THE ADVOCATE 291
VOL. 79 PART 2 MARCH 2021
FROM OUR
BACK PAGES
By D. Michael Bain,Q.C.
MUSINGS FROM MUDGE ISLAND:
MYTH AMERICA PAGEANT*
By His Honour Judge Philip Collings
One of the Family Court sheriffs has a relation who works for
Canada Customs. It appears that foreign magazine importers
have to file one copy of each issue with Canada Customs for
vetting, to see if they constitute a threat to Canada’s innocence.
These samples build up, Canada Customs throws them out, and they
end up around the waiting area in Family Court, where a fair amount of
waiting is done. Which is why you will find me, among others, gazing bugeyed
at old copies of Sol dier of Fortune, Air Combat, Practical Survival, Crime
Beat and other masterworks of the macho literary fringe.
These magazines (or “mags”—they use truncated word forms) open up
aspects of the American soul that you don’t often see. If you want to find
out who their read ers are, a safe rule is to look at the ads. After all, someone
is risking money that those ads are going to bring in business. Let us start,
then, with Soldier of Fortune—SOF to its buddies. It is clear that the readers
aren’t real soldiers of fortune or real any thing else. They are voyeurs, not
doers, and the ads lean heavily towards videos, manuals and instructional
materials. Learn hand-to-hand combat, qualify for your detective badge,
* Reprinted from (1995) 3 Advocate 53.