A diversion from class struggle: Boston Legal

Time out from politics for a moment. It's too hot in Ottawa, and I mean that literally.

I once switched on the box several years ago and caught an episode of The Singing Detective. As I watched the dense and richly-textured plot unfold, I thought to myself, This is what television could be. The medium really does have enormous potential. Slings and Arrows is another rare illustration of this, made right here in Canada, too. Despite the critics' snotty commentaries, Paul Gross did the best Hamlet I've ever seen a few years ago at Stratford, and his considerable talents are uniquely suited to this backstage comedy.

For all sorts of reasons, though (mainly the exigencies of capitalism), TV is a living example of the race to the bottom, a desert of game shows, talk shows, assorted "judge" shows, "reality TV" shows, and random snippets and gobbets of this and that, intended for an audience weaned on Sesame Street who have, consequently, the attention-span of a gnat. That doesn't mean, though, that I don't watch a lot of it myself, and while drinking beer, not latte. My partner likes reno-porn, as a friend of ours calls the house-and-garden shows, and I've built up a healthy respect for Mike Holmes.

But in our case there must be some sort of cosmic re-balancing going on, because our favorite programs have been the Law and Order and CSI series. Fresh from the battlefields of protest and opposition, we cheer on the cops and the district attorneys, those "two separate but equally important groups" who, respectively, investigate crime and (presumption of innocence be damned) "prosecute the offenders." Aggressive defence lawyers, defending indefensible clients on hallucinatory grounds, drive us nuts, not to mention the bleeding-heart judges who waggle their fingers at Jack McCoy for some infinitesimal technical transgression and let sadistic murderers back on the street. We wait for the guilty verdicts with pleasurable anticipation, drinking in the stunned looks of the offenders as they're carted off to Rikers. They'll do hard time. Serves them right.

And, as a long-time critic of positivism, I am all awe and admiration for the hi-tech science and the meticulous evidence-based methodology of the criminalists in Las Vegas, Miami and New York. It's entered the domestic lexicon: "Did you take that last piece of pizza?" "What, did I leave some epithelials?"

But these urban morality plays, which effortlessly seduce us into a point of view that can be found more consistently over at places like Dust My Broom and Small Dead Animals, do not entirely rule the roost. Programs featuring defence attorneys are not as common--it's the Zeitgeist, stupid--but a few of them have shown staying power, like LA Law and The Practice. The spin-off from the latter, however, Boston Legal, transcends the pack of 'em, as well as the cop-and-prosecutor efforts that, in our saner moments, we realize consist of nothing more than hegemonic state propaganda.

A few years ago in New York City, we bought scalper's tickets and went to the theatre to see The Tempest. Who strode magnificently onto the stage as Prospero? Why, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise. Patrick Stewart was first-rate, another Shakesperian, like Paul Gross and indeed William Shatner, who made the real money somewhere else. But I cannot imagine Captain James Kirk doing a proper job of Shakespeare. Shatner was a ham, his acting in the early Star Trek series abominable. He was wooden, self-conscious and frankly silly most of the time.

So what happened? Somehow the man has finally found his métier. Shatner is just playing himself, laughing at himself and making it work, because his character is, well, wooden, self-conscious and frankly silly. Denny Crane has amazing presence as an early-onset Alzheimer's victim, an unabashed Republican and gun nut, who still wins cases, merely by pompously stating his name. "Denny Crane." I love it when he does that.

But one actor alone is not responsible for making this series sing. James Spader and Candace Bergen are indispensible. The three of them play off each other like a trio version of the Beatles. And Boston Legal is simply brilliantly scripted. Watching it is like entering a parallel universe where everyone is just slightly...off. The characters talk English, but one is tempted to search the place for pods. The only person who seems to be from planet Earth is Paul Lewiston (Rene Auberjonois), whom Trekkies will remember as Odo, the bucket man.

The storyline is complex, a mixture of discourses, largely parodic, swirling around themes of human passion and morality in both personal and legal settings. Watching Denny and Alan Shore (James Spader) have their manly Scotch and cigars in the evening, exchanging odd comments in perfect communion, two good friends, is worth the price of admission.

I don't know how the team, actors and writers, maintains such consistency. I haven't heard a false note yet. This is one of those series one watches in fear as well as admiration, wondering when it will come to an end--when that ecstatic jamming will falter, and the regular accordionist lurches once again onto the stage.

On to the next season. I can't wait.

From an alternate universe...

(Small Dead Animals and Celestial Junk were two of the many conservative blogs that mocked the reaction of the Parliamentary Press Gallery to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s demand that his office decide which reporters would be permitted to ask Himself a question. The following was retrieved from a pod that entered this universe through a tear in the space-time continuum. --DD)

PM: And now Comrade Kate McMillan may ask her question.

DT: Many thanks, Comrade Prime Minister. My question, as you know, has to do with freedom of the press. Recognizing that the press, largely composed of members and sympathizers of the disgraced ancien régime, frequently do not offer the respect that the Comrade Prime Minister is due, and do not speak for the broad masses of the workers and peasants, what steps will you take to ensure that the people are properly informed in the future? Thank you, Comrade.

PM: Thank you for your question, Comrade. If more reporters were like you, we would cease to have a problem with them. But for the most part they do not accept the will of the people, and continue to raise questions where none is warranted.

With my Party, I am planning an initiative to ensure that the people receive the information to which they are entitled. We shall be instituting a program of licensing journalists, which is not that radical a departure from the current practice of issuing press credentials. From now on, those credentials will simply have to be earned. As in the case of doctors, lawyers and accountants, certain minimal standards must be met.

Journalists who wish to practise their profession will shortly require a period of training in the basic rules and ethics of the profession. Once this training is complete--Comrade Levant will be the new Commissioner for Journalism, and will oversee the training--an oath of loyalty to Canada will be administered. We expect our first class to graduate sometime in 2007.

Until then, we shall keep the people informed with a regular series of press releases. Anyone with questions will be able to reach us at an email address or a toll-free number --1-800-GET-FACT. An operator will be standing by. Please stay on the line to retain your calling priority. (Laughter)

Journalists already in the profession will be permitted to practise--until they get it right. (Laughter and applause) But we are free not to talk to them--this is, after all, a free country. (Applause) Of course, they all have the option of going back to school.(Laughter)

Once again, Comrade, thank you for your question. (Prolonged and stormy applause)

Fleshing the press

The unseemly delight with which right-wing bloggers are celebrating Harper's on-going attack on freedom of the press speaks volumes about their hidden agenda. Remember that? It's not so hidden any more: this is a command-and-control government, led by a man with clearly authoritarian tendencies, and cheered on by all those erstwhile champions of freedom and transparency who have revealed themselves to be something else entirely. Indeed, as an Italian friend of mine said today, Harper is more and more coming to resemble the strutting and paranoid Silvio Berlusconi. As for his followers, the barking of trained seals is almost deafening.

What Harper and his supporters fail to understand, in the final analysis, is how journalism works. Jeffrey Simpson, not a man I tend to admire, writes a commonsense column in today's Globe & Mail that's worth a read. Journalists ask hard questions to get public figures on the record and to elicit information. Simpson points out that various Canadian prime ministers of both Conservative and Liberal persuasion have considered the press biased against them. They are in fact engaging in an attempt at deflection, one that won't stand up to scrutiny.

Here's an extract from Simpson's piece:

He should ask Paul Martin or John Turner. Or Jean Chrétien, whose government was rocked by endless media coverage of scandals, real or imagined. Did not Mr. Harper's party in opposition feast on that same media coverage month after month? Was it not The Globe and Mail that broke and pursued the sponsorship affair long before the Auditor-General sank her fangs into it?

Not to mention endorsing Harper for Prime Minister back in January! Four months is obviously an eternity in politics.

And here's Harper himself:

Unfortunately, the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government and they don't ask questions at my press conferences now.

The PM's view of journalists, from this extract, seems to be that they ought to behave like Conservative flaks. Penetrating, probing queries annoy those who like to operate in the shadows, uttering imperial pronouncements from time to time that it would be treason to question.

But journalism isn't about showing deference. It's about eliciting information. When a fiercely partisan Conservative was proposed to head up a new commission on public appointments, supposedly put in place to ensure non-partisanship, a parliamentary committee had the effrontery to challenge the choice. Mr. Gwyn Morgan was grilled about his publicly-expressed views on immigration, and was pretty well accused of being a bigot. When CTV's Jane Taber got him on-air, her first question was, "Are you a bigot?" The howls of outrage from the right half of the blogosphere were something to hear. Yet her question was simply good journalism. It offered Morgan the opportunity to rebut, and to enlarge on his views.

Taber was blasted for a recent interview with Rona Ambrose on Kyoto, too: in spite of her questions, some commenters smugly noted, Ambrose came out of the interview looking calm, cool and well-briefed. In spite of her questions? More like because of them. Who allowed Ambrose to shine from coast to coast to coast? Why, the evil "MSM," that's who.

Let me pause for a moment, though, to engage in a little self-criticism. Once upon a time, when I held senior office in a large public service union, I dealt with the media, national and local, on a fairly frequent basis. At first I reacted to pointed questions as though we were having an on-air argument. It took some growing on my part to realize that I was being given an opportunity to get the message out, and to counter assumptions that many held about unions and our position on issues of the day. Nor did it matter if my questioners--many of whom were members of the Canadian Media Guild--were "really" antagonistic to unions or not. The questions themselves were a jumping-off point.

That's not, of course, how Harper sees it. He wants to pick and choose the journalists he will deign to respond to. He has muzzled his own caucus. If the Parliamentary Press Gallery resists becoming in effect his personal PR outfit, well, he just won't talk to them, then.

The peevish and petulant little man who heads our government is demonstrating frankly dangerous tendencies. When he doesn't get his way, he tends to lash out like a spoiled child. It's becoming clear what he and his blindly-partisan supporters want: unconditional obedience and shows of respect, a lot of kow-towing and curtseying, a tame media and a tame electorate.

I am, for some reason, put in mind of W.H. Auden's poem, "Epitaph on a Tyrant":

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

A reporter once took on another imperial-minded prime minister some time ago. Here is the partial exchange:

At what cost? How far would you go? To what extent?

Well, just watch me.

Just watch Stephen Harper. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Carleton U. to honour homophobe

One of Ottawa's most prominent gay-baiters, Rabbi Reuven Bulka, is set to receive an honorary doctorate from Carleton University on June 13. Author of "One Man, One Woman, One Lifetime - An Argument for Moral Tradition," Bulka is well-known on the "pro-life" speaking circuit, and has has spoken out publicly against same-sex marriage in Canada.

His views on homosexuality can only be characterized as extreme. Bulka sits on the so-called "Scientific Advisory Committee" of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a fringy far-right outfit in the United States that believes homosexuality is a disease that can be "cured."

Carleton University is well-known in Canada for its progressive values--it has long prided itself on its diversity and inclusiveness. Its decision to honour Bulka flies in the face of these values. Anyone interested in questioning this eminently questionable decision should get in touch with the President of Carleton University, Dr. David Atkinson, at david_atkinson@carleton.ca. And why not drop a line to Dr. Marc Garneau, Carleton's Chancellor, while you're at it? He can be reached through the Departmental Administrator of the Carleton Board of Governors, Ms. Barbara Steele, at barbara_steele@carleton.ca.

UPDATE: (May 25) The Carleton University GLBTQ Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity is now busy moblilizing against the award. There will be an article in the student newspaper, a letter-writing campaign and a protest at convocation if the university presses forward. Meetings are planned with Dr. Atkinson and with groups such as EGALE. Stay tuned for more.

Chickenhawks

Parliament has agreed, by a slim margin, that we should continue our military adventure in Afghanistan until 2009--and who knows how much longer after that. Bush's "war on terror" is, by definition, endless, like the great wars in Orwell's 1984:

Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war....But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

Now Canada is further enmeshed in the international policy and narrow interests of the US, which, as history reminds us, has engaged itself in wars, proxy wars and invasions almost since it declared independence.

The vote was won with the assistance of people like Michael Ignatieff, an outspoken defender of the American imperial mission, described in the press rather confusingly today as a "senior Liberal." (I'm out of the labour movement, where seniority actually means something.)

So, folks, what are we fighting for? (Cue Country Joe and the Fish).

Some facts:

Afghanistan was ruled until recently by one of the most brutal regimes in the world: the Taliban. Women suffered grievously under their rule. The weekend entertainment was to trek down to the local stadium to watch the public amputations. On perhaps a relatively lighter note, men went to jail for trimming their beards and kite-flying was prohibited. It was a country ruled by a cult of religious insanity.

Where did the Taliban spring from? That's where things get interesting. Afghanistan had a USSR-backed government, later overthrown. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in their own version of quagmire. The US and other interests backed the armed opposition, some of whose fragments coalesced into the Taliban. They call this sort of thing "blow-back."

Needless to say, this nutbar republic attracted the interest of figures such as Osama bin Laden. The rest is recent history. After 9/11, George W. Bush discovered, for the first time, that women were being mistreated by the Taliban, and had his wife wax eloquent about it, just as his regime was making things tougher for women at home.

Strictly speaking, the US did not invade Afghanistan: they provided air support and materiel for the Northern Alliance, which eventually triumphed over the Taliban and took power. Elections were then held. The US and its partners are now trying to shape the new government into a mirror-image of themselves. They've had to rap the knuckles of the new President, Hamadi Karzai, over the threatened execution of a Christian convert. Bad optics, however you look at it; maintaining cosmetic freedom eventually trumped separation of powers, but Karzai has now appointed a religious fundamentalist to head up the new Supreme Court. Perhaps the executions can begin after what Henry Kissinger once called a "decent interval."

My point is this: we're now involved in a civil war between rival gangs of hard men in a failed state. These things tend to go on forever. And the more we extend our mission, the more difficult it will be to extricate ourselves.

I notice that one Warren Kinsella (who shall get no link from me) has applauded the Parliamentary vote, claiming that it's "the right thing to do" because it's only a matter of time before terrorists blow up one of our subways. I'm a little unclear on the logic of that, because it could be argued that the latter might well happen as a result of us merrily pacing the US in its mid-East and Far East romps. Massive civilian casualties tend to make people crazy. The survivors are not likely to make neat distinctions between Canadians and Americans when they embark on suicide missions, distinctions that, in any case, Stephen Harper is hell-bent on erasing.

Make no mistake: if I could have wished away Mullah Omar or Saddam Hussein I would have had no hesitation in doing so. Their dismal records speak loudly for themselves. But that does not, or should not, lead inexorably to the notion that the US has some sort of global manifest destiny to invade countries at will to get rid of stinkers. On closer examination, we find that those stinkers have usually arrived at their positions of power because of the US, and that other stinkers are ignored on the world stage altogether because they are allies of the US. The last century of Latin American history provides more than enough examples to make this point.

The other point is that invasions and wars of attrition do not bring out the best in subject populations, their state institutions or their leaders. Afghanistan is just such a case. Even if, for the sake of argument, we were to assume that the US behaves altruistically when it ventures forth periodically to conduct regime change (an assumption I shall refrain from making), the results of these interventions have tended to be nothing short of disastrous in human terms.

So what do we do about corrupt and cruel leaders around the world? Perhaps stop installing them, for one. Stop propping them up when it's convenient, and overthrowing them when it isn't, for another.

In the meantime, here we are, well and truly implicated in a war without end against "terrorism," that empty signifier. A war that is, in fact, for the purpose of furthering US imperial domination around the globe. We're just one of the privileged nations joining in for reasons of ideology and Realpolitik, and we're making ourselves a target for the damned of the earth.

Is there still time to ask why?

"For the love of God, Montresor!"

President George W. Bush has secured his southern perimeter, stationing troops and Border Patrol agents about 200 or so metres apart, but critics claim this is far too little. Now there is talk of doing something similar to shore up his northern flank.

I have a suggestion. Why not build a wall?

Naturally, I'm not suggesting that this encompass huge swathes of Canadian and Mexican territory; the Israeli example leaves something to be desired. No, I'm suggesting that we think outside the box, and do our best to help our American friends feel secure.

The wall would of course extend the entire length of both Canadian and Mexican borders, but why stop there? There are the Eastern and Western seaboards to worry about as well. Make the entire continental USA a gated community, I say. Well, why not? Hawaii and Alaska can fend for themselves. They weren't part of the original forty-eight, now, were they?

But we need to be comprehensive here. Air space is also a problem. The solution? A huge kevlar geodesic dome that would cover the entire continental area, of course. (Gentlemen, we have the technology--at least in embryo.) Back it up by all means with missiles and armed satellites. Pull back the flap to let the pollution out from time to time, while going on red alert.

The last concern is tunnelling. Possibly a thick "floor" of steel-reinforced concrete could be laid across the US. Basements would be a thing of the past, but perhaps just as well.

When this teraproject is completed, our armed forces can pitch in by continuing to patrol the northern border to forestall any attempted breaches. The Mexicans can do the same. Perhaps the UN could patrol the coastal regions. The borders must remain secure!

Then, only then, will Americans feel safe. Not to mention the rest of us.

EnMasse is up and running

I'm going to get into trouble for this, but I don't give a damn.

I'm one of those "Babble refugees" some of you have heard about--frequenters of a discussion board over at Rabble until their aptly-named Management Committee started acting like Simon Legree. Well, no, let's not exaggerate--more like V.I. Lenin:

We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and 'foremen and accountants'.

The subordination, however, must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and working people, i.e., to the proletariat.

Briefly, because the story has been well-told elsewhere, a well-liked moderator, Audra Williams, was fired during a series of life-crises, by email. The Management Committee that did the firing took a hard-nosed stance, stated that the matter was not up for negotiation, and withdrew into haughty silence. A lot of veteran Babblers picked up and left to create their own site, which recently received its official name: EnMasse. No subordination and control for them.

I'm not really in their number, having lurked but not posted much at Babble--I prefer the blogosphere to Usenet-type groups, as a rule. But I'm old-fashioned enough to take the slogan "An Injury To One Is An Injury To All" to heart. I made a bit of noise in a few Babble forums, and signed up as an EnMasser to show a little solidarity.

What choice did I have? Here was Rabble, behaving like a Type X manager in a non-union shop. No sense of shame. No principled self-criticism. No transparency. No accountability. And leaving its soft underbelly fully exposed for the Right to rip and tear in its inimitable fashion. To use this mess as an excuse to indulge in personal attacks against thoughtful Left stalwarts like Judy Rebick, who was only one of the players involved in any case.

Some people are continuing on over at Babble as though nothing had happened. La desaparecida isn't talked about very much any more. Best to keep your head down, or explain it all away, or make excuses, or pretend it didn't happen.

I've probably already lost a couple of good, longstanding friends over this. One sent me an email that pretty well said just that, after I had the temerity to tell her that this action was out of character. But I'm a trade unionist at heart, and what happened to Williams--and the way it happened--was a damned disgrace. If this had happened on my turf, I could have won the grievance in a deep sleep. Fired for failure to hand in a form. That's what the email said. Good grief.

So anyone interested in some good back and forth that isn't trapped in somebody's combox ought to head over to EnMasse. Some there have a foot in both camps. Others have simply--moved on. Check it out. There's a lot of fresh air over there.

Table manners

I'm just back (briefly) from the PSAC Triennial Convention in Toronto, and I'm still collecting my thoughts. But I couldn't resist a few comments in the meantime about little Luc Cagadoc.

Luc is the seven-year-old Filipino-Canadian kid in Montreal who was accused of "eating like a pig" and disciplined ten times for using a spoon and a fork at the same time in his school cafeteria. It seems fitting, somehow, that I post these few hurried remarks before heading to that city myself for a meeting of the Canadian Anthropology Society.

Reading the news reports on this has been a Rashomonic experience. One report has a teacher, serving as lunchroom monitor, calling him a pig; another attributes the word to both his teacher and his school principal, and another (from the Philippines) included this interview with the parents where the question of intelligence was raised:

She said she confronted Bergeron about the incidents. The principal, however, lectured her that Luc should learn how to eat like the Canadians using only a fork. [Note: another report has the principal insisting on both a knife and fork. –D.D.]

She said she got more angry when the principal of the 387-student Roxboro school told her: "If your son eats like a pig he has to go to another table because this is the way we do it and how we’re going to do it every time."

"I told him have you seen him eat like a pig? How can you tell me that he is eating like a pig. At that time I was furious, I was enraged. I was really mad," she told ABS-CBN.

Even Luc's father, Aldrin, was incensed after talking with one of the school officials. "He said that if you eat aside from this method, it’s not intelligent. I told him, 'You mean if you eat with chopsticks, it’s not intelligent?'" he said.

Little Luc is apparently an A+ student in math.

Perhaps the word "cochon" (pig) is thrown around freely at the school in question. In my day, though, when I lived in Quebec, the c-word was considered one of the gravest of insults: using it on a seven-year-old kid would have been unthinkable. In any case, the school board has its own spin on events: "What was questioned was the way he was eating that day," their spokesperson Brigitte Gauvreau said. She claimed that students could eat with chopsticks, or any other utensils they need. She went on to state:

This child has attended the Lalande primary school since preschool and has thus had those cultural practices since then and it has never been a problem....

What happened on April 12 had to do with the way he was ingesting his food that day and not with the utensils he was eating with, nor how he was using them. It was an educational intervention and in no way had any intercultural dimension.

And--quelle surprise--the parents have been threatened with legal action for speaking out. The issue has been taken up by the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations, an advocacy group, and the mother is expected to file a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission on Monday.

The matter has generated international attention, and the Filipino ambassador in Ottawa, Jose Brillantes, describing it as an affront to Filipino culture, has called upon Canada to live up to its multicultural self-description. Demonstrators have shown up outside our embassy in Manila with large spoon and fork cutouts strapped to their bodies. And there matters lie for now.

I am assuming that a more complete story will emerge once the Quebec Human Rights Commission has done its investigation. I'm aware from personal memory that kids aren't always graceful at the table. Being lectured on table manners is not one of my happier childhood memories. They seemed to me to comprise a huge collection of completely arbitrary rules that took all the fun out of filling one's face.

But there does seem a bit more to this than correcting a bright little boy who may well have a mischievous side. There is at least a strong hint here that cultural differences are at the root of l'affaire cuillère et fourchette, not just kids' table behaviour. If even a fraction of the parents' account of what they were told by school officials is true, a kind of cultural indoctrination seems to have been going on, not untinged by the kind of ethnocentric attitude that would permit school officials to talk to parents in such a fashion about their child.

In any event the simple, unreflective act of eating has become hypostasized. Spoon-and-fork dining is now the Filipino way, the very essence of Filipino-ness; giant spoons and forks parade before our embassy, as noted; and indignant Quebec school officials insist for their part that the proper companion of a fork is a knife (preferably, however, not worn upon the person). If multiculturalism in Canada is, to a large extent, a collection of fetishes, so too is the reaction to it.

An article in the Philippines Times refracts some of this in a way that maybe lets us see things a little more clearly. Here are some of the highlights of "The boy who ate with a spoon," with some comments of my own:

[A] school in Quebec has cast collective contempt on a population of 85 million Filipinos and eight million more who live overseas.

Whereas the Montreal Gazette calls the whole matter a mere "flap."

---

The Chinese and the Japanese have their chopsticks, their staple being sticky rice that can be formed into a ball and picked up easily by clicking sticks. As a matter of fact, some Chinese families dispense with the serving spoon and dip their chopsticks into a common bowl of chow mien [sic]. Some of us would probably flinch, "eeew, serving spoon, anyone?" but culture no matter how strange is something to be studied, understood, and respected, not narrow-mindedly interpreted.

This paragraph sums up the complexities and ambiguities of "Othering" admirably. This is a liberal, not a conservative, take on the "strange," their "clicking sticks," their supposed distasteful habits (Chinese in fact reverse their chopsticks when taking food from a common bowl), so that, instead of discipline, we should "understand" and even "respect" such behaviour, no doubt at a suitable distance.

Theresa said she has been flooded with messages of support not only from Filipinos but also from Canadians and other foreigners.

I do like the "foreigners" part.

A letter writer to the Chronicle said the "arrogant and ignorant" actions of the school monitor and principal make him ashamed to be Canadian.

"That kind of 'superior' attitude belongs to the ugly past of the British Empire...[!] If the child is misbehaving, address that problem but do not insult the boy's culture and an entire nation," he said.

But I repeat all this not to mock, but to illustrate. The writing, a little foreign in its texture, smacks of Otherness to a Canadian reader. The oddnesses and errors in it bring to our consciousness attitudes which, if we would only step back, can be found right here at home, in the words of the schoolteacher and principal of the Ecole Lalande, in the institutional responses when the matter became public, and in the whole sad, hokey spectacle of identity politics known as Canadian multiculturalism.

I am sorry that a child has become the latest surface of emergence for these essentialist cultural battles. His vulnerabilities are many in this affair, and I hope he grows up to be a social activist and not a serial killer. For now, just let the kid eat his damn lunch, for crying out loud.

PSAC Convention, etc.

I'm off to the Triennial Convention of the Public Service Alliance of Canada for a week, and the annual meeting of the Canadian Anthropology Society for a few days after that, so expect sporadic blogging for a while. I'll have some good material for posts on my return, though.

The PSAC Convention promises to be interesting--there will be a top leadership change, as National President Nycole Turmel steps down after two terms in office, and there will also be a call for a dues increase to build up the union strike fund.

In the meantime, some random comments on current events, in no particular order of importance:

The album. I'm an old Neil Young fan, and once included a reference to "Don't Let It Bring You Down" in a piece of academic work. At his best, the man is a lyric poet. He is not at his best here. It's good political stuff, but I get the feeling that, as Theodore Sturgeon once said of H.G. Wells, he's sold his birthright for a pot of message.

The deal. OK, we've paid the US a billion dollars of protection money to keep free trade optically alive. The pragmatists are already out in force--Gordon Ritchie has a piece in the Citizen today, and the Globe and Mail has weighed in with a dreary editorial. Somehow, beatifying Stephen Harper for being shaken down, though, as the Right spinmeisters are now doing apace, makes me feel a little queasy. At best, it's making a virtue out of Realpolitik necessity. The US is the Ishmael of the world--free trade is good for everyone but them. Harper is really just another mugging victim.

The bomb. Yeah, I'm nervous too. Iran has been sat upon by colonial and "post-colonial" powers for long enough to create collective madness. So, what do we do about it? I mean, as progressives? Compared to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein was a model of reason and stability. I have long opposed imperialist adventures like the Iraq and Afghanistan incursions, but...what about Iran? Is there room for a Left discourse of action that differs from the frothy ones on the Right? Serious debaters only, please.

The protest. And speaking of froth, the Caledonia standoff has the folks over at Dust My Broom a tad upset. A loyal reader and one of the Dusters are calling for napalm and white phosphorus. All in fun, of course. Steve Janke, meanwhile, is going on about a fool at Babble (a struck worksite, by the way--perhaps more on that at a later time) who called for Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan to "die like flies," and segueing into a personal attack on Judy Rebick. The aforesaid fool was set upon, rightly, by other Babblers. But nary a peep out of Steve or anyone else on the Right when it comes to joking about mass-murdering Native people. A little hypocrisy in evidence here? Naw, you think?

Enough for now.

GON OUT
BACKSON
BISY
BACKSON

 D.D.

Balls

I guess I've come a little late to the Chris Bliss juggling act. In fact, "juggling act" doesn't cover it, as you discover pretty quickly when you check out the video. It's pure poetry, on-stage transcendental meditation, a perfect synthesis of body and mind. Just look at Bliss' face while he's performing--there's a kind of radiance and raptness shining forth, a transfiguration, like that indescribable expression on Tiger Woods' face as he swept the 2001 Masters, stroke after stroke; the club, ball, and indeed the course itself were an extension of his body. Deleuze and Guattari, anyone?

The parody by Jason Garfield, using five balls instead of three, is just a put-down exercise. Never mind the deliberate, and very clever, setting--alone in a basement, cutting to an imagined audience and so on. The performance imitates but does not either repeat or surpass the original. It's all over-skill, self-conscious, "I can do better" sort of stuff. On one level he does, but the magic is missing. It's the difference between haiku and limerick.

Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of parody is more appealing to me, subversive play with high and "received" cultural language, forms of overturning and resistance. What we have here, on the other hand, is the parody of late modernity: anything can be mocked and derided, everything is fair game. There's no longer a political edge, it no longer has that appealing counter-hegemonic ring. It's just competition, individual against individual, the atomized subjects--or objects--of the New World Order. There's no content to it. There's a kind of hopelessness to it all, a momentary crabs-in-the-bucket advantage substituting for more far-reaching changes in the human condition. Technical routines supplant the merely human; our abilities and practices are misused against each other instead of combining in a project of community.

Turning for a moment to larger balls--basketballs, in fact--I am pleased to report that a downtown Ottawa basketball court is about to be restored to its players. St. Luke's park, host for maybe a quarter-century to some professional-level basketball on the weekends, ran into a snag a few days ago--a city crew lowered one of the hoops, after a handful of neighbours alleged that the predominantly Black players were (as the Ottawa Citizen helpfully repeated day after day) using drugs, drinking, swearing, fighting and publicly urinating. Naw, no whiff of racism there, eh?

The Ottawa police, who have never held back when there have been perceived infractions by visible minorities in the city, reported this time that there has been little or no trouble over the years at the park, and that no arrests have ever been made. The progressive city councillor in the ward, Diane Holmes, initially jumped too soon and supported the petitioners. But to her considerable credit she has since admitted she had been wrong, apologized, and will have the court restored. Everybody wins--except, of course, the folks who wanted "those people" out of the area.

As a side-note, when one basketball player called the local talk-show hosted by vulgarian Lowell Green, and put the case, Green's response was that "you people always play the race angle." The player, who is white, subsequently sent Green a photo of himself. But don't hold your breath waiting for an apology from that guy.

Blog Testing

Hi! This isn't Dr. Dawg. This is James Bow, here on a house call to try and diagnose problems with this site's Atom feed. Don't mind me; I'll soon be on my way and we'll be returning you to your regularly scheduled blogging shortly.

UPDATE: Three or more weeks of pure frustration, solved at a stroke by the masterful James Bow. James, you are da man! Many, many thanks and tailwags [~~~~~~]. Back to regular programming soon. —Dr.Dawg

A whiff of dictatorship

The Harper government's latest outrage—gagging an Environment Canada scientist and part-time novelist, and ordering that he not attend his own book launch—is unsettlingly symptomatic of the regime that Canadians can expect to endure for the next couple of years.

It took virtually no time at all for the totalitarian Conservative worldview to emerge once Stephen Harper took power. Many of us have been in denial ever since, rubbing our eyes and struggling to wake up. But we're already awake, folks. This really is our Canada.

We’re a nation at war, with a strutting Prime Minister posing for endless media photo-ops with the military folks, looking for all the world like a pudgy recrudescence of il Duce. This is a country where research programs to reduce global warming are being trashed as I write, despite hollow denials. A country in which supporting the theory of evolution can lose you a federal research grant.

Canada is now a place where government backbenchers can muse aloud about jailing journalists. A place where sick and elderly Native survivors of residential schools, promised a little cash in advance by the Liberals pending a global settlement, are now denied that support in a staggeringly mean-spirited move. A country that, internationally, leads the charge in trying to starve the Palestinian people into submission after they elected the "wrong" government in free and fair elections.

Harper's cheerleaders, of whom there are many in the blogosphere, have performed extraordinary feats of verbal and mental acrobatics to rationalize his behaviour. The man who claimed that he wanted transparency and openness in government has quickly moved to impose the exact opposite, dropping a new and lethal shroud of secrecy upon the public service and his own Cabinet. He's already making the one-man-rule antics of Jean Chrétien look, well, small-town cheap. And the retrograde and hateful "social conservatism" that has been kept under lock and key by the Maximum Leader continues to leak from bursting seams.

The Conservatives have been in power for less than three months. What's next? Welcome to my waking nightmare, which just may continue a little longer than a few days:

Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of...

Q: At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?

A: Well just watch me.

International sanctions declared against Canada

The United Nations today declared international sanctions against Canada only a few weeks after the election of a Conservative government headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "As freedom-loving, democratic countries," a press release stated, "we cannot support or encourage this reactionary regime. Canada has some distance to go before it can resume its place in the civilized community of nations."

Citing Harper's refusal to recognize the Palestinian Authority, and recent statements from his office demanding that the Afghanistan government force its judges to accept Western standards such as tolerance and the separation of powers, the statement continued: "It is intolerable that a country should be allowed to 'go Conservative' simply because of the irresponsibility of its own people." While direct military force has been ruled out—for now—Canada can expect the imposition of reduced export quotas and a world-wide boycott of seal meat in the near future.

Applauding the move, the newly-elected President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, declared: "Democracy is not a right but a privilege. It is far too precious a commodity to be simply squandered on the electorate."

Media were unable to obtain a comment from Harper's office. "He's out of town with his Cabinet," a typist in his office said. Refusing to provide further details, she stated: "He'll talk to you when he's good and ready."

Bernie Farber's chutzpah

The Hebrew word pilpul precisely sums up the verbal gymnastics of Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, on the Three Wishes issue. A means of reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable in Jewish law and its interpretations, pilpul has come to mean the use of increasingly fine distinctions in argument, often in casuistical fashion.

Mr. Farber doesn’t want to be branded a censor, as he indignantly makes clear in today's Globe and Mail. But, on behalf of the CJC, he sent a letter to all school boards in Ontario, "asking them to reconsider" whether this book is appropriate for Grades 4-6. The Ontario Library Association (OLA) says it is, but the latter, Farber states, with breathtaking chutzpah, are not experts on curriculum design.

That the same is true of Mr. Farber and the CJC is obvious, but that didn't stop them, and a few school boards have caved in. Farber praised the Toronto District School Board in particular for “courageously decid[ing] that Three Wishes is best read by students in older elementary grades, knowing full well that a decision running contrary to the position of the OLA might engender controversy.”

The hard fact is that making decisions contrary to the position of the CJC can land one in controversy too. Nobody wants to be branded an anti-Semite, and for these boards, discretion was clearly the better part of valour when an official letter from the CJC landed on their desks.

The upshot? The book is now banned from several classrooms, whose children are deemed unready by the CJC to hear the voices of their faraway cousins in Israel and Palestine. If that isn’t censorship, what is?

Death by bureaucrat

Thalidomide is a drug with a dubious history. Once prescribed as a sedative and to counteract morning sickness for pregnant women, it turned out to be disastrous for their babies, many of whom were born with shortened limbs and other serious birth defects. More recently, however, it has proven effective in treating a form of cancer called multiple myeloma.

The maker of the drug, Celgene Corp., is making a nice little profit out of what is now called Thalomid; I blogged about this back in August last year, after it was revealed that Celgene was playing the bureaucratic game by not applying to have its drug approved for general use by Health Canada. It has only been available, under our rules, through a special access program, which effectively prevents the sale of generic versions of the medicine.

Until recently, some Canadians in modest circumstances managed to qualify to receive the drug free of charge through Health Canada. This all changed, however, with the introduction of another last-chance drug, Velcade, produced in Canada by Ortho Biotech. This one will have patent protection until doomsday, and is already proving to be another fine money-maker for the Big Pharma folks--one five-month treatment cycle costs up to $35,000.

Because of the availability of Velcade on the market, Health Canada bureaucrats have decided to stop providing Thalomid under its special access program. Velcade is presently covered under all Canadian provincial medical plans--except Ontario's. Health Canada refuses, however, to release a free drug that can save lives in this province, and, for its part, the Ontario government would rather spend its money on roads and bridges.

The official excuse used by Ontario to justify not covering the medication is that a committee of "experts" has recommended that it not be publicly funded. But no one in the Ontario government has apparently bothered to ask them to explain why they disagree with their equally-qualified colleagues in twelve other Canadian jurisdictions. Instead, in the words of Ontario Health Ministry spokesman John Letherby, "When that committee makes a recommendation...the Ministry of Health stands behind it."

If you are an Ontario resident, in other words, and can't meet Velcade's inflated price-tag, that's just too bad--you're going to die. Just ask Raymond Bouchard.

Mr. Bouchard is a retired carpenter living in Northern Ontario. Thalomid is his last chance, because he can't afford Velcade. It's available free from Celgene because of his desperately poor financial circumstances. But he can't get it.

"When the [Ontario] Ministry of Health says 'No,' it is absolute," says Colleen Savage, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Advocacy Coalition of Canada. The same, apparently, applies to Health Canada. Not that the latter isn't sorry about it: a Health Canada spokeswoman said, "Obviously this is a very unfortunate place for this man to be, beyond unfortunate." Hand-wringing, however, won't save Mr. Bouchard.

The Globe and Mail seems to have taken this on as a cause, providing extensive coverage of the issue over the past few days. But the blogosphere, notably a place of much twittering and chirping about the alleged failure of the "MSM" to report on matters of substance, is virtually silent on the slow killing of Mr. Bouchard and others like him in Ontario. He is being murdered--let's not mince words, this is a deliberate, cold-blooded act--by bureaucrats who know his circumstances perfectly well but are withholding life-saving medication; and by grubby politicians who don't give a damn whether people like Mr. Bouchard live or die.

This is my country. In 2006. And I am ashamed.

UPDATE: The outcry worked: it was all a "clerical error" we are told. But, apparently, only Mr. Bouchard, and not others in his predicament, will benefit.

Cops copping cops flops

Once again, we have an egregious example of the worthlessness of the current system of civilian complaints against police in Ontario. Police are not policing themselves: they are pleasing themselves.

I have blogged before about the case of Paul Smith, an Ottawa activist forced to the ground at a demonstration after an improper arrest, handcuffed, and then repeatedly Tasered when he refused to get up and walk to a waiting police vehicle.

His saga has been a long one. His initial complaint to the Ottawa Police Services Board was dismissed out of hand. Going limp, he was told, was active resistance, and "pain compliance" was justified. He appealed to the Ontario Civilian Commission on Police Services, which, unusually, determined that his case had merit. But OCCOPS assigned Robert Fitches, a retired police officer, to adjudicate the case--so much for "civilian review."

Fitches had quite the case before him. The police videotape, oddly enough, was missing precisely those few seconds in which Smith had been Tasered. The police camerawoman claimed that she had simply been "repositioning herself." But an independent cameraperson captured the moment on film, forcing Fitches to concede that excessive force had indeed been used. He noted that the film had been "instrumental" in his findings, and that it directly contradicted police testimony. He did his best with intractable material, though. Only one of the two officers involved in the incident was found guilty, Constable Paolo Batista, the officer who actually used the Taser on Smith. The other officer who was holding him was acquitted.

Yesterday, it was time for Constable Batista's sentence. A reprimand. Yup. Must have stung. Fitches claimed that the use of the Taser was "not gratuitous" and that there had been no intent to harm Smith, just to gain control over him (as he lay on the ground in handcuffs). It was just a "mistake," declared this former Ontario Provincial Police officer. It was done in the "heat of the moment." "Anyone can make a mistake," he said. He sounded for all the world like a judge presiding at an honour killing trial. Besides, Batista lost his rank of acting sergeant but was demoted to constable, and that cost him $10,000, and that should count for something.

I blogged earlier about a case in Toronto, in which a uniformed thug viciously assaulted a Somalian without cause, and then used the old "resisting arrest" ploy. The man was facing jail time and deportation until a videotape surfaced. The officer, who with his buddies was castigated by the judge for lying, covering up and abuse of power, was convicted--and given a thirty-day sentence, immediately denounced as "Draconian" by his police association.

No wonder police increasingly believe they are a law unto themselves. Ottawa has seen some horrific incidents of late, and they are continuing. The price of complaining can even be, as the previous link indicates, losing one's job. The complaints system itself is a virtual whitewash--a farce, in fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, with fewer than one per cent of complaints upheld, not to mention years of frustration for complainants brutalized by police. The most recent case: a businessman who dropped his kid off at school, admittedly in a no stopping zone, was followed to his place of work by a police officer, and ended up in hospital with a fractured rib and a bruise on his face. He's since been charged (surprise, surprise) with "resisting arrest."

I can just smell more reprimands coming--can't you?

And now, perhaps emboldened by the impunity principle that seems to attach to police officers in 21st century Ontario, Ottawa cops want to enter municipal politics. It's enough to make one believe in slippery slopes.

Cowardice

I begin to suspect the reason the Left is so cowardly is that it has abandoned the notion of Transcendance. If you really believe this world is all there is, and that even most of that consists of cynical crap about power struggles between race, class, and gender, it becomes exceedingly hard to find reasons to put your neck on the line for anything. But the human heart goes on demanding heroism of itself. So the Left settles for the child's game of pretending to be courageous by standing up to Tom Monaghan, or calling Bush "Hitler", or similar variations on double-dog daring each other to knock on the door of the widow down the street, shout the F word, and run away. If they actually had to face a real tyrant or threat, they would crumple like tin foil. It's kind of sad, really. I miss Harry Truman.

I ran across the gem just above while doing my usual sweep through the blogosphere yesterday. It's hard not to rise to bait like that, and I did. Unfortunately, however, you won't find anything in the site-owner's Comments section in this respect. It seems that the echo-chamber syndrome has struck him with a vengeance, and I have been banned from his site.

Just so no one jumps to hasty conclusions, I'll tell the story here. Be warned: it has its twists and turns, and even some self-mockery. It has cowardice, lies and over-generalizations aplenty. But—and this I guarantee, although it's hardly necessary to do so for my small but hardy band of regular readers—you will find no X-rated language here, no abuse, no violence, not even the herbs and spice of a good personal jibe. This is Dawg’s Blawg, after all, not Pulp Fiction. Kids are always welcome.

First, let me introduce Mark Shea. He runs a religious blog called Catholic and Enjoying It. It is hard to pigeonhole Mr. Shea. He is generally conservative, but hates what the Bush Administration is doing at Gitmo. He is into Church politics, but is not an extremist: if you want to know about the dread "RadTrads," head on over there. He is also capable, however, of breathtakingly silly comments such as the one above.

Among the cast of characters there is also Kathy Shaidle, who needs no further introduction, and won't get one either, nor will she get a link; someone named Paul who appears to be a co-religionist; some supporting actors on what's left of the Comments thread; and Dr. Dawg himself.

Let’s get the offending paragraph, for "offending" it is, out of the way first. That a person could write such a thing while the news of Tom Fox's death is still reverberating in the media speaks volumes about his world-view. Lacking courage, eh? With Canadians Harmeet Sooden and Jim Loney, and Norman Kember from the UK (who are still alive, many of us hope, but not all), Fox literally put his body on the line for his pacifist and progressive beliefs. It was an act of courage and of integrity so profound that even conservatives in the blogosphere have published respectful pieces. One of them got labelled “lib-leftish” for her pains, but that's the breaks.

Among others who would no doubt be sweepingly dismissed as "cowardly" by Mr. Shea are Nobel laureates Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, NAACP activist Rosa Parks (not to mention Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andy Goodman), the countless other folks who did dangerous sit-ins and voter registration in the Deep South, and, earlier on, IWW union organizers like "Big Bill" Haywood and IWW members like Helen Keller (yes, that Helen Keller)…and the list goes on. And on.

Let’s be blunt: anyone who states that the "left" is composed of cowards is seriously out of touch with the phenonomenal world. It's a preposterous claim, advanced in an unsubtle petitio principii sort of way. It amounts, quite frankly, to revisionist history. The little flourish at the end seems quite in keeping with the rest of the fantasy, too. Harry S. Truman? The man who courageously ordered from his executive office that A-bombs be dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is that the man we’re talking about?

But I didn’t get into much of that over at Shea's. I did, in my initial posting, mention Tom Fox and Rachel Corrie, though. (I also made the foolish mistake of stating that Shea was using the word "Left" to describe anything he didn’t happen to like, but more on that in a moment.) That’s where things began to come apart.

It appears that Shea is somewhat of an admirer of Kathy Shaidle, and it was the latter who had sparked this particular post on his part with an entry at her place about T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas and the slogan “Vote Republican.” A pretty easy target, when you come to think of it, Korporate Amerika making bucks by dissing Korporate Amerika, but this is the blogosphere, and easy targets are our stock in trade. In any case, he linked to her site, and, immediately following what I thought was a pretty inoffensive post over all, Shaidle's trademark blizzard of dry ice landed in the Comments section.

Tom Fox, she said, should have bought an expensive sports car to deal with his middle-aged Angst. As for Rachel Corrie, she was "about as courageous as Patty Heart (sic)." One commentator roasted her for the first throwaway line. I'm still scratching my head over the latter one. But she also accused me of stalking her.

Now, boys and girls, that's a pretty serious charge. Stalking is a specific offence in the Criminal Code of Canada. To accuse someone of that falsely is libellous, and, for what it's worth, actionable. As you know, however, I don’t approve of suing bloggers, so I merely point this out. That this took place in Mark Shea’s version of Fantasyland seemed oddly appropriate, though. Here I was, at Shea’s site, engaging a comment made by Shea, and making no reference whatsoever to Kathy Shaidle, and she drives by to claim that this constitutes stalking. Of her. She's so vain...

It is true, of course, that Kathy and I have crossed swords on occasion, in the Comments section of blogs in which we happen to share an interest. She doesn't permit comments at her site, but I have been known to take a swipe or two at her views on mine. In fact, the very first comment I ever received—now archived at Haloscan until I spring for their "pro" version—was a warm and cuddly little post from none other than Shaidle herself, which I richly deserved, to be honest, having mentioned her and others in an unkind fashion in my maiden post. But that's run-of-the-mill blogosphere give and take. She went after me on a few occasions for using a nom-de-plume; I would obligingly uncloak, but it never made a difference. I referred to her infamous "Newsflash: Arabs are violent retards" header more than once, but I haven't been alone in that. She draws attention for that sort of thing, including mine, but Antonia Zerbisias, for one,has probably spent more time on Shaidle than I have.

So much for the "stalker" charge, which I asked her to take back, not under threat but out of decency. I also wrote directly and non-threateningly to Shea, pointing out that a line had been crossed on this occasion. But then a new actor entered the scene, one "Paul." He went after me like a rabid pit bull for daring to besmirch the name of Shea by my stating that he had misused the word "Leftist" to mean anything that displeased him.

The truth? I was wrong. He hadn't done anything of the kind. I am so used, by now, to hearing the word "leftist" employed by conservatives to describe everything from neo-Nazism to parking in a fire lane—one commentator over at Dust My Broom even called Pat Buchanan a "leftist," for crying out loud—that I over-reacted and over-generalized, not for the first time. Shea wasn't saying that all cowards, by virtue of being cowards, are "leftists." He was saying that all leftists, by virtue of being leftists, are cowards. Mea culpa, and I'm glad we cleared that one up. In fact, I did so over there.

The dénouement of this little saga? This morning, I discovered that Kathy's offending comment had been removed. And every word of every one of my posts had been as well, leaving what Osip Mandelstam once called "just enough people for half a dialogue."

And today we have a guest ending from A.A. Milne:

Tigger said: "Excuse me a moment, but there's something climbing up your table," and with one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the tablecloth, pulled it to the ground, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle, got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully: "Have I won?"

Just another perfect day in the blogosphere.

US. Nose. Face.

The US continues to oppose the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, established under the Rome Statute to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Small wonder, the cynic might conclude. The US has an inglorious history of complicity in torture (e.g., the infamous School of the Americas, the more recent contracting-out of torture in its "extraordinary rendition" program, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo), overthrowing democratically-elected regimes as in Chile and Haiti, and flouting international law, as in its misuse of "enemy combatant" status to sidestep the Fourth Geneva Convention. America, in fact, has nothing to teach the world about human rights, and plenty to fear from vigorous international prosecution of human rights abuses. It's right up there with Israel, China and Zimbabwe, perhaps not-so-strange bedfellows when you come to think of it.

But, not content with simply proclaiming its rogue superpower status, the US has once again adopted its time-honoured custom of bullying other nations, in this case those that have signed on to the Rome Statute:

• In 2002, Congress passed the American Servicemembers' Protection Act. This law mandated the refusal of military aid to any country daring to ratify the treaty establishing the ICC. Exempted were members of NATO and other US allies such as Egypt, and nations that entered into bilateral agreements (see below) with the US to shelter suspected US war criminals by refusing to turn them over to the Court. As for US military personel being held under the jurisdiction of the Court, this Bill authorized the use of military force by the US to free them.
  
  
• In 2002, the US threatened to use its Security Council veto to block a number of peacekeeping mandates unless US citizens are held exempt from the Treaty. This led to a compromise that permitted annual exemptions by the Security Council. Canada, to its credit, opposed the legality of this move. After the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, it became clear that a majority of Security Council members for renewal in 2004 was not to be had, and the US withdrew its application for exemption.
  
  
• "Article 98" agreements, bilateral impunity agreements between the US and a number of other countries permitted under Article 98 of the Rome Statute (although the legality of this interpretation has been challenged) effectively permit the sheltering of suspected US war criminals from the authority of the ICC, . States have been pressured into signing these agreements by US threats of withholding military and economic assistance. In 2003, the US stopped military aid to 35 countries, including nine European countries, who refused to be bullied. By 2005, approximately 100 states had signed agreements, some in secret.
  
  
• The US has cut aid and development funding for a number of countries for cooperasting with the ICC, including, according to the Wikipedia article just referenced, Brazil, Costa Rica, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, South Africa, and several other Latin American and African countries.
  

Mexico is the latest country to feel the wrath of the Bush Administration. But this is where things get interesting. These sanctions have cost Mexico millions of dollars intended for anti-terror and anti-narcotics training and anti-terror equipment for Mexico's military.

Now, there are none so blind as the blinkered ideologues who run the Bush administration. But this latest move makes one positively nostalgic for the clear, predictable Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger, a fellow, by the way, who would have had his own reasons to fear the long reach of the ICC were it not for the non-retroactivity provisions of the Rome Statute. At least there is a logic, if a nasty one, to the self-interest of states. But what are we to make of this utter destruction of the rational actor model?

Mexico, after all, shares a 3,141K border with the US. It is obvious that terrorists and drug lords don't see Mexico as either a place to fly hijacked aircraft into buildings or a good market for narcotics. Pay in the maquiladoras couldn't buy one fix a week, real wages in Mexico have dropped by two-thirds over the past two neoliberal decades, and al-Qaeda has not yet, to my knowledge, designated that country as a Great Satan. The purpose of this military spending, in fact, was to protect--you guessed it--the interests of the United States.

One can only wonder at the closed delusional system inhabited by the policy-makers and enforcers in the Administration. "There," I can hear them saying, "that'll teach Mexico a thing or two." Reason as collateral damage in the continued ideological offensive.

In my nastier moments, I have to say that I find myself wishing the Bush regime success on this front. Canada remains a strong ICC supporter, ratifying the Rome Statute in 2000. We are, however, exempt from US sanctions as a NATO member. But suppose that we were to call for the end of this exemption, demanding that we be treated like Chile and Brazil and now Mexico? Who knows? The US might respond by refusing point blank to permit us to join on with missile defence, demanding that we get our troops out of Afghanistan, maybe even boycotting our water.

One can dream.

Dogging it



There are times one simply has to leave the blogosphere behind and enter the real world, if through circuitous routes and odd back doors. A couple of days dog-mushing can do that.

For my American friends: no, this is not downtown Ottawa. It's near South River, in Algonquin Park. Rank beginners we are, but we'll be back for the five-day run next February.

One last point: it's not just moving effortlessly along watching the scenery. It's hard work every inch of the way, and I have 639 sore muscles to prove it. Anything happen while I was away?

The slurs of Colby Cosh

I wonder, for example, whether the UCC would have raced so quickly to weigh in if the editors and publishers of the Standard and the JFP had been UCC members in good standing? That seems improbable, doesn't it? In view of the United Church's admitted history of anti-Semitism, I'd like to ask James Sinclair and Bruce Gregersen on behalf of all Canadians whether it's a coincidence that they feel so progressive and so comfortable in judging people with names like Richard Bronstein, Ezra Levant, and Kevin Libin guilty of presumptive "racial hatred" where no evidence exists. Surely the question whether the UCC regards public Jew-bashing as marvelous sport for an idle Friday afternoon is at least as fair as the UCC's own letter is.

The UCC is the bastard grandchild of the faith of my fathers.
--Colby Cosh

The other day the United Church of Canada stated the obvious: publication of the anti-Muslim cartoons in Europe, and now in Canada by Ezra Levant of the Western Standard and the Jewish Free Press, "has little to do with freedom of expression and much to do with incitement to racial and religious hatred....The answer to your question of 'why publish such cartoons' we believe is simply racial hatred."

It would appear that National Post superstar Colby Cosh has taken the brave plunge to become another one of Ezra Levant's defenders, albeit by a side route: the United Church of Canada is, in his hands, a useful foil. Levant's low style is reproduced faithfully here, as the sincerest form of flattery, perhaps.

Let's have a look at the more spectacular claims in the quotations above, and judge Cosh's credibility on the basis of his own words.

To begin with, the conscientious act of contrition by the United Church in 2003, confessing historical complicity with the Christian church as a whole in anti-Semitism, is now being used by Cosh in a grossly sinuous manner to denigrate the United Church of Canada and to accuse it implicitly of continuing anti-semitism. I would dispose of that by urging readers to follow the link that he so helpfully provides. Joe McCarthy would be proud of Cosh's disingenuous juxtaposition. It's in a grand tradition.

Cosh, however, doesn't stop there. According to him, criticizing Levant and the JFP editors is--wait for it--"Jew-bashing." Certainly he attempts to make his claims ironically, stating that they are the moral equivalent of imputing race-hatred to the cartoon-publishers. But this comes off as rather lame and suspect. Anyone who reads the Western Standard can just feel Levant's visceral hatred for the Muslim Other. He delights in vicious and unfounded attacks, one of which I have blogged about here. The man is clearly an extremist, and frankly not worth defending--unless his defenders have their own axes to grind.

Levant, and the publisher of the Jewish Free Press, don't get a pass from justified criticism because they happen to be Jewish. To suggest such a thing, even to score a cheap debating point, is devious, not to mention stupid. (No one has attempted, at least to date, to slander critics of the Jyllands-Posten's editors as "anti-Danish," for example.) Cosh's broadside is in fact merely the latest instance of the neo-MacCarthyite smear tactic of deploying words like "anti-Semitism" to attempt to discredit and silence critics of Israel, supporters of the Palestinian cause, or even those who merely deplore gratuitous insults spewed at ordinary workaday Muslims.

Sorry, Cosh, it won't wash. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're arguing motive here, admit it. And your slagging of the United Church in the second comment reproduced above simply reveals the penchant of conservatives to use insult when rational argument is unavailable. "Bastard child?" Ah, your mother wears army boots. Nyah.

Today's Globe and Mail jumps on the fashionable denunciation bandwagon today, claiming that there couldn't possibly be a racial motive behind the gleeful and repetitive publication of the blasphemous anti-Muslim cartoons, heavens no, that the Jyllands-Posten had no idea that it would create the reaction it did, and that other papers were only re-publishing them for news interest or to defend freedom of speech. Pull the other one, fellas. The only real question before us is whether the publication and endless re-publication of the cartoons were exemplars of religious hatred or racial hatred, or both.

I would argue, in fact, that it's most likely the last. "The Muslim," as already noted, has been created in the Western popular imagination as the Other, whether a racial Other or a religious Other: the two are in any case conflated. The popular notion of a Muslim combines a taken-for-granted extremist religious fervor with clearly racialist imagery of swarthy Arabs with unmistakeable facial features in caricature, much like the anti-Semitic cartoons that played a role in the rise of Nazism. (Check out "Muslim" on Google images to get a sense of what I mean--fast-forward to the more run-of-the-mill editorial cartoons).

The sketches that caused offence were originally directed against a minority group--in Denmark, in France, you name it--which, like other minorities, is not in much of a position to fight back. They don't have newspapers. They don't have wads of cash to take out advertisements. They are expected, essentially, to suck it up--just another insult that the majority have the "right" to deploy, but by all means call it "free speech" or something equally noble to dress it up and make it respectable. Denmark contains a traditionally homogenous population--the Romans didn't even succeed in invading it--and immigration has not been welcomed by everyone. It is ruled today by a fairly right-wing government, and immigration has been on the political front burner for some time. Ditto France. That, and nothing else, is the context for the establishment media's publication of the scurrilous cartoons.

The Globe and Mail's disingenuousness on this issue is fairly plain. However, it abstains at least from hysterical shrieking about anti-semitism; the editorial must have gone at least into second draft. I expect I must, in view of Cosh's own scurrility, commend the editors for their admirable restraint.