Author Archives: Michael Happy

The Will of the People

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Frye in The Great Code:

For us democracy, as a source of loyalty, does not mean only the machinery of elections or a greater tolerance of religion and art or a greater relaxation of leisure, privacy, or freedom of movement, but what all these things point to: the sense of an individuality that grows out of society but is infinitely more than a social function. (CW 19, 119)

It is a truism that the results of any election must be respected.

But the fact that 60% of the electorate voted against a government that seeks to polarize the country as a deliberate political strategy, and routinely demonizes the opposition through co-ordinated smear campaigns, says a lot about where we are today. The solid majority of voters who cast ballots against this government may have to respect the results, but they are not required to pretend those results are fully representative of the will of the people. The built-in flaw of our first-past-the-post system is that minority governments more comprehensively represent the majority, while majority governments almost invariably represent a minority. We accept the results, but we understand their limitations and push back against them by way of our constitutional guarantees of free speech and free assembly.

Given their past behavior, the Conservatives will almost certainly press a legislative agenda that will offend the majority that made a particular point to vote against them. It is especially important to remember therefore that democracy is not just about what happens on election day. It is an everyday process. It is a full-time commitment. This government, like all governments, needs to be monitored and the concerns of the majority of citizens who voted against it must be articulated so that they will not be ignored. The next election when it comes ought to be an extension of what we are willing to do from this point on to protect our interests and to support our democratic traditions and institutions. Stephen Harper has tellingly made reference in the past to “real Canadians,” an unacceptable formulation. All Canadians are real Canadians, even if they do not vote for the Conservatives and will continue to vote against them at every opportunity.

It’s worth repeating: government is not our master but our servant. Those who govern may not always remember that, which means that we can never allow them to forget it.

Last Poll

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Here’s where we are today, based upon an aggregate of the latest polls:

Almost 63% of Canadians are set to vote against the Conservatives. Here’s hoping we get a parliament representative of that.

Vote. If you are not registered, you can still go to your local polling station and vote if you produce ID and a piece of mail with your address on it.

Election Day: Orange Crush?

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Frye in his “Speech at the New Canadian Embassy” in Washington, DC:

Then again, Canada has had, for the last fifty years, a Socialist (or more accurately Social Democrat) party which is normally supported by twenty-five to thirty per cent of the electorate, and has been widely respected, through most of its history, for its devotion to principle. Nothing or proportional size or influence has emerged in the United States. When the CCF, the first form of this party, was founded in the 1930s, its most obvious feature went largely unnoticed. That feature was that it was following a British rather than American tendency, trying to assimilate the Canadian political structure to the British Conservative-Labour pattern. The present New Democratic Party, however, never seems to get beyond a certain percentage of support, not enough to come to federal power. Principles make voters nervous, and yet any departure from them towards expediency makes them suspicious. (CW 12, 643-4)

There seems to have been an unprecedented reversion to those principles in this election, leaving the NPD at the very least poised to form the Official Opposition.

It’s become apparent in the last week that there has been a significant shift from the centre left to the hard left among a significant number of Canadians as the NDP goes into election day with support as high as 35% nationally. At the same time, there’s been an equally unprecedented collapse for the Liberals, who have fallen to 20% nationally as a result of years of vicious and unrelenting smear campaigns against its leadership. The biggest and most surprising of these unexpected developments is the NDP lead in Quebec, where it has traditionally only been a marginal presence. This makes sense: if Quebecois voters are looking for an alternative to the Bloc and the Liberals are no longer an option, that leaves the NDP, whose policies are a good fit for the hard line support of social programs in that province.

Just about everything about the Conservatives is disdainful — inheriting a massive budget surplus from the Liberals, which they quickly squandered with record deficits and compounded by commitments to still more corporate tax reductions, as well as tens of billions of dollars earmarked for jet fighters we don’t need, and for the construction of jails despite our diminishing crime rate. And that does not take into account Conservative corruption at all levels, including two findings of contempt of parliament, and the criminality that surrounds the PMO, which includes the possibility of jail time for two Conservative Senators and two more senior Conservative operatives for breaking federal election law.

Here’s your Conservative Party legacy, 2011: criminal corruption, massive debt, contempt, jets, jails.

However, if the vote on the left is split in enough closely-contested ridings, the Conservatives might still eke out enough votes to sneak past with a marginal majority. Even in this unfortunate event, more than 60% of the population will have voted against Harper and everything he stands for. Sadly, our first past the post system may accomplish that for him. It could conceivably occur even if Harper goes into this election with less support than he had in the last one.

In other words, this is still something of a crap shoot. It may be we have never seen an election so volatile or an electorate so clearly scrambling to find the best means to deny Harper his majority.

We already know what he’s got in store for us if he gets it.

So our best hope is what some are calling the “Orange Crush”: the NDP breaking decisively into opposition status and confronting a vulnerable Conservative minority whose days are numbered. That could effectively end Harper’s career: the Big Brother and Maximum Leader portion of it anyway.

So let’s hope for that Orange Crush breakthrough, and the right distribution of votes to break for the left where it is most needed.

A sign a desperation: Harper yesterday pleaded with Liberals to vote Conservative to stop the NDP juggernaut. Given the ugly things he’s said about Liberals, calling them, among other things, “sheeple” and “Lieberals” over the years, not to mention the open contempt he displays for liberal principles at all times, that may not happen to any significant extent. The polling shows that a majority of Liberals fear a Harper majority, for obvious reasons. It may be that enough of them will not find it in themselves to cast a Conservative vote.

But we’ll see. The decisive battleground will likely be Ontario. And the Conservatives themselves seem not to believe, based upon their own internal polling, that they can pick up the seats they need there to offset expected losses in Quebec and British Columbia.

However it turns out, it will be an historic day: either a day in which the majority of Canadians prevail with a massive shift in support for the NDP, or a day they do not and the Conservatives win a slim majority with which they can impose an agenda most Canadians do not support.

So let’s keep that in mind as we set out to vote today while encouraging everyone around us to do the same.

Movie as Doggerel: “Plan 9 From Outer Space”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC9-aEDXEiw

The entire glorious thing is available at the single link above

We’re following the science fiction thread begun with Solaris and followed by Fahrenheit 451 the week after that, but with a twist: Edward D. Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Frye in “Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres,” Anatomy:

The characteristics of babble are again present in doggerel, which is also a creative process left unfinished through lack of skill or patience. . . . Doggerel is not necessarily stupid poetry; it is poetry that begins in the conscious mind and has never gone through the associative process.  It has a prose initiative, but tries to make itself associative by an act of will, and it reveals the same difficulties that great poetry has overcome at a subconscious level.  We can see in doggerel how words are dragged in because they rhyme or scan, how ideas are dragged in because the are suggested by a rhyme-word, and so on. (CW 22, 259)

From this description we can see that any verbal structure might be generically considered doggerel if it lacks skill and patience, is not associative, is self-consciously rather than subconsciously processed, and generally betrays itself as the undressed word salad it invariably turns out to be.

Plan 9 from Outer Space is known as “the worst movie ever made” — so bad that you can’t look away; so bad that its unintentional hilarity provides zen instruction to anyone who thinks funniness is a specialized form of spontaneous combustion. If you haven’t seen it, please do.  It rewards in ways that are unique to it.  If you can’t bear to watch all of it, then at least take in the brief “Criswell Predicts” sequence that opens the movie — which will likely make you want to get to Criswell’s closing remarks at the end, and, just like that, you’ll have watched it right through.

The entire thing, every miscast word of it, is pure doggerel: the tautologies and non-sequiturs, the Dadaist moments of found comedy, the jack-knifing problems with continuity, and the absurd randomness of the elements of “terror” promiscuously thrown into the mix with winning confidence. (“Ah, yes, Plan 9: The resurrection of the dead.”)

Here’s a sample from Criswell’s opening remarks:

Greetings, my friends, we are all interested in the future because that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events, such as these, will affect you in the future.

That’s got to leave you hungry for more because only people who can’t make ’em can make ’em like this.

Post Coming

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The Frye Festival exceeds my ability to keep up with it. I can’t even pretend I’m covering it. I can only report on what I’ve been present to see. I have a high school class to visit in the morning, and will try to get a post up as soon as possible after that.

Frye Festival Day 1

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Frye in the front yard of 24 Pine Street, ca. 1922

I was well prepared to enjoy myself here in Moncton. But I am enjoying myself much more than I expected.  It begins, first, with the extraordinary people who run the Frye Festival, many more than I can name. But the people I’ve seen up close doing their jobs so remarkably well include Festival Chair Dawn Arnold, as well as the inexhaustibly resourceful Danielle LeBlanc, Roxanne Richard, and Ed Lemond. It’s a pleasure to thank them publicly for the tireless work they do, most of it behind the scenes.

Yesterday, Ed Lemond, Co-chair of Program Development, took it upon himself to give me a tour after the morning’s official opening ceremony at City Hall (which, incidentally, was once the site of the Public Library whose contents Frye would have spent many hours exploring). First we toured Frye’s childhood neighborhood, which includes the site of Queen Victoria School, the elementary school he attended; it remains an elementary school, although the original building is of course long gone. Just across the road from the school is Victoria Park, where Frye no doubt spent much time while growing up. And just around the corner from Victoria Park is his home at 24 Pine Street.

Victoria School and Victoria Park are both situated on Park Street, from which Pine Street runs. The block Frye’s home faces is interesting. The first thing you notice is that it is only half the width of an ordinary residential block, with just a single row of large houses overlooking Victoria Park; the backs of those houses, as a result, overlook Pine Street. This means that only the back of these upscale homes face Frye’s house, as well as those of his neighbors who lived on the poorer side of Pine Street. Ed says the reason is that the people who lived on Pine Street and served those large homes in the 19th century were intended to have access to them by the back entrances.

The houses that have occupied Pine Street and the neighborhood for a century and more are still there, but many of course have been refurbished, and, in some cases, siding put over their wooden exteriors.  Even so, the sense of Frye’s childhood neighborhood is remarkably intact.  24 Pine Street is still a duplex combining numbers 24 and 26. Moreover, 24 Pine itself remains comprised of two separate dwellings, one downstairs and one upstairs, the upstairs apartment being where the Frye family lived.

We then went off to Frye’s old school, Aberdeen High, which is still standing. It does not take much of an imaginative leap to imagine it as it was then. Frye spoke of his childhood education with mixed feelings at best; the pedagogy back then was pretty stern and unrelentingly authoritarian — corporal punishment remains part of the living memory of those old enough to have endured it.  (I stood in what was once the principle’s office where, I was told, former students still shudder at the memory of being struck across the palm with a ruler.)

However, that sturdy monument of a building is now the Aberdeen Arts Centre, the home of the Acadian arts community in New Brunswick. It is still under construction, and everything is being opened up into magnificent galleries and working spaces for artists, writers and dancers. On the third floor a large performance space is just beginning to take shape.  One of the best things about antique schools is their wide, high windows. The entire place is flooded with sunlight. I have no doubt Frye would have been delighted to see what had become of his old high school. Like the Frye Festival, it is dedicated to the arts first and foremost.

Despite all of these extensive renovations, one part of the school remains unchanged since Frye’s day: three flights of stairs situated at either end of the long hallways.  Those wooden steps are gently worn by a century of foot traffic, the permanent shine on the banisters burnished by countless hands. The young Frye was really here, and this is what he saw. It’s difficult not to be moved by that.

More coming, including photographs.

Frye Festival Post Coming

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It’s a long day today: CBC interview at 6 am, a panel at noon, and then visits to two high schools after that.

However, I am pulling together a post on yesterday’s events, which I will put up as soon as I can finish it.

Until then, thanks very much to the people who came out to the Navigator’s Pub last night; thanks also for your wonderful questions and the great discussion that followed.  Finally, thanks to the organizers who set the talk at the Nav’s.  The result of the experience is that from now on I will only speak at drinking establishments.

Capture of York

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The barracks at Fort York, ca. 1812

On this date, American troops captured York (now Toronto) during the War of 1812.

From “Canadian Culture Today”:

The United States had a War of Independence against a European power in the eighteenth century, and a civil war on its own soil a century later. Canada had a civil war of European powers on its own soil in the eighteenth century, and a movement of independence against its American partner in the nineteenth. This started with the invasion of 1775 and continued in the War of 1812, which had very little point as a war with Britain, but was in many respects a war of independence for Canada. I discover that Americans, while they know about the bombardment of Washington and the battle of New Orleans, are often hardly aware, that this war involved Canada at all, much less that the bombardment of Washington was a reprisal for the burning of what is now Toronto. (CW 10, 515-16)

Frye Festival

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Next year is Frye’s centenary, so that’s a good reason to attend next year’s Frye Festival. Because it is an arts festival, it is the best honor his hometown could provide him.

I’ll post more soon, including photographs.

Chernobyl

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o

A feature length documentary on the disaster, the whole thing available at the above link

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in Pripyat, Ukraine.

Frye refers to it to illustrate a point about primary concern in The Double Vision:

What we accept as beautiful or attractive or in accord with the way we want things to be has some connection, however indirect, with the satisfying of these concerns, and what we call ugly or dehumanized–air choked with pollution, land turned into waste land by speculators, infernos created by technological idiocies from Chernobyl to Exxon Valdez–with the frustration of them. For a long time the established powers in society looked at their civilization and said, “Probably much of it is very ugly, but that doesn’t matter as long as we make profits out of it, and certainly nothing is going to be done about it.” When it becomes clear that ugly is beginning to mean dangerous as well, however, the point of view may slowly change. (CW 4, 191)