Brian Fawcett is one of those writers you wish were more popular. A former poet, Fawcett moved to prose when he realized, as he puts it in his collection of essays, Local Matters (New Star Books, 2003), “I’d pretty much mined out my youthful lyric vein . . . learning that life is not quite about my private feelings.” And fortunately so, because Fawcett is one of the most biting critics of globalization, rampant commercialism, and economic fundamentalism writing today.

Dissatisfied with the woeful inadequacy of conventional corporate news-gathering, he and fellow writer, American-born Canadian émigré Stan Persky, launched DooneysCafe.com, a website of essays free from the newspaper constraints of word-limit and facile flash. And they should know: Persky, a philosophy instructor at Capilano College, is a former Vancouver Sun columnist, and Fawcett is a former Globe & Mail columnist.

Along with compatriot John Ralston Saul, Fawcett has long detailed the increasingly bureaucratized, distant, destructive, and self-serving power structures of contemporary business-infected politics and media. And both authors’ styles have morphed from angry polemic to a more sober analysis, as anyone who’s compared Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards to his later On Equilibrium can attest to.

This “calming down” is just one intentional theme of Fawcett’s memoir, titled The Way Things Are. Or at least that would be the title if his publisher hadn’t insisted on the decidedly flashier Virtual Clearcut: Or The Way Things Are In My Hometown (Thomas Allen, 2003). That hometown is Prince George, BC, and the book centers on the fact that, like many other small communities, it is “being screwed in a special way by all the wealth-sucking forces of globalization.”

From Gilgamesh to globalization

With Orwellian clarity, seriousness, and honesty, Fawcett explores Prince George's early history and development, from the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway’s original city layout through to the present era of industrial clear-cutting forestry, a history in which “commercial life always took precedence over civic life.” He compares the Bowron River valley clear-cut (vast enough to be seen from space) to the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving written story. Fawcett writes, “From one rarely articulated view, the story at the root of all human development is the story of the eradication of the world’s trees. The Epic of Gilgamesh . . . is also history’s first logging tale.”

Fawcett, who used to work for the Forest Service, in his most depressing observation points out that as “a former bureaucrat, I have come to believe that our political representatives almost never understand the way things are, and that their paid officials have the job of keeping them—and often themselves—as carefully ignorant as possible.”

As for appeals that any commercial industry’s stated intention is benevolent, Fawcett writes, “5,000 years ago in what is now treeless Iraq [King Gilgamesh] claimed that he and his friend Enkidu killed the monster Humbaba to protect the people of Uruk. What they were really doing was logging the cedars of the sacred groves because they wanted to build a bigger palace for themselves.”

Men and slapstick

The book is also, Fawcett writes, “accidentally but unapologetically . . . about men . . . what they think and how they act in the world, as boys, friends, husbands, and as workers, bosses, technologists, or as critics and apologists of globalization—even occasionally, as reasonable adults and citizens.”

In the fittingly titled first section, “Paradise, 1990,” Fawcett is confronted with the Prince George he doesn’t want to see: the one that confirms how bad things are. His former paradise: lost. On a road trip with his son Max, eleven at the time, Fawcett laments the divide between fathers and sons, and the stubbornness of his own youth: “The Truth . . . was a substance of which I naturally thought I had an exclusive grasp.” So instead of berating his son with “lame excuses about how Salmon River was beautiful, once upon a time, before it was sullied by evil, stupid people,” he accepts that “for the rest of my life, and probably the rest of my son’s life, we’re going to have to live with this truth: we’re the barbarians responsible for creating places like Salmon River and the clearcut in the Bowron River valley. Everyone of us.”

Fawcett credits one man in particular, Bill Morris, to whom the book is dedicated, not only with making him “understand that writing books was something people like us might actually do,” but with fostering a sense of slapstick about everyday life. Morris, a Prince George resident for most of his life and who died of liver cancer during the eleven-year span of Fawcett’s memoir, “was a storyteller, skilled at weaving tales from what . . . had seemed like flimsy local materials.”

Other men in town—loggers, struggling entrepreneurs, municipal officials—are scrutinized as much as Fawcett is himself, who writes in a consistently self-deprecating tone. But it’s the daughter of Fawcett’s long-time friend and Prince George English teacher, Bryn McKinnon, who gets the last laugh on the men. Over drinks and a heated discussion in which one of the men “winds down a tirade about half-assed environmentalists who’ve never had to face the difficulties of raising a family or making a living,” Bryn McKinnon shoots back, “’You know what people like me are doing here? We’re waiting for dinosaurs like you to die off.’”

The way things should be

By the book’s close, Fawcett comes to shed most of his cynical pessimism. He began writing the memoir around the publication of Public Eye: An Investigation Into the Disappearance of The World (HarperCollins, 1990), an angry book about the decay of imagination in the culture and its replacement by shallow commercialism. But all his work illustrates that writers should have, as he insists, a “relentless eye for bullshit.”

Bullshit-spotting may be a declining art because, Fawcett says, like “every other community college in North America operating under the influence of the local Chamber of Commerce” “the college [Barry McKinnon] taught at since the early 1970s began ‘downsizing’ its liberal arts program in order to emphasize a series of half-baked job-creation schemes aimed at turning Prince George into an industrial hub of the north.” Civic education, or lack of it, is, therefore, at the heart of economic exploitation. Or, as Fawcett writes, “The true poison is the town’s inability to recognize and protect its own interests.”

In a democracy, even a decaying one like ours, citizens have the responsibility to look at the world around them and think of others, that is, if they don’t want to see democracy dissolve completely. Fawcett, in this regard, is an immensely important writer. As for his mission, he puts it this way: “I have tried my damndest to secure the facts in this book. Doing so has served to convince me that there is no such thing as non-fiction, but that the effort to reach it is among the sacred projects of human intelligence.”