There was a moment in an interview I conducted in the 1990s with American social documentary photographer, Milton Rogovin, at which it occurred to me that I had arrived at a single degree of separation from the great Chilean poet born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, later to become Pablo Neruda. Or perhaps I ought to say I would have been at one degree of remove, had Neruda lived beyond my seventh birthday. As it is he died in 1973, a result of cancer, shortly after the Kissinger-backed military coup against Salvador Allende. Continue reading Pablo Neruda
All posts by Wayne K. Spear
My Grandmother
Among the unwritten and as I understood them incontrovertible laws of life was the cardinal indication never to disregard the wishes of my grandmother.
When I was a teenager my grandmother told me: stay in school and don’t get married until you are thirty. It would be some years before I could appreciate how dearly she’d paid for this wisdom. Seeing my Latin homework, she took the occasion to say, as a matter of fact, she had always been interested in languages and that her generation of Native people had been unable to have an education. She was married at tender age to a man who had befriended her mother, and from that source derived a courtship with my grandmother to-be.
Rhoda Rhodes, whose mother had been a Six Nations Garlow, bore children across four decades — the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. During the Depression and the war the first six came into the world, and following the 1945 surrenders of Japan and Germany, three more would follow, my mother (b. November 1945) being the first. My grandmother was so long at it that she was pregnant concurrently with one of her daughters. I had always assumed that in those days this was just “how it was.” Indeed, but what I did not know were the common reasons. It was only after her death in 1991 that I learned my grandfather, William Johns, “did not like birth control.” In the days before “the pill” a woman had very little power in the matters of sex and sexual reproduction, which went a distance toward ensuring that a man would get his way. This detail said so much, falling as it did into the puzzle, along with other pieces that would emerge in the years after my grandmother was gone.
She had never forgotten from where she had come. “I hate John Wayne,” she once told me. She was proud to be Mohawk, and would not suffer the bellicose ignorance of others. She marshaled all that she had, which was considerable, in furtherance of the family’s dignity and self-respect. She understood that we would be derided as dirty and stupid, but she never gave the haters ground upon which to stand. My mother once came home to recount the slurs. “Look around,” said my grandmother. “Are we dirty? Is our house dirty?” The very fact of her being who she was powerfully repudiated the charge. In this way she lifted us out of depths into which we could have been cast only by ourselves, by surrender to self-doubt, self-hate, and self-disgrace.
One of the last conversations I had with her, in late 1990, took place as they often did at her kitchen table. I don’t know where my grandfather was, but we were alone — an unusual thing in a vast family that considered her kitchen its emotional and gravitational centre. The door was always open, and thirty-five grandchildren (and eventually as many great-grandchildren) could and did come by unexpectedly. That night may have been the only in my life I was alone with my grandmother, and in any case it is the only I can recall.
It was an extraordinary night for another reason. She brought the conversation around to the topic of “what I want to do with my life.” I want to write, I said. Then she told me something I had never known, that in her youth she had been interested in writing and had composed a number of stories. To appreciate the significance of this you need to know that I was a quiet, introverted, and highly imaginative child, which is to say an oddity. For many years I imagined I must have arrived into the world by some sort of magic, surely not by means of descent through the family tree. At eight years old I knew I wanted to be a writer. Clearly my wit and ironic outlook had come from my father. He however had been a high-school athlete of some promise, and it was to sports he had set himself early in life. Nor did my mother show any artistic inclination. Even among the extended family, most of whom were handy at a trade, there was no evidence I’d come by my constitution honestly. In my vocation, I was a singularity.
I suspect this feeling of being the odd one out, which was reinforced in other ways when I entered school, explains my tendency to side with the minority, the opposition, and the underdog. Bookish and uninterested in sport, I grew up in a dying steel town where the hockey rink was the centre of all things and where boys dreamed only of the League. (If you want a sense of how it felt to me growing up there, I can recommend nothing better than Peter Bogdanovich’s portrayal of Anarene in “The Last Picture Show.”) Occupied in the late 1700s by Pennsylvania Dutch, Fort Erie has to this day a Spear Road named for ancestors on my father’s side, which should have meant that I at least half-belonged but never quite did. I was a southpaw in the remnant of an era when people still knew enough Latin to know that sinister means “left” and when conformity was in all things an overriding imperative. A good deal of effort went into the failed attempt of a few teachers to reform me in this and other areas, and it is with some pride that I report their failure. I don’t wish to overstate any of this and leave an impression that my education was harsh. It was only typical of the time, but was nevertheless a good environment to form an oppositional personality.
At the end of her life, my grandmother had disclosed to me a detail which altered everything. In fact, I was not a singularity nor an oddball, at least not in the way I had always imagined. I had indeed come from somewhere, and my grandmother was the living proof. Shortly after she died I wrote a play called The Name Is A Vestige, which was about the many feelings and insights engendered by this revelation. I should also say that I had always felt a connection, and that if you were to look at any photograph of a Johns family gathering, you would see that I am sitting next to my grandmother. But now I had a more definite sense of this connection’s meaning.
Soon she would be gone, but from then on a part of me would feel an obligation to write, and to write well, “for” her. She doubtless had seen who I was and who I might become, with a little luck, and had given me precisely the advice which had perhaps been the obstacles to her own creative fulfillment.
It is rather harsh putting this thought into print. I don’t at all doubt that my grandmother loved her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I never once heard her complain of her lot. When she told me about her desire to be a writer, there was no bitterness or self-indulgence. Yet everything I learned once she was gone contributed to my growing sense that her life could only have been one of great frustration. She had married young and would discover, certain to her horror and disgust, that her husband was a drunk and a lay-about. In his thirties, my grandfather would find the Lord, going from one extreme to another. He was a harsh and obsessive proselytizer. You could not go to his house without getting the sermon, always over the decades the same sermon, focused ever on the vengeance of God and the torments of hell. His God was of the undiluted, high-proof variety, jealous and uncompromising. No one was spared his gospel. My grandmother would tell him to “stop it,” and he would, but not before citing as self-justification Ezekiel 3:18.
When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.
Now that I am older, I have come to see this as child abuse. I think my grandmother, who always stood up for us, would have agreed. Her actions suggested as much. I can’t recall his sermonizing without feeling rather ill at the thought of how vicious, ugly, and deforming it all was. She however met him blow for blow, and he was in the end no match. His brand of religion belied the fact that he was deep down self-loathing and self-defeating, no doubt a carry-over from his days of being bullied by priests in an Indian residential school. My understanding of this, gained as has so often been the case too late, prevents me from judging him too harshly and lends a certain compassion to my reflections. I’ll never know what the world looked like through his eyes.
To the end of his life, which arrived in 1996 after a period of dementia, William Johns was attached to the idea of returning to his thirty-three acre Six Nations farm. It was my grandmother who insisted they leave the desperation, poverty, and self-defeat of the reserve in those days. I often wonder how life would have been different for all of us had she not taken that stand and, as she often did, prevailed. I also wonder what she would have made of her life had she been granted the opportunities of my, let’s admit it, pampered generation. She lived at a time when a woman was expected to give up everything as a matter of duty. The idea that a woman had a right to an independent life and to her human fulfillment, to a Room Of Her Own, was only beginning to advance. The way was doubly, even quadruply difficult, for an Indian woman. For this reason I could never be casual about my education or my opportunities. I worked very hard and, as quaint as it may sound, I resolved to hold myself to a certain standard.
My grandparents had little money, and with over seventy descendants, they were not in the habit of acknowledging birthdays and such. I only ever received one card. My grandmother gave it to me after my graduation from university, and inside she has written “I am so proud of you.” She had lived to see me fulfill one of the two guarantors of my betterment, and if she had lived another five years, that is to say beyond my thirtieth birthday, I would have had the joy of introducing her to my partner and best friend. To have had that day I would give, I think, anything.
Roma and the Debts of History
I HAD JUST been to France when les émeutes de banlieues, in the Fall of 2005, rendered it impossible to ignore what some would characterize a failure of integration, and others a failure to keep out the undesirables. The May 2007 assumption of President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose father had for decades been a “stateless person,” having left Hungary under the advisement of his mother to escape military service, formalized the ascendance of the “keep out the undesirables” side of the argument and prepared the way for fresh campaigns against the Travellers, Gypsies, and Romani.
The “riots in the suburbs,” as the phrase above may be translated, were a shock and a difficult-to-absorb contrast to the pre-rentrée Paris still vivid in my memory. Characterized as an uprising of Muslim youth, which is not entirely accurate, the violence was an indication of longstanding (which is to say pre-9/11) issues. In the case of the Romani, recent sweeps and deportations recall the time of Louis XII and events of one-half a millennium ago.
The 2010 expulsions, unconvincingly claimed by the French Government to be voluntary (“if you please” being for the Romani a quite unprecedented way of putting these things), are the endgame of twenty-two year-old Luigi Duquenet’s death by police bullet. French officials claim the Roma man impacted a gendarme while driving through a checkpoint, adding that he was suspected also of committing burglary. President Sarkozy’s reaction to this incident has been, in the words of Amnesty International’s David Diaz-Joeix, “to target the Roma and Travellers in general and to perpetuate the negative stereotypes of which they are victim.” Some words, concerning both the Roma and the substance of this matter of the victim, are in order.
Almost immediately following their fifteenth-century arrival to Europe and the Iberian peninsula, the Romani — inferred by the English to be of Egyptian derivation, hence the Gypsy misnomer — were regarded sinister outsiders and subjected to slavery, forced labour, and ethnic cleansing. Perhaps the most succinct way to make the point is to recall England’s 1530 Egyptians Act, crafted (unsuccessfully as it happens) to expel the “outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians” and to counteract their “devlish and naughty practices and devices” by subjecting them to a death penalty added in a 1554 amendment. The term for these anti-Roma attitudes is “antiziganism,” which in Nazi Germany took the literal form of a Zigeunerfrage, or “Gypsy Question,” settled in 1936 along the unambiguous lines of the Final Solution.
The result was a wartime Romani and Sinti genocide today generally known by the term Porajmos (or baro xaimos, Great Devouring). The killing of Romani though widespread was especially vicious in Germany, Romania, and the Baltics. Worst of all however was the hateful bloodthirst of Nazi Germany’s proxy regime, the Croatian Ustasha. With the support and cheering of the Vatican, Croatian fascists murdered at Jasenovac an estimated 20,000-50,000 Roma and Sinti, the gold stolen from their teeth eventually being used to fund Nazi post-war flights from justice and the remainder to this day sitting in the Vatican Bank. (For this reason one gags on the rich pontification directed by Rome at the Sarkozy government.)
If this sounds familiar, it will then come as no surprise to you that long before the Second World War the Romani had been blamed for the plague, and that more recently they had been formally denied entry into several of the world’s nations (among them the United States) and into the remainder admitted only to be consigned to the margins and called upon as scapegoats in times of crisis. In 2008, the Italian government declared an Emergenza Nomadi following a murder in Rome, establishing a segregated camp at Castel di Decima, south of the city. The same old same old, and certain to do nothing beyond perhaps scratch a scabby itch at an opportune moment in the election cycle.
In 2007 the controversial and much-beleagured Romanian President Traian Basescu apologized for his country’s role in the Porajmos, having apologized only five months earlier for calling journalist Andreea Pana a stinking Gypsy during an encounter in a Bucharest supermarket, recorded by Pana and broadcast on Romanian television. I’m not able to characterize the relationship of these two events, but it does seem to me that Romania has at least taken some steps in the right direction. Anywhere one today finds the Romani, the words below (from an April 2010 Amnesty International publication “Stop Forced Evictions of Roma in Europe”) will apply:
EU leaders must adopt a concrete plan of action to address the human rights abuses faced by Romani communities. They must speak up against racist attacks and hate speech and provide concrete measures to end discrimination in access to housing, education, health and employment.
In 2009 Turkey’s Prime Minister Rejeb Erdogan acknowledged, in a non-specific manner, that “many things were done in this country for years. People from different ethnic backgrounds were expelled. This was the result of a fascist approach.” There is at present no reason to conclude this sort of thing will not continue for another half-millenium. France is only one of many countries today employing history’s discredited policies in service of history’s ugliest features. The Roma, Sinti, Kale, Romanichal, and other related peoples are very well overdue for formal recognition of their suffering, practical acknowledgement of their human rights, and forward-looking government initiatives which depart from the bankrupt conventions of scapegoating and race hatred.
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Pop Culture: an essay
[Originally published in ASH Magazine, volume 3 number three Summer 1996.]
First, a definition. You will notice that the phrase is made from separable units: popular, and culture. Popular, I think, expresses the essential character of a high-tech, media-dominated age. Hence, by popular culture, I do not mean a culture everyone “likes” — as common usage would have it (“she’s the most popular gal in grade nine!”). If the media are correct, this is emphatically not the character of popular culture. No: pop culture is a “popular” one because it addresses itself to and thereby captivates the attention of The People. Every day each person is addressed by cultural institutions — television for instance — which assume as their audience nothing short of the Collective Man. It is the nature of popular culture to get into one’s daily life, whether discussions, chat, entertainment, or sex. And it does not matter who one is, popular culture makes few rhetorical distinctions, for we are all “of the people.” Innovations in technology guarantee that this will be the case not only in North America, but increasingly also in (for examples) Tokyo, Paris, and Beijing, each of which is becoming increasingly “Americanised.” Another way of saying this: the world is increasingly adopting the trappings of mass-produced popular culture, a culture “of the people.” And we are all of us of the people.
By Culture I intend those instituted actions and objects expressing that which is held in high esteem. For the public articulation of personal beliefs is never free from institutional mediation, such as when a newspaper reporter elicits our private opinion of the Conservative Harris agenda, using carefully-worded questions. Culture does not issue from a vacuum, and not even from the sincere, spontaneous expression of an individual. Culture is the institutionally-determined expression of “values”: admirable actions, appropriate behaviours, moral codes of conduct, aesthetic tastes, religious orthodoxies. And let us not forget perversions and heresies as well; for a culture, if it is to be vibrant, must somehow appropriate to itself that which issues a threatening challenge or a deplored variation. The language in which we express “that which is held in high esteem” will be necessarily variegated; not the Queen’s English certainly, but a jostling Creole, what Mikhail Bakhtin called “heteroglossia,” or “differing tongues.” Culture is a grab-bag of contending but mostly peacefully coexisting perceptions and representations of the world and of our place within it. The strength of a culture is therefore to be judged by the ability (or relative inability) of its institutions to respect diversity while representing to its constituents a public: that is, a collective self-image, construed more-or-less as a people. Aristocracies accomplish this by appealing to the metaphor of the body politic, of which the King serves as head, and we ordinary folk presumably as toes, elbows, and the like. Our tastes however, inclining as they do toward democratic models, are supposedly gratified not by distinctions, but by uniformity. Hence, pop institutions labour toward the illusion that, whatever our superficial peculiarities, we are all of us of a mass, sharing certain fundamental values.
There is one further point I wish to advance before I move on. In an industrialised capitalist nation, the expression of that “which is held in high esteem,” the present definition of culture, is inextricable from the logic and ends of capitalism. That is why capitalist differ from non-capitalist societies, tribal or socialist for examples, which nonetheless also conceive of themselves as a “people.” Capitalist societies express values with dollars and cents. And I know it might sound extreme, but I suggest that everything about persons subject to capitalist social organization, including (as I’ve earlier suggested) their sex lives, is in some manner related to capitalism. (If you doubt this, call me on the 14TH of February). Popular culture is mass-produced by corporations for profit: monetary profit of course, but political and personal profit as well. And most of the time, most people are quite comfortable with this. The relations of culture, values and capitalism — and ultimately one’s personal pathway through them — are ongoing negotiations between the agenda of the individual and the agenda of her culture’s institutions.
Last year’s attack on Time Warner, issued by American Senate leader and Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, was an ostensible defence of the values of the people against those of popular culture. Given my argument thus far, this would appear absurd. How does one defend the values of the people against the culture of the people? Dole’s manoeuvre is a familiar one: he accused Time Warner of representing, not the people, but the “elitist” interests of capital. Whether Dole was right to accuse Time Warner of disregarding the values of the people in their quest for profit I won’t here explore (if I did, I would have to answer a disturbing question: from whence did the profit come?), but the fact that a Republican could even articulate such a critique, for indubitable political gain, is itself telling. Dole’s views are not peculiar; his comments were greeted sympathetically by Liberals and Conservatives alike, amply demonstrating that “popular” culture is widely judged not very popular in either sense of the term: for critics contend it can today claim neither to have achieved uniform popularity (in the vulgar sense) nor an acceptable representation of a public — that is, of a People. Of course, the common wisdom, promulgated with great (self-) interest by the media, is that institutions are under the attack of the people also for their “elitism.” I suggest that such propositions however are hopelessly abstract, even if most individuals are in fact at odds with institutions (and it is not clear to me that they are, for I don’t know “most” individuals).
You might have concluded that Dole’s attack on popular culture represents, or even constitutes, a tear in the national fabric, but I myself doubt this. The popular culture industry feeds on attack, and is indeed founded upon it. The music industry, for one, has been richly rewarded for its appropriation of rebellion and critique, whether it was the 60s youth culture or 90s Gangsta Rap. Establishment record companies promptly soak up the disposable income of anti-establishment teens, to the apparent satisfaction of all involved. This is precisely the genius of capitalism, which swiftly commodifies fringe lunatics, malcontents, and would-be subversives, the latter learning to express their politics in terms compatible with the interests of capital (and being rewarded for it), or else losing their public voice if they don’t. Capitalism thrives because it can sell even anti-capitalism.
What do we learn from all of this? Perhaps that Dole’s attack was germane not because it posed a genuine threat to a cynical elite (it did not), but because it asserted two fundamental truths of capitalist democracy: that pop culture institutions — and the market forces which guide them — play an active role in civic life, and are no less capable of moral neutrality than we are. I do think Dole is correct when he suggests that our media are fundamentally anti-democratic, and that he is in agreement on this point with Noam Chomsky only supports this conclusion. But attacks on “elitism” help little, and might even distract us from more fruitful investigations.
Why an issue of ASH on popular culture? First, we might be instructed if we reflect on the very idea of a popular culture. Inherent in the notion is the belief that people (and not only kings, or some other elite) are competent to imagine, assemble, express and debate visions of their collectivity. Popular culture issues from an implicitly constructive, democratic and hopeful assessment of the human lot. Thus, if constructivism, equity, and hope are not frequent features of public discourse, or “culture,” we might well find this odd, and question why it is so. We will be suspicious of the artist’s mantra that “I am only showing what I see,” which you’ll notice discloses a passive formulation of creativity indeed. Second, considered as a historical development, popular culture is profoundly progressive, anti-elitist, and anti-authoritarian. And yet popular culture too often glamourises ill-gotten wealth, sexism, invidious class and race stereotypes, petty atrocities, and brutal excess. What has become of the notion that all women and men are worthy of justice, respect and dignity? Dole’s attack, for all its hypocrisy (he praised Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican booster), raises important questions about the character of popular culture and its relationship to democracy. Dole’s jeremiad inspired the media to ask the question, What judgement have the people passed on popular culture? But I have been waiting for someone to consider another question: What judgement has popular culture passed on the people?
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The High Arctic Relocation
THE FIRST public act of Canada’s Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, John Duncan, came today in the form of an apology to the nineteen Inuit families of Inukjuak and the three of Pond Inlet relocated to the barren landscapes of Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, on Cornwallis and Ellesmere Islands, respectively, in 1953.
One today commonly refers to this region as “the northernmost inhabited part of Canada,” Cape Columbia being the northernmost point on the map of Canada. However, during the Cold War, when these eighty-nine Inuit were taken on a 2,000 km journey (the trip was shorter for the Pond Inlet residents, relocated to assist the southern Inuit in adjusting to their new life) and then unceremoniously divided up and abandoned to an entirely foreign ecosystem in their ill-adapted clothing, the United States and Greenland had at least as much substantive claim to the territory, if not more.
This detail matters because since the 1980s, when the Inuit initiated their claim against the Canadian government, a stumbling block of negotiations toward a proper settlement has been the suggestion that the relocation was part of an effort to assert Canada’s sovereignty over the “High Arctic.” Arctic Sovereignty is a pressing matter for the Canadian government of our own day, and would have been in the 1950s, when the menacing prospect of Soviet encroachment in the North constituted something beyond a political and economic challenge. It was the Communists after all that drove the Canadian military north in the first place, and many Inuit living today went from tundra to TV, and caribou to cash, within a decade — most never having seen a white man or a dollar bill until the trucks rolled in. Few are the Canadians who have even tried to imagine the trauma doubtless brought on by this sort of encounter, and the truth in any case is that they couldn’t do it.
Canada’s position has always been that the 1953/’55 relocations were a well-intentioned solution to over-crowding, the decline of hunting, and welfare dependency in Inukjuak. (It’s odd to think a place named Giant in Inuktitut would be overcrowded.) Today’s Government apology reiterates the official position that the move had nothing to do with concerns over Arctic Sovereignty, hedging the matter by stating that the “Government of Canada recognizes that these communities have contributed to a strong Canadian presence in the High Arctic.” Those relocated however believe that, in addition to the physical and emotional suffering brought upon them by a poorly conceived and badly executed policy, lies the ironic insult of having been exploited by a Government eager to claim an uninhabited region of the North as its Sovereign Domain. If the claim is true, then the blows do fall rather below the belt. It means that the pointless and avoidable suffering of these individuals was all for the benefit of a colonizing power contemptuous of “its” indigenous people.
The Government’s claims raise many objections, among them the odd choice of destination and the all-too-convenient coincidence of the timing and geographical placement of the families with the evident Government agenda at the time. At the very least, Government officials would have been aware of the nice convenience of having preemptively populated contested land with individuals they could claim belong there anyway. The for-your-own-good line is a familiar convention, a self-serving trope brought out for public consumption on those frequent occasions when Government wants to enjoy the exquisite pleasure of having it both ways. Those who pay careful attention to language will notice that even the name of the department, “Indian Affairs and Northern Development,” is a contradiction as well as a confession.
I have further cause to doubt the Government’s position. The relocation is portrayed in two films, Marquise Lepage’s “Martha of the North” and Zacharias Kunuk’s “Exile.” As it happens, I know the Martha in question, and I knew her when only a few years ago she learned herself the reason why her family had been chosen to be among those moved across a continent. (Around that time I had lunch with her and Zacharias Kunuk in Iqaluit.) You will have to wait for the book she is writing to learn that, but let it suffice that her own relocation was not for the reasons given by Government. And so in at least one case I am certain the official version is wrong, from which it follows that today at least one person has received no more than one-half an apology.
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Speech For The Graduating Class
[“Speech For The Graduating Class” belongs to the Imagined Occasions 2010 series.]
Of my own graduation day many many years ago I remember little. Nothing of the speech, nor of the ceremony. I recall feeling vaguely ridiculous in cap and gown, and I must also have been inconvenienced by heat and by what would have seemed at the time an endless queue of persons, each like me eager to get on with it already. But even in producing this very rough outline I speculate about a day that is mostly, for me, irretrievable. Did I mention it was many years ago? Well, it was.
Notice that the ironies of this observation come at both my expense and yours. And it may be that the only qualitative difference between you and me, between youth and age, innocence and experience — I hesitate to say beast and beauty, it’s a modesty thing — is that I possess an ear finely attuned to the strains of irony. I don’t mind if that sounds like a boast, and I suppose that it is. Time will mostly take from you, but as it’s busy doing this you may as well through your own effort grab something for yourself in return.
Here’s a more plain way of saying it. It’s never too soon to face two unavoidable and unpleasant facts: the first is that your prime is going to pass quickly, whether you now believe this or not, and the second is that you have much disappointment in your future. You have arrived at the first condition, the past-prime, when you see the years ahead not as an exotic land of wild promise but as a more-of-the-same domesticated pasture. (Note. Is it mere coincidence that your waistline has suffered the consequences of too much red meat? I think not!) The second condition is plain enough. The only variable will concern the measure of the disappointment, whether it is generic or extraordinary. Looking at the question from a statistical viewpoint, I infer most of you will have conventional, or average, disappointment — not enough paid, not enough laid, that sort of thing. A few of you will be exceptional, which is a tautology, exception being only for the few. You will reach greater heights, and fall accordingly. Serves you right.
That earlier bit about grabbing something for yourself as time takes from you goes like this. The energy you would have wasted trying to evade, sweeten, or defer unpleasant facts can be much better applied to the active cultivation of an ironic outlook. That’s something that can never be taken away, excepting a blow to the head or dementia, and perhaps not even then, or at least up to a point and in some cases. This is only my professional medical opinion, however. Another useful endeavour is to discover your one or two non-negotiables, the things you will under no condition surrender. You have less of these non-negotiables than you now think, and so in years to come you will find yourself making what the younger you would have considered dangerous compromises and even deals with the devil. I myself believe you should never let your principles get in the way of a good idea, not to mention a good time, and in any case you young people usually have too many principles for your own good. It will take you some time, but paring down your list to what really — really — matters is a good exercise. Think of it as creating a life compass, which needless to say points to your true north. You need only one arrow, and indeed any more than that risks your being set off in the wrong direction. That is my view as an engineering expert. Of course you’ll find that this happens anyway, and when it does be sure to remember that I did warn you, in my expert capacity as a navigator, or career cartographer. Also, this is another instance in which an ironic outlook, and the willingness to laugh at oneself and one’s misfortunes, will provide good value. I say this only because I am an economist by trade, hence I know.
If any of what I have said sounds to you depressing, be mindful of the fact that a person who can laugh at misfortunes great and small is going to laugh, and laugh quite a bit. I know this to be fact because I myself have the good fortune of always being around for misfortune, and other than in the physical and emotional senses of the term, I find I am never in the least depressed. On the other side of the ledger, I could enter jolly claims that your generation is going to change the world, that you will do great things, that your life is all ahead of you, unscripted. The last so-called observation is an empty shell of rhetoric, true but obvious. The second is a maybe, the odds being against you, unless by great one means the many graciously applauded but nonetheless common things a few of which any person who isn’t a total imbecile can do — examples: making a baby, getting an office job, finishing the crossword puzzle without consulting the solution, or baking “a great lasagna.” That’s great, dear! Hurrah, and so forth. I would hardly feel I’d earned my pay, however, if I came here merely to compliment you on your cooking and ability to breed, both of which I don’t doubt are very solid. No, the only certain thing is that your generation will change the world, but that’s only because my generation will do you the enormous favour of getting out of your way, also known as biting the dust.
Concerning changing the world, you do have a choice to make, and your decision will have an effect on the character of life on this planet. Yes, it will be a small difference, but if you just hold on until I reach the end of what I have to say you’ll see a small difference can be of consequence. You can choose to be a decent person. One individual committed to a great cause may or may not improve the quality of living in this world, but one person actively committed to simple decency certainly will. It follows from what I have said that you can also choose to be a massive shit, in which case I ask only that you choose not to move in next door nor to join a religion that will have you in my living-room recommending your deity and the promise of eternal life, among other massive shits like you. If in years to come you recall only one of my points, and given my own admission even this may be asking too much, then the preceding request wouldn’t be a bad one to have at the ready.
Thank-you for putting up with me, not that you had a choice in the matter.
Supposing It Happens
What will you do when you become a billionaire? Well, supposing you do. Become a billionaire. You’ve got to think about something while you’re supposed to be working. Of course, the work day is almost over. When you’re finished, you’ll go home to your dream house in the country and your personal Italian chef will prepare for you a gourmet meal. And this time the chef’s name won’t be Boyardee, either.
Well, supposing it happens.
You better decide right now whether you will have a Jacuzzi after dinner, or see a film in your personal movie theatre. Or maybe just lounge around the master bedroom: build a fire, lie in your big bed, look out of the picture window at the mountains. Boy, your river sure is beautiful. Wish I had one of my own.
Supposing I did. I’d go fishing everyday and catch trout. Fly fishing. Who knows what else I’d hook. Yeah, I’d be a fisherman.
Think of all the things you’re going to have when you’re rich. And the travel! Paris, Bermuda, Greece, South America. Me, I’ll be right here, fishing.
You could finally do the things you’ve always wanted to do. And suppose on top of being rich, you were young and sexy as well. With perfect health. Did I mention you are also brilliant? Everyone thinks you are the best.
You have wonderful taste in clothing. Money isn’t everything: you have to know how to spend it. Anyone can throw a billion dollars around. But taste, that’s another matter. And you have je ne sais quoi, which no amount of money can buy either. That’s why members of the opposite sex find you so attractive. Of course, you’re already involved in a passionate and exciting love affair. You and your lover travel the world together and see exotic places. You make love on beaches and buy each other delightful gifts in Rome and Moscow and Rio de Janeiro.
Meanwhile, I’m quite content to be fishing. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve hooked something. I’m just reeling it in.
Most billionaires aren’t cultured; have you ever noticed that? They’re all capitalism, all business. They have no charm, no class. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see someone like you. You’re rich, but you wear it well, if you know what I mean. You know exactly what you want. You make good choices. Your lover is a cultured person too. Has a great singing voice. A sensitive person. Has lots of talent. Athletic and creative. And witty, but not pretentious or condescending. Kind, loving, generous. And a great body, if you don’t mind me saying so.
Wow, that was a quick catch. Amazing how easy it is when you know what bait to use.
Of Truth and Reconciliation
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (whose website may be accessed here) is faring poorly of late in the court of public opinion, for reasons that have been widely reported. Foremost concerns have been the acrimonious resignations and dismissals of senior staff, a two-year delay of primary activities such as staffing and office-assembly, the apparent compromising of the Commission’s independence, and the inability of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to compel testimony by means of subpoena, or even to name perpetrators. Many are wondering if the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be able to accomplish anything of value.
One might well begin in fairness by acknowledging the extraordinary burden of the “truth and reconciliation commission” brand name. It’s rather like coming into the world christened Brock Skyconqueror. Even before the business cards were printed and the phones were installed, people were day-dreaming about 1989 — Nelson Mandela and the crumbling walls of the prison, that sort of thing. It may however help the cause of expectation management to familiarize yourself, if you haven’t already, with the precise character of this institution:
2. Establishment, Powers, Duties and Procedures of the Commission. Pursuant to the Court-approved final settlement agreement and the class action judgements, the Commissioners: (a) in fulfilling their Truth and Reconciliation Mandate, are authorized to receive statements and documents from former students, their families, community and all other interested participants ….
This is to say, the Commission’s authority consists in the power to listen, under conditions which actively forbid assignment of responsibility:
[the Commissioners] (g) shall not name names in their events, activities, public statements, report or recommendations, or make use of personal information or of statements which identify a person, without the express consent of that individual, unless that information and/or the identity of the person so identified has already been established through legal proceedings, by admission, or by public disclosure by that individual.
I could go on quoting legalese from Schedule N of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, and no doubt you’d be enthralled by my doing so, but most of the twelve-page document establishing the scope of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is contained in these extracts. The rest of it is amplification, that the Commission shall “adopt methods and procedures which it deems necessary to achieve its goals” and shall “have available the use of such facilities and equipment as is required …,” etc.
Part of the burden of this Commission, and quite a large part, is truth — specifically the expectation that it will root out and present to Canada The Truth of the Indian Residential School System. But since the TRC is neither a public inquiry (see 4. Exercise of Duties: “… the Commission is not to act as a public inquiry”) nor a legal process, truth can only mean personal truth, the truth of one’s convictions and experiences as presented to the Commission. Another term for this is subjective truth.
It’s for me impossible to imagine the Government of Canada, the Churches, and their many respective lawyers agreeing to the establishment of an independent investigative body with quasi-judicial powers. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is precisely what one would expect of a court-mandated, lawyer-negotiated instrument: it is a circumspect compromise between parties, an admission of responsibility which carefully circumscribes consequences.
As an agent of public education it does hold promise. The TRC is mandated to create from its gatherings, as well as from other source documents (voluntarily yielded), “as complete an historical record as possible of the IRS system and legacy.” The importance of this cannot be overstated. But the challenge here is on the distribution, and not on the production, end. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples generated enormous material and testimony related to residential schools, much more than could be contained in its Final Report, but few have seen it. Many Canadians remain ignorant of Canada’s Indian Residential School System, and are therefore ignorant of its consequences and legacy. Without a sustained campaign of public education, which means actually getting the stuff into the public domain, the Canadian public is certain to remain in its bubble on not-knowing. So far the degree of effective public outreach is the principal difference between Canada’s and South Africa’s truth and reconciliation efforts, according to comments made by South African professor Piet Meiring. But even here, we must acknowledge that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has resources unequal to the work of educating a country. It must have public and private sector partners in this endeavour.
So to recap: there’s a modest potential for some good in this Truth and Reconciliation Commission, only don’t expect an uncovering of Truth and the reconciliation of Canada and Aboriginal peoples. Rather, hope that individual truths will reach the individuals who can be reached, and that some small, personal acts of reconciliation will result. Expectation of anything more is a mere dream.
Celebrities, Coltan, and the Trial of Charles Taylor
It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that the stupid cult of the celebrity has overtaken a war crimes trial of former professional corpse-maker and Liberian warlord, Charles Taylor. Nor do I need to explain to you either the nature of the misfortune or, especially, of the predictability. Femi Fani-Kayode decries the unfairness of the trial (Taylor had an AU-backed safe-haven agreement) and American hypocrisy (the U.S. is not a member of the International Court of Criminal Justice, and has forever shielded itself from such prosecutions). I would take issue with the first point, and with the second I would agree and would suggest its inaugural application to Henry Kissinger. Confronted by this trial however I see filth of another kind. One can never look deeply into the familiar business of the African tribal massacre without feeling that we are all, you and I, dirtied.
If we weren’t too engrossed in the nonentity Naomi Campbell, we might notice the discomforting Judeo-Christian dimension of Taylor’s criminal undertakings. Among his charges of American hypocrisy, Femi Fani-Kayode bitterly cites the failure to indite war crimes related to Iraq and to the killings of “the defenceless Arab women and children of Sabra and Chatilla in Southern Lebanon just a couple of decades ago.” These giveaway indictments serve to situate Africa’s divisions within their proper, religious context. It is a context manifested in Liberia’s 19th-century proxy colonization, or “re-patriation” if you prefer, by Christianized former American slaves. (The early domination of local, non-Christian Africans by this Americanized elite and proxy-colonizer mirrors the contemporary rivalries of Liberia’s many ethnic groups.) Next, recall some years ago when it was disclosed that Pat Robertson was profiting from the blood diamond business, that furthermore he was financing the business with 700 Club money, and that Taylor was on the take. Taylor, who has been known to compare himself to Jesus, has had other gross associates of the Christian sort. Kilari Anand Paul, for example. Argue, for whatever good it will do you, that these people don’t represent the faith. The points to be taken away are that our world is today poisoned by this sort of rubbish, that it is getting worse — particularly in Africa, from whence the next wave of international terrorism is already arriving — and that we are likely to be living with the consequences for generations to come.
But hold on, it gets worse. Cecil Rhodes’s De Beers company has been for years an Economics 101 textbook case of marketing genius, as well as the cartel knack at price-fixing. If you are a married woman, chances are quite good you can glance down right now at the diamond on your left hand. For years the only kind of diamond was the blood variety, and even now it’s near impossible to guarantee otherwise. Add to this the unpleasant fact that commerce in critical and ubiquitous materials like rubber and coltan (used in computer chips and cell phones) finances the purchases of weapons throughout Africa, has for many years, and will for many more to come. It would be easier to hedge the complicity if it weren’t the case that North Americans only care about Africa when it’s presented through celebrity proxies — Bob Geldof, Bono, Brad Pitt, Madonna, or Naomi Campbell.
In a better world the West would not undermine every attempt by Africans to improve their lot (and only Africans can improve their own lot). North Americans would stop seeing Africa, to the miniscule degree which they see that continent at all, as a backwards place of starvation and war. The many and diverse nations of Africa are so much more than these, and in many cases not even these. Unfortunately this better world is a good way off.
In the meantime the warlord, weapons, cell phone, and celebrity industries thrive.
Why the US Should Not Apologize for the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Looking backwards at the savagery, at the irrational and disgusting business of industrial murder which was World War Two, it seems a fool’s errand to sort out the matter of guilt and innocence in any manner which nicely assigns positive moral value to what happened between the years 1939-1945. There is never an honourable soldier and never a good war: war is a positive evil which makes everyone, and everything, dirty. So surely the legacy of the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ought to be universal commitment to the denuclearization of our world.
The call for an American apology for these acts of mass killing may seem on its surface reasonable enough, but to apologize would be to engage in hypocrisy and would misrepresent both history and current attitudes in the United States. Many of the Americans who would have been there far from feeling apologetic after the war were thankful. (A good and representative example is Paul Fussell’s essay, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.”) The simple fact of the August 6 and 9 murders is that the war was brought to an immediate end, preventing the certain deaths of many hundreds of thousands who would have been compelled to fight on land in a gruesome and bloodied exercise of attrition. Nor should we forget by whom they would have been compelled — specifically, the Emperor Showa, who, claiming himself to be an arahitogami (god), lived in extreme comfort on his massive conclave-estate while forcefully urging upon his subjects the honour of suicide. His defeat and displacement made possible a democratic and prosperous Japan, and though it is not today fashionable to say so, often only violence (or the credible threat of violence) can accomplish the fascism-to-democracy transformation. If you wish to blame someone for the death and misery which follow from this vile truism, let me recommend the fascists.
In my opinion it is one of the principal shames of the post-war period that the Emperor was allowed to keep his material possessions and to avoid facing prosecution as a war criminal, particularly for his sanctioning of the 1937 invasion of China and the depravity which thereby ensued. General MacArthur appears to have thought him useful as a stabilizing presence during the post-war occupation, and it may be that the Allies wished to avoid imposing the humiliating terms of the previous war, resentments over which abetted the successes of militarist regimes. The Emperor appears in retrospect to have cultivated the notion that decisions were made by the gozen kaigi, or Imperial Conference, and that he himself was a mere figurehead — a fiction which would perhaps have been credible.
This is speculation. What is certain is that the Emperor Showa exploited all the Twentieth Century signature barbarisms, which is to say fascism, religious fanaticism, and militaristic nationalism. A self-aggrandizing god when it suited him, or a mere mortal figurehead on a walkabout with foreign heads of state — when that had become the ticket — the man for many years was as deadly for the Japanese as any bomb. Yet he was allowed to enjoy a long and privileged life, during which no apology ever came from his lips.
All In A Day’s Work
It happens that Stockwell Day once again has the misfortune to be rather thickly in the news. You must have noted the tautology in that: Stockwell Day in the news is always a misfortune, never anything else. Quite without needing to, the man is perennially at the habit of putting himself before microphone and camera, only to make a bung of it.
Do you recall the extraordinary media hyperventilation which attended his farcical lunge, conducted partly by Jet Ski, at the Canadian Alliance leadership, in 2000? As Finance Minister, in the Ralph Klein government, Day had paid down debt and balanced the provincial budget. On these accomplishments, and little else, rested the extraordinary enthusiasm for an unexamined man who began to dismay as soon as the shrink wrap was off.
Everywhere Stockwell Day went throughout his leadership campaign against Preston Manning, he said plainly wrong things, made an ass of himself, and in the end split the Alliance Party in two. It is worth remembering that Day has a federal political career only as a result of a deal made with Stephen Harper — a deal which brought prominent party members disgusted with Day back into the fold, restoring the Alliance and enabling them to take power. There’s another, even less kind, way to say this: the Conservative Party of Canada is today united and in power because its absurd and impossible leader got out of the way and let someone competent take over.
One is tempted in speaking of Day’s political career to produce the actuarial. Well then, one instructive example of the real-world liability he represents is his illogical and tub-thumping attack on Lorne Goddard, which cost the Albertan taxpayers over $700,000, again needlessly. The expression, “it is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt,” could have been written about Stockwell Day and in any case would provide him some sound direction. His mistakes were at one time innocent and therefore merely comical, such as when he got the direction of the Niagara River backward. This is no longer the case. His lazy indifference to the assimilation and production of relevant facts, and his recourse to settled ideological conviction, are liabilities and nothing beside.
Nor are these character traits limited within the Harper Government to the Treasury Board President. He is unique only in that looking over his career one can see that he always brings the misery upon himself, and upon his party, despite there being an alternative within an easy reach. Now it appears the misery will overtake Canadians as well, as they endure yet another avoidable controversy, this time about whether crime is going up or down. All that, and more, in a Day’s work.
(Big) Business As Usual
[Originally published in ASH Magaine, Volume Four Number Three, Summer 1997.]
Now and then I find myself in a philosophical mood, pondering the evolution of this creature called ASH. I think it’s a healthy activity, the more so since I’m inclined these days not to take the magazine too seriously. I’d like to leave behind me a respectable corpus when I at long last turn my attention elsewhere, but I know also that ASH is likely never to attain a status beyond the obscurity common to small publications.
I confess this disappoints me — and not merely for its humbling effect on the ego. You see, I had a conversation once with a business-minded fellow, who maintained that the market should decide the outcome in all matters. He noted the widespread reliance of Canadian magazines on government funding (ASH is an exception) and wondered aloud: Why sustain a magazine read by so few that it needs taxpayers’ money just to survive? Indeed. I must say the logic, bolstered by economic concepts such as “utility maximization,” seemed to me to be solid. But when I drew out its implications and followed them to their conclusions, I was left with a rather troubling picture.
The image I had in my mind was of a culture that could never have enough movie celebrities, rock stars, elite athletes, arms traders, investment bankers, futures speculators, and corporate lawyers: for their market value is, it appears, without limit. As for, say, motherhood (that sacred job which is praised to the skies at appropriate occasions by businessmen and politicians), well, it has no market value whatsoever; and nearly the same is true of all the so-called “caring” professions and the many wage-labour jobs which have long sustained our privileged standard of living. Think about it: much that we might reasonably claim dignifies and enriches life, much which makes this world more than merely bearable, is practically valueless, economically speaking. Remember Mike Harris’s contempt, oft-expressed in the 1995 Ontario election campaign, for welfare mothers, who don’t do anything? Such contempt is one of the free market’s proud accomplishments, and a remarkable accomplishment it is.
I suspect my business-minded acquaintance is now pleased. His vision of an efficient, competitive, rational, growth-centred world has triumphed, and we shall live for many years to come its social and ecological consequences. The New World Order has its bureaucracy (the economists, policy experts, and investment gurus who now make regular appearances on the evening news and the bestseller lists), its constitution (the General Agreement on Trade and Tarrifs), and its Bill of Rights (the Multilateral Agreement on Investment). The message for the masses is also vaguely familiar: believe, submit, and you’ll be rewarded in a future life.
Perhaps the market knows best in some matters — magazines, for instance. In any case, I’m inclined these days to keep ASH going, if only that it might be a voice crying in the market wilderness. It’s an obscure voice, as I’ve already acknowledged, and so there’s little hope ASH might counter effectively the fallacious claims of the economic experts who dominate the landscape. The very attempt risks the pomposity and the intolerable self-righteousness that usually attend those who are convinced they’re on a mission from God. So much, you might then say, for not taking ASH too seriously.
Self-righteousness isn’t the only temptation to which the dissenters are susceptible, as the global economic empire discloses what appears to many to be a heartless agenda. Have you noticed the abundance of books in the last few years with the phrase “The End Of” in their titles? All about us, the horsemen are assuming the saddle in gleeful anticipation of the apocalypse. Unfortunately for them, there’s no end in sight. It’s (big) business as usual.
Not long ago I read George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier, a book that makes me wonder why Orwell is represented in the school curricula by Animal Farm and 1984. Wigan Pier is really two books in one: the first half describes in horrific detail the lives of U.K. miners during the 1930s, and the second half is a scathing look at the people who propose to improve matters by adopting socialism. Orwell of course considered himself a socialist, but his temperament was such that he could never settle into a dogmatic understanding of human affairs. The possessor of a keen, sceptical mind, Orwell had the habit of bringing into his work troubling details — such as his observation that many a would-be “bourgeois Socialist” of his day was at heart an “old Etonian”:
Perhaps once, out of sheer bravado, he has smoked a cigar with the band on, but it would be almost physically impossible for him to put pieces of cheese into his mouth on the point of his knife, or to sit indoors with his cap on, or even to drink his tea out of the saucer. … It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.
Wigan Pier is full of such scandal, much of it delivered at the author’s expense. Orwell could be, and often was, indignant in the face of injustice, but I’ve yet to catch him indulging in self-righteous cant or doom-saying. It’s this balanced cast of mind that strikes me as Orwell’s greatest contribution to the dissenters’ canon, a contribution well worth recalling.
As it has turned out, Orwell’s works have thus far escaped obscurity. It would be silly to hope for the same outcome in the case of ASH, but that isn’t the point. In the here and now, there’s plenty of Orwellian work to be done — and after all, I’ve only said I’d like to leave a respectable corpus.
An Interview with Heather Menzies
[The following was first published in ASH Magazine Volume 4 Number 1, Winter 1996.]
Your argument, in the book Whose Brave New World?, is that a corporate agenda is “colonizing” the institutions and services upon which we depend in this country. Would you comment on the choice of this word?
In a colonization model, what we are talking about is empire rather than democracy —the empire of technique, but also the new corporate empires imposing their centralised authority, which is what empire is all about, over more and more of the territories of our lives. Colonization has to do with the fact that there is a cultural component, and related to that an ideological component. We’re shifting from an ethic of public service to an ethic that treats services as commodities and service transactions. In the health care field this is very dramatic, and therefore something very important to watch. This is coming out of the United States, where health care is an industry, where sickness is the raw material for a profit-making industry —their bias is built into that— and these are completely taking us away from prevention of debility, prevention of disease, and taking us toward simply the treatment model, where people can make money off a continuing dependence on medicines and treatments and so on. So the colonization aspect gets at the cultural component and the shift toward this more commoditized approach to life, generally, and then within that, service being transformed from an engaged and empathetic human interaction, to a service transaction —which is a business.
There is also colonization in the sense of an existing knowledge base being pushed to the side and treated as completely unimportant while this new knowledge base, and the new sets of technological skills being imposed by the colonizers —by the new technological agents— are being treated as the only ones that count. It’s the same kind of way in which you had the imposition of the pricing system and the commodity form that displaced barter, exchange, and the subsistence basis of an economy based on the commons of the land here.
Neil Postman has stated, in Technopoly, that a technology will “play out its hand” when introduced —that is, it will do what it’s designed to do, regardless of our efforts to control it. But you seem to believe we have a good degree of control.
I’m neither for nor against technology: I’m for a particular use of technology, one that extends what people do, rather than replaces people and replaces what they do. And so, at a fundamental level I understand and I work with the definition of technology as a social construction. Now, there’s a point at which it begins to become deterministic. It’s a bit like what Ursula Franklin said, that once values are incorporated into the design of a technology, they cannot be negotiated. That speaks to the fact that, for instance, once software monitors people and has taken over more and more of the knowledge required to do a job effectively —taken that knowledge away from people and de-skilled them — once that system is put into place, you can’t negotiate around it. There is a time when one has to negotiate. That is in the initial stages of design, and the initial stages of organizing work and the place of technology. There is scope for intervention at that point. I am somewhat sanguine about the possibility of people gaining control. People still have the capacity to negotiate. People are endlessly inventive.
What do you say to the people —and some of them aren’t necessarily pro-business— who find your critique of corporations “conspiratorial,” or at least so dark that it’s hard to accept? I have to admit I find it hard to believe that business has gotten so mean-spirited that it can enrich itself on human misery.
I think that people who subscribe to conspiracy theories are capitulating to the mystique of all-powerfulness associated with many of the institutions of power, which get all the press and are held up as being the only institutions of power. The corollary of that is that these people are betraying and not sufficiently having confidence in the power that in fact people out in the community still do have, to think for themselves, to speak for themselves, and to act. Where I think I come down is that those people who are in institutions of power do have, usually, access to faster means of communication, and they are therefore able to more quickly apprise the situation and seize an opportunity to exploit it. History is much more chaotic, much more fraught with possibilities than the conspiracy theorists would have us believe. And also it’s peopled on the other side with an awfully lot more stupidity and laziness than conspiracy theorists would have us believe [laughter]
There is another enormous advantage for those who have power, and that’s the ability to define the public interest. Until a public interest is defined, it’s impossible to get any sort of program underway.
And again, that comes back to this moral voice issue. I was giving a speech Friday, in which I stressed the importance of scale —the scale of the voices that are saying “This is in fact what the public interest is all about.” I proceeded to lay out what’s happening —the social devastations that globalization and restructuring are causing, with the downsizing and deficit being part of that larger agenda —and having done so, I was talking about the need for media paying attention to networking amongst all those voices, so that you can get the kind of sustained moral tone that is going to in fact communicate this different definition of the public interest: that the public interest is not deficit cutting, is not global competitiveness; the public interest is in fact defined by meeting people’s needs and positioning all these other agendas within the caring capacity of the larger social environment.
I find myself using the language of “community” when I speak of the public interest. But I suspect this is a buzzword — I mean, community is clearly important, but it’s hard not to be self-conscious. Do I really live in a community? And what’s the relation of business, on any scale, to the interests of community? — particularly given the erosion of traditional ties of business to employees, towns, and even democracy itself?
Too much of this gets discussed in the abstract. And abstractions can be so used by anybody. Community is a perfect case in point. You’ve got various ways in which “community” is being used. It’s being used by business to talk about corporate alliances —now they’re being called communities. Communities are also being defined around ownership of consumer goods, such as cars. And communities are being defined around lifestyles. These are all a redefinition of community into consumer roles and property relations. And that’s a complete betrayal of the historical origins of community. People don’t tend to pay attention to the hard work that communities involve. There’s this tendency to reach into the past and pull out this golden, hazy image of community where everybody gets along with their neighbours. But in fact there is no such community. Community-building is hard work. It’s the art of listening to the other person, putting up with their halitosis [laughter] —one of my ways of describing it— but it’s also the daily practice of dialogue, and dialogue doesn’t just involve speaking for yourself, and your family, and your locale, and the particularities of your group identity. It also involves listening. Listening, to be able to respect, so that freedom can be combined with responsibility, in the microcosm, and you can actually work out differences —you know, negotiate differences. That’s my sense of a real community. We need that kind of practice to avoid the idealisms: the golden age of community, which didn’t exist, and also to avoid the new commoditized images of community. The public interest isn’t an abstraction; it’s the people going to the food bank around the corner from where I live, or the Daily Bread food bank in Toronto, or the one where you live.
The current buzzwords do express an abstracted way of looking at the world which has not very much to do with people and a lot to do with processes and technologies.
One of the major shifts going on right now is we’re moving toward the equivalence of the neoliberal and neoconservative agenda —they’re really one and the same. Democracy and democratic values are being subsumed by corporate values. Human rights are being subsumed, or eclipsed, by property rights. “Whoever has the most power wins” seems to be emerging as the ethic of the new era. It’s really important to name that for what it is, and then also know what you have to do if you want to turn that around. You don’t do it, I think, with abstractions about human rights. I think we can regain our perspectives by grounding ourselves, positioning ourselves in solidarity with the people who have been marginalized —who are being displaced. We’re not doing them a favour; we’re doing ourselves a favour. Because we can redefine the public interest with people at the centre.
The economist Paul Krugman has stated [in Mother Jones], “it will take another [Roosevelt], and perhaps the moral equivalent of another war” to bring back the decent society Americans had a generation ago. What do you think it will take here?
What I was also saying about “the empire versus a democracy” is that you get something imposed, versus something negotiated. The whole public discussion of this has almost shut out the notion, the idea, that this kind of thing should be negotiated. In other words, that there should be a debate, a negotiation, between an ethic of social justice and an ethic of business efficiency and corporate profit. And instead what we’re getting is the imposition of this one ethic, the business agenda. Negotiation is reduced to quibbling over the adjustment mechanisms. To be able to reassert that this is in fact an ethical discussion, and that there are moral choices to be made, requires leadership in a very engaged form. And I think there are already in Canada a number of voices that do represent the kind of moral equivalent of, let’s say, the Roosevelt era —people like Ursula Franklin, various people also in communities. We need to pay attention to the fact that the macrocosm is also composed of a bunch of microcosms.
You’ve written a half-dozen or so books about computers, and one about cheese [By the Labour of Their Hands]. Obviously, there’s more to Heather Menzies than technology.
[laughter] The Menzies were farmers in rural Ontario, so this is sort of my personal roots book. I was also as a child taken to the cheese factories. I got a sense of fascination with technology as part of the landscape. I think I gained a sense that machines had characters and were part of our story. And having written that book, it gave me a lovely perspective, because I jumped into 18th and 19th century technology. I learned a lot about technology in the process of writing [By the Labour of Their Hands], although it isn’t at all a technology book. It’s very much a book of the rural culture in Ontario, which has hardly been written on at all. The other thing is I’m a writer first; I hate being described as an expert on computer technology. Now I’m able to pose, at least for myself if not for others, some of the deeper questions about our society and the philosophies at work in it. It’s been an interesting journey.
Heather Menzies is the author of 7 books, including Whose Brave New World?: The Information Highway and the New Economy. (Between The Lines, 1996). She spoke to ASH from Ottawa, Ontario.
E. B. White
As many of my generation, I first encountered Elwyn Brooks White as the author of Charlotte’s Web. In college, The Elements of Style was an often-recommended guide to prose composition, written by William Strunk in 1918 and by White revised in the 1950s. With these associations, E. B. White would for years be summed up in my mind.
Some time ago I found a collection of his “Notes and Comment” writings for The New Yorker. It now rests on my bedside table, and most nights I dip in at day’s end. In our age of the rant, it’s pleasurable to read prose of a decent, civilized, and ironic character: prose which recalls a time when irony was not mere sarcastic contempt. His work suggests a man of principle and conviction, but of some reservation also. One imagines him too kind to engage in polemic, though the firmness of his convictions seems clear. John Updike, in Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, states that White’s writing career began with an essay describing his reaction to a waitress who had spilled a glass of buttermilk on him:
with composure and dignity, he comforted the waitress, paid for the soup and even left her a tip, while the entire restaurant gaped in awe. The readers loved it. Andy [i.e. White] discovered that “the world would pay a man for setting down a simple, legible account of his own misfortunes.” For most of the rest of his career, Andy published steady accounts of his own misfortunes, to popular acclaim.
Having read a good deal of White’s published works, I find the story credible. The words “simple” and “legible” well describe the sort of prose you will get from an E. B. White essay. He writes in defence of humanist values, principally of freedom of thought, critical expression, and the dignity of the individual. Much of his work concerns compassion and solidarity, themes which are prominent in his writings for children.
In recent years he has been blamed for having introduced “hyper-correctness” into the teaching of English prose composition. Some of his grammatical dicta, for instance the prohibition against splitting of infinitives, are seen as nit-picking. To some readers, his style will seem antique and stilted — a perception doubtless compounded by The New Yorker’s insistence that he write in the third person. Against these charges, I’ll say only that in times of war and inquisition, when much was at stake, E. B. White took a clear and thoughtful stand against tyranny, and even when confronting his opponents he was generous and thoughtful. Never having allowed himself to lose grip on his wit, nor his wits, he has left us a useful legacy.
What The Media Won’t Tell You About The Oka Crisis
I assume you are familiar with the background and chronology of what is today known as “The Oka Crisis.” My purpose in this short piece is not to rehearse the already amply-stated; it is instead to provide you some remarks concerning the events of 1990 which I am confident you have not encountered in Canada’s media.
In August 1990 I moved from Niagara to Kingston. Four days earlier, the Canadian Army had occupied the community. I contemplated a show of support for Kanesatake — now a half-day’s drive away — but quickly came to the conclusion there was nothing I could do that wasn’t useless and indeed reckless. The main problem, it seemed to me, was that there were too many outsiders in Kanesatake and Kahnawake already.
Most Canadians misapprehend the Kanesatake conflict. The media coverage is to a degree responsible, but it should also be allowed that historical conflicts are by their nature highly complex. Consider the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia, which was near unintelligible to most Westerners. Slobodan Milošević instigated Serbian nationalist attacks of Albanians in the 1990s by invoking the 1389 Battle of Kosovo with the Ottomans. In this one sentence there is a lot of history (some of it arguably bogus) and a lot of ethnic division at work. In similar fashion, the proposed 1990 expansion of an Oka golf course invoked a land dispute going back to the early eighteenth century, unresolved to this day. Those who see the Oka Crisis as a dispute over a golf course see a flat rendering of a three-dimensional world.
Here is what most Canadians don’t know about the Oka Crisis, and likely never will. Very few community members in Kanesatake or Kahnawake wanted the barricades. By “community members” I mean just that: the Kanien’keha:ka [Mohawk] men, women, and children who live in these two communities, and in nearby Oka. The people were caught between, on the one side, Canadian politicians such as the Mayor of Oka, Jean Ouellette, and on the other hand, the so-called “Mohawk Warriors.” Municipal and provincial politicians immediately resorted to force, deploying first the Sûreté du Québec and thereafter the army. (Federal politicians, for instance the spineless Minister of Indian Affairs, Tom Siddon, mostly just twiddled thumbs and waited for the mess to go away.) This militancy suited the Warriors just fine, since their interest is not in land settlements or Mohawk sovereignty or even in the well-being of the community itself, but in the operation of a petty third-world crime empire. The Warriors had come to Oka from across the United States and Canada to pursue a plan, and the Canadian politicians — whose collective failure at Oka has yet to receive an adequate accounting — were playing right into it.
The plan of these Warrior outsiders was to provoke Canada to armed battle at Oka, on the assumption Canada would be surprised by the fierceness of the Warriors. First a fight, then negotiations cloaked in the Haudenosaunee, the Kaswentha (Two Row Wampum — the Nation-to-Nation treaty with Canada) and the ongoing land claims. The Warriors since the 70s have been adept at co-opting both the good name and legitimacy of the Haudenosaunee, or “Iroquois Confederacy,” but have no real interest in the struggles. The goal has always been to place Mohawk territories outside of Canada’s legal jurisdiction, thereby giving the Warriors a law-free zone to do what they do best: make money from drugs, cigarettes, weapons, and gambling. To this end the people of Kanesatake were put before Canada’s army, by thugs who play the game of Haudenosaunee dress-up.
The disgusting and sad fact of the Oka Crisis is that this strategy worked. The Warriors are much stronger today as a result of what happened in Oka. Their crime empire thrives. Canada treads more lightly, a fact evident in the Caledonia occupation. Many indigenous people in Canada, as well as Canadians, regard the Warriors as a legitimate voice of the Haudenosaunee. I have often seen, to my sorrow, Warrior flags flown by Aboriginal people at gatherings. If only they knew. (Some do, and still approve, but that’s another matter.) Meanwhile none of the community’s land claims has been addressed. The mess persists, and the people tossed unwillingly into the Warriors’ filthy little 1990 gambit today suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. The Warriors are a cancer, as threatening to the aspirations of the Haudenosaunee as any Canadian soldier or Indian-hating politician.
Those who say nothing has changed are wrong. Matters have gotten worse. The Oka Crisis has further divided and wounded the Haudenosaunee. The Warriors attract our angry and hopeless youth, and submit the communities to further harms. Their hypocrisies turn the public against us. They misrepresent themselves as spokespersons of the Confederacy, which they are not, and make a mockery of our struggles and aspirations. And always — always — the needs and concerns of the people are pushed aside so the bullies can better work the camera. On a silly CBC Radio program called ReVision Quest, broadcast last night, comedian and host Darrell Dennis at least got one thing right: “it’s kind of ironic,” he said, “twenty years later, the lasting impact of the biggest armed confrontation between Aboriginals and Canada in recent history has been to push Aboriginals to buy into the Canadian system.” This too is a legacy of the bogus, corrosive, and repellent work of the Warriors.
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