Edith in the Sky with Diamonds

Yesterday I read that the Province of Alberta has four times the amount of prescriptions drug abuse as Quebec. They don’t know why.

I can hazard a guess…:)

When I was in my 20′s I had a close friend who was hooked on some prescription pain killer. She had an important job and few noticed she was in la la land most of the time.

Can’t recall which drug it was. A powerful one. She had multiple prescriptions and one day she overdosed and I had to bring her to emergency where they let her writhe in pain on her gurney for hours.

I had an inkling they were doing this on purpose, but maybe not. I vividly recall that day I spent in ER because I wasn’t sick, so I got to watch all the human drama unfolding around, and that day ER I recall was like an episode of ER the TV show, I tell you.

A man died and his two kids (youths) were reacting in opposite ways:the daughter wailing and the son with his head in a textbook.

I heard a doctor tell another that the same man had presented the day before with a paralyzed finger and they had sent him home… and then he presented again…. anyway, it sounded like the doctor was describing how his case had been mismanaged, like Mrs. Haufnagel on St. Elsewhere.

Anyway, I took a Tylenol blue pill yesterday, just one, to see if it helped my blocked ears, which are acting up. I’m using a homeopathic remedy.. I don’t like taking drugs of any kind. (Except the one that pours from a bottle and comes from grapes.)

I am clearly a rarity today. And the modern doctor loves to give pills. (A recent Salon.com article claimed that in the old days doctors did everything they could not to give a pill, now they do the opposite. No time. Easier. They really are “pill pushers.”)

When my husband goes for a checkup, his doctor now always offers him Viagra, just out of the blue. My husband is totally healthy, but he is asked if he wants this ‘recreational’ drug, so the doctor must ask all the older guys. (Last time I told my husband to say that he didn’t need Viagra, but he could sure use Angelina Jolie. Viagra is not an aphrodesiac, as far as I know, but it is treated as one. Ps. and the ads say that 40 percent of men over a certain age have this condition on occasion. Then it isn’t a condition, is it? It’s normal.

The same goes for Prozac. If a huge proportion of the population is depressed (and the prescribing statistics for these anti-depression drugs seem to suggest it is.. One fifth of the population of Glasgow is on some sort of anti-depressant apparently) then depression is normal – especially in Scots.. So these drugs are merely mood enhancers. The same Salon article says that depression in now something to be ‘managed’ and not be ‘cured’. Managing makes more money than curing, you see. Almost 9 percent of Americans are on the drugs,and the figure is ever rising, but not African Americans, oddly, who have something to be sad about if the recent NYT article, saying that MLK is weeping in his grave is true.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/martin-luther-king-jr-would-want-a-revolution-not-a-memorial.htm

(But managing your mood with marijuana is bad, very bad. Well, were it legal, it couldn’t make money for Big Pharma, so better that it make money for Big Crime, and provide an excuse to abritrarily incarcerate certain racial groups. That’s the logic anyway.)

They don’t talk about this on the News, because were it not for advertising from Big Pharma, the mainstream media would be dead as nail in door. An awful lot has changed since they allowed Pharmaceutical Companies to sell directly to civilians and not just to doctors. And the way the announcers race through the list of possible side effects at the end of these drug ads, makes it sound funny, like a joke. Indeed, the side effect of Viagra have reached iconic joke status in TV sitcoms and movies.

The prescription drugs Alberta’s citizens are abusing are opiods. Probably akin to the drugs found in ‘tonics’ in 1900.

I am writing Edith’s Story, the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

 

and I have her stoned on some tonic as she goes to the Art Show.

I know for a fact her principal, who was also medical doctor, gave her tonics for ‘heart’ conditions. So he probably really dosed her here after the death of her fiance. And there were always those medicines for La Grippe.

So has it really changed that much? People in those days, women mostly, were going out stoned too. (It’s only coincidental that she was a Canadian Scot.) They were just outlawing opiates in every day products.. In the US, especially, which is why the Patent Medicine People all moved to Brockville, Ontario.

I read an ad for a baby medicine that proudly claimed Contains no Opiates. Imagine.

Of course they famously sedated housewives in the 50′s with Valium.

Newswatch: Anglo-Quebec style

I spend a lot of time  reading the news on the web, reading US, UK and Canadian sources (the sensible ones  so so I thought I’d check out the Google News ‘favorite search’ list for today, 20th of August – to see what the hoi polloi is curious about.

I started with the letter A for Canada (English). Amy Winehouse is first, then Ayano Tokumasu,the poor girl who fell over fence at the Niagara Falls, apple, air canada and aecl which is a story related to Fukishuma, some rod provided by Canada, whereas in the UK, although Amy Winehouse is top search subject, Arsenal comes in second, Andy Murray, Amir Khan, aston villa, Amy Childs are also on the list. Hmm. Arsenal is a soccer team. I’ve read Fever Pitch. Andy Murry, wasn’t he on one of those Extras episodes?  Hmm. I spend a lot of time on the Guardian website, but I know none of these names. Wait, Andy Murray is a tennis player. (I didn’t watch the Rogers Canadian Open last week; too busy watching my savings go down, down down, up, down, UP UP, down down down. Who needs tennis. (The next thing you know, my cat will be watching the Financial Channel.)Amy Childs is a person on Big Brother. So entertainment issues were tops here in the UK.  I guess they need a break from the week or two of heavy duty news they just endured.

( In the US for the letter Amy Winehouse, apple, Anderson Cooper, android, Amanda Knox,Antoinette Stephen, amateur radio,amazon and yes, Arsenal. Was the team bought by US concern? I wonder….. No. Hmm.  Well, I know who Anderson Cooper is, and I know amazon, but why amateur radio? Checked, can’t see why it comes up so high. Amanda Knox is involved in a murder trial. and Anoinette Stephen is another murder story. Very taboid interests!

Oh, and since I live in French Canada, I checked their 10 ten news searches. Yes, Amy Winehouse first. Algerie, apple, ashton kutcher (who according to headline, forgets the details of his investments, and Angelina Jolie who is buying a house with Brad Pitt in England. At least they can afford it but how is this news? So what? Like I fed the cat this morning.

 The fact that I just had to check the spelling of these two pretty folks’s names, says something about me. Then Android. What is Android? I ask, sounding like one of the bubble-headed beauties in the  original Star Trek..Oh, something to to with Google.

burundi, bombardier, barak obama,bute, bell, bourse, black keys, britney spears, beyonce.. (I’m using this as a memory exercise, since I can’t keep both windows open together. I  am NOT good at this. I can keep three items in my brain at best. I keep having to go back. Scary, since I think this is similar to a test they give for Alzheimer’s. Note to self: Must practice more memory games!)

That’s the B’s for French Canada. Bourse is the Stock Market. It’s also the word for purse,as in “Je n’ai rien dans ma bourse.”I bet that’s been one the the favourites in all Western Countries all week.

English Canada: blue jays, big brother  Blackberry, brad richards.bluesfest, brad griffith, bombardier

UK: big brother, bbc sport, big brother 2011, bbc, bbcnews, (and they are cutting funds for teh BBC?)beyonce, beckham, british open, borders, black ops, boeing.beyonce bachman, breaking bad and then, funny enough, betty ford, brett favre

US: bank of america, booton shooting, burger king

and a random letter for fun: (I close my eyes and touch the keyboard)…mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

memphis 3, murdoch, machbook air, mumbai, mexico, memphis three, mobile, that’s the US for M.

The UK..man utd, that’s Manchester United for cool people,  mata, manchester united ,for boring people, madeline mccann (another alleged sighting) murdoch, metsut ozil, man city, modric (whaaa?)Manchester City, Michael Jackson

Canada Anglais: Montreal, Maple Leafs, Murdoch, mac book air, Mayor Rob Ford, Mumbai.. why Montreal? Did something happen here? OH, our major cities all show up tops in their letter.

Canada French:maroc, martine obry, monaco, meteo, mylene farmer,  messi, marseilles, mercato,mesut ozil (who is a footballer.)

Oh, and I noticed, these ‘favorites’ change pretty fast.

I don’t know what this proves… a sliver of a sample…..My top news searches would not fall into any of these catagories.. but that’s because I am an English Canadian living in Quebec. We just don’t fit in anywhere.

I guess I’ll get back to living in the past, 100 years ago as I write Edith’s Story, about a young woman and the suffragettes in 1910, which is a follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf  about a college student in 1910. L. P. Hartley wrote that the Past in a Foreign Country, but he’s wrong, I think. It’s familiar territory as human nature  is very predictable.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading era newspapers, especially the Montreal Gazette. People’s interests, when it comes to the news, has really not changed much. The big difference, Minister’s Sermons and lectures aren’t reported on in the newspaper any more. (I’m glad they were, for this is very useful to me as I write this book about Presbyterian women, after all.

 The Home Secretary, in 1910, (I think it was Winston Churchill) sure came down on the suffragettes, in much the same way Prime Minister David Cameron (who was No. 4 on the news list, after David Haye, David Tennant, and NO. 1 the Duchess of Cambridge, has come down on this year’s rioters in England, the education-fee protesters and the unemployed youth looters of last week.

I think Mr. Churchill used the same confrontation rhetoric against any threat: women who rallied  for the vote and broke a window or two;  skinny Indians who promoted peaceful resistance; and the Third Reich. Churchill’s tone was appropriate for the war years, at least, and he was voted The Greatest Briton of the Century for it.

 Yes, no reporter has to sit through a sermon anymore, thank GOODNESS..The clergy has no clout today… but then, with Perry prayer vigils and the Tea Party people, maybe it’s deja vu all over again..

Summing up Suffrage: Nicholson style

Suffragette rally, Hyde Park 1910. International Contingent. Were there Canadians represented. Not sure, but I don’t think so.

In the preface to Pierre Berton’s Marching as to War, about Canada’s role in the Great War, he mentions the Canadian Suffrage Movement, but only in passing. It was temperance, he said, that pushed through woman suffrage. And he is right.

When I read that about 6 years ago, when I started researching the Tighsolas letters, I knew nothing about the suffrage movement, in Canada or elsewhere. I recall feeling disappointed about that statement.

“You mean, these early feminists were ‘stuffy’ old ladies?”

Boy, I didn’t know the half of it.

I soon got a hold of the two books that exist on Canadian Suffrage, one of them an American’s masters thesis written in 1940. However, these books did not enlighten me much.

There appears to be a real vacuum in this area of scholarship. Even the Canadian Social History Series doesn’t have a book on suffrage.

I guess that’s because it is commonly believed that there was no real suffrage movement in Canada except that Famous Four business – and that ‘history’ avoids the dark side of things.

That may explain why there is no bio of Carrie Derick, (except for another master’s thesis that is next to impossible to track down. McGill has a copy).

Anyway, I have to decide what to do with all this women’s rights info that I’ve uncovered, with respect to Flo in the City, a novel about a girl coming of age in 1910 Canada, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas/.

Edith Nicholson is the one interested in suffrage. (She’s the one who likely clipped all the items in the Nicholson collection.) Flo mentions suffrage once in a joke in a letter from Macdonald. Marion never mentions it. And it is Marion Nicholson who would have made a terrific suffragette organizer, with her drive and determination. Indeed, if Marion had wanted to start a movement in Montreal, she would have done it, no question!

But she was kept too busy trying to find a place to live.

Edith was a bit of a dreamer, so her interest in suffrage wasn’t much of a threat.

So I think I will have Edith promote the positive side of the movement, and I’ll have Marion dismiss it, by pointing out the dark side, by pointing out that the suffagettes mightn’t have approved of her living in her own apartment with three other girls.

Still, I wonder if the militant suffragettes believed all they said: I wonder if they were saying whatever needed to be said to get women the vote. Did they believe that men were all whoring, drinking, money-grubbing degenerates, and that women would change the world and make it better with the vote or were they tapping into repressed female anger? They were politically savvy, after all.

Politicians today will say or do anything to win and regularly ‘pander to their base’ as it is called. Did the suffragettes do this too? I suspect so.

The liquor trade, the sex trade and the textile trade have been described in my research as anti-woman suffrage, for financial reasons; they joined forces with moralists and traditionalists, who didn’t want women to get the vote, as they believed women would turn their backs on family, contributing to what was called “race suicide.” (Politics makes strange bed-fellows.)

Anyway, I’m lucky I have Herb Nicholson for my story: he clearly did some gambling, whoring and drinking…not to mention stealing. And then I have Henry Watters for the other side. (I wonder if Henry was gay. He was so successful but didn’t marry.)