Malcolm Gladwell’s Stunning ‘Oops’ Moment
August 11, 2014 § 3 Comments
Malcolm Gladwell was on the BBC recently picking his Desert Island Discs. For the most part, it’s hard to argue with Gladwell’s choices, given his age and his Canadianness. I’m about a decade younger than him, and his choices look like the selections of someone’s cool older brother c. 1989, there’s BIlly Bragg, and Gillian Welch. Brian Eno’s there, so is Marvin Gaye. Gaye actually appears twice, with Gladwell choosing the classic deep cut, ‘Piece of Clay.’ But he also picked Gaye’s rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, which was allegedly the reference point for Bleeding Gums Murphy’s 45-minute version on The Simpsons. But, none of this really matters so much as Gladwell’s sheer, utter ignorance in introducing The Star Spangled Banner.
He claims that the American national anthem is an ‘insight into the heart of the American soul.’ Why? Because ‘[t]hey’re blowing stuff up. This is their national anthem, it’s about rockets and bombs.’
Gladwell is referring to the first verse of the song:
Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
See? There’s the red glare of the rockets, bombs bursting in the air? All that nasty stuff, this deep insight into “the heart of the American soul.” Except. Gladwell is so wrong it’s embarrassing. The Star Spangled Banner is about the British attempting to level Baltimore the night of 13-14 September 1814 during the War of 1812. The author of this song was a lawyer named Frances Scott Key, who was stuck on a British frigate that night, watching the British attempt to reduce Baltimore’s defences to rubble. He was there because he had negotiated a prisoner swap with the British. The next morning, he was shocked to see Old Glory in the ‘dawn’s early light.’ Somehow, Fort McHenry survived the night and the flag still flew.
Scott was so overcome with emotion, he wrote The Star Spangled Banner almost on the spot. He set the lyrics to a common British drinking song that every American knew. Understand the irony: The Star Spangled Banner arose from the War of 1812, when the enemy was the British. It also had three more verses that, thankfully, have long since been forgotten.
There are many problems with The Star Spangled Banner. The major one is that anthem singers in the United States think that they must stretch their vocal chords to the breaking point (or quite often beyond) in singing the song. Interestingly, when the campaign to make the song the official American national anthem picked up steam in the era around the First World War (it finally happened in 1931), newspaper editors complained the song was ‘unsingable.’
But this is all beside the point of Gladwell’s stunning mis-step here, as he descends down into stupid, knee-jerk anti-Americanness. He should know better.
The West and the Rest and the Fate of the Environment
May 2, 2014 § 2 Comments
I just read a quick book review in Foreign Affairs of Charles Kenny’s new book, The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Good for the West. This comes on the heels of a spate of books in recent years about why it is that the West rules now, but why it won’t shortly. The best of these books (at least amongst those I’ve read) is Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules — For Now: The Patterns of HIstory and What They Reveal about the Future. The worst is my favourite village idiot, Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest, and not just because of his incredibly stupid device of the “killer apps” that the West downloaded first, but have since been downloaded by the rest, but because of Ferguson’s inability to hide his triumphalist ethno-centrism. I also teach a lot of World History, so the topic interests me.
Kenny argues that, in contrast to Ferguson and others, that the rise of the Rest isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the West. Moreover, Kenny also claims that the rise of the Rest isn’t due to any failure on the part of the US, but, rather, is a function of Washington’s global leadership. And, unlike any other writer I’ve read on the matter, Kenny is also concerned about the possibilities for environmental degradation due to global economic advancement. This is interesting, actually, making me think of Doug Saunder’s Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Re-Shaping Our World (I reviewed that here on this blog). Saunders is also a triumphalist, arguing that urbanisation is a great boon to humankind, but he overlooks the environmental degradation from cities.
However. Where Kenny falls down, at least according to this review (I do look forward to reading The Upside of Down), is that he expects the free market (along with education and innovation) to take care of that problem. This is where I get suspicious, given that the free market has done very little for environmental degradation, and left to our own devices, we humans would destroy the environment without some kind of governmental intervention. I don’t see why it would work any better in the developing world, frankly.
But, Kenny also redeems himself in his concluding argument wherein he favours the establishment of global rules and regulations to regulate global development and environmental damage. Of course, I’m not sure how this squares with his faith in the free market, but I suppose I’ll have to read the book to find the answer to that.
On Uganda’s Homophobic Laws
February 26, 2014 § Leave a comment
Earlier this week, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, signed a law that toughens the country’s already rampantly homophobic laws, making some sexual acts subject to life in prison. Being gay was already illegal in Uganda prior to this law being passed. This law had been under discussion since 2009, and originally called for the death penalty for some sexual acts, and was originally tabled when the European Union objected. It was revived last year. President Musveni had flip flopped on whether or not he would sign the law, at one point arguing that gay people were “sick,” but didn’t require imprisonment, but help and treatment. And just to make it absolutely where Musveni stands on the issue, he clarified his thoughts in this CNN article. Musveni says:
They’re disgusting. What sort of people are they? I never knew what they were doing. I’ve been told recently that what they do is terrible. Disgusting. But I was ready to ignore that if there was proof that that’s how he is born, abnormal. But now the proof is not there…”I was regarding it as an inborn problem. Genetic distortion — that was my argument. But now our scientists have knocked this one out.
Charming. Just charming.
Also in the past week, documentary filmmaker Roger Ross Williams’s new film, God Loves Uganda has been making the rounds. It is based largely on the undercover work of a Boston-based Anglican (Episcopalian in the US) priest, Kapya Kaoma. In the film, we learn that missionaries from the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer have been proselytising in Uganda, preaching that God hates LGBT people. Charming.
All of this is deeply unsettling. Yesterday, I tweeted this
https://twitter.com/Matthew_Barlow/status/438310875305635840
I immediately got into a discussion on several fronts about the role of these American missionaries in all of this, on several fronts. I maintain that the IHOP missionaries are disgusting and an afront to humanity, but Uganda is to blame for this. But I’m writing this to expand what one can say in 140 characters on Twitter. One, being gay was already illegal in Uganda when the IHOP missionaries began spreading hate. Two, the IHOP missionaries capitalised on the already extant homophobia in Uganda in their preaching. And three, Uganda is responsible for its laws. The missionaries are a handful of people in a nation of 36 million people.
To argue that the missionaries are entirely to blame is wrong-headed to me for several reasons. First and foremost, it reflects an imperialist mindset to say that American missionaries went to Uganda and taught Ugandans that being gay is a sin and therefore Uganda passed a law that toughened anti-gay measures already in place. To blame the missionaries removes Ugandan culpability here. It also says that Ugandans are not capable of forming their own thoughts. Being gay was already a crime in Uganda before the IHOP missionaries gained a following. And Uganda is hardly alone in the world in an anti-gay stance. I point to, say, for example, Russia (interestingly, Russia’s anti-gay laws are also based on conservative Christian thought). The new law just expanded on earlier ones.
Ultimately, Uganda is responsible for this new law. Musveni is responsible for signing it. No missionary held a gun to his head, or bribed him. It’s his doing. And it’s entirely consistent with his thoughts on being gay to start with. And its consistent with Ugandan thought before the advent of the missionaries.
Half of Québec Anglos want out. Why this isn’t news
February 25, 2014 § 8 Comments
So the CBC is reporting that 51% of Anglos and 49% of Allophones in Québec have pondered leaving in the past year (compared to 11% of francophones) But, SURPRISE, it’s not because of language. It’s the economy, stupid. And Québec’s is sinking apparently. Another report I saw today said that Montréal’s economy is lagging behind the Rest of Canada’s major cities. In the past decade, Montréal’s GDP has grown by 37 per cent. Sounds impressive, no? Well. not really, since the five major cities in the Rest of Canada (Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa) have seen their cumulative GPD grow 59 per cent. As well, Montréal’s unemployment rate hovers around 8.5 per cent, compared with TVCEO’s (I think I just invented an acronym!) 6.3 per cent. Says Jacques Ménard, chair of BMO Nesbitt Burns and President of the Bank of Montréal in Québec, “Montreal has been slowly decelerating for 15 years, and now it shows. Another 10 years of this and we will be in clear and present danger.”
A decade ago, however, Montréal had the fastest growing economy amongst Canada’s major cities, from 1999-2004, as Montréal was, for all intents and purposes, a post-conflict society. Montréal was healing from the long constitutional battles that erupted in the 1960s and seemed to have been finally put to bed with the divisive 1995 Referendum on Québec sovereignty. Certainly, Québec was by-and-large still represented by the separatist Bloc Québécois in Ottawa, but the Parti Québécois government of Lucien Bouchard and André Boisclair, and then the Liberals of Jean Charest, turned attention away from the ethnic nationalist debates that had divided Québec for so long. Instead, Bouchard, Gilles Duceppe and most of the leadership of the nationalist movement began thinking in terms of civic nationalism, but the largest issue was put on the back burner. And, as a result, Montréal recovered.
I remember walking back across downtown after Maurice “The Rocket” Richard’s funeral in the spring of 2000. As I passed Square Victoria, a little boy was pointing at a crane on the skyline, asking his father, “Ce quoi ça, Papa?” He was about 5 or 6, and it hit me that he probably hadn’t seen a crane in downtown Montréal. But, in the first decade of the 2000s, Montréal underwent a construction boom, and prosperity returned to the city (and it slowly began to lose its unique character, at least in the downtown core and much of the Anglophone parts of the city as global culture took hold).
But in the wake of the 2008 Global Economic Meltdown, all bets are off. Québec is now governed by a tribalist Parti Québécois, led by the incredibly uninspiring Pauline Marois (and let me be clear, despite being an Anglo, I voted for the PQ 2003, 2007, and 2008, and for the sovereigntist Québec Solidaire in 2012 and I voted for the Bloc Québécois federally in every election), who seems determined to play to her base, whipping up a frenzy amongst the “bluenecks” outside of the metropole. And now Diane de Courcy, Minister of Immigration and Cultural Communities, says that if the PQ wins a majority in the election everyone knows is coming this spring, well, then we can expect Bill 101 to be toughened. Oh boy.
I would like to point out, however, that when de Courcy says “Montreal is not a bilingual city. Quebec is not a bilingual Quebec,” she is right. The metropole is a multilingual city at this point. But, it is the metropole of Québec, which is, at least officially, unilingually French.
BUT: I would also like to point out that had anyone thought about polling the Allo- and Anglo- phones about their thoughts on leaving Québec at any time in the past decade, my guess is that the numbers wouldn’t be all that different. Most diasporic groups in Montréal have connections to similar ethnic communities in other Canadian and American cities. And Anglophones have a long tradition of driving up the 401 to Toronto and beyond, or heading to the United States (hi, there). This is not news.
In conjunction with the depressing state of the economy in Montréal and Québec, and the struggles of thereof, it’s not surprising to see so much unrest in the province. Usually when the economy tanks, people at least give some thought to moving. And the years since 2008 have seen a fair amount of mobility in North America. Since Ireland’s economy collapsed at the same time, the Irish have been leaving home in search of new opportunities. What would make this real news is if even a fraction of those who claim to have thought about leaving did pack up and leave Québec. Then we would see something akin to the Flight of the Anglos from Québec in the late 1970s. Until then, this really should be filed under “Interesting, but not news.”
An Alternative America
January 30, 2014 § 4 Comments
A couple of days ago, an interesting article appeared in the Des Moines Register. I knew of it because my social media friend, and a geographer at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, Andy Shears, had a map published with the article. Andy’s map is an alternative United States, based on historically proposed states, none of which came into existence. He created the map 2 1/2 years ago for his own blog. The Register also mis-identifies Andy’s map as one of what the country would look like if all the separatist movements in history had actually worked. But, either way, it’s actually a really interesting map, put together in what I image was after agonising research, Andy came up with an alternative United States based on a country of 124 separate states, all based on proposals that never came to be. In the case of Massachusetts, there would actually be two states: Massachusetts and Boston. Of course, anyone who lives outside the Hub, especially in Western Mass, would say there already ARE two Massachusetts. Cascadia, in this version, is a state that straddles the mountains of eastern Washington and Oregon. And then there’s a wonderful little state called Forgottonia carved into what is today the border between Illinois and Missouri, just north of the hypothetical state of St. Louis.
The America That Never Was, map courtesy of AndrewShears.com
But I digress. The column in the Register was written by Steffan Schmidt, a political scientist at Iowa State. In it, Schmidt ruminates on an apparent proposal in California to split the state into six smaller states, based on a proposal from Silicon Valley. Schmidt notes that this would give the general California region 12 senators compared to the 2 it has now, which means that it would have much greater power in Washington. Schmidt, though, seems to assume that the 6 Californias would all elect Democratic senators, which is incredibly unlikely.
Schmidt’s larger point is about the apparent immutability of the United States, that Americans consider the national boundaries to be sacrosanct. He ties that back to the Civil War, just another legacy of that war in American life. But then he goes on to note that countries fracture into newer ones continually, pointing to various examples from Slovakia to Scotland to South Sudan. Interestingly, he does not mention Québec and Canada. But that’s an entirely different kettle of fish (though, interestingly, both Canadians and Quebecers consider their national borders to be sacrosanct). But it is a point well worth considering, at least to a degree.
The difference between, say, Scotland and the United States is simple. Scotland was annexed by England to create Britain in 1707. The United States is comprised of states that all chose to be part of the Union. By that I mean the European settlers of the territory that is now the United States of America all petitioned to Congress to be admitted to the Union. And even if the Confederate States were defeated and then had to be re-admitted to the Union, they also did so willingly (or at least as willingly as they could). In contrast, Scotland was annexed. Slovakia was annexed. We all know how Yugoslavia was formed and what happened when that came apart.
So there is a huge difference between the American model and those Schmidt offers in comparison. Similarly, Canada was formed in a manner very similar to the United States. But Schmidt is correct to note that it is remarkable how resilient the American state has been since 1776. I was recently thinking about this when I saw news that the population shift in the United States, based on recent census data, will make the South and the West stronger politically, at least in the House. This led me to think about my current research, of course (The far right of American politics and history), and I began to wonder if the relative decline of New England and the Northwest in favour of greater power in the South and Southwest would lead to separatist movements throughout the nation. Not that I think they’d ever be successful, any more than I think Québec will ever separate. But it’s fun to have such idle thoughts.
And then I got one of the great classics of punk rock in my head, “Alternative Ulster,” by Belfast punks Stiff Little Fingers. The song dates from 1978, the height of the Troubles, and the Stiffies, two Catholics and two Protestants, simply wanted a different future for themselves.
Got Land? Thank an Indian and Canadian racism
January 17, 2014 § 12 Comments
Tenelle Star is a 13-year old girl who is a member of the Star Blanket First Nation in Saskatchewan. She goes to school in Balcarres, SK. Last week when she wore a hilarious pink hoodie that asked “Got Land?” on the front, and said “Thank an Indian” on the back, she created a controversy. The CBC reported on the matter on 14 January, and from there things have gone sort of viral. Jeff Menard, the Winnipeg man behind the shirts, says he’s getting flooded with orders. But the fallout around Star’s hoodie is getting ridiculous.
A few days ago, I tweeted my disbelief, in a rather inelegant fashion after reading the comments on the original CBC story:
https://twitter.com/Matthew_Barlow/status/423498348289474560
The response to this and a few other similar, though more eloquent, tweets was generally positive, but I got some pushback. Most of it was garden-variety racism, but this one was particularly interesting:
Further discussion revealed nothing, and I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out the logic, which appeared to be connected to the term “Indian.” Of course, the term comes from Christopher Columbus who, upon landing Hispaniola in 1492 thought he was in India. The name stuck. Today it is an incredibly loaded term politically, but, despite all that many aboriginals in Canada continue to prefer the term to the various attempts at replacing it. And if we really want to get semantic, I could point out that the term “India” for the country India actually comes from the Persians who termed the land around the Indus River India in the 5th century BCE.
The second part of that tweet was much more obvious. Blue Squadron’s grandfather worked for a living, the implication being that aboriginals in Canada do not. That’s beneath contempt.
This morning on the CBC’s website the fallout from Star’s hoodie continued. Her Facebook page has been inundated with comments, most of which are positive, but more than a few are disgustingly racist. The sad fact of the matter is that Canada is a racist nation when it comes to the First Nations, as I noted in this tweet
https://twitter.com/Matthew_Barlow/status/423596289733824512
One only need read the comments on the CBC article, or even the comments on Star’s Facebook page to see that. I also have the added benefit of having worked for eight years in the field of aboriginal law and litigation in Canada. I was a research analyst for an Ottawa-based company, we did research surrounding the myriad claims and counterclaims between the First Nations of Canada and the federal and provincial governments. The duplicity of government agents astounded me then, it still does today. And that’s not even touching the racism. I could cite many examples of horrible racist comments I came across the in the archives, but one has always stuck out for its complete lack of self-reflection. It came from an RCMP officer named Gallagher (an Irish name) who, when supervising a work camp where a few aboriginal men were sentenced for trivial criminal acts, complained that they didn’t want to do the backbreaking work. Said Gallagher, “They are sun-burnt Irishmen.” Oy vey.
But today, a new low was reached with the CBC reporting on the response of a Vancouver woman, Michele Tittler, to Star’s sweatshirt. Tittler is the head of this group called End Race-Based Laws, Inc., which was apparently formed in response to last year’s #IdleNoMore movement. This is from the CBC article:
Michele Tittler was posting on social media sites connected to the story. Tittler, from Vancouver, is a co-founder of a non-profit political organization called End Race-Based Laws, or ERBL Inc.
“I was immensely offended,” Tittler told CBC News Thursday, regarding the message of the shirt. “And I was going to do everything within my power to have that shirt banned from that school.”
Tittler said she had written to the Balcarres school and also sent notes to Facebook, complaining about the content on Starr’s page.
She is also planning to lodge a formal complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission , although it’s not clear on what grounds. Tittler is, however, convinced that the message of the shirt is racist.
“This is racism,” she said. “Canadians are really getting sick of the double-standard. No white kid could walk into a school with a shirt that says that in reverse.”
First off, no white kid SHOULD walk into school wearing the reverse of Star’s hoodie. Secondly, it is NOT reverse racism, it’s not racism. Tittler is is just flat-out, plain wrong. She is the latest iteration of an old phenomenon in Canadian history. Many aboriginals in Canada would be just as happy getting rid of the Indian Act, but the fact of the matter is that cannot happen. The playing field in Canada is not even. First Nations start at such a massive disadvantage to the average Canadian it’s almost unbelievable. The on-going legacy of Canadian colonialism and the systematic attempt at ethnocide in the 19th and early 20th centuries remain. During that period Canada made every attempt it could to eradicate aboriginals from Canada, not by killing them, but by taking their culture, making their kids speak English or French, through residential schools, through enfranchising aboriginals for leaving reserves and so on. None of that worked, for obvious reasons.
It is disgraceful that Canada remains such a fundamentally racist society when it comes to First Nations. It is a shame. It embarrasses me. In the year 2000, I was working in Ottawa, on a claim that centred around a group of Inuit in what is now Nunavut. This is where that gem from Officer Gallagher comes from. It was just one of many, and the more I read in the archives, the more appalled I was. And the more embarrassed that my country could have acted in this way. It was also Canada Day. In Ottawa. It was not a happy time for me.
And fourteen years on, it hasn’t got any better. The National Post, that noted bastion of retrenchment, published a collection of letters it received on residential schools, all of which appear to have been written by white people. I was astounded. Just astounded at these comments.
This is not going to get better at any time soon. It’s acceptable for far too many Canadians to be racist in this respect. And that is to the great shame of Canada.
The English Language and Montreal
January 8, 2014 § 8 Comments
An interesting oped appeared in the Montreal Gazette today. It was written by a guy, Nicholas Robinson, who teaches Japanese in Montreal, an expat American who has been there for the past 30 years. He is critical of the Anglo community of Quebec when they kvetch about not getting service in English, whether at the hospital or on the STM. He says that learning French is just as essential to living in Montreal as learning Japanese is to living in Kyoto.
I tend to agree, the fact of the matter is that Quebec is a French province and Montreal is a French city. Last time I looked at census data, just a shade under 600,000 Quebecers identified as Anglos, as defined by speaking English as their mother tongue. That’s 7.7% of the population of Quebec. The largest group of Anglos live in and around Montreal, where 16.8% of the population is Anglo. Statistically, that’s a sizeable minority. And yet, most Anglos, at least in Montreal are at least functionally bilingual.
Robinson goes on to argue that “the French speakers of Quebec have been incredibly tolerant of the anglophone “community,” and a vast swath of them have gone to the immense trouble of learning English — when they don’t have to at all.” I also tend to agree here, though I will note something based on my experience of teaching CÉGEP for 6 years. I would say that somewhere between 40-45% of our students at my Anglophone CÉGEP were francophone, some of whom did not have great English-language skills upon entering the school. But their reason for wanting to go to CÉGEP in English (they often went onto French-language universities) was simple: English is the dominant language in the world today, and is the lingua franca of global business (I would also add that about 70% of my students wanted to get degrees in business or related fields). So there are practical reasons for Quebec’s francophones to learn and speak English.
But, as you might expect, the comments in response to Robinson’s missive are, well, predictable. And vitriolic. They include exhortations that he remove himself from Quebec and “go home.” But the first comment I saw was perhaps the most instructive of all. The commentator lambasts Robinson and notes that Canada is a bilingual nation. And Quebec is a province of that bilingual nation. That much is true.
But. Quebec is not bilingual. In fact, there is only one officially bilingual province in Canada: New Brunswick, though Ontario and Manitoba will also provide services in French to their population. Moreover, despite the fact that, say, British Columbia is a province in a bilingual nation, good luck getting anyone to speak French to you in Vancouver. Canadian bilingualism functions in reality a lot more along the Belgian model: insofar as it exists, it’s regional. Canada has something called a “bilingual belt” that stretches from New Brunswick along the St. Lawrence River valley to Eastern Ontario. Within this belt, you will find a sizeable amount of the populace that can speak both English and French, and you’ll also find some bilinguality in Manitoba. Aside from that, though, forget it.
So, in reality, the Anglophone population of Quebec and Montreal, as Robinson notes, has it relatively good. An Anglophone in Montreal can get an education in English, and healthcare in English, and there is a robust Anglo media in the city. And, I might add, while I can speak French, when I had to deal with the government of Quebec, I tended to at least try to get service in English, in large part because I, like many Anglos, don’t trust my French all that much. This was especially the case when dealing with Revenu Québec or the Ministère de la Santé et les services sociaux. Much to my surprise, this was never a problem. I always got responses in English. A francophone in Toronto gets none of that.
Having said that, Montreal has a robust Anglophone community because it has jealously protected itself and its “rights”, especially since the rise of the Parti québécois’ first government in 1976 and Bill 101 in 1977. But that doesn’t mean that Robinson doesn’t have a point.
Phil Robertson, the 1st Amendment and Free Speech
December 20, 2013 § 1 Comment
As I wrap up the Griffintown book, and reach the end of what has been a decade-plus-long odyssey, I have begun work on a new research project that examines the far right of American politics and its relationship to history. As such, I have spent a lot of time working with the US Constitution, its history, its interpretation, and its meaning. Beginning with this post, I will be using this space to begin to hash out ideas for this project.
———
So Phil Robertson is a homophobic bigot. The Duck Dynasty patriarch was interviewed by GQ and when asked his definition of sinful behaviour responded “Start with homosexual behaviour and just morph out from there.” Robertson is a deeply religious man. So his beliefs, as deeply offensive as they are, aren’t all that surprising.
What has struck me is the firestorm on Twitter about Robertson, and the conservative backlash against his suspension from the show (not that it’ll matter, this season’s episodes are already filmed, the season starts in the spring and the long-term future of the show is up in the air). From what I’ve seen on Twitter, Robertson’s bigotry is being framed as a 1st Amendment issue. The argument I’ve seen on Twitter from rank and file “constitutional conservatives” is that A&E (the network that Duck Dynasty is on) and all the “libtards” (I suppose I’m one of them) are violating Robertson’s 1st Amendment rights. Even Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has suggested Robertson’s constitutional rights are at stake.
They’re not. At all. The 1st Amendment reads as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In other words, the 1st Amendment is limited to government. “Congress shall make no law…”, and the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) have consistently limited the alleged rights and freedoms the Bill of Rights gives to government, limiting the reach of government. In other words, private corporations and private citizens are not bound by the 1st Amendment or any other of the Amendments that are part of the Bill of Rights. So that takes care of that argument.
As for Bobby Jindal, when he says, “This is a free country, and everyone is entitled to express their views,” he is bang on correct. But it has nothing to do with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Robertson can expose his own bigotry any day of the week and six times on Sunday. But Jindal’s argument is disingenuous at best. His implication is that anyone who is opposed to Robertson’s ideas is stifling his right to speak his mind. In other words, those who are appalled at Robertson’s comments to GQ are NOT entitled to their right to speak their minds. Interesting, that.
The Value of Death and the Value of Passion
December 14, 2013 § 4 Comments
I am reading what is turning out to be one of the best books I’ve read in years, Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Schulman is a survivor of the AIDS Plague in New York City in the 80s and early 90s. She is deeply implicated in queer culture in New York, in the fight for the rights of those inflicted with AIDS during that era and the fight to commemorate and remember those who died. 81,542 people died of AIDS in New York City from 1981 to 2008. 2008 is 12 years after the Plague ended, according to Schulman.
The Gentrification of the Mind is a blistering indictment of gentrification in the East Village of Manhattan, an area of the city I knew as Alphabet City, and the area around St. Mark’s Place. It’s the same terrain of Manhattan that Eleanor Henderson’s fantastic novel, Ten Thousand Saints, takes place in (I wrote about that here). This is one of the things I love about cities: the simultaneous and layered existences of people in neighbourhoods, their lives spatially entwined, but culturally separate.
Schulman’s fury drips off the page of The Gentrification of the Mind, which is largely her own memoir of living through that era, in that neighbourhood where she still lives. In the same flat she lived in in 1982. She makes an interesting juxtaposition of the value of death, arguing that the 81,542 were of no value to our society, that their deaths were marginalised and, ultimately, forgotten. Whereas the 2,752 people who died in New York on 9/11 have experienced the exact opposite in death: their lives have been valued, re-assessed and immortalised. Her point is not to take away from those who died in 9/11, but to interestingly juxtapose those who died due to the neglect of their government and culture and those who died due to external forces.
I just finished reading Amy Waldman’s The Submission, a fictionalised account of the process leading to the creation of the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero. Waldman reminds us that the lives of those killed on 9/11 were not valued equally, something that should be intrinsic to us all. The lives of the people who worked in the food courts, the restaurants, cafés and those who manned the parking lots, the custodial staff did not mater, in the end, as much as the first responders, the office workers, the people on the planes.
And this is an interesting argument. Schulman’s response is much more visceral than mine, but she was there in the 80s and 90s. I wasn’t. She was also there on 9/11, I wasn’t. But I am an historian, she is not. Death is never equal, just as life isn’t. It has been this way since forever. In The Iliad and The Odyssey, set in Ancient Greece, the lives of the foot soldiers and the sailors under Odysseus’ command are worth nothing, whereas the lives of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus are valued. The deaths of the first two cause mourning and grief for Odysseus, both at Marathon and on his epic journey home.
All throughout history, people’s lives have been valued differently. What Schulman sees relative to the victims of the AIDS Plague and 9/11 shouldn’t be surprising. It doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t make it okay. But, fact of the matter, it’s the same as it ever was. And, after researching, writing, and teaching history for much of the past two decades, I can’t even get all that upset about the devaluation of the marginalised in society anymore. I don’t think it’s any more right in 2013 than I did as an angry young man 20 years ago, but I have become so jaded as to not even register surprise or anger anymore.
So in reading Schulman’s book, I am surprised by her anger and her passion, and I am also intrigued by it, and I’m a little sad that being an historian is making me increasingly resigned to bad things happening in the world. It might be time to get my Howard Zinn, E.P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm out, and remember that those men, even after a lifetime of studying, writing, and teaching history, maintained a righteous anger at injustice.
“Jobs Not Welfare” — UPDATED
October 20, 2013 § 2 Comments
In reading an issue of The Times Literary Supplement from September recently, I came across a review of an economics treatise, Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not Welfare, by Hyman P. Minsky. The very title of the book struck me as an absurdity (as much of economic theory does, to be frank). But then I realised that as ridiculous as Minsky’s title is, this reflects a larger problem in our society. Welfare was never meant to replace jobs. Ever. That’s not the point. Welfare was meant to provide a social safety net for workers when the economy failed, they lost their jobs, etc. Welfare was never meant to be a permanent situation.
But the problem is that politicians, economists, and bureaucrats have, in the years since welfare states were created around the time of the Second World War, decided that welfare is a permanent state. And, of course, someone reading this right now is going to argue that some people actually prefer to live on welfare permanently. This is a stupid argument, to be blunt. There are also some people who prefer to murder their fellow human beings. This is not a reason to cut welfare.
People who complain about welfare and the cost to taxpayers (and those who claim that people on welfare are lazy, etc.) tend not to be people who have ever actually lived on welfare. When I was a kid, my family did. It wasn’t pretty. Any study I’ve ever seen of poverty are very clear that it is nigh impossible to survive on welfare in any urban centre anywhere in the Western world.
Permanent welfare is NOT an option, nor should it be, nor should it ever be. And yet, politicians and bureaucrats seem to think it is. People on welfare don’t. Thus, Minsky might actually have a point. Of course, Minsky, a maverick economist if ever there was one (he died in 1996), argues for massive government intervention to create jobs, not exactly an argument that’s going to make him a lot of friends in today’s neoconservative orthodoxy.
UPDATE: Brian Bixby published this last week with some factual basis to back up what I have to say here.
Matthew Barlow 