Category Archives: Politics

Quote of the Day: “Do we think no Muslims died in the towers?”

Alissa Torres, a 9/11 widow, on the “Ground Zero Mosque” in today’s Salon.

Money quote:

What did I think about the decision to construct a “mosque” this close to ground zero? I thought it was a no-brainer. Of course it should be built there. I sometimes wonder if those people fighting so passionately against Park51 can fathom the diversity of those who died at ground zero. Do we think no Muslims died in the towers? My husband, Eddie Torres, killed on his second day of work at Cantor Fitzgerald while I was pregnant with our first child, was a dark-skinned Latino, often mistaken for Pakistani, who came here illegally from Colombia. How did “9/11 victim” become sloppy shorthand for “white Christian”? I wish someone would put out a list of all the ethnicities and religions and countries and economic levels of the victims. For all the talk of “remembering 9/11,” I wonder if we’ve missed the patriotic message entirely.

For the record, hundreds of foreign nationals from 90 countries died in the twin towers; Canada alone lost two dozen citizens.  It doesn’t mean that this was not primarily an American tragedy.  It simply means that this was a shared tragedy.  No one included in the loss should be excluded from the possibility of reconciliation, whatever the shouters who wrongly insist that “3000 Americans died that day” have to say about it.

Sign the Petition to Support the CRTC and Stop Fox News North! [Updated]

Sign here to stop the Harper-Mulroney-Quebecor axis from imposing a politicized rightwing “mandatory access” news channel on cable service providers.

[Update]

CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein has already refused Sun TV’s application for a “must carry” license because it didn’t meet the necessary requirements, but parent company Quebecor is still pressing a fast track application that would give it “mandatory access” status.

The Harper government is facilitating the process, and is apparently trying to drive von Finckenstein from office in order to put someone more amenable in place.

The next CRTC hearing on the matter is November 19th.

Read the Avaaz mass email in an earlier post here.

Sign the petition to “Stop Fox News North” here.

Sarah Barracuda

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

A segment people might commit to memory if it made any sense.  (Tina Fey comes closest by quoting Palin verbatim here.)

Vanity Fair has an article on Sarah Palin this month, which she has used as an excuse to accuse the “lamestream media” of being “impotent” and “limp” — which actually confirms how she is portrayed in the article: snarling, thin-skinned, and incapable of accepting anything but adoring praise without going immediately on the attack in an effort to bully opponents into silence.  And with Fox News behind her, she can afford to stomp around noisily, swinging a big stick the entire time.  She is the anti-Obama.  No cool.  No control.  All drama.  All the time.

A sample from Vanity Fair:

Palin has been a national figure for barely two years—John McCain selected her as his running mate in August 2008. Her on-the-record statements about herself amount to a litany of untruths and half-truths. With few exceptions—mostly Palin antagonists in journalism and politics whose beefs with her have long been out in the open—virtually no one who knows Palin well is willing to talk about her on the record, whether because they are loyal and want to protect her (a small and shrinking number), or because they expect her prominence to grow and intend to keep their options open, or because they fear she will exact revenge, as she has been known to do. It is an astonishing phenomenon. Colleagues and acquaintances by the hundreds went on the record to reveal what they knew, for good or ill, about prospective national candidates as diverse as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Barack Obama. When it comes to Palin, people button their lips and slink away.

Palin’s rallying cry is “We’re taking America back!”  Back?  Where did it go?  And back from whom?  Oh. Right. It starts with Obama and extends to everything that does not rise to the Palin standard of representing the “real America.”  For her followers, who are well-polled on the issue, these include non-whites, non-Christians, Christians not Christian enough to believe in the End Times, city dwellers, gays, lesbians, liberals, and voters under 30.  In other words, taken all together, most of the country.

“Conservatives” like Palin revere Ronald Reagan as the most perfect president for a more perfect union, even though he raised taxes every year after 1982 (including what was then the largest tax increase in American history), and increased government spending more than twice that of the Ford and Carter administrations combined.  He did this while also running record deficits (tripling the national debt), a feat surpassed only by George W. Bush.  He was moreover responsible for the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry through irresponsible deregulation.  And — does this sound familiar? — $160 billion in losses had to be picked up by the American taxpayer.  But these inconvenient and verifiable facts are simply thrown down the memory hole.  It only matters the legend persist that Reagan brought down Communism with one well-placed judo chop, so there can’t be much reality to the perception of him from any angle.  Frye, however, saw it very clearly.  Here are two of his observations on Reagan from Denham’s Frye Unbuttoned:

Television brings a theatricalizing of the social contract.  Reagan may be a cipher as President, but as an actor acting the role of a decisive President in a Grade B movie he’s I suppose acceptable to people who think life is a Grade B movie. (249)

The Soviet Union is trying to outgrow the Leninist dialectical rigidity, and some elements in the U.S.A. are trying to outgrow its counterpart.  But it’s hard: Reagan is the great symbol of clinging to the great-power syndrome, which is why he sounds so charismatic even when he’s talking the most obvious nonsense. (250)

Which brings us back round to Sarah Palin.  She can’t speak in unscripted grammatical sentences, and she’s as mean and flinty as Reagan was genial and reassuring.  But apparently she’ll do for a “great-power syndrome” now in such a delusional state that empirical evidence and the historical record are swept aside by a policy of reckless lies delivered with indifference to the damage they do– such as Palin’s infamous “death panels,” which reduced reasoned debate about health care reform to paranoid hysteria.

The reason I always put “conservative” in quotes when talking about such people is because they’re not conservatives.  They’re oligarchs.  Conservatives accept change while promoting social stability.  Conservatives respect tradition and do not seek the radical overturning of it.  Disraeli was a conservative (“Upon the education of the people of the nation the future of the nation depends”).  Palin is not.  She’s more like a narcissistic personality disorder with a political action committee.

Video of the Day

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hvaeHllwtw

Under any other circumstances, it’d be cruel to post such a video. But now that the cavernously ignorant and aggressively semi-literate serial liar Sarah Palin is the de facto leader of the Republican Party, it’s not necessarily a laughing matter.

This is Basil Marceaux, Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee.

Website here.

Frye on Fascism and Communism

frye-2

In “The Present Condition of Society” (1943):

It was inevitable that those who saw most clearly that there was much in American life heading straight for Nazism, and who were still looking for something which should be definitely anti-Nazi enough and still consistent with deism, should have found what they were looking for in the Communists.  (CW 10, 219)

In 1949 Diary (Jan. 28):

Many well-meaning and gentle people suffer from a vicious streak of masochism–they feel helpless in the midst of a brutal society, & in some warped way they want to feel so: they like saying they can’t do anything about, say, the American hold on Canada, or say it with a significant grin.  In the last decade they helped the rise of fascism, & now they show a sneaking fondness for communism because of the nihilistic element in it.  (CW 8, 104)

In “Trends in Modern Culture” (1952):

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.  Communism is the corresponding conspiracy on the other end, addressing itself to those most likely to feel that society in its present form will permanently exclude them from its benefits. (CW 11, 252)

In T. S. Eliot (1963):

Fascism and Communism are the products of strong tendencies within democracy itself, and our horror at these products springs from the ego’s dislike of inconvenience rather than love of freedom. (CW 29, 188)

In the “Foreward to 1984″ (1967):

In [Orwell’s] writings on Spain, particularly Homage to Catalonia, he shows how like in aim and motivation Russian Communism was to the Fascism it in theory opposed. (ibid., 278)

Quote of the Day: Frye on Mulroney

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlkEkyS3gOQ

Mulroney’s dramatic call for a Royal Commission to clear his good name starts to go awry . . .

In his notes for “Levels of Cultural Identity,” Frye says early on:

De Tocqueville says almost nothing about Canada, even though most of the people there in his day spoke his native language, but he does have one wonderful sentence I want to quote: it describes the Mulroney regime perfectly. (CW 25, 231)

That sentence is:

In Canada the most enlightened, patriotic and humane inhabitants make extraordinary efforts to render the people dissatisfied with those simple enjoyments which still content them . . . more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere. (Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley [New York: Knopf, 1960], 1:296–7 [chap. 8].)

Stanley Knowles

Stanley_Knowles

On this date the great Canadian parliamentarian Stanley Knowles was born (1908 – 1997).  He represented the riding of Winnipeg North Centre for the CCF from 1942 to 1958, and again for the NDP from 1962 to 1984.  Upon his retirement he was given the unprecedented distinction of being made an honorary table officer of the House of Commons by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Given back-to-back CCF/NDP anniversaries, this is a good time to cite Frye on his view of socialism as the C.C.F. emerged as a national political movement.

The current issue of Maclean’s [Sept. 1, 1934] has a very interesting catechism in it on Canadian problems and so forth that is supposed, after being related to a score, to show whether you are of a Conservative, Liberal, or C.C.F temperament.  It’s pretty ingenious, and interested me chiefly because it placed me, with perfect accuracy.  On the fence with the Liberal and C.C.F. battalions, exactly where a follower of Spengler and Mantalini ought to be.  I think, with the C.C.F., that capitalism is crashing around our ears, and that any attempt to build it up again will bring it down with a bigger crash.  I think with the Liberals that Socialism, as it is bound to develop historically, is an impracticable remedy, not because it is impracticable — it is inevitable — but because it is not a remedy.  I think with the C.C.F. that a co-operative state is necessary to preserve us from chaos.  I think with the Liberals that it is impossible to administer that state at present.  I think with the C.C.F. that man is unable, in a laissez faire system, to avoid running after false gods and destroying himself.  I think with the Liberals that it is only by individual freedom and individual democratic development that any progress can be made.  In short, any “way out” must of necessity be miraculous.  We can save ourselves only through an established co-operative church, and if the church ever wakes up to that fact, that will constitute enough of a miracle to get us the rest of the way. (Frye-Kemp Correspondence, CW 1, 155-6)

And here’s Frye fifty years later in Creation and Recreation on Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”:

Wilde attempted to deal with this aspect of creation too, in his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”  He remarks there that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”  By “socialism,” however, Wilde means apparently only distributing wealth and opportunity more evenly, so that all people can become pure individualists, and hence, to some degree, artists.  He says that in his ideal world the state is to produce the useful, and the individual or artist the beautiful.  But beauty, like nature and reality, is merely another of those reassuring words indicating a good deal of ready-made social acceptance.  Wilde is preoccupied in this essay by his contempt for censorship, and is optimistic that what he calls socialism would bring about the end of the tyranny of an ignorant and mischievous public opinion.  This has not been our experience with socialism or any other system since Wilde’s time, and his prophetic vision in this essay seems to have gone out of focus.  But, as usual, his sense of context is very accurate: he identifies the two aspects of our subject, the creation of a future society and the continuing of the creativity of the past in spite of the past.  As he says: “the past is what man should not have been; the present is what man ought not to be; the future is what artists are.” (CW 4, 44-5)

New Democratic Party

TOMMY DOUGLAS

Tommy Douglas (former CCF Premier of Saskatchewan and father of Medicare) becomes the NDP’s first leader, holding the post until 1971

On this date in 1961 the New Democratic Party was formed with the merger of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress.

Frye on Canadian Socialism in his “Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington,” September 14, 1989:

….Canada has had, for the last fifty years, a Socialist (or more accurately Social Democratic) party which is normally supported by twenty-five to thirty percent of the electorate, and has been widely respected through most of its history, for its devotion to principle.  Nothing of proportional size or influence has emerged among socialists 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 an 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)

CBC Radio archives on Tommy Douglas and the NDP here.

CBC Television memorial for Tommy Douglas here.

John Diefenbaker

diefenbaker

On this date in 1957 John Diefenbaker led the Progressive Conservatives to an upset electoral victory, ending 22 years of Liberal rule.

From Frye’s address on the occasion of Victoria University’s awarding an honorary doctorate to Prime Minister Diefenbaker in September 1961.

It is a sign of an immature society when politicians are contemptuous of eggheads.  It is equally a sign of an immature society when the university is contemptuous of politics, when it congratulates itself unduly on its clean hands and its pure heart.  There is a natural tension between university and government.  Government is based on majority rule; the universities are one of the most effective instruments of minority right.  The university seeks truth at all cost; the government must seek compromise at all cost.  The university, like a totalitarian state, is exclusive, and holds annual purges to remove those who do not support it with sufficient energy.  The government, in a democracy, must deal with all the people, and Mr. Diefenbaker was no less representing the people of Canada when he was Leader of the Opposition than he does now.  The university tries to abolish conflicting opinion by facts and evidence; the government must reconcile conflicting opinion in an area where all facts and evidence come too late.  What the university stands for demands admiration and respect from government; what the government stands for demands admiration and sympathy from the university.  It is this equal pact that is symbolized by the honour which the Prime Minister has done us in accepting our degree, and by our desire to honour him in offering it.  (CW 12, 314-15)