Monthly Archives: November 2010

Thugocracy

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcXhEd_mDt4

Amy Miller describes her incarceration, which included threats of rape by police at last June’s G20 summit.

Let’s call it what it is, shall we?  How else to characterize a regime that budgeted a billion dollars to hire goons who brutalized and unlawfully detained hundreds of Canadian citizens?  According to The Globe and Mail, 10,000 uniformed police were involved, as well as 1,000 “private security.”  Private security? Private security forces were unleashed on citizens exercising their constitutional right to free and peaceful assembly?  Under what laws was this private security operating?  Was it private security operatives or publicly accountable peace officers who were responsible for attacks on citizens?  Who provided this private security?  How much was this private security paid?  What is the liability of this private security for any mischief, damage and harm it might have caused?  This is why we need a public inquiry.

Catherine Porter has a report today in The Toronto Star.

A sample:

Sean Salvati was the 10th person to slip behind the skirted table Thursday afternoon. He looked like a guy’s guy — jeans, long-sleeve T-shirt, short brown hair. He’s 32 and works as a paralegal.

He went to a Blue Jays game with four buddies three nights before the G20 summit. On his way out, he passed two police officers. He wished them good luck on Saturday, before hopping into a cab.

The cab made it two blocks before he was “pulled forcefully” out by the same officers and asked about his “suspicious comment.”

After an hour-long interrogation by a growing number of officers, he was arrested for “being intoxicated in a public place.” He’d drunk 31/2 beers over the course of the ball game.

At the station, Salvati said he was violently strip-searched — “they kicked me in the knees, kneed me in the torso, slapped me in the face, dragged me along the floor until my pants and underwear were removed” — and left naked in a holding cell for four hours. He was never permitted to speak to a lawyer. Upon his release, he asked the sergeant for the name of the officers who interviewed him.

“I was told nobody came to interview me. I imagined the entire interview,” he said.

You can find coverage (including video) of the G20 violence by police in posts from last June 28 – 30.  (Click on the archive link for June 2010 in the right hand menu column.)

(Thanks to Ross Belot for the tip)

Robert Louis Stevenson

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Today is Robert Louis Stevenson‘s birthday (1850-1894).  Even Google is celebrating, as you can see from its Treasure Island-themed link icon (above).

Frye in “Third Variation: The Cave” in Words with Power:

In most descent mythis there is some formidable enemy — Minotaur or dragon or demon like Asmodeus — to be fought and overcome, and frequently this enemy is blocking the goal of the descent.  The goal is often, in popular romance especially, a treasure of gold or jewels, as in Treasure Island or Tom Sawyer or Poe’s Gold Bug. . . The type of society that searches for such treasure is an instensely selective one.  In popular literature the searchers may be boys or antisocial groups (pirates and the like) that boys find it easy to identify with.  The standards of admission often reverse those of more conventional societies. . . Often the dragon-guarded hoard is a metaphor for some form of wisdom or fertility that is the real object of descent.  (CW 26, 203)

Quote of the Day: “A zen kind of chutzpah”

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Tremonton Utah’s indefatigible satirist Jesus’ General (“an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender”) posts his review of George Bush’s Decision Points at Amazon.com.  A taste:

The presidential memoir serves an important function in our society. It provides a former president with an opportunity to shape how we will be viewed by history.

They aren’t easy books to write. Facts create roadblocks that the ex-president must overcome. Most attempt to do so by twisting and tearing at the facts until an acceptable truth emerges. My president, Our Glorious Leader George W. Bush, boldly took another approach. He tortured the facts until they confessed to their treachery. Then, He summarily executed them with a Hellfire-C missile launched from a Predator drone.

And the results are breathtaking. I stood up and cheered when I read His claim that waterboarding isn’t torture because He paid His lawyers to say it isn’t. That’s chutzpah, my friends. It’s a zen kind of chutzpah, one that is only achieved when self-delusion and a supreme lack of self-awareness come into perfect balance.

Neil Young

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFNqj3RGUuM

“Heart of Gold,” performed live in 1971 (sorry for the weird and inexplicable first five seconds of this clip)

Today is Neil Young‘s birthday (born 1945).  Young seems to make a point of being known as Canadian (there’s the Toronto Maple Leafs patch he prominently displays on his jeans in concert, for starters).  His more than forty year long career has always been based in the U.S.  But he has never sought American citizenship and lives about half the year in Canada.

That’s gratifying to know and to say.  But it may also be beside the point, as Frye suggests in “Levels of Cultural Identity”:

I suppose that nowhere in the world is there a relationship between two countries even remotely like that of Canada and the United States.  The full awareness of this relationship is largely confined to Canada, where it has churned up a great deal of speculation about “the Canadian identity,” the extent to which Canadians may be said to be different from non-Canadians, meaning, ninety percent of the time, Americans.  I am not concerned with this approach to the question, which seems to me futile and unreal.  A nation’s identity is (not “is in”) its cultural, and culture is a structure with several different levels.  On an elementary level there is culture in the sense of custom or life-style: the distinctive way that people eat, dress, talk, marry, play games, produce goods, and the like.  On this level culture in Canada, including both English and French Canada, has been practically identical with the northern part of American culture for a long time.  This fact is not, in my view, one of any great significance.  The time is past when we could speak of the “Americanizing” of this aspect of Canadian life.  What faces us now is the homogenizing of the entire world, including the United States, through twentieth-century technology.  Today Canadians, like other people, are hardly more Americanized in their lifestyle than they are Japanned or common-marketed.

War Criminal

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We can’t let this Remembrance Day pass without citing George W. Bush’s latest so-sue-me confession to war crimes.

The gorge-filling moment comes when Bush explains his decision to waterboard  prisoners by passing the buck to those who provided him with legal opinion on the matter: “I’m not a lawyer.” It wasn’t Bush after all.  The President of the United States of America pursued a policy of torture on the advice of counsel.

The war criminals at Nuremburg claimed to be subordinates following the orders of the executive.  Bush may be the first executive war criminal to claim to be following the orders of subordinates.

“Remembrance goes beyond the military”

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Jeff Mahoney reminds us that the values people fought and died for in two world wars somehow got lost in the peace thanks to corporate indifference to the common good.

Money quote:

We know it so well here. Siemens is pulling out of the city. This week Maple Leaf sold its meat plant in Burlington.

When these things happen I like to go to the company websites and read their value and mission statements. U.S. Steel: “ … guided by a new vision for its second century of business. Building value for its stakeholders.”

Siemens: “Values: Highest performance with the highest ethics. Excellent: Achieving high performance and excellent results.” Wow, the specificity!

Maple Leaf: “Six Sigma embodies our commitment to continuous improvement and provides our people with the discipline to never accept status quo . . . .”

Six Sigma? Did they get that from one of Keanu Reeves’ Matrix movies?

Please, captains of industry, spare us the halo-polishing and bust down your zen-for-dummies rhetoric costs. Here, have this one on me: “Valuing excellence, excelling at values, valuing valuable values, excelling at most excellent excellence, Teletubbies, big hug.”

Translated it means “more gold faucets in the yacht — we remain leaders in the all-important layoff sector of the economy.”

Remembrance of sacrifice on the battlefield is supposed to instil in us  the value of courage and honour in the pursuit of social justice.

Armistice: An Eyewitness Account

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The inside cover of Gordon Agnew’s diary

Here is about as moving an eyewitness account from the front on November 11th, 1918 as you’re likely to come across.  It’s from the diary of Gordon Agnew, a Gunner with the 25th Battery, 2nd Division, Canadian Expeditionary Force.  After the jump is a beautifully rendered account of that day which very few people before now have had the opportunity to read.  The entry for November 11th begins at the bottom of the first page.

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Remembrance Day

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18vw5vbz_Gs

The lament playing over this footage from the First World War is “Sgt. MacKenzie” by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie

Here’s Frye in “Hart House Rededicated,” delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Hart House, University of Toronto, November 11th, 1969.  As so often happens with Frye on public occasions, somehow everything comes together with a resonance that is immediately recognizable.  In this instance, the elements are the anniversary of Hart House, Remembrance Day, and our hard won — and too easily lost — sense of community.

Since 1919, a memorial service at the tower, along with an editorial in the Varsity attacking its hypocrisy and crypto-militarism, has been an annual event of campus life.  Certainly I would not myself participate in such a service if I thought that its purpose was to strengthen our wills to fight another war, instead of to fight against the coming of another war.  That being understood, I think there is a place for the memorial service, apart from the personal reason that many students of mine have their names inscribed on the tower.  It reminds us of something inescapable in the human situation.  Man is a creature of communities, and communities enrich themselves by what they include: the university enriches itself by breaking down the middle-class fences and reaching out to less privileged social areas; the city enriches itself by the variety of ethnical groups it has taken in.  But while communities enrich themselves by what they include, they define themselves by what they exclude.  The more intensely a community feels its identity as a community, the more intensely it feels its difference from what is across its boundary.  In a strong sense of community there is thus always an element that may become hostile and aggressive.

It is significant that our memorial service commemorates two wars, both fought against the same country.  In all wars, including all revolutions, the enemy becomes an imaginary abstraction of evil. Some German who never heard of us becomes a “Hun”; some demonstrator who is really protesting against his mother becomes a “Communist”; some policeman with a wife and a family to support becomes a “fascist pig.”  We know that we are lying when we do this sort of thing, but we say it is tactically necessary and go on doing it.  But because it is lying, it cannot create or accomplish anything, and so all wars, including all revolutions, take us back to square one of frustrated aggression in which they began.  (CW 7, 397)

Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy”

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On this date in 1619 Rene Descartes had the dreams that inspired Meditations on First Philosophy.

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: You begin Fearful Symmetry with Blake’s theory of knowledge and his attack on the unholy trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, who often appear together in his writings as a sort of three-headed monster.  What did he have against them?

Frye: They all represent what most people now attach to Descartes.  That is, a theory of a conscious ego which is an observer of the world but not a participant in it and consequently regards the world as something to be dominated and mastered.  That is, his real hatred of what he calls Bacon, Newton, and Locke is based on what is ultimately a political feeling, that this kind of thing leads to the exploitation of nature and, as an inevitable by-product, the exploitation of other people.  (CW 24, 927-8)