with good timing, good equipment and the right licences, could actually make some money.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised about the fact that snow crab look so much like something from another planet - their fishery, at least for a few years, looked like something from another planet as well.
Science fiction author Robert Heinlein once wrote that the moon is a harsh mistress: well, the moon tugs the sea, and all the creatures beneath it. And the sea, it seems, is equally cruel.

And Friday's

Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post was the first, in the National Post’s business section Tuesday.
He came out in a column headlined "Williams plays a Chavez role," describing Premier Danny Williams as "Hugo Williams," comparing the premier to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who recently began taking over oil operations run by foreign oil giants.
It is the easiest of arguments - using a comparison to belittle a person, rather than addressing their point.
Welcome to the knee-jerk pinstriped reaction of the national business press.
Wednesday, the Post ran a question-and-answer piece, asking Williams how he felt about being compared to Chavez.
Thursday, it was the Globe and Mail, with columnist Deborah Yedlin opining that "Newfoundland might come to be known in energy circles as Canada’s Venezuela."
The Post’s Mark Milke also waded in on Thursday, with "Newfoundland’s Conservative Premier Danny Williams not only replicates Hugo Chavez and Vladmir Putin, but also former Newfoundland premiers." Yikes.
National business reporters suffer from their own version of Stockholm syndrome: bottled up with business types for long enough, they begin to believe the rarefied hot air they’re inhaling. In the United States, the Enron and WorldCom scandals brought a sharp review of just how tight the ties were between the business press and the businesses the press was supposed to be watching.
"In many cases, (the business media) has compounded the problem by engaging in superficial cheerleading and personality-driven business reporting that, in hindsight, portrayed some villains as heroes," a Washington Post columnist wrote.
Post-Enron, there’s a new reality in U.S. business reporting: the San Francisco Chronicle quoted David Calloway of Marketwatch.com as saying the skepticism has to be palpable: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
But to get back to the sudden desire by Canada’s business press to find a Venezuelan nationalist wolf inside Danny Williams’ clothing.
There’s no doubt that Williams’ comments about pushing ExxonMobil out of the Hebron project are out to lunch, the same as his posturing about expropriating the Stephenville paper mill was. It’s possible to bluff and sabre-rattle to your heart’s content, but the moment a government actually seizes someone’s property, well, the whole playing field changes.
You simply can’t expect business to invest in a region if it feels its investment is at risk. Most businesses will just look somewhere else for something else to do.
It may be a convenient way to vilify a premier who doesn’t seem to be willing to play by the established rules.
What Williams has said is that the deal offered by the Hebron consortium doesn’t measure up, and he has discussed a variety of options for solving what he views as an impasse with one partner in the project.
What the business press has chosen to do is to focus on one of those options, and then paint Williams as an unstable radical.
Name-calling is easy: what’s fascinating is how easily the same comparison seems to flow from so many different scribes within so few days.
It almost seems as if they’ve been hearing it all from the same place.