Fear not! This site has not become moribund. I'm just down the road on the trail of stories and things got a little complicated over the last week. But the Legion is now safely ensconced on the West Coast for the summer and posts will flow freely in the days to come.

My focus will be seriously split for the next while and based on what's already bubbling up, some may struggle to make the connections within the seemingly unrelated subject matter of what's to come. But the linkages are becoming clear to me and hopefully I can make them visible for you.

Here's a first taste…

Some people compile a list of road tunes when they travel or pack an assortment of music they think will fit or enhance the mood. I go a different direction. I just roll with what comes over the satellite radio interspersed with my frequent News Junkie forays into what's going on in the world.

And as it should in life, reality and art inform one another.

To play fair with the news, I always skip around the satellite dial for takes from Fox and MSNBC and CBC and the bending over backward to be accurate BBC. Somehow from that mix I think you get closer to the real truth rather than a single truth somebody wants you to believe.

A lot of the news last week was still about the G20 in Toronto and the protests that had surrounded it. With the fences down and our Constitutional rights restored after being casually "set aside" for a weekend, some troubling personal stories began to surface. Stories that suggested we go most wrong when we trust our governments to know what's best for us.

Take Benjamin Elroy Yau…

Mr. Yau, 37, was walking to the Queen’s Park subway station before his 6 p.m. shift as an employee of the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission). There was no protest in sight and not many people in the street. Then two police officers “tackled” him to the ground and yelled at him to stop resisting arrest.

“I told them I wasn’t resisting arrest, that I was on my way to work. I was in full uniform, full ID, my employee card, everything,” Yau said. “They said, ‘Really? Well, you’re a prisoner today.’ ”

Berating Yau and swearing at him for being an “embarrassment” to the TTC, the officers dragged him half a block in handcuffs and shackles and threw him into a paddy wagon. Even after a TTC supervisor arrived to vouch for him, he was sent to the Eastern Ave. detention centre.

In custody, he went through “sheer terror” as he listened to other prisoners screaming and tried to sleep on a bloodied concrete floor. He was denied a phone call and fed only a “disgusting” cheese sandwich. His hands were cuffed the whole time.

Four charges that included resisting arrest and obstructing justice were dropped before he was released at 2 a.m. on Monday. The booking sergeant told him he was in the “wrong place at the wrong time,” said Yau, who’s never been in trouble with the law.

With that little nugget rolling through my head, I tuned to my favorite spot on the Sirius music dial -- Channel 103 -- "Outlaw Country" founded by Steve Van Zandt as "a sanctuary for the freaks, misfits, rebels, and renegades of country music".

In addition to offering great music from the Outlaw Country sub-genre, the station features phenomenal DJ's cum Country stars like Mojo Nixon, Shooter Jennings, Steve Earle and "Cowboy" Jack Clement, all augmenting the music with their own insight and anecdotes about where the music came from and why it still matters.

Outlaw Country developed as a reaction to the tightly controlled and manufactured Nashville image of the 1960's and 70's, where every recording artist was a clean-living, God-fearing "Good Ole Boy" in a rhinestone suit. The Outlaws wrote their own tunes and didn't stick to any formula, providing an infusion of energy and excitement that threatened to upset the entire genre.

Guys like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and almost anybody who came out of Texas delivered the message that just because Nashville said something was the way it needed to be didn't mean it was the way it needed to be. Despite being vilified and attacked by the Music Row establishment, the Outlaws stuck to their guns (and guitars) and won in the end.

In the wake of the G20, too many people with legitimate grievances about the way the world is being run are being painted with a radical brush. And completely innocent guys like Benjamin Yau have had their lives turned upside down so somebody could justify the Establishment's fear of being exposed as incompetent at best and paranoid beyond all reason at worst.

Musicians are used to being portrayed as the problem. From evangelical preachers sermonizing about "Race Music" to the soon to be ex-Mrs. Al Gore going after heavy metal artists, there's always some popular artist being blamed for problems they didn't create. But blaming them takes the heat off the people who really should be questioned.

There's an online petition for those who would like to see a guy like Benjamin Yau get some justice. You can find it here.

And this week's video is about that process of finding scapegoats by Todd Snider, one of the artists who regularly appears on "Outlaw Country". "The Ballad of the Kingsmen" could be about all of us if we don't start demanding what we're due instead of what somebody else decides is all we deserve.

Enjoy your Sunday.

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My apologies for the lack of activity at the Legion last week. We've been busy. But we'll be back with lots more because of it real soon.

When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's always hard to keep track of everything else that's going on in the world. That used to be a simple thing. Buy a newspaper on the way home, catch the 11 o'clock news, spend Sunday lounging over a magazine.

These days, the news cycle runs 24/7. There's dozens of news channels, hundreds of web sites and enough citizen journalists on Twitter to give you every angle on every event and non-event in every part of the planet.

On one level, that's a good thing because you can get what you need to know when you need it. On another, it seems to be driving what used to be our most reliable sources (newspapers and television) into a position where they're afraid to stop and examine, to dig for more information or insight.

Their attitude seems to be that they've got to be the first one on the next bus, "breaking" news rather than telling you what it really means, why it's important and what you can expect to come next. They're leaving us all well aware of what's going on in the moment, but with little idea of why it's happening or whether it might mean something more important in the days to come.

I pulled this off a Twitter feed from the G-20 riots in Toronto last night. Dramatic image. But without context it could lead to any number of conclusions. Protestor arrested. Man hurt during demonstration. Compassionate cop giving a wino directions to the nearest un-torched liquor store.

Unlike screenwriters, who understand the necessity of being aware of the audience's questions every second, most modern journalists seem to figure that once they've transmitted the gist, they can move on.

No wonder the world is rife with conspiracy theories about what's "really" happening and the belief that "certain people" control what we're told.

It's not that hard to find a story. But it takes a lot of work to make sure everybody understands it.

Howard Bernstein has a brilliant piece over at Medium Close Up examining the inability of the Canadian Main Stream Media to uncover the truth behind the ballooning costs of the G20. Meanwhile, the American media struggles with a similar inability to get to the bottom of what's really going on in the Gulf of Mexico.

All over the web, you can find reporters from ABC, CBS, CNN or local news affiliates being bullied away from asking questions of those on the ground. They can't seem to get access to those in the corporate structures involved and seem somehow unwilling or unable to put pressure on politicians to get straight answers.

It shouldn't be this hard to get to the truth.

And as it turns out -- it isn't.

From the earliest days of this blog, I've been tossing out links to Vice TV. If you haven't found them by now, you need to. Vice specializes in getting the stories everybody else either shies away from or ignores.

And in a move that tells you more about the current state of journalism than anything else, this week CNN began running their stories on the Gulf oil spill.

CNN with all their influence and access to resources can't get the story. But a ragtag outfit of guerrilla journalists can.

If that doesn't tell you there's something seriously wrong in the whole "take-a-side", "if-it-bleeds-it-leads", "breaking-news-now" format everybody is following, nothing else will.

I can't find a stable video embed of Vice's story on the Gulf oil spill. But you can see it here. Elsewhere on the site are dozens of important and impactful stories you've either never encountered or been unable to access without the appended Left or Right or Whatever spin.

Find the story and hopefully the Truth. And Enjoy your Sunday.

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Father's Day always gets you thinking of your own dad and sidetracks most of us into recalling the times when we were primarily "fathered".

Maybe it was that which inspired today's sermon. Maybe it was seeing a dour TV news report from rain drenched Saskatchewan about police cracking down on the dangerous sport of "Ditch Boarding", better known in some parts as White Trash Water Skiing.

The concept is about as simple as simple minds can devise. Find a flooded ditch. Strap on a snowboard, wakeboard, surfboard or set of skis, grab a tow line tied to the back of a pick-up truck and --- "Yee-haw".

Yeah, it's a little dangerous and sometimes people even get killed. And while that's unfortunate, it's also a part of a lot of approved and organized sports as well as falling into the category of departure Bill Hicks described as "We're Missing a Moron".

My own Ditch Boarding adventures took place my last year of high school. After a too long winter cooped up in classroom and living in a city where 15" of annual precipitation (mostly in the form of snow) was the norm. You had to expect that the first hot day after torrential rains would cause some to see what could be made of all this exciting and unexplored standing water.

Inspired by Beach Boys records and too many Annette Funicello movies, some of us decided to replicate Malibu Beach at the edge of a lonely prairie road.

Unable to find anything to imitate a surf board, however, we ended up using a set of water skis, taking turns either skimming skillfully over the muddy water, scattering ducks and muskrats as we passed or getting dragged through thick black prairie topsoil.

An occasional vehicle would roll past, honking its horns or waving at the mud caked idiots charging through the ditch water. Then one car followed us for one of my runs and pulled over when we coasted to a stop. The driver got out. It was some guy none of us recognized. But I sure knew his passenger. It was my dad.

He'd been nearby when his car broke down and somebody had stopped to give him a ride back to the city. They'd noticed the odd activity on the side road as they passed and came back for a closer look.

I thought I was dead for sure.

My dad just stared at me tightly as we explained how the whole thing worked, doing all we could to deflect any possibility that it could be construed as dangerous, illegal or even just plain stupid. Neither he or the other guy said anything.

I knew I was looking at a grounded Prom night at best.

Then I noticed my dad kicking off his shoes and rolling up his pants.

"Let's give it a try."

We spent the next hour towing he and his Good Samaritan friend up and down the waters beside that lonely road. By the time they'd had enough they were just as muddy as we were, almost as sunburnt and grinning ear to ear.

As they got in the car, my dad reminded me that dinner was at six and I better have the mud washed off before I came home. Then he added, "One more thing. Don't tell your mother."

I believe that was the moment when I realized my father would no longer treat me as a kid.

Most of our memories of our fathers are tied up in the sweetness of our youth and one of my favorite songs about growing up (maybe because it so closely replicates the experiences of my own era) is Rodney Crowell's "Telephone Road". Oddly it also includes Ditch Boarding.

Have a Great Father's Day. And Enjoy your Sunday.

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