Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

Epilogue

FATAL FANTASIES

(Draft)

My grandfather was murdered by one of his sons during an alleged hunting accident. The boys were out hunting with the old man when they got to a small lake where the group of maybe eight or six split into two, one going to the right the other to the left to make their way around the lake.

When the group with the old man reached a small clearing by the lake, they stopped to ostensibly let their father rest. A shot rang out from the other side of the lake. My father insisted that he had never agreed to the killing of the old man, which he admitted was deliberate, not naming the brother who fired the fatal shot by name.

Decades later it was my old man who was murdered by someone close; a woman with whom he formed a relationship after mom died from a heart attack.

I remember a few occasions when my old man came home drunker than the proverbial skunk as we were getting ready for bed and took out a large knife from a kitchen drawer and, with a hand on my mother’s shoulder guided her to their bedroom telling her it was her last night on earth. It was up to my oldest brother, who was still a teenager, and the only sibling my father would listen to at times like these to get the old man to give up the knife.

On another occasion I remember the police in the middle of the day coming to my mother’s rescue. They knew the old man so they did not come in with guns drawn but simply extended a hand and he gave them the knife. They asked my mother if she wanted to press charges. She didn’t and never would. She had married him for better or for worst and would always stand by him knowing that in spite of the threats he would never harm her physically. In those days the police could not charge her husband without her consent.

When her husband threatened her she would assure her crying children she would be alright. That was mother, the woman, who murdered my father, one night after both had been drinking heavily and he made his trademark threat, took him seriously and when he fell asleep did to him what he threatened to do to her.

Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, was wrong when he said only religion could get good people to do bad things. My father was a good person and so was probably the woman who killed him. She was found guilty of manslaughter and given a suspended sentence largely, I suspect, because of my oldest sister Lea, who befriended her when she was in prison and later testified on her behalf, telling the court what our father was like when he drank.

My father, when he was sober, if only once a week on Sundays when booze was only available from bootleggers was what you expected from the head of the family. On most Sundays, except in wintertime, early in the morning he would takes us boys fishing along a narrow river that wend its ways through a forest of pine trees about forty miles out of town.

We followed him only for so long before he disappeared into the underbrush to reappear maybe six hours later with a basket filled with rainbow trout and we all returned to where we left the car and returned home for a feast of freshly caught fish that had been kept alive by placing the basket in the fast flowing cold water of the Skunk river.

Sunday supper was my father’s thing. If it wasn’t fish it was a large turkey, ham or roast… which he cooked then presided over a lovely family dinner.

When I first started writing about the Koran, Lucette half-jokingly said that I wanted to continue the tradition of at least one male member of my family getting murdered every generation. That was not the suicidal fantasy, that could easily have become reality in the days and months after she died, but for the lack of a gun. Lucette knew she had only a few years to live and wished to die among her things in the almost century-old cottage-like house that was our home for more than thirty years.

For that to happen, I needed my stolen pension to pay the interest on a line of credit that had been at its limit for some time; if not, we would have to sell the house which would make her wish to die surrounded by the familiar in a place she loved impossible. Perhaps I could shame a government that was willing to shell out in excess of forty million dollars to four individuals for alleged abuse of their Charter Rights as a result of the actions of foreigners, to part with pennies on the dollar for domestic abuse of one’s Charter Rights.

Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmatti and Muayyed Nureddin—who, through their own carelessness in visiting Syria during Middle East hostilities, and honest mistakes made by government officials engaged in counter Islamic terrorism in uncertain times found themselves at the mercy of coreligionists—shared a $31-million tax-free windfall. Khadr would get $10.5 million for the alleged violation of his Charter Rights while in American custody at Guantanamo.

I wrote to the Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Global Affairs (the renamed Foreign Affairs). July 10, 2017

Dear Ms. Freeland,

At a news conference on Parliament Hill on July 7, you Minister, the Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould Minister of Justice, and the Honourable Ralph Goodale Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, to quote the Ottawa Citizen “drove home the point that the settlement dealt exclusively with the fact Khadr's Charter Rights were violated by the previous Conservative government.”

That is awfully decent of all of you. In the hope that this is not only for show I ask you to do right by me and my wife as you say your government has done by Mr. Khadr, and, one has to assume, by Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmatti and Muayyed Nureddin.

For denying me my Charter Rights, in this instance due process, I ask only for what was taken away from me then, nothing more, nothing less. A pittance considering; but that is alright. After all, it was not the taxpayers’ fault.

Sincerely Yours,

Bernard Payeur

The end was near. I had been served with a notice that shortly, at management's discretion no less; I would be required to serve a ten-day suspension. After serving this suspension, as required by law, I would be asked one last time to deliver the impossible report. If I could not deliver that report, I would be deemed to have refused a legitimate request of management three times, at which point I could officially be dismissed for insubordination.

The fact that they did not have me serve my suspension then and there, as was customary, led me to believe that they were still undecided as to how to proceed, not that their resolve had weakened. I was right.

Foreign Affairs was in such in a hurry be rid of my presence once the powers that be decided I had to go that they completely ignored my right to more than a semblance of due process.

I was dismissed before I had served a suspension as required by law and, as required by law, having served this suspension, I had to be asked one last time to deliver the impossible report and if I failed to do so, then and only then could I be dismissed for alleged insubordination.

To get around my right to due process Foreign Affairs simply deemed that I had served a ten-day suspension, and deemed that after serving the deemed suspension I was deemed to have been asked to end the alleged insubordination and deemed to have refused.

What does Thomas W. Brown think of all this deeming that actions that did not occur have occurred?

I have no reason to believe that more progressive disciplinary measures meted out prior to March 22, 1985 would have any effect whatsoever on the grievor. It would only have made a more classical approach to progressive discipline.

Decision of Thomas W. Brown in Bernard Payeur v. TREASURY BOARD (Foreign Affairs), p. 114.

The classical approach is synonymous with the right to due process and is the only protection afforded an individual against arbitrary dismissal, imprisonment, etc. The unmitigated arrogance of Thomas W. Brown in thinking he could predict the future and, knowing the future, ignore the law in the present.

Chrystia Freeland was our last hope. Without the return of my stolen pension to pay the bills our house was sold to a developer who demolished it to make room for an infilled. 

In this first fatal fantasy, I show up at the large front desk that welcomes visitors to Global Affairs HQ and informed them that I have a book that I would like to personally give to the Minster. When told to leave the book with them, I take out a gun and fire a shot into the air as I make my way to the elevator that will take me to the floor where the Minister can be found only to be met by a hail of bullets. I fall to ground still clutching my now blood-stained copy of Shooting the Messenger—Till Death Do Us Part, a murder no longer a metaphor.

That fantasy is unlikely to become reality as, unlike my Lucette, I don’t have the courage to say “today is the day that I die” and follow through with it. Therefore, I pin my hopes on getting noticed by someone whom I offended by something I wrote about Allah and/or Muhammad and who, seeking revenge on their behalf, spots me enjoying a glass of wine at my favourite outdoor patio on Elgin street—or any other venue for that matter, doing whatever—and slices my throat, if not completely take my head off.

Of course, if I wanted to get notice without waiting for Islam’s unkindest cut of all when it comes to dealing with detractors, I would trigger a Pavlovian-like collective reaction in the ummah (the community of believers) by publically burning the Book in which they have been indoctrinated. The problem is, I don’t believe in burning books no matter the content; and if the content does matter, I prefer an honest objective discussion like the type I have tried to promote with my books and postings.

If I had the inclination and the courage to burn the Book, I would do it in remembrance of a woman who was falsely accused of doing so and was set upon by a rabid mob of the easily offended whose picture of her pleading for mercy has been imprinted on my brain.

Wiki Commons

Woman falsely accused of burning Koran is killed by mob.

The 27-year-old religious scholar Farkhunda was beaten, pushed from a roof, run over by a car and set alight before her body was thrown in the Kabul River.

Globe and Mail, March 23, 2015

That children raised on a steady diet of the Koran would, when grown up, do this to another human being, for whatever reason, should give you pause. The reason for my last, and what I consider my most important recommendation, that you read what I wrote in Children and the Koran - The End of Empathy to fully grasp the implication of this wretched scene.