Do You Have Socialism Lurking In The Dank Corners Of Your Home?

Socialism is a scarlet letter. We all know it; we fear being branded with it. All your do-gooder efforts can be quashed in an instant once you have been labeled socialist. It’s a disgusting word, like commie and pinko(and we know what happened to them—and they were so social, not fascist and crony capitalist). No effort has been spared by the enemies of community to make sure you revile socialism because socialism is the dire nemesis of inequality and the hater of wealth concentration.

I am constantly impressed, no, amazed, at how completely the very wealthy people who own the newspapers, magazines, and tv have convinced the great sprawling masses that said masses deserve squalor, that they should never join together and that they should fight and sacrifice to preserve the power and wealth that is concentrated in the hands of so few. It’s brilliant. More than that, there is a side-splitting irony to it all. It works so well that it is enough to make you hate your fellow man. Except, the elite disdain for the working class—that too is an effective measure in dividing people, disempowering people and smothering socialism.

Socialism is a charged term with disputed definitions. Some of the common notions or tenets associated with this vilified term are “social organization”, “collective decisions”, “allocation of economic inputs to satisfy economic demands and human needs”, “cooperative”. Doesn't sound so bad. Yet this socialism is the villain in our collective story right now, and is a vile boogey-man to be feared and hopefully dashed. According to the narrative.

Really? I can see being the bad guy and disguising vinegar as kool-aid. It’s a goal effective tactic. But just handing out vinegar and expecting it to be swallowed, well, that should fail, shouldn’t it? I’m being facetious. Obviously, the blanket message received by most people is that higher ups are struggling to look after us and that socialism is a menace that would destroy us. But, man, they don’t even try hard to con us. It’s like we were begging to be demolished.

There is no way I can put a dent in the effective, intelligent, far-reaching propaganda machine that wealthy neo-conservatives employ, but I can try. (and I am not being cad when I call it intelligent and effective. The proof is all around us).

When you help your buddy move, even when he couldn’t foot the bill for pizza and beer--that is socialism.

When you drop money in the plate at church, or in the Sally Ann pot next to the bell ringing Santa--that is socialism.

When expanding on the positive reinforcement you have received from networking and sharing with family, friends and friends of friends, you feel everyone should be safe and fed--that is socialism.

Devoting a bit of everyone’s income to building roads so we can get all the stuff where it needs to go, allocating it because no canny capitalist would be daft to do anything so unprofitable--that is socialism.

Devising a welfare system, either because starving homeless people make you feel icky, or you are afraid they will kill you for your home and food--that is socialism.

Building a healthcare system for the whole community, not just because it’s sad when sick children die, but also because it is unproductive and costly to let illness spread unchecked--that is socialism.

Understanding that the world is really big and complex, and wanting your community to be able to compete, and so subsidizing necessary education—all the way up, not just primary—that is socialism.

Wanting proportionate representation, and ensuring that every voter has access to valid information--that is socialism.

Creating institutions that examine and evaluate industry (say, pharmaceutical, energy, waste removal and construction, or anyone else who might affect all of society in good and bad ways) and giving their employees a living wage so they don’t have to take bribes--that is socialism.

Fighting tying up knowledge in copyrights that suck all the affluence out of a community or not--that is socialism.

Fighting the patenting of food so giant corporations cannot hold the entire hungry planet hostage--that is socialism.

Questioning labyrinthine Gordian financial tools that decree all profit to the few and all costs and failure to the community--that is socialism.

Demanding that the richest not be allowed to hide behind unaccountable corporate documents when they steal or fail--that is socialism.

Getting really angry when the richest nations on the planet feature mass amounts of hard working people losing their homes and jobs, and angrily demanding some kind of reasonable answer and response from the government that everyone pays so much for, votes for and counts on--that is socialism.

Envisioning a world where some people are rewarded more than others depending on the amount of school, work or necessity of their tasks, but not supporting a few people to make thousands of times more than most, and not relegating most tasks to a wage that is below cost of living--that is socialism.

Wishing for a world where the average person wasn’t seeking two or three jobs to get by, where that person did not live in anxiety and had time to see their kids--that is socialism.

Demanding accountability from our elected representatives, since we elected them based on what they said they were about--that is socialism.

Not treating the planet like it, and we are transient, not behaving as though we are sociopaths, alone, on our own little islands, not looking at others like they are logs for the fire--that is socialism.

If you should happen to be some well off person who despises socialism, and believes there is some meritocracy that gave you--by your bootstraps alone--all you possess, MAKE NO MISTAKE: when socialism fails, I will sit in your sparkling kitchen eating a sandwich over your bleeding out body that I stabbed, before I loot your home. Do you know why? It will be me only because I was first in a very very long line. And I will laugh while your life ebbs.

Welcome To The New Dark Ages

My problem with democracy is 50 million Elvis fans can be wrong. They can be wrong about all kinds of shit.  But it is much more than the oversimplified idea that electing leaders based on popularity, soundbites and tie choice is a dodgy way to go about things.

My problem with democracy is most people are, through no fault of their own, not in a great position to make informed choice--whether they are smart or stupid, greedy or community oriented.  Even if inclined towards good decisions, does the average citizen have the time, energy and accurate information to become knowledgeable about economics, environment, climate, social costs and benefits?  I'm not saying the average voter is a simpleton (though it seems that way at times) but that s/he is very busy with mundane immediate concerns (like paying the rent or feeding the kids) and the world is a very big and very complex set of systems.

Add to the recipe a media that confuses people about important issues so intensely that people will often become hostile at even being asked to think about something. Sometimes this media is incompetent in exactly the same way as the poor voter, but often the Media, concentrated as it is in the hands of a wealthy few, has a strong agenda not at all in line with the best interests of the average voter.

Now you have a voter, commuting several hours a day, working at a job that is perhaps underpaid, struggling to keep a roof over his two kid’s heads and he has at best 20 minutes a day for information gathering.  This, he usually gleans from The Sun.  His peers are pretty much identical.  None of them want to appear ignorant.  All of them are biologically wired, and socially conditioned to look for group identity and fear the consequences of standing out.  Now you have a group with very little real information, a great deal of misinformation and slant, and a strong desire to take the shortest route to a comfortable unconflicted solidarity.  

If you think I am painting an unrealistic portrait of Joe Six-Pack, chances are you are an idealist who spends little time among the working class.  It’s not so different among the white-collared except they have a bigger mortgage and receive their propaganda dose from The Globe and Mail.  Then these people are expected to vote, not on an issue, but for a fairly concentrated executive group who will make decisions and laws for four years.  When the government screws them over, they are told tough titty, you got what you voted for. But did they understand what they were voting for?

The vast majority of people, including those with higher education—which face it, isn’t what it used to be, and at its strongest tends to be highly specialized--are not well informed about virtually any of the issues that should concern them most when it comes to civic activity, politics or voting.

The average citizen doesn't even understand that smaller government (a constant Conservative rallying cry) means less social goods and protections.  They do not understand that the majority of tax money is recycled right into society via jobs, social programs, culture, healthcare, infrastructure, safety regulations, etc, etc.  They vote for the party promising smaller government because they have been bamboozled into thinking that the government is their enemy.  

Ironically, by fulfilling the promise of leaner government through gutting social spending, deregulation, closing down oversight departments, cutting science spending, and fighting public unions, the resulting social problems confirm for the voter his suspicion that government is the enemy.  As a bonus: that same government still manages to overspend, just not in ways that benefit the people, further aggravating the voter. The sad thing is this cycle often does not translate into a shift in alliances to parties that actually would look after the voter better.  Absurdly, the voter often takes out his anger on the party that would be his best ally.  This does not happen in a vacuum, it happens in a heavily mediated environment.

Take for example, recent talks to privatize Canada Post.  CP is not an essential service, but the way privatization is framed perfectly illustrates the smaller government fallacy.  The spin in the media is that this will create competition and efficiency and benefit you.  Now, Canada Post is not only fiscally responsible, but generates a profit, nearly 300 million dollars annually, the article I read stated.  So talks of privatization are, from the get go, about fixing things that ain’t broke.  The article went on to state that 2/3 of CP’s expenses are the incomes of its 71 000 employees and that that money is costing you too much.  The article warns that in coming years a stamp could rise to 61 cents.  Given the size of Canada, this still strikes me as a steal. 

 

What made me angry is this angle I see all the time that you should feel vindictive because people are employed at a living wage, that wages are a frivolous unacceptable use of money.  These wages, posed as a negative are wages that get spent on houses and washing machines and cars, on restaurant meals, on clothes, on charitable donations, on taxes that keep parks, sewers and roads in good shape.  These wages aren’t stolen from you; they are part of the social compact of interdependence and mutual benefit.  These wages contribute to a healthy economy and a functioning community.  

With privatization, some significant portion of those jobs disappears altogether; many become rehires at substandard wages with benefits and protections removed.  The newly unemployed are added into job competition (which pushes wages down), the reduced wage employees have less money to spend in the community and contribute less tax to the government leaving it less able to provide for the community.  The collective economic and political clout of the people is reduced as well.  Lastly, the price of postage does not go down because private executives make much bigger salaries and with those fussy government regulations out the window perhaps the mail is less reliable too.

There isn’t a single good reason for an average person to want Canada Post privatized, but if all a person has to go on is the persuasive slanted media (that doesn’t feel the same strident need to portray “both sides of the story” as it does with climate change), that person will probably feel encouraged and supportive that another fat-cat public institution is getting its comeuppance.

More and more often, it’s the same story no matter the issue.  People are fooled into laws that harm them, deregulating safeguards that protect them, foisting costs into the public and profits into the private.  Is it really hard to see the harm in a Harper government?  Slash social spending; this grows poverty desperation, and social ills.  Create an omnibus crime bill with harsher sentencing and wider swathes of criminally deemed activities which eventually soar due to the aforementioned.  Build private super prisons for a slave waged “competitive” manufacturing industry for profit.  Is that what it has come to mean to be Canadian?

 

What is the end game in destroying civil rights and their institutions—for women, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, children, psychiatric patients and what motivates someone to vote for that?  What’s the end game in destroying environmental protection departments, closing down scientific bodies and denying the already actualizing consequences of climate change and what motivates someone to vote for that?  What motivates an average citizen to vote for a constrictive police state of disempowered citizens while creating a free for all for banks and corporations?

Why do farmers vote conservative, their worst enemy?  I know working poor and unemployed people who voted conservative.  I know rabid atheists who voted for Harper.  I know women who voted for Harper.  You would think in a world of record oil profits even the most ignorant voter would be wary of a party that endorses fat subsidies and tax breaks for the oil industry?

I get angry at voters even though voters are so poorly situated to vote well so it’s hard to blame them.  I do blame our voting system and voter apathy for awarding a majority government to the party that received approval from 24% of the electorate. 60% of the electorate voted, and nearly 40% of those chose Harper.

Harper doesn't even talk a good game about "the people" or "family values" or any other traditional political veil.  Whenever he refers to Canadians, he sounds like he is speaking of foreigners who he deems barely human, an irritating obstacle that needs to be humoured at times.  So, I just don't understand him winning an election, except that a lot of the non-voters are people who wouldn't have voted conservative had they voted.  They did not understand that refusing to vote was not a vote for none of the above, or an act of defiance, but a tacit endorsement of whoever did end up with the most votes.  If every person who earns less than 25 grand a year and didn't vote had added their vote to the NDP, we'd likely have Prime Minister Layton today.  

There were a lot more non-voters than Harper votes.  Think about that.  If every non-voter had voted rhinoceros party, they would be the government of Canada.

John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilization, discusses at length how helpful it is to conservatives to encourage the idea that "all parties are the same" and "what difference does my vote make" and "politics is all corruption and greed", because it never fools conservatives, only left leaning people and vulnerable people who feel powerless.  Every time a conservative rolls back the social good, it reinforces powerlessness to the vulnerable people in society and they feel further disenfranchised from the political process.  It’s a terrible ignorance fed feedback loop.

I keep hearing “the people have spoken”.  And I think, so what.  Even if it weren’t the case that a small minority has granted a great deal of power to a dangerous man, even if it was a real majority, even if it was unanimous, should I feel consoled that democracy has been served?

To Hell With The Nefarious Sharing Of Social Costs.

So many momentous things happening in the world: the horrible tragedy of the quake in New Zealand, the undulating ripple of change in the Middle East, the first acrid taste of a new wave of oil shocks, it’s enough to make anyone’s head spin.

So, I will avoid all that.  I’m thinking more about the stink in the air about metering bandwidth in Canada.  I am not sure why it is news or controversy, because to my knowledge, all the big players have been metering for ages.  But for some reason, right now, amidst all the other crazy stuff going on, metering is a big deal.

Humble ape that I am, I am coming out in support of metering.  Think about it:  while I am busy as an asshole pirate-downloading 50 years worth of Coronation Street, my neighbor, a sweet old gramma on a fixed income barely navigates three emails per month containing lo-res pics of the newest tots in her clan.  Why in hell should we pay the same rate?

I am not concerned by the fact that the big providers have admitted they have bandwidth to spare for ten times the amount of traffic we have today.  I am not concerned that they only seek a way to market discrete increases in bandwidth.  I’m just really mad that some people use more than other people, and yet everyone gets charged the same.  I hate that, it’s like someone gets a freebie.  It’s like everyone bands together and some people profit more.

I wholeheartedly support metering.  Of course, I am one of those ugly consistent people.  I like the idea of metering so much, I would like it applied to everything.  I understand that internet is a utility, but, in today’s world, it is also an essential communication tool.  Seriously, try and function in the modern world without internet.  But I don’t really care about what is essential or common to all, I just want metering.

As you use, so shall you pay. Mantra gold or maybe golden mantra.  I could almost get tea party donations for this.

A gross amount of my taxes go towards roads.  I do not own a car, nor do I drive.  I would never consider it a good idea to opt out, because someday I may need a taxi, an ambulance, or a police car and they require roads.  Just the same, I do not place wear and tear on roads the way drivers do.  So, in all fairness, why can’t we meter driving?  My tax bill could go down, and for heavy drivers, bills could go up.

Another big suck on my money is healthcare.  Some people use lots of healthcare.  Breeders, with their childbirth and sick kids suck the hell out of things.  And  old people who don’t smoke ride that rail for decades of plastic joints, heart medicine and cancer eradication, not to mention lying stupid in a bed in an old folks home.  And then there are the gays and drug addicts, constantly creating black holes in healthcare dollars.  I like this metering system, where I could bypass all that expense at the cost of others.

Speaking of breeders, there is the whole business of schools.  Whether I have no children, one child, or seven children, I pay the same amount of tax because some bleeding heart thought that education would profit us all.  Yeah, whatever.  If we metered education tax to match offspring, those who use more would rightfully pay more, instead of freeloading on my tax dollar.  Don’t talk to me about what those educated tots could do for me, I'm just not interested because that is about later and i am about now.

For that matter, I never call the police, I would like to opt out of paying for that too.  Let the user pay.  I used the fire department once, my best friend never has, but we pay the same tax.

In fact, now that I have thought this through to its logical conclusion, I realize that there is no basis for community or pooling of resources.  I dismiss organizing communities to facilitate good healthy functioning safe productive spaces as pie in the sky leftist drivel.

We already meter electricity and heating energies, both absolutely essential to surviving in a northern clime.  Or in other words we already say, you are only allowed to survive if you earn a sufficient amount of money.  Let’s embrace our credo, let’s fully embrace economic Darwinism.  I never use the phone, therefore I want people who use the phone more than I do to pay more.  It’s only fair.

Ok, ok, I’ve gotten ridiculous in my analogy.  But consider, bandwidth is like a great big pipe.  You pay your ISP for access to the pipe.  They aren’t costed more by your usage(seriously, they aren't and they have admitted it), but they can make big money if they demonize the people who spend more time on the internet, and they can exclude poor people from the basic right to apply for a job, since that is the only way it is done now.  They can convince you that a commodity you use is rare, when it is not and make us all feel greedy about how much of the interent we get, and leery of others who are 'freeloading' off of us.

Oil is precious and rare, bandwidth is not.  Both capitalist and socialist communities have to figure out what to do about oil, but not bandwidth.   

Communities and societies are real, despite what Thatcher declared.  Humans are pack animals and have always pooled resources.  But he people with a lot of money would like more money—I don’t know why, after all, once your needs are met, it’s just numbers.  It’s one of those things I just don’t understand.

If you are an average citizen, what way do you really want to vote about anything that is socialized?  Your vote against socialization either penalizes you or a relative or a friend, or a nieghbour that you don’t know but might need in the future.  Your vote for socialization ensures that whatever size the pot of goods is, it is divvyed to everyone as needed.

Internet service is not exactly a noble place to make a stand, but it does illustrate a point.  Very wealthy people are quite canny about turning us against our neighbours so they can profit.  Next time that you use a service of any kind—roads, sewage, medical assistance, garbage pick up, schools, the bloody post office, think about the contributions of people you will never meet, who make it possible because they believed in pooling resources.  They believed in spending some of their resources on things that profited you more than themselves, in hopes that you might do the same for them.

A Christmas Story

Christmas is not my favorite time of the year.  In fact, other than getting all mental about finding perfect gifts, I would be happy to do away with it forever.  But if I look back, and dig through this primates treasure chest of memories, there is one that sticks out.  This is the story of Christmas of 1988.

It was a bitter winter, not a lot of snow, but biting winds, kind of like this year.  I remember it well because I was homeless at the time, so other than escaping into a mall, briefly before security kicked me out, the evil wind was all I knew.

Every one of us criminals and urchins knew every corner that offered respite from the wind, and we jockeyed for place in our hidey spaces.  It was so bad that people fought over alley ways.  No one was mean; it was simply the difference between being cold and dying.  Not one of us felt being in a house was an option.

We were a rag-tag bunch of punk and metal youth, old war veteran winos and the homeless crazy population (made homeless that year by a change in the law).  Everyone had been working overtime panhandling, pulling double shifts in the cold wind, because there are more shoppers out that time of year, and they sometimes feel more inclined to give.

Between the holiday spirit/guilt and our shivering blue fingers, it was a veritable gold rush in the panhandler belt.  Even those of us that possessed excellent theft skills, sometimes came out on the street to reap the wealth of a populace that suddenly felt benevolent to us.  I even remember one guy, who we all feared because he was violent, and even he gave up “rolling” (violent muggings) to come panhandling with us.

It’s lost on understanding today, but we even wrapped presents for each other.  Mostly it was strange stuff that suited someone, or crazy things people believed in.  One of my friends collected 317 bottlecaps and wrapped them for a girl he was in love with.  She thought bottle caps were the only way to save a human soul and cried when she opened his gift.  (As an aside, she never accepted his love).

We weren’t alone.  During the so-called “fatcat” years of government, there were social agencies tasked with helping us out.  Mostly this was silly money pseudo-spent, and scary bureaucrats running the programs.  But there were a couple of people who really felt for the strange addled people of the street.

In December of 1988, budgets were being slashed, people were being fired.  It was completely a duck and cover situation. 

Everyone had an excuse to forget us on the street.

I hate to have memory die, and most of my memories seem to be dying—aging or killed brain cells, who knows?  I am trying to remember back then, the lone social worker who was trying to save us from ourselves that night, and who forsook his own Christmas to be down in the trenches with us.  His name was James Mullen.  He did not take the easy way out.

Its troubling to think of him now.  He was, at the time, in his mid thirties, past troubles with alcohol himself, and totally devoted to trying to make the streets less lethal to us; he was grumpy and impatient and a growly brother to us all.  he was a great bear on the street filled with a spirit i can barely describe.  Now, I am in the same age bracket and wonder what I have accomplished.  James may have very well saved me from myself or the streets.  I’m not sure I have given back.

I don’t know what the streets are like now, they seem cold and vicious with crack, but maybe it only looks that way because I am now a citizen, and just see scary street people.  But back then, we were dropping off like flies: suicide, overdose, car accidents.  James was trying to instill a sense of life into us.  He was trying to save us.

On that wintery 1988 night, boisterous James rallied every one of us: stinking kids, limping drunk vets and even the crazy folk; and we went to the movies.  Yes, having no hearth to go to, James brilliantly came up with the idea of the magic shadows for us.  It was a long pilgrimage down Rideau Street, constantly collecting our fallen.  I stumbled along, and someone put acid in my mouth to keep me going.   The theatre didn’t even want to let us in, and James had to vouch for all of us so we could go.  It was on his ass if we behaved badly—and badly was our specialty.

And we couldn’t quiet ourselves down, couldn’t behave like citizens;  we were just too excited.  We were like a mange of animals, and we laughed and caroused throughout the film. . None of us thanked him, we ran off to the next mania of the night.  But we all stayed alive, and we got to cavort in a togetherness that we should have had but rarely did.  It was Christmas.  And thanks to James, every forgotten soul got to feel good at Christmas that year.  In retrospect, I only feel sad that we abandoned him after, after all, he too was a lonely soul.  I hope he took pleasure in our zoo-like frenetic.

In 1988, James acted as our shepherd, and distracted us from the holocaust of pain that is the alone, demon plagued, homeless person on christmas eve.  And while never being saccharine or paternal, brought us all to a theatre, and made us feel like we were together.  When I try and summon a warm feeling for Christmas, it is back to that year that I remember.  That is my nativity.

Blessed Be on Samhain!

I’m taking a class in population geography. Because a big part of the class is demographics, the class exists in uncomfortable places. Native issues, multiculturism and the war on terror(which is code for war on Islam) routinely come up and we all get squeamish.

We would sit quietly and squeam like good Canadians, except my professor is really bombastic, and has no shame. He will, if you engage him, call you on everything. He will challenge, poke and dig at you. I started out thinking of him as my nemesis. And I felt he was a nemesis I couldn’t attack, because he is from Ghana and works for the department of Indian affairs. Yes, that fucking untouchable, from a politically correct viewpoint. So, as a good student who cares about my grades and the money I spend, I shut the hell up. Bazinga!

No, this ape never knows when to shut up, and I started arguing with him on line and in class. On the one hand, my voice encouraged the rest of the class to speak their own voices. On the other, that prof got past my neurotic feelings and engaged my brain. It had been sitting in a dusty corner, untouched for some time.

Fast-forward to the present and I am trying to find some way to segue this into a paste up from an online class dialogue. The professor had challenged a student who questioned whether we want to be embracing Islamic culture, and he challenged the idea that there is an Islamic culture. He suggested that Islam is a religion, not a culture. I’m only pasting my response because there is probably some kind of privacy violation otherwise, and really, it’s my blog, I don’t ever have a soapbox outside this space. So, clumsy segue:

“To be fair, Religion is a strong element in culture. I was raised atheist by lapsed catholics, but my parents unconsciously lived beliefs that would be considered catholic. When I listen to a stand-up comedian joke about catholicism, I relate, big time. More so, I was raised in a Christian culture. Christmas and Easter are high holidays in my national culture, but the biggest celebration in my own religion is Samhain. I recited the lords prayer every day in public school though it meant nothing to me, consciously. Of course, we also sang God Save the Queen, which meant even less. my daily bread was far more intrinsically meaningful than the queen. On the odd occasion that i have found myself in court, I was really confused as to why I should swear on a bible, and what did my swear mean if i was not Christian? I'm just lucky i wasn't afraid of the bible.

One quarter of the planets humans are Muslim, and Islamic cultures are nestled among other cultures. i.e nation based cultures, regional cultures, and cultures of immigrants. As a person who belongs to a minority religion, I always find it astonishing that people can so readily draw rigid lines between essentially similar religions. When I studied religion at Concordia University, years ago we referred to Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions as a type. And they aren't just similar; they share the many of the same source materials. Buddhism, Shinto, and Hinduism are far more "different" than Christianity and Islam. Native Indian religions and paganism are also much further away from Christianity than Islam is, and ironically have more history as being Canadian.

While all the "one god" religious cultures have been empirical, I'd have to say that Christianity holds the title for being the most aggressive and defensive. There is a bit in the bible about who should cast the first stone. Christian peoples and Muslim peoples routinely demonize each other despite the similarity of their values. What would the world look like if they joined together and opposed the military culture or the corporate culture?

That said, many Islamic cultures are pastoral and carry much better egalitarianism than our own culture. Perhaps "Islamic Culture" can bring something really meaningful to the table in Canada. One of the wisest men i have ever known ran a convenience store that actually stocked good food and fresh nuts and dates, not just soda pop and chocolate bars. He was from Iran and taught me a great deal about Persian culture and history and he had a gentle kindness that Ghandi would have envied. Unlike university, this education cost me nothing. His store was vandalized after a terrorist bombing in London. Trace the abstract cultural patterns in that.

Didn't mean to end on a bitter note. . . Joyous Samhain! Blessed be! (That is a religious freedom I enjoy in Canada)”

Revisiting Fat Albert Again

I’m afraid I may have been a bit flippant during my love for Fat Albert, and in crafting my narrative, lost sight of some truths.

Fat Albert began as a one shot special for television in 1969. Its success led to a weekly series in 1972. Both these dates predate the grim depression the US fell under. The show continued off and on production until 1982, so did produce and air during that deep depression. But it took place in an economically depressed world that had nothing to do with global economics and everything to do with institutionalized racism.

But in a very Canadian way, I wrote about it in a colour blind way. Obviously, the Cosby kids were created in an attempt to include black America. It was unheard of in its time for devoting itself to a portrayal of black youth. The show had a heavy handed moralistic message about topics like staying in school, not lying and forgoing crime. Assumedly, in a non racist America, blacks were still more susceptible to the dark side than whites and required this kind of messaging.

That snark aside, the show was groundbreaking for depicting an inner city impoverished black experience. It isn’t simply the cast, when the Fat Albert kids visit the hospital, the staff is all black, when they encounter police, they encounter black police.

And the show took place in the inner city, a setting that was not a part of America’s mythology, outside of Dirty Harry. Its setting is the same space that in 2010 is the playgrounds for retiring baby boomers that buy condos and shuffle around from restaurants to comedy clubs. Today’s inner city is clean, expensive and well-policed.


But back in the seventies, that same boomer power sank all its money and civic policy into suburbs, and the city suffered badly, and a generation of underpaid visible minorities kept cities barely alive, while conveniently tax supporting the Disneyland that so many Americans recognise as their childhood.

Fat Albert took place in alley ways, in a garbage dump, in movie theatres that were tattered, in a poisonous river that was drying up. It featured kids whose clothes were ratty, who sometimes went barefoot. It featured Kids who were hungry. It centred on stories where kids had to be clever and hard working just to find dimes to go to the movies. Kids who rummaged in the garbage for recyclables, kids who built the things they needed from the dump, and kids who imaginatively built a world for themselves out of what they had at hand.

Long before the gas crunch hit America, Fat Albert portrayed a world that had always lived under austerity conditions.

I always like a point Dimitry Orlov makes when thinking about America. He says in America you feel ashamed if you are poor, whereas the reality for most people everywhere, throughout history is to be poor. He feels wealth has often blinded us to the strengths that exist in economic poverty. People are not islands; they exist within communities and rely on one another, they know one another. They learn and practice a great many skills, building things, fixing things, mending clothes, finding fuel, growing food. Stuff the wealthy westerner knows nothing about. When everyone is poor, the last thing on your mind is any notion of being embarrassed about it.

Rewatching Fat Albert, I was loving the time capsule of my own childhood, a childhood where you ran in the wild, where the community of children had to fumble their way through making rules and finding justice among themselves. My own childhood involved scavenging in the garbage for useful things and even profiting from salvaging electronics that could be repaired. My childhood played in ravines and sewage drains, growing its own mythology about places. My childhood treasured trading crumpled comic books, so we could increase the amount of stories we got to read.

But after my reverie, I just felt I’d left a bit unsaid, concerning Bill Cosby’s greatest contribution to culture.

Plug: Retribution For A World Lost In Screens

I just need to post a link to the very best and smartest, yet pained rant I have read in a while. I appreciated the fire, yet felt shamed for my own state of wallow. If you go ahead and read it, keep watching Chris Hedges, he writes a lot of thought provoking material:

Retribution For A World Lost In Screens

I came across this via countercurrents, but it originated at:

Truthdigs

And my apologies for calling a desperate plea a "rant", but really, where are we but ranting at this point?

Nowhere To Hide

As it is winter, and as usual winter is doing its best to kill my soul, I have begun to avoid reading the news--it's just too maddening for a freezing ape to bear. I didn't quite escape this weekend though because reading the news is a good way to procrastinate on schoolwork.

In Ottawa, Federal stimulus spending has trickled down. Trickled into Ottawa. What I read about is increased spending in road expansions and extensions. In related news, public transit is being reduced in routes and frequencies. This is depressing all around, but especially depressing in the CAPITAL OF A G-7, G-8, G-20 NATION. Internationally, the world's nations have acknowledged and begun to accept the realities of peak oil, and are investing in light rail, renewables and public transit. But not Canada. We are Canadian, we build highways and subdivisions to drive to. Maybe its just a symptom of being an oil rich nation?

But it is winter, and I don't really want to think about frustrating things, so I turn to the entertainment section of the paper.

In the Globe and Mail, I read about an Australian dance troupe touring an intriguing sounding multimedia show. Ah so, when is it coming to Ottawa? Well, it isn't. The troupe is mainstream, and playing the biggest venues. In Canada it is going to Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary. yes, Calgary, with a smaller population than Ottawa.

I shouldn't be shocked. Living here for the last five years, I have watched as countless musical, theatrical and even film spectacles have bypassed Ottawa, sometimes stopping in tiny University towns, but not the nations capital. I've never understood how a nations capital could be such a cultural wasteland. Ottawa just isn't on the map. It's absurd to know that I might have a better time seeing a band I like in Sudbury than Ottawa.

I wonder if members of my federal government, who have closed up shop for the winter simply go to to other cities with their freed up time?

Sigh, where am I to escape to, if I cannot even read the entertainment section of the paper?

There Is No Such Thing As Society, Only Individuals

So many problems facing human communities can be attributed to a lack of collective political will. Optimists will sit back and praise the ability of technology to bring salvation, but we are not short of technology. The largest portion of money that goes to technology is associated with warfare. Number two on the list is diversions. Both of these expenditures of human, economic, and resource capital greatly contribute to the growth of isolationism, individualism and selfish obsession. Put another way, technology exacerbates the problems of collective action. So if technology isn’t riding in to save the day, then what?

Sometimes collective action problems are due to self-interest, competition, an inability to empathize at a distance or about things that have been abstracted. Sometimes, though, collective action problems are the result of a deliberate fracturing of communities.

John Ralston Saul described problems associated with a depoliticized population in his book, “The Unconscious Civilization”. It collects a series of Massey lectures. Much of the book can be summed up in the following quote:

You know a society is in trouble when the virtual totality of the elite, now a good third of the population, adopts public silence and private passivity on the professional level, then walks away from society to blow off accumulated steam on private pleasures.
Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't.

There are norms and ideologies that reinforce the kind of isolation and passivity that lead to collective action problems. Think of the saying, about how religion and politics are to be avoided in polite conversation. The number of places where it is appropriate to discuss matters of importance, let alone organise some kind of response seem to dwindle daily. Saul maintains that corporate interests encourage the belief that political discourse and political institutions are not to be trusted, ineffective, and out of reach to the individual because it is very beneficial to clearing the way for those corporate interests.

My concern of the moment is the limited number of social spheres where people even have the possibility of communicating with one another(yes, in the communication age). It is the workplace I am thinking about. Bringing your concerns about the public good into the workplace(even if your workplace is supposedly dedicated to the public good, or maybe especially if it is) can cause friction, can black mark you and can get you fired. Now, in the modern world, the largest block of waking time is generally spent in the workplace and the workplace is often one of the only group social venues a person has. The place where people might have the greatest ability to gravitate together on some issue of importance is the very last place where it would ever happen.

Borrowing again from Saul’s Massey lectures, here is a quote from Socrates:

If I say I cannot "mind my own business" you will not believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and that examining both myself or others is really the very best thing a man can do and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me. Nevertheless, gentlemen, that is how it is.

There are two important things here.

The first, is that Socrates’ famous quote, “the unexamined life is not worth living” did not concern the psychiatrist’s couch, navel gazing or personal fulfillment. It was about the public good. The quote takes on its self-absorbed reading when filtered through a society that has bought into the Thatcher quote that forms the title of this essay; a society that has become a cult of diversion and ego.

The second important thing is the notion that to pursue the public good, ideas about the good need to be out in the public. If people can’t talk together about the things that are important, or work on consensus and strategy, they become removed from the very basic idea that they are citizens, that they have a role to play, that they have responsibilities and that they have power. Any particular ill, whether political, economic or environmental, is not the governments problem, it’s your problem, my problem. The government is a distillation of you, me and everyone else. Of our aims. Of our priorities. If it isn’t, it loses its legitimacy, and that is still our problem.

Government isn’t “they”, it is “us”. It is how and who we choose to coordinate our efforts. Society isn’t something out there, something abstract, it is us, and the sum total of the things we think, say and do. The Thatcher quote can be turned around. If there is no society “up” there, or “out” there, if there is just you, your spouse, your children, your neighbours, your classmates, your coworkers, if there is just people everywhere, all over the globe, can anyone afford silence and passivity? Can we afford to simply ignore collective action?

I don’t have an answer as to how exactly to bring back public discourse into the public. I don’t know how to make it safe, desirable or protected. I simply bring up the fact reducing citizens to units of production, and threatening ostracization and/or expulsion when they attempt to present a whole integrated civically aware self in the workplace constitutes a grave and insidious dilemma. It’s an incapacitating viral dilemma. In or out of the workplace, bring up some pressing concern of the public good and watch how fast the room turns icy, or worse watch the almost fearful discomfort rise up. The code of silence and passivity originates from a variety of spheres, but it is self-reinforcing. And that is a collective action.

From Active Resistance to Civil Disobedience to Play-Time Protest

Emma Goldman is famous for, among other things, saying, “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution”. And that seems such an endearing slogan, beseeching us to retain our humanity on the battlefield. But sometimes it looks like there is an awful lot of dancing, and not very much revolution. There is a lot of crap going on in the world that could use attending to. Ever rising rates of carbon emission. Military “adventuring” for material gain. The economic gutting of working people. Governments moving ever further away from the public good toward corporate interest. Environmental regulations being dismantled. Food production slowly evolving into a kind of biological warfare. In 2009, we might be better served by a slogan more along the lines of “If you won’t get down to work then you have no place at the dance”.

I read in the news recently, that a protest group was declaring a hunger strike because the Copenhagen climate talks are taking on the character of a vaudeville routine (Who’s on first. What’s on second). Hunger strikes may be of dubious value, but they do tend to garner attention and they offer a pretty strong statement of commitment on the part of the protester. Being willing to starve, risk kidney damage, and possibly death does effectively shout “guys, this is really really important to me, I need you to listen”. It’s often overlooked that one of the handiest things about this form of resistance is it is simple and requires little in the way of effort or knowledge. As long as you are somewhere that people will notice, all you do is stop eating. Watching someone waste away, consumed from the inside out does make people uncomfortable in today’s world of delicate sensibilities.

I read a little further. It turns out that this group decided to fix something that wasn’t broke. They devised a rotating system of shifts: You starve today, I take my turn tomorrow and we’re letting Jack Sprat sit this one out, because he’s already a little on the thin side. More of a peckish strike than a hunger strike. The advantage of this strategy is you can keep up a hunger strike indefinitely instead of the previous hard limits of 30 to 50 days. Unfortunately, since it takes about three days for your body to even get past burning this morning's gummy bears, your previously visceral statement is turned into a lame metaphor and the cameras will move on to the topless protesters down the block.

What prompted this post was waking up to an email from Adbusters, with a bold 18 point font headline: “Buy Nothing Day Morphs into a Wildcat General Strike”. Wow, what’s this? Things have grown dire and we have to step up our efforts to bring down the “capitalist consuming machine”(otherwise known as ‘us’). While recognizing my noble efforts in the past, valiantly completing my immediate shopping needs by the 26th or else focusing my will to put them off until the 28th, the think tank in the Adbuster War Room calculates that we now need a hard push if we are to turn the tables on. . .on. . . well, I am still a little unclear on who the recipient of this message is, but I digress. This year, on November 27th, I need to go even further beyond the call of duty and “turn off all non-essential appliances”. Whoah, the kid gloves are off. I'm not sure how to differentiate between essential and non-essential though. Hospital life-support machines, ok, they’re probably essential. It gets a little grey when I think about the blender which provides my organic-whey-protein-with-açaí power shake in the morning(hey, I'm not in the hunger strike battalion). If Joan of Arc had had this hammer in her toolbox, just think how things could have turned out. More tools is good, isn’t it?

One of the benefits of the broad application of post-secondary education to the young adult consumer market is that there is just a hothouse of fertile creativity in the protest movement. Back around the time that unions started to gain strength, protesters were uneducated and had to resort to carrying two-by-fours and bricks and engaging in a kind of urban warfare to gain the attention of their oppressors. Remember those Wildcat Strikes! Today though, in a more enlightened age, we have Puppet Theatre. This is arguably a more complex form of protest, but education filled that ingenuity gap. Basically, the night before the protest, you pull on your best Che Guevera(TM)t-shirt, then you gather your cell members, pick up some markers, glue, scissors, fabric and a couple of six packs of local micro brew and then you just let your creativity run wild in an explosively anarchic synergistic collaboration. Then, at the protest, you stage a drama, rich in symbolism and mythic allusion and really let the enemy know you mean business.

Author Derrick Jensen cuts right to the heart of the matter. He poses the question, What if, in the Star Wars Saga, the rebel Alliance had used the tools of the environmental movement? Some highlights are the promoting of eco-tourism on Endor among the storm troopers, setting up fair-trade coffee stands on the death star, and letter writing campaigns imploring Vader to give up his destructive ways. Jensen’s telling of the story underscores the absurdity of it all. As amusing as it is, your laughter gets hollow and an uncomfortable feeling creeps into your gut when he gets to the more radical protesters. The hardcore of the movement go down to planets slated for destruction, link hands, sing give peace a chance and project "waves and waves of loving kindness" at Vader.

I do understand the value of protest. Sometimes it raises awareness on an issue. It gives people a chance to declare their non-support. Occasionally, with enough of a groundswell, it gets politicians itchy under the collar as they wonder where the voter heart lies. And it is an opportunity to build community ties, human bonds and to learn you are not alone in your discontent. But the flip-side is the mistaken sense of what it can accomplish, and its vulnerability due to media filtering (when the news reports a protest, it usually doesn’t identify the cause, but instead focuses on how “they” thwarted “you” by disrupting traffic). There are other liabilities too. It can cause complacency in the casual witness who may feel sympathetic but is comforted that “something is being done”. Worst of all, it becomes a substitution for the real work involved in change. A good portion of this cohort don’t vote and don’t “believe in” politics or institutions (wake up call: they are real, powerful, organized and effective and they don’t require our belief). For the most educated generation ever, there is a flabbergasting naivety concerning how things work, how things get done. If the limits of your political discourse are “hey hey, ho ho, blank-blank has to go”, and the limits of your resistance activities are token protest gestures and you are blind to how supportive to “the enemy” your complete civic absenteeism is, then you will always have a growing number of protests to attend. Because the world will keep merrily on in its terrible way, guided by the people who are actually doing things.

Years ago, I was sitting with some friends. Decent, intelligent, kind, educated middle class adults. All very concerned with the state of the world. My disgruntled peer group was highly identifiable by their fashionable blend of post-punk and nerd-chic. They considered the “anti-conformism” of their store bought clothes to be part of their “political” statement(yes, with enough education, you can simultaneously disbelieve in politics, yet believe denim is a political statement). A very ordinary looking guy in white shirt and tie walked up to us. Turns out he was a former classmate of the group. Nobody had seem him hanging around in a long time, and they asked what he had been up to. As it was, he had gone off to law school and was well on his way to becoming an environmental lawyer. After he left, they jeered about how he had sold out, and wondered what he hoped to accomplish. There was even a lament, that he “had been so cool, what happened to him"? If the whole group had all become environmental lawyers, would Canada have gotten away with re-designating a bunch of lakes, “tailings ponds”, as a clever cost-effective solution to toxic pollution by resource industries?

Incidentally, Emma Goldman wrote, spoke and did an awful lot of pretty impressive revolutionary stuff, but most likely never said that quote in the opening. She did however try to assassinate a corporate industrialist CEO that she had identified as one of the enemy.

Better Off

One of the more vivid stories from mythology we have carefully carried through time, is the flight of Icarus. It is a cautionary tale, and the villain is sometimes thought of as Hubris and sometimes as Recklessness. Daedalus, Icarus’ father, builds 2 sets of wings out of wood, feathers and wax, to use to escape from Crete. Icarus’ father had warned him not to fly too low or his wings would get wet and not too high or they would melt. Icarus, of course, flew higher and higher, in ecstasy at the glory and sense of freedom, until he flew too close to the sun and melted away his wings. It is a valuable story with many possible nuances in the telling.

I found myself thinking about that ancient tale while watching the latest incarnation in the Stargate franchise. Television, with its truncated story arcs, tendency to melodrama and its use of unlikely situations to illuminate the human condition has always struck me as being akin to a modern mythology. In Stargate Universe, our heroes are trapped on a hyper-advanced alien space ship that has run out of fuel and is on a collision course with a star. They soon realise that they should have burned up, but instead, their shields are holding. Depicted in breathtaking visuals, we watch the ship swoop down right into the star to harvest energy. The ship refuels and our awestruck heroes continue their quest into the unknown. Watching, the hair on my arms stood on end, I felt misty and moved and having followed the narrative through the crisis-climax-relief, I had a swirl of endorphins churning inside that gave me wonder at the possibilities in the universe. Great story-telling.

And you know part of why it was so satisfying? It was a myth of wish-fulfillment. It was the opposite of the kind of wisdom that has been honed to its essence in a myth. The Icarus myth warns us of our shortcomings, our short-sightedness and what we stand to lose when we neglect what is important in a bid to have it all. The Stargate myth is the myth of our time. It is the technology myth and it is the myth of no limits and it is the myth of more is better.

Only it isn’t a true myth. It is a child’s fantasy of being loose in the candy store. Fantasy and myth are not the same thing at all. Fantasies provide escape and temporary relief from stress and are a valuable contribution from our imaginations. Myth, like its cousins fable, parable and allegory, is meant to harness the power of story in order to guide, instruct, and provoke reflection. Myth is meant to give you pause.

I came across a book recently by Eric Brende, entitled, “Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology”. In the course of completing a PhD at MIT on the social effects of machines on human life, Brende spent 18 months living in a small Mennonite-styled farming community that had closed the door on electricity and fossil fuels. He did this to gain some sense of what life is like without automatic machines, to discover other forms of technology and to reflect on what technology brings as well as takes away. Brende is instinctually wary of technology, yet not wanting to be reactionary. He asks how much technology is enough. How much is too much? Like Daedelus, he is looking for a successful flight path.

In a sumptuous narrative that twines strands of history, science, religion, economics as well as community, friendship, and family, Brende weaves an engaging story of his own voyage, his own reflections on the myth of technology. The very structure of the book is designed to be an example of what it discusses. It moves at a lazy pace, and winds in and out of spaces and times and ideas. It encourages the reader to step out of linear efficiency and slow his own pace down. It invites the reader to have his own reflections interact with the text. That the book turned out the way it did, is a demonstration of things learned along the way.

It isn’t an anti-technology polemic, far from it. The first thing Brende does is distinguish between tools and automatic machines. Tools bring a person into contact with his aim. Tools engage. Tools are useful without being in the way. Machines tend to rob a person of skills, physical health and human connections. Machines, designed to free up time tend to rob a person of many human pursuits and take activities that once integrated many functions—social, physical, mental, emotional, and fractures them. Aside from the energy drain of working for the money to buy and maintain machines, life becomes cluttered and stressful trying to manage jobs and friends and family and personal life that each have their own little compartments of time. He makes the point over and over again that instead of shaping machines to our human ends, we end up shaping ourselves around the machines.

Brende soon learns that life among the Mennonites isn’t drudgery, but a rich complexity of skilled tasks set in a densely interdependent community and carried out with gentle rhythms and cycles. While he is at it, he discovers a multitude of simpler, sometimes older, technologies, each with a specific purpose, each requiring human skills. Some technologies are recent innovations, applications of human ingenuity that fine tune an application without displacing the human input.

When it comes to questions about technology, members of the community meet in council to discuss what purposes their might be in adopting a new technology and what risks it entails. Society at large tends to simply adopt most technology on the principle that more is better. At best, we ask what can this technology give us. We don’t spend much time at all worrying about what it will cost, what will be lost, and if it would be reversible. To this day we use the term luddite to ridicule anyone who questions technology. The luddites balked at the introduction of automatic looms which destroyed an entire skilled trade, severed a history of skills and craftsmanship, put an entire sector out of work, concentrated the wealth of the community into fewer hands, and probably caused all manner of tragic circumstances in the families of those affected. And those are only the immediate consequences. One might ponder higher order consequences linked to standardization, homogenization, the consumerism that follows mass production.

The Mennonites ask will this technology rob us of skills? Will it cut us off from cherished activities? Perhaps, most importantly, they ask will this technology interfere with the cooperative nature of our community. They are concerned with their social fabric. They don’t see independence and idleness at rewards. They’re all for technologies that help get the job done well, technologies that serve their efforts and technologies that genuinely benefit the community.

By way of example, forgoing cars is seen as essential to maintaining a human pace. Just as the “new urbanism” movement discusses building communities that are human scaled, human pace is to be considered also. Travelling by foot, bicycle or horse drawn wagon limits speed and the sphere of travel. It is a precondition for neighbourly stability, mutual aid, and everyday face to face interaction. Brende makes the point also, that human paced transportation lets you remain interactive with your environment. You can see more, hear more, you can smell things, touch things, talk to people. He described the wagon as a “kind of moving front porch” that let you become a “transitory neighbour”.

After functional communities, maybe the best benefit discussed is silence and stillness. Human paced life is full with quiet times, slow times. It leaves time to reflect and be mindful. It is difficult to lead a directed and centred life if you are always rushing about, your whole life is compartmentalized and your day is an assembly line of moments. The sensory overload that comes from our electronic commercialized world can be both blinding and numbing.

One of the first criticisms that comes to mind is the question of whether any of this folksy charm is applicable in the greater world of near seven billion rapidly urbanizing souls. As well, technologies are linked in an intricate web and it is hard to just pick and choose. I might feel many of the technologies in a hospital are quite desirable, but they do not manifest without a whole host of other technologies I find undesirable.

Between fossil fuel shortages and the need to constrain carbon emissions, we may just find out the wide scale applicability of the ideas in Brende’s book. But the obvious first question is: what is more likely, that technology will solve our problems, or that runaway technology helped us arrive at this problematic place in the first place. Frankly, I'm often terrified by our desperation to hang onto what seems to me to be a fairly ugly way of life. I carry an image in my head befitting a Steven King story, of the slaves working in the fields to grow corn for the cars, and then the cars drive the slaves back home and plug them into their televisions to maintain stability. I carry another one similar to the “grey goo” theory of nanobots, except we are the nanobots and we eat every last thing on the planet.

I also have daydreams of a country having thousands of small towns rather than a few megacities. I imagine endless variations between towns in their look, culture and flavour. I imagine people working at many different tasks rather than being specialized. I imagine knowing and needing your neighbours. I imagine people listening to live music together that they produce instead of having massive CD collections that they listen to isolated in their headphones. I imagine communities where the various talents of everyone is useful because we haven’t sought out economy of scale, mass production or the most efficient path to profit.

I'm not naive. If we are in for challenging times ahead, I understand perfectly well the problems engendered by greed, paranoia, and desperation. I understand collective action problems and the problem of previous investment. And then there are the hardwired problems of evolution around competition for resources. The list doesn’t end there. I have a hard time hanging onto my little daydreams of a more wholesome slow paced world and an even harder time not being overwhelmed with frustration and fear at the bad places I can imagine ourselves heading to.

Icarus plummeted after attaining great heights. That the sun educated Hubris and Recklessness is a sublime serendipity when viewed today. The sun gives all life and is the source of every energy we have from oil to the flexing of our own muscles. It is a symbol of power and ambition and a destructive force. Apollo, a sun god, is a god of harmony, yet a god of conquest. He is associated with healing and with bringing plagues. The issues we face today are all about our relationship to the sun, and which side of Apollo we have been promoting. In our own playing out of the Icarus tale, we have been trying to change our relationship with the sun from harmony to conquest. We keep cranking out the technology trying to heal our ills and we bring more plagues. The ancient sunlight in coal and oil that we burn have given us flight, but with the onset of climate change, we are melting the wings we have been so proud of.

As much as that Stargate storyscape is wondrous and fascinating, I don’t need or want that in my future. I don’t need more technology. I need very simple things, the same as everyone else does: food, community and meaningful things to do. Brende’s book may contribute some idea and inspiration for how we respond to the things that are coming our way. It may also offer a sense that what is coming could be viewed as a renewal, not a collapse.