Harpokon hatred and the lessons of history

Further to Wednesday's post, Chet Scoville made an excellent point yesterday about the moral and political myopia infecting the Harpokons.

That they're motivated by spite and malice isn't really in dispute. It's the target and the historical focus of their bile that makes this consideration worthwhile;  as Chet argues, they seem convinced that all the bad things they've come to hate – progressive legislation, a social safety net, expansion of the body politic beyond the subset of white men who own property – started with Pierre Trudeau in the Sixties.

Any objective and reasonably comprehensive survey of Canadian history should reveal, however, that that just isn't the case. For a worldview like that to make sense, you'd have to believe, in essence, that the years before the Trudeau era were the Golden Age of feudalism. Men were men, serfs were serfs, women and peasants knew their place, and the advent of industrialization did nothing to alter the fundamental class order of society.

But to believe that you'd have to ignore the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Progressive movement, the New Deal, and probably even the Protestant Reformation for that matter. (Hey, I'm a big admirer of the Protestant work ethic. I also like those little finger sandwiches ... ) And as Paul Wells argues, much of what we've seen over the decades suggests that 

major social change happens incrementally and through stealth, rather than through the kind of romantic Thatcherite Big Fight for which some of my colleagues are so often nostalgic.

He goes on to suggest that that's what's really motivating Harper's assault on the census. It's not really about intrusiveness – after all, this is the same government that's installing full-body scanners in airports – so much as it is about removing the factual and statistical basis for much of the debate that precedes and surrounds policy initiatives.

A valid argument, so far as it goes, and it's not the first time it's been made. When you combine and consider the suggestions cited above, though, a number of observations arise.

Firstly, Paul is onto something when he contrasts policy advanced through electoral politics with policy advanced through things like the Court Challenges Program. Things like that have always been red meat to the Harpokon base; naturally, Birkenstock-wearing-tofu-eating-gay-Muslim urban elitists can't win at the polls, so they use our tax dollars to get what they want from activist judges, yargle bargle bleghh ...

The thrust of Paul's argument, however, is that the census kerfuffle reveals Harper's readiness to employ  exactly the same tactics that he was always ready to condemn the Liberals for using. If you can't advance your agenda through the political arena, you use "back channels" like the courts program, or simply emasculate and silence whatever sectors of the public service or NGO sector provide aid, comfort or factual backup to your opposition. Perhaps the ultimate goal may indeed be the dismantlement of the welfare state as we know it.

If that's the calculation behind the assault on the census, however, it's based not only on a misreading of history, but also of the Liberal Party's role in advancing the developments the Harpokons and their base have come to hate. As Chet argues, the Liberal Party didn't spearhead those developments; it reacted to popular sentiment, it co-opted initiatives from more progressive sectors, and it built its electoral success on aligning itself with fundamental Canadian values as they emerged and developed over the decades.  In his own words:

In none of these important cases did the Liberal Party make us who we are. On the contrary, they stayed in power for decades at a time by usually following our lead, and by reflecting (always imperfectly) the centre of the overall values of Canadians as we saw ourselves in the larger world. When they failed to follow our lead, they typically suffered at the ballot box, and then rebuilt by reconnecting with the electorate. In other words, the values that Harper's base mistake for Liberal ideology are no such thing.

Also, as Paul humourously suggests, the policy mechanisms associated with the hated "welfare state" can prove quite useful to governments of various ideological bent. Perhaps, once the census is rendered statistically and politically useless, future Harpokon governments can begin arranging 

the realignment of massive state action to serve the electoral interests of the Conservative Party. If one day we have no idea how many rock-ribbed family-values farmers and small tradesmen of Icelandic, Ukrainian, Scottish and Irish descent there are between Kenora and Kelowna, it will be easy enough for Tony Clement and Stockwell Day to claim there are 147 million of them and every one needs a tool-belt tax credit and a little something extra to help raise the kids.

So, what to take from this? It goes beyond Harper's hypocrisy, and certainly he's not the first politician guilty of talking out of both sides of his mouth, and occasionally out of his ass. Ultimately, though, if he's out to rewrite fundamental Canadian character, he's in for a disappointment. What we have to worry about, more than anything else, is how much damage he's going to do the social fabric in the attempt.

Conservatism, stewardship, and Edmund Burke

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.

It's worth taking a few moments to reflect upon the words of Edmund Burke. In the late 18^th century, Europe was in the midst of the social, political and intellectual ferment stirred up by the French Revolution. Burke was presented to me, during my early years at university, as one of the greatest figures in conservative political thought. The passage cited above is from his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and continues:

A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together would be my standard of a statesman. Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

I'm choosing to cite Burke for two reasons. Firstly, his warning about “presumption” has always resonated with me, not just because of its integrity and principled eloquence, but also because of the way he uses the word. In this context, the word embodies everything we've come to dislike about “leaders,” whether they're in politics, business, academia, or anything else. It carries noxious connotations of arrogance, single-mindedness, disdain for opponents, condescension, authoritarianism, high-handedness, arbitrary behaviour, and entitlement.

Secondly, because he's been cited, so regularly, as one of the paragons of conservatism. Just so we're clear, I have no problem or complaint with principled conservatism, at least as I understand it. If it means you argue for the preservation of worthwhile traditions and retaining the best parts of our character, our history and the lessons we've learned from it, you get no argument from me. While I prefer not to throw too many labels around, that's also part of the way I've always understood the term “Tory.” Especially of the pink or red variety. It may not coincide with the dictionary definition, but at least in terms of the connotations it's acquired, the Tory tradition – indeed, conservatism itself – is a proud and honourable framework from which to address whatever issues one is confronted with. It embodies all the best things about citizenship: decency, respect, caring, and acceptance of obligations to one's society, community, and fellow citizens.

So what is to be preserved? One can't really do justice to it in the space of a single blog post, but I'd like to consider the question of character: in particular, the qualities of the Canadian national character. Yes, much of it is based on stereotype and caricature, and yes, in real life we may frequently fail to live up to it, but at a minimum, I'd like to believe that they include:

• generosity
• civility
• tolerance
• respect for different points of view
• a wholesome ethic of common provision
• deference – perhaps we are, in truth, a tad too deferential, but I'd submit that our readiness to accommodate is also a measure of our character.

Obviously this is just scratching the surface. And just as obviously, any one of these could spark extensive debate. It's an off-the-cuff enumeration, rather than an exhaustive or definitive list. Given that our real-life history is full of examples wherein we have fallen short of those qualities, perhaps the enumeration borders on the mythic. And perhaps I'm betraying an attachment to that myth that may even be a little excessive.

Be that as it may, however, it is for that reason that I will not refer to the present collection of Harperite / Reformist thugs and their media lickspittles as conservatives. They aren't worthy of that. They are not conservatives, they're pale U.S. Republican wannabes with a revolting extra layer of teabaggery. They and their ideological bed partners have hijacked the good name of conservatism and bent it to one of the most destructive and antisocial currents in recent intellectual and political history.

Over the span of generations Canadians have created, through our democratic institutions and processes (flawed and vulnerable though those may be), one of the most generous and envied societies in the world. Health care, education, a social safety net – all informed by perhaps the most fundamental principle in Judeo-Christian moral teaching: the notion that we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers. (I'm not suggesting, of course, that this notion is unique to the Western European Judeo-Christian heritage.) In other words, a body of character, tradition, and established social convention that we've collectively decided, over the decades, are worth preserving. That ought to warm any conservative heart.

So how is it that we have entrusted the care and stewardship of our country and our character to a man who has built his entire career on contempt for those very principles? On his disgust for everything we are and everything that defines us? In a blog post today, Chet Scoville writes about contempt. But it's not just, as he suggests, contempt for us as people and as citizens. It's contempt for us as a society, as a body of tradition and sociopolitical culture, and of everything we've built and everything we stand for.

But let's linger for a moment on stewardship. At its core, it's the idea that we have an obligation to care for our society, our environment, and our fellow citizens, so that what we pass on to succeeding generations is in as good a condition as the way we found it.

When you go camping, you don't leave the campsite a mess for the next person.

When you use public space, you clean up after yourself.

When you find a source of clean water, you don't hoard it all to yourself and you don't pollute it or ruin it for others. Simple good manners. Everything we know about sustainability, about avoiding profligate consumption or resource exploitation, about taking what we need and leaving enough for others, is related to the idea of stewardship.

When you're entrusted with a mandate to govern, your every action should, in my submission, be informed by an awareness of the responsibilities inherent in stewardship. That's the definition of good government in one sentence. You're inheriting something that generations of Canadians have built, have poured their lives, their hearts, their work and their souls into. You don't get to piss on it, tell your audiences how worthless or contemptible you think it is, or demolish it in favour of a pathetic attempt to remake it in the image of the worst aspects of U.S. Republican legacy.

We are a better nation than that.   

Again with the coalition fearmongering?

Can we give it a rest, for Christ's sakes?

In their seemingly endless quest to generate bullshit stories and manufacture controversies (honestly, don't these people have better things to do?  Like, maybe, I don't know ... govern competently?), the Harpokons are reviving the moldy and discredited spectre of a coalition among the opposition parties.  Stand by for the usual flood of crap:  anti-democratic, coup, seizing power against the will of the people, yargle bargle bleghhh ...

It's beyond me how this nonsense continues to find any traction. As anyone versed in even the most basic civic principles knows, this is how parliamentary democracies work: you get to govern only as long as you can command the confidence of Parliament. Once you lose that, your mandate is gone.  Moreover, coalition governments function all over the world, anywhere there are parliamentary democracies. They're a fact of life. Describing the possibility of a coalition as anti-democratic isn't just disingenuous -- it's a lie. A Pants-On-Fire lie. Plain and simple. It is a deliberate and calculated attempt to mislead.

And yet, in the poisonous atmosphere of partisanship and misinformation that seems central to the Harper government's modus operandi, that simple fact has been transformed into a rhetorical cudgel used to beat the opposition and the media. Pointing out the facts about how things work, or citing parliamentary convention, isn't merely a statement of fact any more. Now it's taken as evidence of bias and partisanship.

Never mind their sustained and systematic assault on the infrastructure of democracy for the moment. Among the Harpokons' many acts of vandalism against Canadian civil society, that's got to be one of the worst. The goalposts defining civic discourse have been moved so far that the simple act of telling the truth in the face of lies and bullshit is now not merely a risky act -- it's taken as evidence of disloyalty. The farther down this road we allow them to take us, the harder it's going to be to get back.

Sun Media leaves another mess on the sidewalk

I've never been fond of the news business's predilection for describing the late summer as the “silly season” It implies that there isn't any real news happening, which is patently not true. And it provides a justification for manufactured bullshit stories.

That's what we're seeing in the “controversy” surrounding Homegrown, one of the plays on the bill for the current SummerWorks theatre festival in Toronto. Apparently we're supposed to consider it objectionable because it portrays Shareef Abdelhaleem, one of the so-called Toronto 18, in a sympathetic light. And we're supposed to be even more pissed off because the festival got some money from Ottawa. Cue the braying from the Fox wannabes at Sun Media, the Levantines, the Corians, and the rest of the perpetually angry flying monkeys of the right.

As J. Kelly Nestruck points out, the festival got perhaps $35,000 from the federal government. When you do the math and consider how that was divided up among various productions, promotional costs, etc., he suggests that this particular play might have gotten around $850 or so. (Well, I can certainly understand the outrage. How many tasers and cans of pepper spray could have been had for that kind of money?)

Sun Media hack Brian Lilley has been the point man on this. He's taken issue with Nestruck's accusations of censorship in a blog post today, in which he takes the predictable tack of posing as a hard-working dogged reporter, crusading for the rights of the hard-working little guy, bristling at the sneering condescension of media elites, yada yada yada. We've heard the cliches so many times we can probably recite them in our sleep. As he puts it:

There is no right to arts funding, a point that many supporters of the performing arts just don’t understand. Just because a play is written doesn’t mean it should be funded. Just because a theatre company wishes to put it on does not mean it should receive a grant.

Nestruck, Toronto city councilor Adam Vaughan and other defenders of Homegrown would prefer it if the hoi poloi, the great unwashed would just pay the bills and shut up.

Apparently the issue is about public money being spent on things Brian Lilley and his bosses don't like. Well, boo fucking hoo. Can we talk about how tiresome and fundamentally anti-social that line of argument is? “Yargle bargle bleghh, I don't want my tax dollars spent on things I don't agree with.” Straight out of the teabaggers manual.

To anyone who still wants to dance to that music, I say tough shit. You're a citizen of a democratic society. It's not your money, it is society's money – to be allocated in accordance with publicly determined priorities. You get your say in how those determinations are made through your inherent right to participate in the political process. And if you don't get what you want through participating, you don't get to simply take your marbles and go home. I don't think the Canadian military should be in Afghanistan. I don't think public money should be spent on billion-dollar summits or paying cops to beat the shit out of peaceful citizens, but I don't get to withhold my tax dollars on that basis.

As for Brian Lilley, his argument is disingenuous bullshit. What he and his Sun Media paymasters have done is taken one play – one play, from a festival staging more than 40 plays – which may have gotten a tiny little percentage of the money allocated to this theatre festival and built a cynical and contrived narrative of “glorifying Islamic terrorism” around it for the sole purpose of working their knuckle-dragging, drooling readership into a frenzy. Another textbook demonstration of how right-wing operatives manufacture controversies.

What's worse, though, is the insult to our intelligence, with the wide-eyed, innocent “we're not advocating censorship, we're just asking questions about the funding” script. (Yeah, right. I'm not saying your sister's a whore, I'm just asking why she has sex with strangers for money.) They're not just asking. They've poisoned the debate before it's even started by framing this as a story about our hard-earned tax dollars coddling terror-symp artists who don't work for a living because they're milking our socialist government for grant money. It's faux-populist crap.

One last question: did Lilley actually talk to Nestruck, or Vaughan, before penning this load of shite? How can he presume to tell us what they would prefer?

But that's standard procedure for Fox / Sun operatives. Their object isn't to inform, it's to inflame. Just because it's late summer doesn't mean we can afford to relax our guard. The stupidity virus is a nasty one. If we're not vigilant, we could end up here.

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.

Oh, so now they believe in statistics?

The guy who thinks men walked the earth with dinosaurs was at it again today.

Stockwell Day says crime is way up, so that's why the Harpokons need to drop $9-billion on new prisons - part of a policy initiative even Conrad Black has trouble with.

Well, where to begin?  How can this guy, and the government he's part of, speak with any credibility to any public-policy initiative whatsoever?  Especially given their wooden-headed insistence on scuppering the census, in the face of near-universal public condemnation and opposition from virtually every sector of society?  If the facts don't back them up, it seems, the Harpokons' first response is to neutralize the nation's most comprehensive collector and organizer of facts.

Second response, apparently, is to make up your own "facts."



A few years ago, Julian Fantino used to suggest - especially when the police budget was being discussed -  that crime was rising all over Toronto, and that we weren't safe in our homes, and that criminals were everywhere, and that the police weren't getting enough gratitude and appreciation.  This despite the fact that the crime rates were actually dropping once the data was analyzed and set out systematically.

When ideology leads you toward a punitive and vindictive view of the world, facts can become inconvenient.  When your focus groups tell you that that punitive approach plays well with your knuckle-dragging base, facts can become downright bothersome.  So when the facts get in the way of your fearmongering or race-baiting, well ... the Harper government's response  to that is now appallingly clear.

Safari extensions: so far, a big 'meh'

Well, it's a start, but so far nothing really earthshaking.

Would be really nice to see something like this ...