What Was I Thinking?: The Autobiography of an Idea and Other Essays - Softcover

Salutin, Rick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770412603 ISBN 13: 9781770412606

Publisher: ECW Press,Canada, 2015

Synopsis

A lifetime of engagement with religion, philosophy, and activism in a series of fascinating reflections.

Brilliant, fractious, mordantly funny, playwright/novelist/essayist Rick Salutin has been Canadian journalism's agent provocateur for over three decades. Whether needling governments and politicians, holding public policy to account, or decrying the shortfalls of activist thought and action, he has been one of the most outspoken commentators of his generation.

In What Was I Thinking?, Salutin reveals his curiosity about both the world of the mind and the world of the here and now. His life has been graced with contact with extraordinary people from Hannah Arendt to Holocaust theologian Emil Fackenheim to goalkeeper-politician Ken Dryden, and we discover the profound influence their thought has had on his. but he has also had encounters with Conrad Black and Peter Worthington, joined his fellow coffee-drinkers in the infamous fight to save the west-end institution Dooney's from displacement by Starbucks, and taken furious potshots at the political pandering of the nation's media outlets.

This is classic Salutin and most of it hasn't been published before -- including a lengthy personal and historical essay on the world of therapy. It's a wonderful roller-coaster ride of thought and opinion. Step on!

About this title

About the Author

Rick Salutin is a playwright, novelist, and journalist who has received awards in all these areas. He wrote a weekly column for the Globe and Mail for 20 years and now provides weekly columns and videos for the Toronto Star.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What Was I Thinking?

The Autobiography of An Idea And Other Essays

By Rick Salutin

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Rick Salutin
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77041-260-6

CHAPTER 1

UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN IDEA

Our apparatus for acquiring knowledge is not designed for knowledge.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I'M STANDING IN THE PHILOSOPHY section of the bookstore at the University of Toronto one day in the early 2000s. I stepped in here bereft, after dropping off my poor laptop at the computer shop next door for service. They'll call when it's ready. I can't write or check email. I might as well read. I'm looking for something by Hannah Arendt, with whom I studied philosophy in New York in the 1960s. I'd gone into philosophy after dropping out of rabbinical seminary. It seemed a natural transition; I still hankered for meaning, but my faith was fading.

"Thanks a lot for that column this morning," says a man scanning the shelves beside me. "You're welcome," I say, blanking on the column, as I often do the day after I write one. "Based on what you said," he goes on, "you might be interested in the new book by Agamben, on the state of exception." Oh yes, the column was about torture and "the new normal" since 9/11. I don't know Agamben. I think of Agrabah, capital of a desert sultanate in the Disney film Aladdin. I'm up on kid culture these days.

He hands me the book from the shelf and moves on. It's slim and costs $15.95. I reshelve it, but as I'm crossing College, realize it's akin to a subject that has been preoccupying me, so I return and buy it. When I awake at three that night, I read it. Agamben, an Italian academic, says the state of exception — also known as a state of siege, martial law, or a state of emergency, depending on national proclivities — has been a normal political condition since the end of the First World War. In Canada it's known as the War Measures Act and was last invoked in October 1970, on the day I returned from my student decade in the U.S. Agamben traces the modern beginnings of states of exception to Germany but, surprisingly, not Nazi Germany. Rather, he connects it to the progressive Weimar Republic of pre-Hitler years. He quotes Walter Benjamin on the state of exception being the new normal, though not in that phrase. There's even a reference to "Taubes," who would be Jacob, with whom I did an M.A. in religion, before switching to philosophy. Nobody quotes Taubes. I didn't know he published a book in the '80s. On the night of the east coast blackout in 1965, I found him humming nigunim in the dark in his office — he came from a line of rabbis. We wandered up and down Broadway together, stepping into restaurants and bars that were operating by candlelight. But I digress. I'd recently been pondering the idea of uniqueness, or exception, associated for me with the Holocaust.

* * *

FOR TORONTO JEWS IN THE 1950s, the Holocaust was inescapable, the centre of everything serious — politics, morality, faith, identity. When I taught a grade three class at Holy Blossom Temple, we did a unit on it. We asked the kids to compose a letter from someone their age living in Nazi Germany. "Hello cousin Hymie," wrote Rickie Beck. "I hope things are good in Canada. Here in Nazi Germany there is a bad man named Hitler. He should be called Shitler." We herded our students into the second-floor auditorium one Sunday morning and listened to a shaliach, an emissary from Israel, say, "The world is finally learning, because of the state of Israel, that Jewish blood is as expensive to shed as anyone's." Sunlight streamed th

Edition details

• Publisher: ECW Press,Canada
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1770412603
• ISBN 13: 9781770412606
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240