Category Archives: Current Events

Polls, Polls, Polls

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Want to know why the polls are all over the place?  Read this.

What seems clear, however, is that things are more or less the way they were before the writ was dropped. Harper has peaked. His game of divide and rule has reached its limit. He can’t pick up any support because a significant portion of the population outside of the west simply does not trust him. At the same time, the months of branding Michael Ignatieff in a relentless smear campaign has had its effect. And Jack Layton, meanwhile, has been enjoying a “surge” the last couple of days, thanks to notoriously unreliable online polls in which the young urban population is over-represented.  The old saying is that the only poll that matters is the one on election day.  Thanks to poor polling practices, that’s especially true this time round.

In any event, it looks like another Conservative minority at this point.

Video of the Day: “There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are only dollars”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B1uF9gmkVw

Everyone remembers Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell” speech from Network. But, while less viscerally memorable, this speech by Beale’s corporate nemesis, Arthur Jensen, is the movie’s darkly revealed core.

Network got it exactly right about the decline of television news into infotainment based upon already discernible trends in the early 1970s, right down to the frenzied pursuit of profit, whatever the social cost, as represented now by Fox News. But the movie also got it right about transnational corporatism, whose fundamental principles are lucidly laid out in the clip above.

Government representing the actual interests of actual citizens is a threatened species, which is suggested by the hoarding-insect behavior of an increasing number of politicians. Our votes are gradually devolving into the means by which the more cynical elements of the political class gain access to power (typically through progressively unhinged demagoguery), and whose single-minded purpose is to promote commercial interests at the expense of everything else, including the institution of government itself. Conservatives especially know that, just as it is easier to lie than to tell the truth, it is much easier to cut taxes to the richest of the rich than it is to reclaim that lost revenue from them somewhere down the line. Just look at the Bush tax cuts in the States. Those “temporary” cuts are, at the moment, the single greatest threat to an economy that could shed its deficit burden almost completely just by letting them lapse as they were supposed to do in the first place. As it is, the current Republican “debate” on budget cuts revolves around dismantling Medicare while, of course, providing still more top end tax cuts.

It promises to get worse before we can think about it getting even marginally better. Most of the population is still living in a world where political authorities are trusted to a minimally acceptable degree. It seems they will only be disabused of that misplaced trust one bloody insult and injury at a time. People understandably want to feel that their elected representatives have some residual sense of duty to them. On the right side of the political spectrum most notably, it’s getting harder to find any sign at all to suggest that might still be true.

The world we live in is looking more and more like the dysfunctional state described in the monologue above: no national or personal interests, just corporate ones in a multi-national sacrifice-ritual of saps who think they have elected governments to (snicker) “represent” them. Our elected officials are more openly go-getters in the exciting new world of transnational economies, where national wealth is just one more resource to cheat out of the suckers who haven’t figured that out yet.

So watch the clip above. Listen to what is said, and see if you don’t recognize it as a frighteningly rendered version of a world that is already way more familiar to us than it should be. (As sometimes happens, this video cannot be embedded: click on the image and hit the YouTube link.)

Benjamin Disraeli: True Blue Conservative

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yrPtRgK6Gk Disraeli addresses Parliament in Mrs. Brown

Benjamin Disraeli died on this date in 1881 (born 1804).

It cannot be said too often: North American politicians who call themselves “conservatives” are no such thing.  They are corporatists. Below is some of the notable legislation passed during the arch-conservative Disraeli’s ministry. This is what the record of a real conservative looks like: offering assistance to those in need in the name of social stability; promoting justice for the sake of sound social health. Just the titles of this legislation might give contemporary “conservatives” a Victorian case of the vapors. Where are the tax cuts for the rich and for corporations? Where is the corporate welfare? Disraeli extended the franchise, offered assistance to the poor, and enhanced the rights and protections of workers, including the right to form trades unions:

Artisans’ and Laborers’ Dwellings Improvement Act

Public Health Act

Factory Acts

Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act

In response to these reforms, Liberal-Labour MP Alexander Macdonald told his constituents in 1879: “The Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.”

It would raise hurricanes of laughter all along the political spectrum to suggest that today’s “conservatives” might do anything remotely resembling this now.

Maybe a large part of the reason is that Disraeli was extraordinarily accomplished. However “conservatives” regard themselves, glad handing the corporate elite does not round out a world-view.

Here’s Frye making reference in “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours” to Disraeli the novelist; a writer who gives expression to the enduring foundations of romance, despite the conventional thinking:

In general, [it is assumed that] the serious Victorian fiction writers are realistic and the less serious ones are romancers. We expect George Eliot or Trollope to give us a solid and well-rounded realization of the social life, attitudes, and intellectual issues of their time; we expect Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton, because they are more “romantic,” to give us the same kind of thing in a more flighty and dilettantish way; from the cheaper brands, Marie Corelli or Ouida, we expect nothing but the standard romance formulas. (CW 10, 287)

As Frye goes on to say in his examination of the work of Dickens, the second-tier status of romance is a long way from the truth. Writers of romance like Disraeli are closer to the imaginative bedrock of literature and life than any realist. “Conservatives” who by denying assistance to the poor and justice to society at large to further enrich a bogus crony-capitalisim may flatter themselves as living in “the real world.” But it is in fact not much of a world and, because it’s unsustainable, it is not even real; just temporarily realized and doomed to fail.

Primary Concerns, Democracy, and Conservative Ideology

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvE9EN4YPGM

The Hour: Stephen Harper and U.S. style media control

Bob Denham`s article on Frye and Kierkegaard, recently published in our journal, shows the importance in Frye’s later work of the Danish philosopher’s emphasis, among other things, on concern. Frye first develops the idea in terms of the tension or dialectic between freedom and the myth of concern, as most fully worked out in The Critical Path. There it is argued that the imagery of literature is ultimately the language of concern. This insight becomes the basis of his later formulation of primary concerns in Words with Power, where he makes the distinction between primary human concerns and secondary or ideological ones. One of the books of Frye`s now famous Ogdoad (famous at least among amateurs of Frye) is entitled Liberal, and it strikes me that this indicates another source of Frye`s concept of concern, and in particular his formulation of the distinction between primary and secondary concerns.

It would be of great interest to examine this idea of primary concerns as a genuine contribution to socio-political thought, specifically liberal and social democratic thought. Certainly there have been essays touching on the liberal humanism of Frye`s critical position, or what I would prefer to call his critical “vision.” It is often a stance he has been attacked for. More sympathetically, Graham Good, for example, has a particularly discerning article on the subject. Years ago I presented at a conference a very preliminary stab at such an examination, but I have not had the opportunity yet to follow it up. Involved in such a study would have to be a comparison, ultimately, of Frye`s concept of primary concerns with such theories as John Rawl’s idea of basic goods, and even more with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s idea of basic human capabilities. These ideas are a different way of talking about human rights and are very close to Frye`s primary concerns, focusing as they do on those universal human needs and wishes that can be regarded as essential to the dignity and fulfillment of every human individual. It is worth emphasizing that it is this kind of thinking in the liberal and social democratic tradition that has given us, among other things: universal health care (now severely threatened); legal access to abortion; gay marriage; serious efforts to ensure gender equality and protect minority rights; a less punitive system of law and order aimed at restoring the incarcerated to reentering and contributing to society; a more welcoming policy to refugees fleeing persecution or unimaginable hardship in their own countries. The list could go on.

These great benefits have derived from an often invisible or inarticulate social norm, not in the normative sense, but as an ideal the departure from which makes irony and the grotesque ironic and grotesque. This ideal is “the vision of a more sensible society,” of a world that actually makes human sense. Such a vision works outside literature among individuals in their daily lives and workplaces, giving meaning to their work and actions beyond any need for a pay-cheque. As Frye writes: “one can hardly imagine, say, doctors or social workers unmotivated by some vision of a healthier or freer society than the one they see around them.” The same could be said of any member of society who contributes in a meaningful way, who has, in other words, a social function, this being, as Frye views it, the real significance of the democratic ideal of equality. In a true democracy, everyone is potentially a member of an elite, and no-one`s social function is more worthy of respect than another’s.

This idea of a social vision, ultimately the vision of a world of fulfilled primary concerns, is particularly useful in defining the issues we face in the current Canadian election campaigns. Any genuine social vision of a healthier or freer society is precisely what the program of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are devoid of. It is telling that Harper almost always speaks of the economy, never of society. It is as if it doesn’t even occur to him. Contrary, however, to the famous tag-line, it’s not the economy, stupid: it’s society.

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$50 Billion

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The F-35: the jet we don’t need and can’t afford

We’ve entered the stage of the election campaign where there’s always the danger that issues give way completely to optics, the frivolity by which perceptions replace policy.

There’s much that can be said about the Harper government, but perhaps this figure sums it up: $50 billion. That’s the rounded off sum in corporate welfare Harper is proposing to shell out with taxpayer dollars.

Jets: $30 billion.

Jails: $13 billion.

Corporate tax cuts: $6 billion.

We don’t need any of these things, and they will certainly come at the cost of social spending. It’s a guarantee: a Harper majority government, after having squandered a surplus and run up record deficits, will demand “sacrifices” of those already footing the bill for his wish-list.

It’s our money. What law of economics requires that it go to Lockheed Martin and building contractors with Conservative ties and corporations already turning massive profits?

If there must be optics, let this be the filter.

Frye on Lester Pearson

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Lester Pearson receiving the Nobel Peace Prize

Further to yesterday’s post in which former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney conspicuously does not endorse Stephen Harper but does praise Nobel Peace Prize recipient and former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson as an example of how to run a productive minority government, here’s Frye in his 1972 Victoria College memorial address on Pearson:

Canada never gave him a clear mandate as Prime Minister, yet he managed to get through an extraordinary amount of legislation. His ambition for Canada was founded on his experience of external affairs: he wanted it to be, in the international scene at least, a quiet and sensible country, with no interest in fighting or aggression, devoting itself to discouraging fighting and aggression among its more powerful neighbours. We honour his memory today, not merely as a graduate of Victoria who achieved unique fame and admiration, but primarily as the faithful servant of a Master, who, as far as the political world is concerned, reserves his blessing for the peacemakers. (CW 12, 428)

Mulroney’s point is well-taken. Harper resembles nothing like the man described here.

In fact, a friend has observed that Harper’s policy can be characterized as simply jets and jails, neither of which we need. (Our crime rate, all across the board, for example, has been in decline for a decade.) But the fact that Harper insists on both jets ($30 billion) and jails ($13 billion) despite no demonstrable need for either says about all we need to know.

All of this is familiar as the politics of fear; just one of Harper’s many American imports designed to confuse, anger and render uncertain an increasingly intimidated public. It is not traditionally how we do things here, and there are increasing signs that this is beginning to show. Harper and Ignatieff were both in Hamilton on the same day last week. Ignatieff’s rally outdrew Harper’s three to one. This seems to be the slowly emerging pattern in the parts of the country that could swing the election, southern Ontario especially. As Mulroney said yesterday, Ignatieff could win this if things continue to break his way. The aura of menace Harper gives off is increasingly unpleasant, even threatening, and it seems to be all he’s got on offer. He calls it “stability.” To us it looks like a pathological need to control and an unhealthy appetite for power.

Quote of the Day: Mulroney Says Ignatieff Can Win

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From today’s Toronto Star, a report on TVO’s Steve Paikin’s interview with former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, who goes out of his way to withhold praise from Stephen Harper.  He does, however, offer effusive praise for the other party leaders, even saying that the Liberals could win this election under Michael Ignatieff. Ouch. He also praises former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, whom Mulroney cites as an example of how much a minority government can accomplish. Double ouch.

An excerpt:

“You’re voting for Mr. Harper, I take it,” said Paikin, coincidentally the moderator of Tuesday’s English-language leaders’ debate.

“At this point,” replied Mulroney with a pause that seemed to hang in the air longer than its mere second, “I’ll vote for the Conservative candidate in my constituency.”

Although the architect of decisive Progressive Conservative victories in 1984 and 1988 conceded that Harper is “clearly a competent Prime Minister,” his unease with the current Tory leader was barely concealed.

He praised Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff (“an intelligent man, hard-working guy”), NDP Leader Jack Layton (“an outstanding leader of his party”), and even Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe (“respected in Quebec”), whose party began in 1990 as a separatist offshoot of Mulroney’s Tories.

He suggested Ignatieff could win despite polls indicating otherwise: “You never can tell what happens in political life. I’ll tell you this, in 1984, when the campaign started I was 14 points behind. We ended up in a rather different fashion.”

He touted former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, who endured similar political uncertainty to Harper, but had far more to show for his tenure, including medicare and the Maple Leaf flag: “You can do big things — even if you have a minority Parliament. Witness what happened with Mr. Pearson, who achieved great things with minority status.”