httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyuXptGR9cY
The women of Hamilton, Ontario, “break up” with Stephen Harper
More on the way at itsoversteve on YouTube
Video of the Day: “It’s Over, Steve”
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Frye on Lester Pearson
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
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.”
Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga20M4XBgks
Trial witness Leon Welczilker describes mass executions
The trial of Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem on this date in 1961.
Frye in “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason” on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem:
We may recall the impression given to Hannah Arendt by the experience of attending the Eichmann trial, as recorded in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. What disconcerted her about Eichmann was not a sense of great wickedness or even of great stupidity, for either of which she would have been prepared. She felt rather that, so to speak, he wasn’t there: something impossible to define, but nevertheless at the core of real humanity, was simply missing. She developed from this a conception of “the banality of evil, which, I take it, was a philosopher’s way of putting clothes over the naked metaphor of “lost soul.” (Myth and Metaphor, 127-3)
Frye Quote of the Day
Courtesy of Clayton Chrusch:
“The release of creative genius is the only social problem that matters.” Fearful Symmetry
See the full paragraph in Clayton’s comment here.
“All the Young Dudes”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfwVfEXJhQQ
A friend since childhood died a week ago today. I met him the first day of second grade and we were friends from then till now.
I know that this blog is not for personal disclosure. But the loss of people we love along the way until, finally, it is our turn, is something we all share. Sometimes our mortality bites down just hard enough that something gives way; the mundane becomes sinister, and our silly preoccupations seem eager to be gone because they’re leaving us one way or another. And that may make us wonder if the sources of comfort we call upon every day are illusions. Push them aside and we see where we really are, which is a transient little somewhere situated between two darknesses. Love is the gift we grant ourselves most confidently when life is sure and the end of it is still over the horizon. But push even that aside, and at some terrible proximate point there seems to be nothing at all.
Maybe this is the truth we turn away from whenever the inertia of just being alive carries us from moment to moment. It’s startling to see how short that stretch of memory — a lifetime’s worth — turns out to be. Any randomly chosen reminiscence from decades of accumulating them can, in the early stages of grief especially, be as easily plucked as a daisy in a meadow full of them. But there are still never nearly enough of them.
I know that when death came, my friend was resolute in taking hold of it. He was not a sentimental person and was not given to nostalgia, the one exception being a gruff concession to the things he could occasionally admit to love, which retained a fleeting power, like a sharp rising breeze.
He had disappeared from my life just over a year before, and then returned as the end approached. In January I posted some videos by David Bowie, half hoping he would see them, one song in particular; it was a call back to the youth we’d shared when the future had not yet devolved into a compromised and diminished present. He dropped me a line, tersely acknowledging that he’d been glad to hear the song, glad just to be reminded of it.
I knew him well, and can imagine what that last day and night might have been like. The increasingly less contingent plans patiently carried out point by point, and then the unself-pitying commitment to the last thing on his list to do. I knew him well enough also to believe that he might then have muttered a final sardonic self-deprecating remark: with your oldest friends it’s all well-understood cues, coded like the secret language of twins. I knew him well enough to believe that this might have happened. But I didn’t understand him well enough to guess how he must have felt when his determination had finally brought him to the last place where a choice had to be made. I am sure he was fearless. But the loneliness and the remoteness of it are unimaginable. However, this was his moment, and he made sure he experienced it alone.
He likely wouldn’t have been thinking at any point that day about the note he sent me back in January, or even of our two brief meetings in the last month, the second of them just the week before, which, it turns out, were simply last stops along the way. He had too much to keep in order, and had besides to maintain the resolve of someone who is in pain but not afraid. Those last modest exchanges of affection between us were just a late bit of ephemera in a life that was by now defined by loss. We sometimes have good reason to believe that unlooked-for joy might open up into an expanded life, but those moments elude those who are born in pain and who still have a life to live. I dwell upon this, not just because I’m grieving or because I am sentimental in a way my friend was not, but because in his small expression of happiness at hearing a song that stretched far back into a youth where everything was still possible, he was within reach one last time. After that, he somehow forgot how much he was loved.
I know that this reflection will not register as a matter of significance to most, and it is a common fate to be forgotten. But, as surely as my friend found death to be the companion he sought, I hold on to my love for him as someone I can never wholly lose. Beyond that I do not know. His life is in the love he leaves, if only between two darknesses.
Above is David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes,” performed by Mott the Hoople — a band whose albums my friend in his teens continued to buy in the hope they could match this song. If you know it, you know that there’s an undertow of melancholy in it; it’s a rock ‘n’ roll anthem to the passing of things. What makes their passing bearable is the hope that they might not disappear completely. All the young dudes carry the news. My much beloved friend was one of them, and he always understood the news is never unambiguously good or bad. He was my traveling companion for four decades, and for most of that time capable of bearing the pain that overtook him year by year. It is not false comfort to know that, with a little less pain and a little more luck, he might have continued to do so. It is the news I carry.
Frye at the Movies: “Fahrenheit 451”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWFmKt9NVMw
We know that Frye read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, met him and then corresponded with him at least once (see “A Little Chrestomathy of Frye on Sci-Fi” in the Denham Library). We don’t know that he saw the film adaptation of Bradbury’s novel, but it does seem to be the sort of thing he might take the time to see. Despite the very limited special effects available at the time, it is an elegant little mainstream movie that we knew how to make in the 1960s, and then evidently forgot. It was directed by Francois Truffaut in his only English language film. Truffaut with minimal fuss creates a dystopian world characterized by compact but comfy suburban homes equipped with bigscreen TVs that provide unending interactive entertainment to fill otherwise empty lives; all of which rings true, as does his depiction of a familiar in-denial conformity that quickly morphs into furtive but willing collaboration.
The mass-produced codex we call the book has served us very well over the last five hundred years. This makes Truffaut’s rendering of the incineration of thousands of books a terrifying sight it is difficult to forget, especially one extended sequence in which we watch in close up the covers of familiar books peeled away by the flames. It’s like helplessly witnessing a mass slaughter, reminding us that books are to be loved and cherished, if only because they have, in some form or other, proven to be the surest way the dead communicate with the living, and the living with the unborn.
The film has an excellent cast. Julie Christie plays both of the women in the protagonist Montag’s life: his fully co-opted and prescription drug-addicted wife, as well as the tenacious school teacher who guides him to freedom. The end of the film is subdued and modest but very moving. It remains one of the most vivid movie experiences of my childhood: people quietly becoming the books they love.
The rest of the movie is after the jump. It is in English with non-intrusive Chinese subtitles — which by itself suggests that dystopias like the one depicted here may remain probable, but they aren’t inevitable.
(The movie, unfortunately, is not embedded: click on the image above and hit the YouTube link.)
Imagine Stephen Harper Posing with John Lennon
Trudeau with Lennon and Ono in Ottawa in 1969
Yoko Ono Yanks Stephen Harper’s “Imagine”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7qaSxuZUg
Above is the original Lennon-Ono video of the song, the Stephen Harper cover of which Yoko Ono has compelled him to take down from YouTube. Listen to the song again and ask yourself if it has anything to do with Harper — beyond, that is, his desire to distract from a radical right wing agenda. Listen to the lyrics, and then think — billions more in corporate tax cuts in a country with one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the OECD, and tens of billions worth of jet fighters we do not need. Oh, and the prisons. That’s the one area of social spending Harper intends to increase: prisons. Not health care, not education, not support for the middle class and the poor. Prisons. Where, exactly, is the spirit of John Lennon in Stephen Harper’s politics?
After the jump, those who are still allowed to post the song: Bill Clinton, Neil Young and Lady Gaga.
And, finally, an earlier post featuring Northrop Frye on John Lennon.
Frye and Tomkins on Democracy and Contempt
In a review of 1984 when it first appeared, Frye writes that the real value of the book is that the author
gives us a terrifyingly clear impression of what we don’t want for either ourselves or our children. Mr. Orwell doesn’t tell us what to fight for, but he gives us a terrifyingly clear impression of what we should fight against. And what we should fight against, according to him, is not Russia or China, not Eurasia or Eastasia, but the evil tendencies in our own minds, our own weak and gullible compromises in a contempt of law and a contempt for truth. (CW 10, 143)
What is it exactly if not these evil tendencies, driven by contempt, that have given the Harper Conservatives permission to compromise their consciences, to lie, deceive, break rules and the law, cheat, conceal, refuse to answer questions, de-route all democratic process, and generally engage in vindictive attacks on perceived enemies and malign and smear honest public servants who inconveniently speak the truth? The great psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins–like Frye, a genius with a grand theory–postulates that at the heart of contempt is a drive auxiliary that acts like an affect and which he calls “dissmell.” Dissmell is clearest in the sneer, the raised upper lip directed at another, as if other people smelled bad and were not fit for human consumption.
Tomkins points out that in a democracy contempt (which is unilateral dissmell combined with anger) is rarely used (Tomkins calls it the most unappealing affect), because it undermines the assumption of equality and solidarity with others. It is however a central affect in authoritarian and hierarchical societies, where dominance and superiority must be communicated by rejecting and distancing “malodorous” others. Contempt, as Tomkins neatly puts it, is the mark of the oppressor.
In contrast, shame is the affect central in democratic societies, because shame does not sunder the interpersonal bridge: it is not unilateral and only functions when there is already an affluence, a closeness and fellow feeling that is impeded in some way but with only an incomplete reduction of enjoyment or interest. Shame implies an identification with others, and a wish to return to the good scene of communion with the other. Contempt, on the other hand, insists on an unbridgeable distance from the other in the first place, so that there is no good scene to return to. There is no identification with the other. It is a very handy affect if you want to lynch someone, or cheat them out of their life’s savings, or if you are just part of an oligarchy that wants to avoid uncomfortable feelings of guilt (moral shame) for the misery that has been inflicted on the rest of the human population.
Compare for example, the facial display of Dick Cheney with that of Barack Obama. As far as I know, Cheney’s prominently raised upper lip is not due to any physical paralysis of any kind; it is an expression of dissmell. It is hard to imagine a sneer like Cheney’s coming over the features of someone like Obama. So when you have a leader of a government, Stephen Harper, who treats his own fellow citizens with dissmell it is best to be suspicious and wonder about the fate of our democracy.
But as of yet too many Canadian voters seem inert, immobilized, unconcerned with the erosion of democratic institutions and processes, and it is this very situation the Conservatives count on in a fear campaign directed at everybody’s pocket book. Harper’s government is a perfect example of what Frye calls, in an essay on democracy which I will quote more fully below, a “managerial dictatorship.” Its primary model is a corporation, and thus it is naturally in conflict with democratic principles and processes. The only principles the Conservatives uphold are the rights of Canadians to own unregistered deadly weapons and to pollute the environment in the name of the economy. But, to lift a phrase from Thoreau,“whether we should live like baboons or like men seems a little uncertain.”
In contrast to the current inertia of voters is the famous reversal in the 1993 election when a negative Conservative ad ridiculing Jean Chrétien’s facial paralysis turned the election around on a dime, leaving the Conservatives, by the time the dust had settled, with only two seats in the country. It was an encouraging moment. It was uplifting to know that the voters could say so loudly and clearly that such a mean and ugly attack on a fellow human being and citizen is just not welcome here, thank you very much.
The following paragraph is from an essay Frye wrote in 1950, an essay he wrote for The Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto. He is not speaking in affective terms, but the antithesis he speaks of is the same:
All governments whatever must be either the expression of the will as a minority holding autonomous power, which is able to impose that will on society as a whole, or the expression of the will of the people as a whole to govern themselves. In the former case there is an antithesis between a ruling class and the ruled classes; in the latter case there is no governing class, but only a group of executives and public servants responsible to society as a whole for what they do. The latter conception is the democratic one. (CW 11, 235)
“Democracy,” he goes on to say, “ is thus essentially the attempt to preserve law and order in society which has superseded the primitive and outmoded idea of ‘rule.’” We now have a government, of course, that seeks the very opposite: to rule as a minority and actively undermine the preservation of law and order in its own house: the House of Commons. Our House, as Michael so rightly puts it. The Conservatives have been found in contempt of parliament, guilty as charged of obstructing parliament and undermining democracy. Consider this paragraph from Frye in the same essay:
Anti-democratic social action, of the kind intolerable to a democracy must necessarily be in the direction of withdrawing information and action from the community as a whole. It is a contradiction in terms for democracy to tolerate a conspiratorial coup d’etat aimed at the restoration of the old idea of a professional ruling class. (236)
I can’t think of a better way of describing the threat that this country faces right now.