Wright and wrong

"Incendiary." "Racist." So what did Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright say, exactly?

Consider the following a kind of counter-fisking. I've read what he said, and you know what? I agree with most of it. I'll go further--the comments of "in the fold" white preachers who happen to support John McCain and the Republican Party are true examples of horrendous bigotry--but no one's going after them. Hypocrisy. Double standards. Racist American media and pols rush to "judge" (politically assassinate) Barack Obama because of comments that his pastor made, comments that are, in fact, pretty mild compared to the evil outpourings of the Falwells and Buchanans of this world.

Pastor Wright has delivered 5,000 sermons. Two minutes have been extracted by the Obama-haters. Here they are:

1) "The government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

After Contragate, who can doubt that the US administration is, well, equivocal on the drug issue, depending on circumstances. Drugs are a scourge in America, especially amongst the poor. But the cynicism of the Powers That Be is truly extraordinary. A man who has seen the results of crack cocaine in his community might be forgiven--one would have thought--for being passionately angry about an administration that preaches against drugs and facilitates their circulation at the same time.

2)After September 11, 2001, Pastor Wright said: "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

There's nothing very new here: this is standard root cause theory. One looks for compassion, of course, for the victims of this crime against humanity--but we don't know what the pastor said on that matter. As for the motivations behind it, though--who can argue against the proposition that, before 9/11, the US thought its home territory was in a different galaxy, not part of this world, a world where children die because of US sanctions, and a Secretary of State says, "We think the price is worth it." A world where civilians are routinely slaughtered, where US-led wars have killed, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Perhaps the pastor was not tactful. Perhaps he did not express the proper degree of sympathy for the victims of an atrocity that killed Blacks and whites indiscriminately. But was he wrong?

3) "It just came to me within the past few weeks, y'all, why so many folks are hating on Barack Obama. He doesn't fit the model. He ain't white, he ain't rich, and he ain't privileged. Hillary fits the mold. Europeans fit the mold, Giuliani fits the mold. Rich white men fit the mold. Hillary never had a cab whiz past her and not pick her up because her skin was the wrong colour. Hillary never had to worry about being pulled over in her car as a black man driving in the wrong… I am sick of Negroes who just do not get it. Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home, Barack was. Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain't never been called a nigger. Hillary has never had her people defined as non-persons."

Does this paragraph really need a defence? These truths are self-evident. Anyone who argues that US politics aren't racialized is living on another planet. Of course they are. The extreme reaction to Wright's comments, dare I say it, is just another manifestation of this.

4) Bill Clinton "did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."

A throwaway line like this is hardly worth dealing with. It's part of the rhetorical the stock-in-trade of those, on both sides of the political spectrum, who want to comment negatively about their opposition. Big deal. Should such a comment cost Obama the presidency?

5) "In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just “disappeared” as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns. The hundreds of thousands who have been killed in Rwanda, in Angola, in Zimbabwe, in Mozambique and in Kenya are still invisible. There has been no international uproar about the thousands of Black lives lost, just about the loss of white life, American life and British life!"

Well, is this essentially true or is it not? The killing of brown people simply doesn't appear to garner the same concern in the North American public mind. One million (not hundreds of thousands) of Rwandans died--but what was the West's response? Ethnic cleansing outrages of the same kind but considerably less in scale in the former Yugoslavia warranted a multi-country offensive.

6) “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Here the good pastor is simply retailing a hoary old piece of urban folklore still current in the Black community. It's obviously not literally true. But does the claim convey any meaning at all? Well, there was the infamous Tuskagee experiment. And the practice of experimenting on Third World people remains to this day; the anti-AIDS antiviral drug AZT was first tested on Third World women--half of them, unbeknownst to them, were given a placebo. This grossly unethical conduct, which happened under the Clinton administration, was the subject of protest at the time. More than a thousand babies may have died because of this criminal act.

Jeremiah Wright, God help him, was essentially telling it like it is. Obama's subsequent speech, certainly, was a masterpiece of political skating, positively artistic. But, if the US campaign were not so fraught with half-thought thoughts, prejudices, knee-jerk reactions and omnipresent racism, neither he nor his pastor would have anything to apologize for. "Make it plain," Malcolm X used to tell his supporters. Now, in case we didn't know already, we have learned the cost of doing that in present-day America.

Wintry thoughts from Ottawa

The snow continues. Wet, gummy snow. Mr. 0%, aka Hizzoner Mayor Larry O'Brien, is demanding a $50 "snow tax" per household to cover the unforeseen costs of snow removal in the city of Ottawa. Seems he spent the reserve set aside for just this kind of thing to plug some holes in the city budget, during his bootless quest to fulfill his campaign promise of a 0% tax hike. Maybe we can pay it in snow.

The windrows are simply mountainous in my neighbourhood and elsewhere in the city. At this point we are approaching the snowfall record--if we don't make it, I for one am going to feel ripped off. The streets are impassable, many down to one lane. The runoff this spring is bound to flood basements. Oh joy, oh rapture.

And to top it all off, we can't blame it on Bush. The cold icing on the cake.

Times like this are best spent indoors. Thoughts turn gloomy, but at least it's warm and dry in here. The bad news recently has been like the snow: relentless, grim, without end. A few scattered observations:

• The Omar Khadr case. Turns out that things were worse than we might have imagined. Child torture by sadistic American guards; the Harper government's active interference in the case, attempting to withhold relevant documents from Khadr's defence team; the callous behaviour of Canadian officials; and now, it seems, he might not have done what he was originally accused of anyway. This has all been too much even for some Canadian conservative commentators. Jonathan Kay refers to the US military tribunals, one of which will soon be faced by Khadr, as "kangaroo courts that are operated as conviction machines."
  
  
• Sunny Mexico. For two years, Brenda Martin has sat in a Mexican jail, without a trial. She is currently on suicide watch. She is a Canadian citizen. Roused from its torpor, the Conservatives are sending down a team of MPs, including the serviceable Jason Kenney, to meet with her. Martin isn't fooled by this exercise in optics; neither are we. "Tell Kenney not to come here," she said. "If he is not coming here to take me out, then tell him not to come. They can ship me home in a fucking casket because I have had it."
  
  It seems that she could have been home 72 hours after her arrest, but for the initial indifference of Canadian consular officials. Move over, Franco Pillarella-- you've got plenty of company.
  
  Meanwhile, our compassionate conservatives come up with this sort of thing: "Finally, why is one hysterical women important enough for the Prime Minister to intervene with the President of Mexico?" (H/t). Nice.
  
  
• Chinese social colonialism. I don't hold much of a brief for the former Tibetan regime, run by monks whose transcendental ecstasies were supported by a huge army of ill-treated serfs. The Dalai Lama is the happy-face of feudalism. But China's subsequent brutal colonization of Tibet--Lhasa, the capital city, is by now half Han (Chinese)--is nothing less than criminal. This policy has been in force for some time: declared Zhou Enlai in 1980,
  
  The Han are greater in number and more developed in economy and culture but in the regions they inhabit there is not much arable land left and underground resources there are not as abundant as in the regions inhabited by fraternal nationalities.
  
  (Zhou, Enlai, "Some Questions on Policy towards Nationalities," Beijing Review, v.34, no.9 (1980), 16.)
  
  What we're seeing today is another dreary episode in the history of yet another colonial state. The parallels with Israel and its annexation of the West Bank are inescapable: settlement, military occupation, resistance, and religion as an ethnic marker and rallying-cry.
  
  
• We are, we are, we are the engineers. I can remember when there was only one woman enrolled in the faculty of engineering at McGill, and the boyz elected a shy and gentle man as Homecoming Queen, har, har. But despite the high proportion of women now enrolled in engineering across Canada, stupidity like this continues. What is it about learning to build bridges and skyscrapers that is so indissolubly linked to misogyny?

Aw, enough. Time for a good breakfast. Maybe I'll light a fire in the fireplace and pretend that I'm roughing it in the bush. My mood and my country: quelques arpents de neige.

Contempt of court

A judicial pogrom against Native leaders appears to be underway in Ontario. For the second time in two months, jail sentences of six months have been handed down by our justice system, for the "crime" of peacefully protesting against mining operations on Indian traditional lands.

In February, Professor Robert Lovelace, spokesperson for the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, and Chief Paula Sherman, were sentenced by Justice Douglas Cunningham in Kingston for upholding Algonquin law by opposing uranium mining operations on Algonquin land. Sherman offered to obey previous court injunctions against protesting the incursions of Frontenac Ventures Corp., and was spared jail time--as the mother of three young children, she could ill afford to be separated from them. Lovelace is currently serving his sentence in Quinte Correctional Facility. The Ardoch First Nation was fined $10,000 and Sherman, $15,000.

This month, it was the turn of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninunwug First Nation, near Big Trout Lake, 600 km. north of Thunder Bay, to get a taste of white man's justice. Justice Patrick Smith sent six band members to jail, including Chief Donny Morris and Deputy Chief Jack MacKay. Two others, Enus McKay and Evelyn Quequish, were given suspended sentences after they agreed to stop protesting.

The judge cited last month's decision as a precedent for the jail terms, and stated that he could not impose fines in any case because the defendants would be unable to pay them. One member "purged his contempt" by agreeing to stop protesting. Indian land is now safe for Platinex Inc. to commence its drilling operations.

The short message is this: if you are Native, forget about protesting peacefully in Ontario. Miners can come on to your land with impunity, and dig it up at their whim. You have no recourse. If you stand up, white judges will lock you down. The justice system stands with the mining companies, and the McGuinty government, including the feckless Aboriginal Affairs minister Michael Bryant, stands with the justice system.

But solidarity is building. Whites joined with Ardoch Algonquin First Nation to protest uranium prospecting around Sharbot Lake. Now Nishnawbe Aski Nation has broken off bilateral talks with the government of Ontario. And Anishinabek Nation, with its secretariat the Union of Ontario Indians (representing a third of Ontario's Aboriginal population), has thrown its support behind the newest victims of the judicial/mining axis. It's time for the rest of us to show our contempt for a court system that is so clearly biased against Aboriginal people and their traditional rights.

[As an aside: while some go on wringing their hands about the alleged racking and screwing of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, and whine about fascism and the like, not a peep has been heard from that quarter about the on-going judicial suppression of Native people in Ontario. Could it be that jailed Native people don't warrant the same concern as a couple of journalists who have been mildly inconvenienced at best? Militant conservative whites, of course, get somewhat different treatment from the establishment when they do their protests in my province.]

Of Truthers and truth

I have no doubt that every time one of those Loose Change dickwads opens his mouth, a Republican somewhere picks up five votes.... [I]t's bad enough that people in this country think Tim LaHaye is a prophet and Sean Hannity is an objective newsman. But if large numbers of people in this country can swallow 9/11 conspiracy theory without puking, all hope is lost.
--Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Hoo, boy. Today I encountered a roomful (or so it seemed) of Loose Change types--in a graduate seminar. This was my first up-close-and-personal encounter with Truthers. I wielded Occam's Razor like a headsman's axe, but to no avail. I was ignoring the laws of physics! What about Building 7? Controlled explosions!

It did make me think, though, about my reasons for dismissing this all, rather rudely on this occasion, as "madness" and "raving." Why should I swallow the official line? It's not like we haven't been lied to before. I'm old enough to remember the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and being part of a small, despised minority who thought the whole incident was a crock, thanks to I.F. Stone's Weekly. Besides, the most harshly dismissive critics of alternative explanations for 9/11 are conservatives (well, not entirely). And besides, cui bono? Why, the Project for the New American Century folks--the neo-cons. "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." Which means, of course, that any such "catalyzing event" must have been engineered by this self-same bunch. Well, doesn't it?

OK, here's my take, based, not upon the physics of steel, the hole in the Pentagon, or Saudis winging their way out of the US to safety right after the event. I can only offer a witch's brew of common sense, logic and shavings from that razor I was mentioning. It's not very original: all's been said, and more eloquently, elsewhere. But the thought that bright graduate students can suspend their critical faculties to this extent forces me to blink, scratch my head, blink again, and write something down. Consider it therapy. The Truthers have a lot of unanswered questions. Well, so do I.

1) Why go to all the trouble and risk of stringing miles of wire and installing shaped charges in buildings that are open 24/7 and are full of people at all hours, when flying planes into the buildings alone would have sufficed to accomplish The Plan, even if they hadn't collapsed? (Note that I do not ask how this feat was accomplished, because there are no doubt intricate explanations involving twelve-foot lizards and Israel that I am in no position to refute.)

2) Why go through amazing hassles to disguise a controlled demolition by flying planes into buildings at the same time as the detonation, but then blow the lid off the whole scheme by doing the same thing to Building 7 without benefit of aircraft?

3) Why fire into the Pentagon when the WTC demolition would have accomplished The Plan without any need to attack a key US military installation?

4) In other words, why go to all of this immense labour, and (allegedly) involve hundreds or even thousands of people in a dangerous conspiracy, when most of it isn't even necessary to accomplish The Plan?

There are many versions of Trutherism, of course. Some border, not on the fantastic, but on the hallucinatory. The planes were drones: the real ones were diverted, and we'll never know what happened to the passengers. All the Jews who worked at the WTC stayed home that day. Small nukes were used.

If a sceptic merely insists that we don't know the whole story, that's a reasonable point to start from. But the rules of evidence haven't been suspended just because we don't like Bush. Could US intelligence have known about the plot and done nothing? Maybe--there is, after all, some debate in respectable circles about possible advance knowledge of Pearl Harbour, suppressed, it is claimed, to get the US into the Second World War.

But we need more than supposition. The whole nature of inquiry is to raise hypotheses, and, on the basis of evidence, to confirm, modify or reject them. In this case, calling for evidence is pointless: lurid hypotheses are self-proven by the remorseless logic of cui bono. 9/11 did provide the opportunity to enact a host of neo-con measures, from the suspension of habeas corpus to heavy domestic surveillance, from secret prisons and torture to the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. So what? 9/11 also made air travel a frustrating and tiresome experience for millions, but no one is accusing the bus companies of anything, or the security firms whose employees now make their living sticking wands into your armpits and confiscating salad dressing.

Looking for evidence to support hypotheses is fair enough, although it too often leads to excluding unsupportive evidence rather than modifying or abandoning the beloved hypothesis. Because there is something beguiling about the latter when it confirms your worst suspicions about the folks you already dislike and the politics you already despise.

You want to believe, don't you? But that way madness lies.

Happy (belated) International Women's Day!

In a cab in Sydney on March 6 I listened to a radio commentator ask a variant of the Tiresome Question: "Does feminism still have any relevance now women are free to do what they want?"

That week, two issues were in the Aussie news. The first, which had been simmering for a while, was PM Kevin Rudd's blue-ribbon panel to brainstorm ideas for the next decade. One thousand of the best and brightest Australians were selected, to be led in discussion by ten prominent public figures.

Exactly one of those figures was a woman. And, of the thousand best and brightest, only 10% were women. (That figure made me speculate: was the selection committee perhaps thinking of gays and lesbians? I recall a recent brouhaha over the Canadian Blog awards...)

Aussies make noise when they're unhappy, and there has been quite a spate of comment in the press about this "blokefest."

The second matter concerned a revolting creature known as the Butcher of Bega--a sadistic gynecologist who, over a two-decade period, assaulted and sexually mutilated hundreds of women under his care. It took fourteen years to have his licence to practice suspended, and he continued to practise for another seven years without one.

The best piece I could find about both of these news items, complete with vintage Australian saltiness, is this one. It begins:

They insist we live in an egalitarian meritocracy, not - as so much of the evidence suggests - a diehard cockocracy. Apparently the outrageous discrepancies in earnings and the paltry scattering of women at the pointy end of the labour force plane are simply the innocuous results of merit-based decisions.

Those of us travelling back in cattle class, however, know the world is simply not the same place for women as it is for men.

Here at home an Ontario study reveals that men who go to doctors with chronic knee pain are twice as likely as women to be recommended for a knee replacement. That's one news story, on one day.

Is feminism relevant, you ask? Good grief.

There is a peculiar kind of ability that all humans seem to have, namely, to hold staggeringly contradictory information and ideas in their heads at the same time and notice nothing odd. There have been all kinds of fancy names for it--false consciousness and cognitive dissonance spring to mind--but it seems to me that "mental blindness" does the trick quite adequately. And, as H.G. Wells convincingly argued, in the country of the blind the one-eyed person isn't a king (or queen), but a target.

He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.

He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look you here, you people," he said. "There are things you do not understand in me."

Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it was to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelids less red and sunken than the others, so that one could almost fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to persuade. He spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity that presently became condemnatory.

His rebellion is not successful:

He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had whipped him they appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did submissively what he was told.

Sound familiar? And so some go on, extolling peace as we all hunker down for a permanent state of war (because no war against terrorism can ever be won: yellow alert is the best we can hope for). They deny that racism exists, other than anti-Semitism, which is apparently everywhere. They claim that the Montreal Massacre had nothing to do with sexism in society.

And they say that feminism is not relevant today.

So my overdue message of celebration is directed to the sighted few in our country of the blind. Keep observing, keep thinking, and keep talking. Some will continue to believe, as the inhabitants of Wells' community did, that the world is just an enormous cavern. Nothing we can say will shake them, and they will do their utmost to shut us up when we differ. But others, one at a time, will come to see the stars overhead. Thank you, sisters, for pointing so many of them out.

For those with teenagers

I thought I'd share this Aussie song with those who have experienced, er, communication problems with their teenagers.

I once talked to my father in exactly this way, over a restaurant table back in the early 1960s. I remember this only because he subsequently reminded me of it quite a bit. Recently I told my teenage stepson that my old man was finally getting his revenge. :)

Pretend I'm not here

Y'all know what our dear Dr Dawg did to me a little earlier today. So, ok, I'll play. But just this once.

Six ultra-minor truths about myself:

1. Somebody told me that Preparation H can tighten up the unfortunate pouches I seem to be developing below my eyes ("All the runway models use it!"), so I have just slathered on some Prep H and am waiting for a miracle. I dunno, though: by the time he was my age, my dad had the eyes of a hound dog, and I think I got that gene.

2. I think that the white sand beaches of Kootenay Lake just south of Nelson, B.C., are the most beautiful place on earth. Well: in summer, anyway.

3. My position on food is that I will eat almost anything short of raw sheep's eyes, and yet I simply cannot face coconut, not the texture, not the smell, not the anything. I have no idea where that neurosis came from.

4. I can swim a bit, in theory well enough, but I am afraid of water over my head. Something about the depths makes me feel I am being pulled down. I have no idea where that neurosis came from either.

5. Something about people playing devil's advocate drives me up walls. So we're going to have an argument, aren't we, Dr D?

6. I am a sucker for kitchen gadgets and hardware just generally. My aluminum step-ladder is one of the best birthday presents I ever got. My very favourite thing, though, is an enormous copper and steel wok, which takes two hands to lift. I cook almost everything in it. And lifted with two hands, it is a most effective weapon.

The meme-ing of life

I see my friend Jay Currie has tagged me with this: Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.

Oh, all right.

1) I am an admirer of wombats, and would, in a perfect world, have one for a pet.

2) I can only do serious academic work well after midnight.

3) I'm always on the qui vive for new meats. Most recently I tasted kangaroo, crocodile and camel. Muskox is my all time fave, though. No wonder my stepdaughter is vegan. :)

4) I have a fondness for hats, which appears to be increasing with age.

5) I don't usually eat breakfast.

6) I like arguing theology with believers, not out of disrespect, but out of interest. How does this belief thing work, exactly? Why that book, and not that book?

Tagging:

Balb
Sholto
McClelland
Kinsella
Stribe
skdadl

Thank you, friends, allies...

...and sparring partners. We're back.

A few words about that, and a comment or two on the trip, but, first of all, a vast thank-you to my four colleagues for keeping the place hopping in my absence; and to all those who have posted comments here. Some excellent discussions have taken place, and I hope I can spark a few more when I recover from jet lag and the Greater Toronto Airport.

We had, it seems, a few more hurdles to jump. We did get standby seats this afternoon, and arrived in Ottawa an hour later. But there was that security incident. Allow me one last rant before moving on to better things.

Let me say, first of all, that I'm all for airport security. I mean the real stuff, not the optical illusions created for the rubes--air marshals, intel networks, data bases, explosives sniffers, and common-sense precautions, not nail-clipper bans and belt removal and bans on bottles except for duty-free ones. (The latter make just as good weapons, broken or whole, but imagine the fuss from the business community if you tried to ban duty-free booze sales.)

What I dislike--intensely--is charades, arbitrariness, cheap power-tripping, lack of training, and jobbing the whole thing out to security firms. If this thing is worth doing, it's worth doing to one standard under one set of policies. Security at airports should be an accountable public matter, carried out by well-trained government employees. Instead, it's being done by poorly-trained private security grunts who all too often make things up as they go along.

So today (for example) my stepson's salve for a skin condition attracted the notice of one over-zealous twit. This had been through security any number of times before. It's not a gel, liquid or aerosol.

I was waiting on the other side of the metal detector. The person running that end of things had told me that I had to wait until the rest of my party had been completely processed after passing through it. That meant, to begin with, that I had the boarding passes, but the twit on the other side was demanding them all over again from the others. We sorted that one out, and I passed through the detector, and went up to help my kid, who was doing all right on his own, as it happens. I explained what the salve was for, pointed out that there was no rule forbidding it, and suggested that he was being unreasonable.

He went off to get support from his higher-ups, sitting at a table some distance off. He came back with one of those looks on his face, so I went over to the table, my young'un in tow, and made the mistake of trying to reason with these guys. The head cheese (and you know the type, don't you? Two hundred pounds of smug in a cheap suit, a sawdust Caesar with the intelligence of a centipede) refused to give his name, tucking his ID under his coat; his assistant was a fellow named Shahin. I pointed out that the ointment had been no problem until a new rule had been made on the spot by their man. I suggested that they were demonstrating everything that's wrong with current airport security measures.

But, says the head cheese, if this melted it would be a liquid! "Look, it's melting now!" Shahin chimed in. I looked. It wasn't, of course. "How do you melt something on a plane?" I asked. It's not like you can bring matches or a hot-plate on board, after all. At this point Shahin said that he'd call the police if I kept up--I was, he said, being an "unruly passenger." That I wasn't a passenger at all at that point seemed to have escaped him entirely; nor, dear readers, was I being abusive or profane. He was just like those kids you see in school who hang behind the class bully when he's doing his thing, grimacing at you and saying, "Yeah!"

My stepson pulled me away, and I was escorted back out to put the salve through the luggage system. Afterwards he pointed out that candles are allowed, and you can melt them as well. "And belt-buckles," I said. A perfect end to the adventure, I thought. You simply can't make this stuff up. I felt as though I had been in a surrealist novel, but that may have been lack of sleep.

Anyhow, the trip was a success. We took Marianne not to Kapowairua but to the spot where spirits jump into the sea--Te Rerenga Wairua, Cape Reinga itself. My stepkids were present, other family members, and the wonderful Peter Kitchen, a former successful businessman, a healer, and a person wise in the ways of māoritanga, and tikanga (doing what is right and proper). His kōrero (spoken words), karakia (prayers) and waiata (song) were immensely healing. We headed back to his place afterwards for a feast that he and his family had prepared for us.

After that, we embarked upon a whirlwind tour of the North Island of New Zealand/Aotearoa and then Australia, seeing friends and relatives and a bit of the countryside. Through a happy chain of circumstances, we got the kids connected to their own marae, Matawaia, in the midst of Ngati Hine country, and our guide had his daughter formally call us onto their own marae. More on this later, perhaps.

In Sydney I sank a few excellent beers with critical commenter Sholto Douglas. It was great fun. His fangs and brightly polished horns troubled me not a whit. Indeed, he is a personable fellow, whose company I enjoyed, and I hope we can repeat the experience one day.

I am also confirmed in my love of wombats, although every keeper we talked to had similar leg scars from their razor-sharp teeth.

And a high point for me was visiting Uluru (Ayer's Rock).

It's hard to write about. You could feel the strangeness of this vast stone in the middle of a desert, upon which the texts of 40,000 years of Aboriginal culture have been written; a palimpsest, with every feature of the stone carrying its myths and stories. It seemed alive. It is a palpably sacred place. Guidebooks tell you that the Aborigines don't like people climbing it, and then proceed to tell you how to go about it.

So much more to tell. I'll do a few pieces in the coming weeks. Again, for now, my thanks to all who participated here while we were gone.

UPDATE: (March 28)

Well, I guess this puts things in perspective...

"You can't go home again"

I suggest this should be the motto of Err Canada henceforward.

I was hoping to return with a courteous thank-you to my support bloggers and their loyal readership. That will come, in the measured, dulcet tones that my readers have rightly come to expect. But not just now.

My family and I began our journey a day or so ago, from Brisbane, on to Auckland, and then to LAX. In my sleepy state I figured that could lead to extraordinary rendition, given the warnings we had had about the place, but we were whisked through US Customs and Homeland Security with smiles and good wishes. Then to Toronto.

*cough*

We're still there.

Now, the huge dump of snow arranged to remind us of our Canadian roots is no human's fault,unless we can relate it to global warming somehow. But my already jaundiced view of our national airline has been confirmed. A quick recap of our adventures so far:

We landed in Toronto an hour late--given the conditions, this was understandable. Customs and Immigration were sweet and welcoming--took us ten minutes or so, including line-ups, for Immigration, and then a forty-minute wait for the luggage carrousel to start moving. Then we were waved through Customs and the fun began.

We took our luggage to the onward transfer point. There we were told that we had to take it away because the Ottawa Airport was closed. We headed up to Departures and lined up to speak to an Air Canada rep. Upon getting through the line, we were told that the flight was going ahead, our boarding passes were good, and we'd better hustle through security. We did. The plane was just about ready to board when we got there. They proceeded by row number, the usual--then the Air Canada folks announced that the flight had been cancelled, and I swear they turned tail and ran, after telling us we had to pick up our baggage on the way out.

Back we went to the original line. We were told that Air Canada was shutting that line down, and then all staff abruptly headed off, leaving a number of us with slips of paper containing three telephone numbers. One yielded a "no service at this number" recorded message. Another, to obtain a hotel discount, gave us a voice recording to the effect that this was unavailable. The third--well, it's been a night of busy signals and, when lucky, Air Canada weekend getaway commercials.

We took a cab ride to Brampton, where there was some hotel space. Our driver had never dealt with snow before, it seems--near the hotel, he headed straight into a snowbank, and got himself so stuck that we couldn't budge him. We scrambled over snowbanks in our summer clothes, and got our rooms. The fun with Air Canada telephone numbers continued far into the night.

I thought I might try the all-purpose reservations number. No dice. "Due to the high volume of calls we cannot take your call right now. Please call back later." Trying departure information, fully automated, yielded this: "Please hold while I transfer you to an agent who can assist you." The phone rang three times and then went dead. Same the second time.

We're now heading off to the airport (I don't trust their on-line info), as soon as I can rouse my demoralized family.

No blame, as noted, attaches to the weather conditions. But Err Canada is nothing less than a public relations disaster. Why would they not provide information and advice at the scene? Why do their numbers invariably produce no results? Why can no two staff ever agree on the message? Why can we never, ever, raise a living person in the voicemail prison they have erected? If there is a high volume of calls, why not add some bodies to the telephone banks? As it is, we can't even find out if there are planes flying to Ottawa today. Another $75 cab ride looms, possibly to no avail.

I wish I had Montie Brewer's telephone number, but I'd likely be put on hold. Given my mood at the moment, though, that would probably be just as well.

The past-due date of Master Ian Brodie

Sorry, but I just had to get that off my chest. I reserve the right to reuse the title of this post at any time in the future. I am in my prime, after all, and I do not intend to devote my prime to petrification.

Maggie Smith, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Enjoy.

Obama's Canadian Enemies

By now most people are aware that someone, somehow in the Harper government interfered with the Barack Obama campaign in the US. Ian Brodie, Harper's chief of staff, is directly implicated for his so-called off-hand remark. That Brodie still has a job in the Prime Minister's Office is an indication of how Bush-like the Harper regime has actually become. Wrong-doing by Harper loyalists is treated the same as it is in the Bush administration. Nothing happens.

The truth is, Harper and his Conservative Party of Canada are not the Tories of Canada's historical past. Jeet Heer has done the heavy lifting on this one and has a must read article in the Guardian.

One contextual fact might help explain the whole matter: the increasing integration between Canadian and American conservatives, who tend to be as thick as thieves. Brodie's own career is part of this story of the Canadian right becoming increasingly tied to its American counterpart. Brodie did his PhD in political science at the University of Calgary under Ted Morton, an American-born former academic and activist and known as the dean of the "Calgary school", an intellectual movement that has remade Canadian conservatism along American-lines. Traditionally, Canadian conservatives have followed the model of old-fashioned British Tories, emphasising social cohesion and accommodation to the welfare state. Morton, who has served as an advisor to many conservative politicians, has consistently worked to make the Canadian right imitate their successful brothers to the south in marrying populism on social issues (including opposition to gay rights and abortion) with free-market economic policies. This is a major development. Historically, Canadian conservatives have been the most anti-American of our major political parties. Brian Mulroney changed that with the Free Trade Agreement of 1988, but it's worth bearing in mind that even under Mulroney the Conservative party had very little formal ties with the American right. Mulroney's political roots were in the machine politics of Quebec, always friendly toward American big business but culturally and socially distinct from American conservatism. One telling detail: Mulroney once said that the American politician he most admired was Mario Cuomo, an equally earthy street-fighting Catholic pol.

It's not just the politicians that have caused this change. There are the inside operators who regularly cross the border and work both the Canadian and US conservative movement.

... the emergence of a cohort of intellectual entrepreneurs, journalists and thinktank types who happily shuttled back and forth from Washington and New York to Toronto and Ottawa. David Frum is perhaps the most famous figure of this crowd, happy to write for the National Post and the National Review, work one day to merge the two right-wing parties of Canada and then go on to pen speeches for George Bush.

More. Oh yes there's more.

Daniel Casse, Father Richard John Neuhaus, Ken Whyte, Rachel Marsden, Peter Brimelow and Mark Steyn.

A bit of curiosity with this crowd is the "residences" they maintain. Some are clearly permanent US residents. Whyte is most definitely resident in Canada. But some of them claim to maintain two residences - one in Canada and one in the US. Given that this lot regularly bashes the idea of single-payer health care in the US, one has to wonder if those maintaining Canadian residences carry Canadian provincial health-care cards.

There is one other name which floats to the surface.

Back when he was still a media baron, Conrad Black was the great patron of this group. Like a czar willing to send the Cossacks wherever needed, whether Mongolia or the Ukraine, Black was happy to move his minions around the globe, not just to Toronto and Washington (where Black owned The Hill, a small but influential congressional newspaper) but also London and Jerusalem. The net result was the creation of a global right-wing intellectual movement that is very well coordinated. In fighting Bill Clinton, for example, Black's papers abroad would sometime print scurrilous reports that were too wild and un-sourced for the American press. Thanks to the internet and talk radio, these reports would echo back in the United States and eventually become part of the mainstream discourse.

Drudge, Limbaugh, O'Reilly...

Heer poses an interesting idea in his conclusion. The most important aspect though is that Harper's integration with the US movement conservatives is virtually complete and it would be a mistake to suggest they are related to past Canadian conservative parties by anything but a slender thread. In fact, they are, as Heer suggests, a part of a much larger international conservative movement headquartered in this US toilet.

We didn't like the Comintern and the Cominform. Why would we accept a conservative form of it?

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver

So what is the truth of it?

Personally, I don't care about who leaked what about whom.
What's important is the truth of it -- will either Clinton or Obama actually renegotiate NAFTA or not?
This time, will the Americans negotiate a deal they can live up to, or will we have to go through another decade of court cases with obstructive American industries blaming Canada for their marketing problems?
And for our part, will the Harper government actually negotiate with the best interests of Canada at heart, or will their basic operating principle be just the protection of industries in Conservative ridings?

Drowning in a Bathtub

We're so screwed. No one in Ottawa seems to have noticed.

Stephen Harper wants a weaker, less-intrusive federal government or, as one blogger quoting right-wing intellectual Grover Nordquist [sic] put it, he wants to "shrink government down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub." That's the secret agenda and it's baffling how some media thought it was secret considering it's been the unabashed dream of conservatives for roughly half of the 20th century if anyone cared to listen.

What's astonishing about it is Harper, for the past two years, has been mounting a closet revolution that involved systematically dismembering Ottawa, but it was so much more interesting to concentrate on important matters of the state like Rona Ambrose's hotness and its effect vis-a-vis global warming.

And now it's done.

He left it up to his former advisor Tom Flanagan to cackle about his accomplishments - it wouldn't be prime ministerial to riffle the fingers and mutter the Monty Burn's "Excellent."

In a wide-ranging interview with CP this week, Flanagan said last week's budget was the final flourish to a stage-whisper campaign that's left Ottawa unable to mount any sort of meaningful initiative over the next few years.

That's the way it's has worked around the world for a quarter of a century: get in power, spend everything in sight as quickly as possible, underfund social programs so that you can claim they don't work anyway, destroy the revenue base, and declare a crisis which can only be solved by the very policies that caused it. You'd think we'd have learned by now.

H/t Drew.

Tell me the Harperites aren't Republicans again...

From ABC News:

On Wednesday, the Canadian Television network reported that two unnamed Canadian sources said a "senior member" of Obama's campaign team had called Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador in Washington, in the last month to warn him that Obama would be ratcheting up rhetoric against the North American Free Trade Agreement, but that he should "not be worried about what Obama says about NAFTA," adding, "It's just campaign rhetoric. … It's not serious."

Both the Canadian Embassy and the Obama campaign have repeatedly denied the CTV report.

However, a source close to the Canadian prime minister's office tells ABC News that the original communication was between Austan Goolsbee, Obama's senior economic adviser and an economics professor at the University of Chicago, and Georges Rioux, Canada's consul general in Chicago, about Obama's rhetoric against NAFTA.

According to the source, Wilson exaggerated the communication between the Obama campaign and the Canadian official during discussions this week with Ian Brodie, the prime minister's chief of staff, who leaked the story to CTV.

And now... from Susan Delacourt:

A "source close to the Prime Minister's Office" has told ABC News who leaked some misinformation to CTV News this week about conversations between the Canadian government and Barack Obama's campaign. The alleged leaker? None other than Ian Brodie, chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

[...]

But let's also pause and look again at that ABC News item for a second. Someone close to the PMO is outing Ian Brodie as an anonymous leaker. Hope that "source's" job is secure.

And now, let's also look at what this "source close to the Prime Minister's Office" is saying about how all the misinforming happened.

Apparently, Brodie was the victim of some "exaggeration" by Canada's ambassador to the U.S., Michael Wilson. Ah yes, that notorious exaggerator, Michael Wilson, former finance minister in Brian Mulroney's government, one of the straightest, most understated cabinet members in those times. Does this sound a bit familiar? Didn't "sources" in the PMO try to blame the military for misinformation around the issue of Afghan detainees a few weeks ago? Blame that later had to be retracted? And isn't it interesting how "sources" close to this government are quick to turn on old Mulroney Conservatives when the going gets tough?

It would probably be very interesting to hear conversations going on this afternoon inside the PMO and between Ottawa and Washington. Unless we're reading the ABC News item incorrectly, someone "close to the Prime Minister's Office" has managed to smear the PMO chief of staff and Canada's ambassador to the U.S in one fell swoop.

So, our guys are playing games across the border. How fucking quaint. How fucking Rovian of them.

Further, it shows how Harper and his knee-capping political coalition of wannabe baby elephants doesn't give a red-rat's-ass about the direction of Canadian public opinion. Or are they going to try to tell you they missed this:

Both Democratic nominees remain far and away the preferred option among Canadian respondents to become the next American president when compared to Republicans - a trend that holds true even among Conservative party supporters.

Of course... maybe it's just all of us "out of step" with the movement. Kady explains:

I'm not sure which aspect of this story will thrill Canadian voters more: that the Stephen Harper's chief of staff is allegedly playing electoral silly buggers south of the border, or that he's apparently doing so to help the Republicans. Then again, this is the smartest prime minister in the history of ever, so I'm probably just missing the strategic brilliance.

Exactly.

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver

Your government is being run by Christian Dominionists

Yeah. Thanks for taking the shroud off the agenda. Christian dominionist, Charles McVety, is taking full credit for a change in the Income Tax Act which allows the federal government to censor anything McVety finds doesn't meet his Christian zombie brigade agenda.

A well-known evangelical crusader is claiming credit for the federal government's move to deny tax credits to TV and film productions that contain graphic sex and violence or other offensive content.

Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition, said his lobbying efforts included discussions with Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, and "numerous" meetings with officials in the Prime Minister's Office.

This slimy piece of work is exactly what the Harper government is all about. In January 2006, just before election day, I wrote this about Harper and the coalition of Christian right-wing freaks that had gathered around him.

Harper gathers support, either through candidates or directly, from groups which will expect their social issues to receive priority on any Conservative government order paper. Vote Marriage Canada, The Promise Keepers, Focus On The Family Canada, R.E.A.L. Women of Canada, Canada Family Action Coalition and Campaign Life Coalition are some of the groups which support the Harper campaign by either promoting their candidate or openly supporting the Conservative Party of Canada platform. All of these groups are homophobic, most are anti-abortion and most pursue an extreme right-wing christian agenda. While some claim to be non-partisan, that suggestion is quickly dispatched with one look at their election literature. Many of these groups are Canadian branches of larger US bodies led by proselytizing christian extremists.

[...]

As much as Harper preaches "less government" he only means it in terms of taxation and delivery of programs. When it comes to social governance, a Conservative government would be in your face, in your bedroom and likely listening to your phone calls.

At the time several readers responded suggesting I was overstating the situation and being deliberately hyperbolic.

So, tell me which part of that prediction isn't now coming true?

After Harper's narrow minority victory in 2006, McVety was one of the first people invited to the Prime Minister's office. In September 2006, Marci McDonald wrote the cover story for The Walrus providing a glimpse of how ingrained the Christian dominionists had become in the Harper government. She too, was largely dismissed as exaggerating the problem even though we now knew what McVety was all about.

During the last election, as head of a handful of pro-family lobbies including the Defend Marriage Coalition, McVety emerged as a power to be reckoned with. He bought up the rights to unclaimed Liberal websites such as josephvolpe.com and stacked a handful of Conservative nomination contests in favour of evangelical candidates adamantly opposed to same-sex matrimony, a campaign he has vowed to repeat. As Harper navigates the tricky waters of minority rule—keeping the lid on any eruptions of rhetorical fervour from the rambunctious theo-cons in his caucus—it is noteworthy that he has continued to cultivate a man regarded as the lightning rod of the Christian right. Last spring, those around the prime minister drafted McVety to help sell the government’s contentious child-care policy, and on budget day he was the personal guest of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in the Commons’ vip gallery.

This latest move is intended to shut down Canadian film and television productions which don't pass the "Disney" test of McVety's living room. But worse, far worse, is the absolute fact that a rabid Christian dominionist has penetrated government and is now writing policy.

If you think McVety wasn't behind Bill C-484, think again. It's right on the front page of McVety's Family Action Coalition website.

McVety clearly has a strategy: Get the thin edge of various Christian dominionist wedges into government policy and when the time is right, drive them in as deep as possible. McVety wants a Christian evangelist theocracy and Harper is more than happy to lead it for him. Anything for power.

And while McVety is proudly taking credit for his attack on Canadian freedoms via the Income Tax Act, there is this whiny little line off his group's website:

(NOTE: Due to CFAC's political actions to support family, religious freedom and democracy, Revenue Canada will not allow us to issue charitable tax receipts.)

Take note of the attempt to portray themselves as "persecuted". If Harper ever gets a majority, you can expect that McVety's groups, hardly beacons of freedom and democracy, will find a way to further amend the Income Tax Act to make themselves tax-exempt.

This isn't just dangerous. This is very dangerous. Bill C-10 should never have gotten out of committee. It is up to the opposition, the majority in Parliament and on parliamentary committees, to be aware that Harper is serving the Christian dominionist agenda. It's time they get off their asses and stop the creep towards a theocracy.

No more playing hooky from committee meetings, no more missing votes. Read every line of every piece of proposed legislation and do the required research. Do otherwise and we'll be in the same condition as the train-wreck that rests against our southern border.

Cross posted from The Galloping Beaver

Shall we dance?

Gentlemen, take cover. It’s Leap Day (Sadie Hawkins Day in some traditions). That’s the one day in every four years that I get to stop sitting anxiously by the phone (in my customarily appealing and dependent feminine way), waiting for you to call, and I call you instead. Today, you’re the ones dancing backwards, although we won’t make you wear high heels (unless you really want to). Whee.

Lessee. What should I invite you to do? Dance with me? Whisk me off to a Moroccan beach? Peel me a grape? Wash the kitchen floor? Muck out the cat boxes? Oh, all of those, and then one more thing.

Recognize the full humanity of women, which means accepting that women are perfectly capable of making reasonable decisions about their bodies and their lives without state (or imperial) paternalism, and that given the freedom to do so, they have overwhelmingly made the wisest choices, which are definitely not always the same choices – they are the choices of the women on the spot. The liberation and empowerment of women has historically always meant a leap in social health. Support it however you can. (Rule 1 of support: listen and follow; don’t lead.)

In Canada this week and next, a dishonest attempt to separate women from their pregnancies and to establish and privilege the personhood of the fetus over the full humanity of the mother is underway. You can read about it here and here. You can sign the petition against it here. You can write to Stéphane Dion to ask him to whip his caucus from a handy form here. And you can talk or write to your MP.

And then we’ll boogie, as soon as pogge gets his blues blogging up tonight. We love you guys very much, in spite of everything, under the circumstances, all things considered, and weather permitting.

Thanks to fern hill at Bread and Roses for the alert.

Great line of the day

Dana at Galloping Beaver writes about Harper's law and order obsession:

There are some who understand just how much the Harperites intend to legislate changes in the culture of the country.
Unfortunately none of them are sitting on the opposition benches.

Holy Crap

The Globe reports:

The widow of former B.C. MP Chuck Cadman says two Conservative Party officials offered her husband a million-dollar life insurance policy in exchange for his vote to bring down the Liberal government in May of 2005.

The offer, which was summarily rejected by the dying man, is outlined in a biography of Mr. Cadman by Vancouver journalist Tom Zytaruk that is to be released on March 14. A copy of the manuscript, including an introduction by former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, has been obtained by The Globe and Mail.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is quoted in the book, Like a Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, as confirming that a visit took place, and that officials were "legitimately" representing the Conservative Party. But he says any offer to Mr. Cadman was only to defray any losses he might suffer due to an election....

Dona Cadman, who is now running for the Conservatives [Why??? - CS] in the Vancouver-area riding of Surrey North, was not in the office at the time. But she says her husband was furious when he returned to their apartment. "Chuck was really insulted," she said in a telephone interview with The Globe Wednesday. "He was quite mad about it, thinking they could bribe him with that."

Mr. Cadman died less than two months after the vote.

Ms. Cadman, who has read and approved the manuscript for the book, said she has "no idea" where the money for the life insurance was supposed to come from. "They had the form there. Chuck just had to sign."

Ms. Cadman also said her husband never told her the names of the two officials. "He did know them but he said, no, he wouldn't say who they were. I imagine they were up there somewhere along the line."

I honestly don't know where to begin.

Shorter

Shorter Brian Mulroney:

I'll do absolutely anything to clear my name...except tell anyone what actually happened.