Category Archives: Fiction

The Toronto District School Board is making a mockery of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations.

✎  Wayne K. Spear | October 17, 2017 ◈ Current Events

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T TAKES A LOT to render me speechless, but there I was nonplussed by the October 11 CBC headline, “Toronto District School Board to remove ‘chief’ from job titles out of respect for Indigenous communities.” Job titles with the word “chief” will now be replaced with “manager.”

The Toronto District School Board says its decision to scrub “chief” from the lexicon was “in the spirit of recommendations made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, or TRC. It’s a shame they didn’t spend more time with those recommendations in the flesh. Or with Indigenous people, who would have helpfully informed the board that their proposal was a cure in search of a disease, and a ridiculous one at that.

It would be easy to mock the initiative for its frivolity, but this is no laughing matter. The cynic in me wondered if perhaps the bureaucracy was undergoing an internal job title review and simply tacked-on a high-minded purpose. Indeed, the TDSB has said the move is part of a larger renaming initiative, the most generous interpretation of which is that TDSB acted alone and only afterward took to the work of selling the public on the supposed merits of its decision.

And I’ve no doubt the bureaucrats believe this is for the good of Indigenous people, in the spirit of every boneheaded policy ever made in our absence and dropped on our heads from on-high.

I’m discerning a trend, and I don’t like it, and neither do many other Indigenous folks. The trend is to read (or pretend to have read) the TRC’s recommendations and to have been “inspired” to do something symbolic no Indigenous person has ever requested and that will have no discernible material benefit.

The word “chief” can be used as a slur, but it happens also to be an honorific title. It’s considered a breach of protocol, for example, not to address the Assembly of First Nations’ leader as National Chief.

The title “chief” is widely used in the communities, but there are, in some cases, preferred usages derived from Indigenous languages. I am a member of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations, whose traditional leaders are called rotiianer. When using English, we typically render the word roia:ner (singular of rotiianer) as “chief.” If you’re ever unsure what word to use, don’t worry. The rule of thumb concerning protocol is: when in doubt, ask.

An empty gesture would be bad enough, but it’s worse even than that. The TDSB’s proposal trivializes reconciliation and makes the cause appear pernicious by putting into the minds of the public a spectre of thick-headed literalists, nit-picking school-marms and language police, set loose to hunt down and banish words deemed offensive by the Politbureau. The TRC called for a lot of things, comrades, but not for this.

I know a bit about the Toronto District School Board. I’ve been the chair of a school council, and I’ve given TDSB presentations on Indian residential schools. I’m the co-author of a book (Residential Schools: with the Words and Images of Survivors) used in classrooms and libraries across the city. The teachers and librarians of the TDSB are good people. They are making an effort to involve Indigenous people — especially those who were in the residential schools — in the work of education and reconciliation.

Fulfilment of the TRC’s “Calls to Action” is not an easy task, and the educators I’ve spoken to feel the weight of their responsibilities. They have my respect. But whatever sub-committee made this decision needs to understand that they are undermining the work of educators.

Symbolism can be powerful in a good or a bad way, and this is a case of bad symbolism. Bad symbolism misrepresents reality and diverts our attention to non-existent problems like “offensive” job titles. When the bureaucracy of an institution with great power dabbles in bad symbolism, the confidence of the public in that institution is undermined.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has provided specific recommendations for educators and educational institutions, such as creating age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools and providing appropriate teacher training. There’s more than enough there to keep you busy. If the TDSB needs guidance or clarification, you can have it, from the many Indigenous people who are more than willing to work with you.

But if you go it alone and as a result alienate the public with bad symbolism of your own doing, you will find it much harder to do the work that actually needs to get done.

Where would Donald Trump be without fake media like The Apprentice?

✎  Wayne K. Spear | October 10, 2017 ◈ Politics

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FEW YEARS AGO I spent a week at Sunset Bronson Studios, in Hollywood, home of Let’s Make A Deal and The Biggest Loser and the first-ever “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. Opposite the third-floor offices of Judge Judy a fellow named Clint Arthur runs his business, Celebrity Launchpad. Arthur’s Sunset Bronson students learn pitching to small-market morning television producers and the art of hustling their way to New York and Los Angeles, where celebrities are born. His tagline is “Make a difference & a fortune sharing your message on local TV.” Celebrity after all translates nicely into influence and money, regardless of the means by which it’s attained.

Donald Trump plays a successful human being on a TV game show

You can easily grasp why the President of the United States makes me think of Celebrity Launchpad. The Arthur method bares a truth of our era, that performance is everything. In the 1980s Donald Trump worked the New York tabloid and chat-show circuit as a Lothario figure, and in the 1990s his revised performance, as a builder and politician, went national. The celebrity breakthrough arrived in 2003 when Trump was offered the starring role in a reality television program. Here is what Kelly McEvers had to say of this, in an October 5 NPR interview titled “The Apprentice Creators Look Back.”

At the time of The Apprentice, Donald Trump’s companies had already been through four bankruptcies, and there were two more to come, including the Taj Mahal. Airbrushing all this out is what [producer] Bill Pruitt says he feels most guilty about now. He says he was a good con artist, and his con helped take Donald Trump all the way to the White House.

There you have it: the performance is everything. Mark Twain once remarked that a man with an established reputation for rising early could safely sleep until noon, and the same appears true of a man with an airbrushed reputation for business success. Over and over again The Donald failed—at marriage, at dealmaking, at ingratiating himself with the members of a social class whose acceptance he craved, and at business. When the new millennium arrived he was persona non grata among New York’s elite and a notorious credit risk no American bank would touch. No one who had followed his antics since the early 80s could take him seriously, whether as a businessman or a politician. But that was in real life, and television is something altogether different.

Donald Trump kept at it when there was nothing in the bank and nothing in the tank except hype. The columnist Christopher Hitchens was asked in January 2000 what he thought of the rumoured Trump candidacy and dismissed it with the comment, “he’s managed to cover ninety percent of his head with thirty percent of his hair.” Such was the state of affairs when Mark Burnett committed the considerable resources of his major-network prime-time game show to a rescue and rehab operation. We’ll never know what would have become of Mr. Trump in the absence of this deus ex machina, but we know what did happen. An entire generation who knew about Trump only what The Apprentice chose to tell them swallowed Burnett’s fiction whole. Trump used the show to perfect a business model he’s since carried into the White House, surrounding himself with toadies whose sole job is to flatter the boss, shilling Trump-licensed products, giving his children jobs as “advisors,” and spending NBC’s money at Trump properties.

Don’t ever forget that Donald Trump hadn’t built anything for years when The Apprentice made him the world’s most famous builder. In the 1990s he became a RINO (Real estate In Name Only) by licensing the word TRUMP to the developers who did the negotiating, land acquisition, financing, contracting, and project management. A large chunk of The Apprentice was fabricated, from the sets to the pretense that Trump was judging the contestants to decide who would be fired. (In fact the producers chose who would leave and who would stay, using criteria that had everything to do with show business and little to do with Trump’s in any case dubious business acumen.) But it wasn’t all fake. The show’s star was, as the theme song goes, a lover of money, and as we’ve seen since January 20 of this year he likes to fire the people around him. The Apprentice did well—very well—because the future President has a knack for drawing attention to himself, which is the alpha and omega of a celebrity job description.

The President has spent his life working three of the principal routes to fame: New York talk shows, Los Angeles film and TV, and DC politics. (He’s hinted at a fourth with his comment about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.) Today he’s the most famous and most-talked-about human being on our planet. When he tweets the world moves. Every day the newspapers turn his cast-away and often incoherent utterances into news. The stock market rises and falls on speculation over the thoughts in his head. He may soon say something that starts a war. Hundreds of thousands of lives perch upon his volatile mercies. And this, all of this, because he understands that in America you prevail as long as you perform.