Narratives, from the personal to the political

I keep harping on this, I know, but it's for a reason – acknowledging the importance of the stories people tell themselves and the weight they attach to those stories is frequently the first step in effecting change, whether it's at a purely personal level or at the macro/social level.

Those stories, whether they're accurate reflections of fact or fucked-up dysfunctional compensations, form touchstones. They are the scripts whereby we live our lives. They provide the cues and the guideposts we use in responding to events, to new information. They provide the internal filing systems we use to organize what we know and what we learn and slot it into categories; how we react to things depends very much on how they fit into those categories. The stories may or may not be true. They don't have to make sense or even appear coherent to external observers, objective or otherwise. As long as they make sense to us, we hang on to them.

So much of your identity and sense of yourself is wrapped up in that narrative, in fact, that it provides a psychic and emotional touchstone. To have it challenged, in whole or in part, is akin to having your psychic anchor taken away. The more you have invested in your storyline, the more resistant you're going to be to any attempt to redefine or rewrite it. And that's true, I'd submit, regardless of whether you're talking about a single person attempting to deal with personal issues or a defined group attempting to deal with social and political change.

Could that be part of the explanation for Susan Crean's account of her encounter with Stephen Harper in 1992? She recalls:

When the man learned that she had co-authored a certain book about American domination of Canadian and Quebec politicians, the man responded: "You should not have been allowed to write that book."

The man: Stephen Harper. Crean never forgot his words, but especially the word allowed. The room full of writers in Ottawa issued a gasp.

Crean later elaborated on the encounter. "Harper spoke to me first and asked if I had written 'that book.' I asked which one, and he mentioned Two Nations, which I wrote with Quebec activist/sociologist and well known independentiste Marcel Rioux. ... Harper was clearly still angry about having had to read it at university. In his view, I took it, the book was treasonous. I was so shaken by his words, and his open hostility, that I immediately left the dining room."

-- Lawrence Scanlan, A less proud country, Ottawa Citizen, July 28, 2010

Perhaps Stephen Harper has a different recollection of the encounter. I'd be delighted to hear him share it. Scanlan argues, however, that the exchange suggests an impulse on Harper's part to suppress and control viewpoints with which he disagrees, and that his government is being criticized, almost two decades later, for exactly that.

I haven't read the book in question, and I've never met either Susan Crean or Stephen Harper. What I'd like to believe, however naively, is that we can affirm our individual and collective rights to disagree among ourselves, and to advance the storylines of our choosing -- without bringing the coercive power of the State down upon our heads, and without inviting the rhetorical bludgeons of the Sun Medias / Fox News Corporations of the world.

Disagreement and dissent are fundamental to citizenship in open societies. They're inseparable from civil discourse, free speech and free inquiry. In these times, remembering that is more important than ever.

When public institutions fail us

Just finished listening to a ridiculously shallow and badly scripted interview by Robyn Brown on CBC Radio's Here and Now with Farrah Miranda (was in the car, so I may not have the names right, and I'll correct if necessary) from the Toronto Community Mobilization Network. TCMN is conducting its own investigation of the violence and brutality inflicted upon peaceful demonstrators by police during the recent G20 summit in Toronto. Not surprisingly, this grassroots initiative stems, in part, from a recognition that there isn't going to be any meaningful institutional response. No one is going to be held accountable by the Police Services Board, the city, the province, or Ottawa.

So what's Robyn Brown's approach to this, but to badger Ms. Miranda for signs of “balance?” It sounds to me like you've got your minds made up already, she said – are you going to talk to the police and get their side of the story?

Wow.

Where to begin? How many things can you find wrong with this?

Well, let's start with intellectual laziness. That's very much in evidence in Ms. Brown's attempt to impose a facile “he said / she said” framework on the story. There aren't many stories that boil down to that. Framing it as “protesters say this, but police say that” makes it possible to ignore all kinds of complexities and shoehorn the story into a simple one-size-fits-all model. That may work for an eight-minute segment before you break for the news on the half-hour, and it may mean you can file your story without any conscious effort, but it doesn't do justice to the story or serve your listeners especially well.

And the suggestion that the Network organizers have their minds made up? Or that they ought to be talking to the police to get their side of the story? Let's see now. The Network is asking people to come forward with pictures, video and first-hand accounts of their treatment at the hands of police. In other words, anyone who was:

• gassed
• beaten
• tasered
• kicked
• shot with plastic bullets
• subjected to racial or ethnic profiling
• “kettled” in the rain at Queen and Spadina
• held without charge in the gulag on Eastern Avenue
• threatened with gang rape
• degraded by sexist and / or homophobic slurs, etc.

Associated with the CBC interview, I also heard one citizen describe how the bones in her finger had been shattered by a police baton. I also heard a doctor who was treating people for trauma, broken bones and concussion describe how police confronted her and confiscated her gauze, bandages and other medical supplies.

Just an observation, but I'd say those folks have already heard the police side of things quite clearly.

And it's not as if the traditional media outlets are going to devote any further air time or newsprint to these stories. They've got their images of broken windows and burning cop cars, and their interest in revising the narrative is pretty much non-existent. (Time to move on. Didn't Mel Gibson say something rude or something?)

If anything, the TCMN's initiative is just a further demonstration of the impotence of regular institutional responses – and of how traditional media outlets fail in their responsibilities. We already know that bodies such as the Police Services Board, not to mention all three levels of government, aren't even going to pretend to care about the citizens whose rights they're supposedly charged with safeguarding.

The G20 narrative: whose story is it?

Throughout the G20 weekend, I was following events on TV, on Facebook, on various blogs and websites, and on Twitter. (not quite like being out on the street, I know, but it’s a start ...)

It was hard to miss the building drama Saturday, what with the smashing windows, burning police cruisers and assorted related mayhem. By early evening, TVO broadcaster Steve Paikin’s real-time observations had started attracting a following on Twitter. I started following @spaikin as the buzz intensified. Good reporting -- amplified and enhanced by the sense of real-time immediacy inherent in the use of social media tools like twitter -- and I have no reason to question the honesty of his observations or the authenticity of his reactions to what he was seeing. The sense of outrage is genuine, and he asks several worthwhile questions that everyone in this town -- journalists, public officials, citizens -- ought to be following up.

My problem with Paikin's tweets, though, is that ultimately they simply feed a narrative that was almost certainly manufactured days, if not weeks, in advance. We can see that narrative taking hold, even as we speak, in the dreaded MSM, on Facebook posts, on blogs, and on Twitter. And it's a narrative that just happens to serve the agenda of the powerbrokers who orchestrate all this G20 / FTAA / SPP / MIA crap. How does it go? Watch:

"Peaceful city besieged by violent black-clad anarchist thugs." Get used to that theme, because we're going to be hearing a lot of it over the next little while. Thus giving corporate / state security apparatus an excuse for even more repression.

This leads to an even more chilling effect on public protest. Yes, you have the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech, free assembly and all the other fundamental rights inherent to an open and democratic society, but how likely are you to exercise those rights when you're worried about getting clubbed, gassed or tasered? Especially when you're getting demonized and lumped in so consistently and overwhelmingly that the very words "protest" and "demonstration" take on pejorative overtones?

And how convenient that makes it for the owners / managers / investors who want all this -- "free trade," "security and prosperity partnership," "free market ," etc. -- to happen. Democracy, civil discourse and public engagement are all messy and unpredictable, after all, and they make it that much harder to maximize profits.

It's crucial that anyone with a conscience and a commitment to telling the truth do everything in his or her power to challenge and derail that storyline, ASAP, before the news cycle ramps up.

Were there any undercover cops trying to incite violence?







Gee, I wonder if anything like this was going on in Toronto today? Honestly, who doesn't think the images of smashed windows and burning cop cars play right into the hands of those who want more cops, more security, more surveillance, more pre-emptive arrests?

And what about the reports of police rousting people out of bed, without warrants? That's straight out of the gestapo-jackboots-on-the-stairs playbook.

And someone tweeted about the script CTV was following Saturday: over and over, video of one of the burning police cruisers. No images of cops charging / beating / assaulting people. Gee, I wonder what kind of storyline they're trying to construct?

If we don't challenge this immediately, the story is going to be all about the nasty violent black-clad anarchist thugs. An easy story for lazy media types to manufacture. Hell, I'd bet most of us could fashion that storyline in our sleep. Nothing about the midnight arrests days in advance. Nothing about indiscriminate police brutality. Nothing about exclusive access to G20 leaders for selected business leaders and other members of the privileged class.

Time to start pushing back, like right now.