I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. My mind isn’t going-so far as I can tell-but it’s changing. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those who seek to shut me up on this, or any other subject, will need more than a few vicious blog posts."Dave, stop. That’s my practice and I don’t much intend to change. I have never on television, in a column or in a speech said, written or delivered any views other than my own and what I actually believe. Nor ever, have I been invited out to that lonely derrick on the edge of the fields where I am told the “oil companies” plot the future of the world and hunt down the last panda with a bullet made from the concentrated bones of the last grey whale. No, dollars sliding under the table for a “special mention.” No preliminaries or conditions attached to what I say. There are no conditions, no comfy side deals. But what I absolutely guarantee is that what opinions people hear from me are mine. I try to be interesting, sometimes even reach for humour. It’s an empty, insulting slur against my reputation as a journalist. Now some columnists and some foundations (including the Sierra Club, which is, quite ironically, working the issue into a fund-raising campaign) are making claims by innuendo and artful headlines (“friends with benefits”) that amount to saying that I’m in bed with the oil companies, I’m undercover with Big Oil.Įssentially the cry is that I’m a ventriloquist for hire. But it stands, too sadly, as an illustration of the radical opposition to Alberta, its oil industry, and those who work in it. Neil Young’s comparison of the oilsands with Hiroshima had not been made at the time. I spoke about my views on the region’s national importance, the rescue it offered to so many thousands of Newfoundlanders who found jobs there after the fish crisis back home, and my view of the remorseless scapegoating of the oilsands as a singular threat to the planet. My subject was the Alberta Oil Boom, principally referring to Fort McMurray and - importantly - those who work there (a corps or workers that once included my own brother, so I know something of what I speak). Yet some bloggers now are questioning my commitment to that principle, thanks largely to a talk I gave recently to Business Forum, a gathering sponsored by the Calgary-based Bennett Jones law firm, featuring oil executives, First Nation leadership, premiers of Alberta and New Brunswick, and delegates from over the world. If my thoughts are not my own, they are nothing. I value independence of thought and expression, intensely. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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