I ’ve been spending time with “Ice-T” (the American, Tracy Marrow) recently. Or his reminiscences anyway, as they’re compiled in a new, co-written, autobiographical book.

I, like Charlton Heston before me who tried to have one of Marrow’s ‘songs’ (“Cop Killer”) pulled, am no fan of T’s ‘music’ – it isn’t my cup of tea at all.

His book is chock-a-block with varieties the “F”-word and the “N”-word (with various spellings), and assorted other epithets, racialisms, and taunts.

T, born in 1958 in New Jersey, customized a career in ‘entertainment’ (he’s now best known as NYPD Detective Odafin Tutuola on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a television show that debuted under the title “Sex Crimes”, and a show I’ve never seen), ‘progressing’ through petty theft, smash-and-grab, extortion, pimping, and sundry other criminal activities and transgressive ‘services’, ’til he arrived at spinning vinyl records backwards (a minor, dextrous talent one allows) and talking/shouting (“rapping”) angrily over the resulting noise, an activity where he has achieved both iconic status across North America, and immense wealth.

T, whose ‘art’ chills to the marrow, whose message is highly anti-social, and whose noise focuses on showy acquisitions, robbing, raping, killing, gangs and shootings, hasn’t derived any wealth from me, however. I’ve been standing in surreptitious spells, skimming his book, in an HMV store on Yonge Street just north of the Yonge-Dundas square, a cold, cheerless, open space that is garishly attempting to imitate New York’s Times Square with its full-on electronic surrounds, a windswept Stonehenge of in-your-face, wallto wall advertising. This was a part of Toronto where I loved coming to the record sales around 1980 and where I had, to my mind, massive innocent fun amidst the mad-rush of fellow-shoppers. Especially on Boxing Day.

As I leave the HMV and head north on Yonge, I pass the site of the 2005 Boxing Day shootout where some 14 members of two rival Toronto gangs, clashing in a tempest over territory and “respect” in an expensive athletic shoe store, took it outside with a fusillade of bullets fired from several handguns, in which seven innocent bystanders were hit in a deadly cross-fire. One, Jane Creba, a 15-year-old, died before she could be gotten to St. Michael’s Hospital.

During the shoot-out, it was noticed by several bystanders, as they hugged the pavement for dear life, that at least one of the shooters fired his handgun from the hip (aimlessly) in a style similar to those found all too often in rap or hip-hop videos, or in a highly dramatized Hollywood action movie.

In the immediate aftermath of this too-real shootout, the thugs – and now killers – played the usual tactical ‘game’ of passing the fired handguns to any gang member 17-and-under. Unlettered as they may be, gang members are seriously savvy when it comes to getting around with maximum ease and efficiency to extract leniency from Canada’s porous legal system.

“Ice-T”, and his bling-sporting, Bentley-driving coterie, was not present for this tragic event, but he was present in spirit. Now, in the near-complete perversion of television’s “mainstream,” Mr. Marrow may well smirk, receiving his $200,000-per-episode (or so) salary on the New York City set of SVU, where he has comfortably roosted for most of the past decade, hemmed in by a small phalanx of security guards.

The lack of a wider, and deeper, culture in Ontario is also troubling. Bill Bothwell, writing informatively for so many years in this space,

Ontario reflected and, perhaps, lamented Matters that we have little of domestic culture here. But he said the Toronto of his youth was safe and, if not Toronto the Good, then certainly “Toronto the Good Enough.”

This core cultural paucity has left us, moreor less, wide open to near-complete cultural encroachment. In my day it was one of English moods, mores, and manners: now, however, we are almost fully, hotly, avidly Americanized (and weaponized in certain deadly niches and violence-ridden neighbourhoods).

My wife Sabina commented recently that, in Ontario, “acquistiveness is now king ... the only real culture in Ontario.” Empty 24/7 consumerism, one wonders?

The American moralist, Fulton J. Sheen (who so positively and profoundly influenced the legendary Spanish/Irish/American actor Martin (Estevez) Sheen, perhaps America’s best and busiest actor as well as being father to the egregious, King-of-trash culture Charlie, that he adopted and Americanized his family name after him, wrote: “There is a profound difference in quality between the possessions that we need and use and actually enjoy, and the accumulation of useless things we accumulate out of vanity or greed or the desire to surpass others ... (or an) attempt to satisfy (ourselves) through an infinity of material things.”

In the shadow of handguns, with increasing transgressive, anti-social, deviant, law-ducking, and violent behaviour, large parts of Toronto are surely being lost to an imported guns-and-drug culture, which has found, tragically now, a home and a too polite, passive host culture here in Ontario.