Author Archives: Michael Happy

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)

Quote of the Day II: Rush Limbaugh, Dessert, and Liberal Lies

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To insanity and beyond.  This used to be an SNL skit.  Now it’s real life.  Rush Limbaugh advises his listeners:

What have I told you about diet and exercise?  Exercise is irrelevant…. “How do you know all this?”  One of the reasons I know what I know is that I know liberals, and I know liberals lie, and if Michelle Obama’s gonna be out there ripping into “food desserts” and saying, “This is why people are fat,” I know it’s not true.  “Rush, do you really believe that? It’s that simple to you, liberals lie?”  Yes, it is, folks.  Once you learn that, once you come to grips with that, once you accept that, the rest is easy.  Very, very simple.  Now, my doctor has never told me to restrict any intake of salt, but if he did, I wouldn’t.  I’d just spend more time in the steam or the sauna sweating it out.

(Via the Daily Dish)

Quote of the Day: “The Big Lie”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC6whPX4s7s

Extra!  Extra!  Read all about it!  Barack Obama’s trip to India is costing 200 million dollars a day!!

Libertarian conservative Andrew Sullivan in a post today characterizes the last two years as the “era of the Big Lie.”  It’s no secret who’s to blame.

Money quote:

It seems to me that the last year or so in America’s political culture has represented the triumph of untruth. And the untruth was propagated by a deliberate, simple and systemic campaign to kill Obama’s presidency in its crib. Emergency measures in a near-unprecedented economic collapse – the bank bailout, the auto-bailout, the stimulus – were described by the right as ideological moves of choice, when they were, in fact, pragmatic moves of necessity. The increasingly effective isolation of Iran’s regime – and destruction of its legitimacy from within – was portrayed as a function of Obama’s weakness, rather than his strength. The health insurance reform – almost identical to Romney’s, to the right of the Clintons in 1993, costed to reduce the deficit, without a public option, and with millions more customers for the insurance and drug companies – was turned into a socialist government take-over.

Every one of these moves could be criticized in many ways. What cannot be done honestly, in my view, is to create a narrative from all of them to describe Obama as an anti-American hyper-leftist, spending the US into oblivion. But since this seems to be the only shred of thinking left on the right (exacerbated by the justified flight of the educated classes from a party that is now openly contemptuous of learning), it became a familiar refrain – pummeled into our heads day and night by talk radio and Fox. If you think I’m exaggerating, try the following thought experiment.

If a black Republican president had come in, helped turn around the banking and auto industries (at a small profit!), insured millions through the private sector while cutting Medicare, overseen a sharp decline in illegal immigration, ramped up the war in Afghanistan, reinstituted pay-as-you go in the Congress, set up a debt commission to offer hard choices for future debt reduction, and seen private sector job growth outstrip the public sector’s in a slow but dogged recovery, somehow I don’t think that Republican would be regarded as a socialist.

Joseph Goebbels infamously observed, “The bigger the lie, the more likely it will be believed.”  The RNC/FNC conglomerate seems to be betting on that.

Frye on fascism and oligarchy:

Fascism is an oligarchic conspiracy against the open-class system, deriving its real power from the big oligarchs and its mass support from would-be oligarchs, the “independent” (i.e. unsuccessful) entrepreneurs.  (CW 11, 252)

This is apparently how free people become eager accomplices in their own enslavement.

An earlier post, “Mendocracy,” here.

Ivan Turgenev

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Today is Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev‘s birthday (1818-1880).

Frye on Russian literary language in an interview with Matthew Fraser, “Northrop Frye: Signifying Everything”:

Fraser: The language of literature is often very different from the common spoken language of a country.  For example in Russia, because of the strong influence of Pushkin, the literary language is divorced from spoken Russian.  In North America, however, the literary language is virtually the same as our spoken language.  Why do you think that in some countries there is such a gap between literary and spoken language, and in other countries there is no difference at all?

Frye: I think that with Russia it has something to do with the rather late development of their literature.  And of course there are other countries like Norway where the literary language is almost an invented language.  I think that the gap between literary language and ordinary spoke language is a very unhealthy thing, especially in fiction where the dialogue, at any rate, has to capture the spoken word.  I don’t know how countries get along if there is too great a gap between literary language and the colloquial language, but certainly in North America that battle was fought out as early as Huckleberry Finn, where it was clear that the language spoken by the people is the literary language as well.