by-Frank Macdonald
This weekend central Inverness County was spared the sky-gazing act of looking up, way, way up, to stare at the Super Moon. That was because of cloud cover, nature’s cataracts. I’m not sorry.
Perhaps it’s superstition, but strange events in the sky disturb me.
They didn’t used to.
In an earlier time in Canada’s history, a decade ago, say, I would have been enchanted by the arrival of the summer’s second, and largest Super Moon. I would have tuned into a weather channel to listen to meteorologists explain why Sunday night’s moon was 14 per cent larger as it rose in luminous elegance over Gorey’s Mountain. I would have listened to someone like CBC’s resident scientist, Bob MacDonald, explain that it wasn’t really ‘larger,’ it just appeared to be, like objects in your car’s rearview mirror. The moon wasn’t larger, they’d say, just closer to Earth.
There was a time when I would have wanted to understand this, but that oh so long ago, in a time before Canada acquired a prime minister whose mission has been to dismiss, ignore, delete, shelve or debunk any and all scientific findings. Now we are a country with little use for objective science, so much so that most of Canada’s scientists now compete with foreign doctors for jobs driving taxis in Toronto.
One of the prime minister’s achievements has been the de-sciencification of Canada’s waterways, turning them into places that resource-based corporations are free to pollute. Any other field of scientific study that contradicts Capitalism`s theory of maximum shareholder profits has also been disallowed.
The prime minister’s greatest success has been the dismissing any suggestion that global warming is happening, and any evidence to the contrary is burned in bonfires of the vanities along with all other contradictions of the prime minister’s personal or corporate creeds.
So, living in a country where the findings of science have been debunked, I find myself avoiding information that goes against the grain of Canada’s neo-Medievalism. And yet it is the nature of the species to need to believe in something, God or gods or vampires or super heroes.
Disarmed of the findings of science, I find myself wandering in search of a pre-Enlightenment understanding of the Universe. It is here that I find the twin offerings of faith; comfort and fear. While I may worship the sun, I shun the moon because as any well informed Druid or Canadian knows, the moon toys with men’s minds.
This summer we are experiencing three, count ‘em, three consecutive Super Moons, three larger than life celestial phenomena about which much ado is being made, as if this wasn’t some natural occurrence that happens every 13 months or so, as some scientists outside of Canada claim. Here we know better than to believe that cheesy fact.
A truer fact is the correlation between the moon (luna) and lunatics, so any person who has been relieved of the benefits of science, as we Canadians have, should be grateful that there was no Super Moon to gaze upon Sunday night. It might have made us crazier than Question Period on Parliament Hill.
The full moon, whether super or simply the same old moon, is something to be feared. Edgar Cayce, America’s sleeping prophet, warns people not to sleep outside with one’s face exposed to the full moon. I don’t recall why a person shouldn’t sleep with his face exposed to the full moon, but here in Canada that’s all we need, just the ‘do nots’ and not the ‘whys,’ and it would not be wise under the present prime minister’s dictatorial method of governing, to ask ‘why?’ of anything he has not ordained as truth, or there will be consequences.
I, for one Canadian, am happy to be relieved of the findings of scientific study. It was a subject I kept failing in high school so to have a prime minister make everything I failed to learn in high school irrelevant makes me feel vindicated for my sloppy study habits. Like the prime minister, I know little about science, and so if he feels the rest of the country should live in the same depth of ignorance as himself, well I’m okay with that.
Let the rest of the world be maddened by a triple dose of Super Moons, but come September 9th, when the third of the Super Moons rises over Gorey`s Mountain I will close my eyes and listen closely for the sound of someone howling on Parliament Hill.
