On Living in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood, Pt. V
October 2, 2013 § 6 Comments
[I thought I was done with this series (parts I, II, III, and IV and the prequel) when I left Pointe-Saint-Charles last summer and moved to New England. Apparently not.]
In the mid-1980s in Vancouver, the BC provincial government built the SkyTrain, a new light-rail system connecting the western suburbs of New Westminster and Burnaby to the City of Vancouver. SkyTrain caused a lot of disruption when it was built, as you might expect for a brand new system. When it finally opened, just in time for Expo ’86, people were excited. Vancouver finally got rapid trasit! But some people weren’t so happy, the people who lived along the line in New West, Burnaby, and East Vancouver (it’s worth noting the SkyTrain went primarily through working-class neighbourhoods). I recall a news segment that investigated the claims of the noise. In particular, I remember a glass of water on a counter next to an open window as the SkyTrain went by. The water didn’t move. At all.
Nonetheless, I can understand in the inconvenience of the SkyTrain for those whose day-to-day lives were affected by it. They were there before SkyTrain, it moved into their neighbourhood.
But let us now consider Pointe-Saint-Charles. The Pointe has been home to a train yard since the Grand Trunk Railway built its yards there in 1853. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that’s 160 years ago. In other words, the trains have been in the Pointe for a long, long time. And for much of its history, the trains were part and parcel of the experience of living in the Pointe. There was a train yard there. Life goes on.
But, as I’ve been noting in this series, the Pointe is undergoing redevelopment and gentrification. And nowhere is this clearer than in that part of the southern part of the Pointe which, even a decade ago, was a pretty dodgy part of town. Here, people have been snapping up cheap housing, both the 19th century stock and hideous new condos, and movingin. The Pointe, ever-so-slowly has become a more happening place because of this gentrification and that closer to the north end of the neighbourhood, near the Canal and the Nordelec building (which is in the process of being condofied now). In short, the yuppies (of whom I was obviously one when I lived there) are moving in.
For the most part, the process of gentrification has been more or less smooth in the Pointe, but, then again, I’m not one of the people being priced out of the neighbourhood. But the tension that exists in Saint-Henri was lacking in the Pointe. But, there were subtle changes in the culture of the neighbourhood when I lived there. This was seen most obviously to me in the case of the community garden at the end of our block. A couple of years ago, the arrivistes took control of it and essentially pushed the old-timers out of the garden. Not cool.
So, today I was reading the news on CBC Montréal, and I came across this little gem. Some of the yuppies who’ve moved into that southern part of the Pointe (taking advantage of cheap housing and pushing the poor out) are crying foul over the sound of the trains at all hours of the day. Yup. Imagine that! Trains! In a train yard! One resident hears the trains and he gets afraid of what might happen. Others complain sound like The Grinch, complaining about the noise, noise, noise!
Certainly, some of this is in response to the disaster in Lac Mégantic. But, it is worth noting that in all my years in the sud-ouest, I cannot recall a single accident involving trains in Pointe-Saint-Charles or Saint-Henri. Accidents between cars, bikes, and peoples, certainly. But not trains.
So, these people want Canadian National to reduce the trains and the noise they make. This is not unprecedented. There is a condo building on rue Saint-Ambroise in Saint-Henri, right where the CN tracks go through Saint-Henri. When it was first opened up, the people who bought in there respectfully asked that the Canadian National STOP running trains through their backyards. That line, which is connected to the largely disused yards in the Pointe, remains one of the busiest train tracks in North America, used by CN and ViaRail between Montréal and Ottawa and Toronto. I’m not making that up.
It would seem to me that one of the basic facts of living in a city is that there is noise. And if you are on the market for a new condo, you would look at what’s around you in your new neighbourhood and consider the inconvenience of the noise factor, or other things that might upset you. And, if you move into a condo near a train yard, you might want to consider the fact that it’s going to get loud occasionally. Trains are like that, they’re loud (I can hear the Commuter Rail train from my house here at all hours of the day and night, in fact, one is going by right now!). It is asinine and selfish to move into a neighbourhood with a train yard in and then act surprised when there are trains that make lots of noise. It is the height of idiocy, quite frankly. If you don’t like the noise, then go live somewhere else. It’s that simple. And so, that is my solution for these fine people in the Pointe. Sell. Move elsewhere.
How Terror Works
September 26, 2013 § 16 Comments
Yesterday, there was a stabbing on my bucolic New England college campus. A male student (on leave from the university after an arrest two weeks ago) approached a female student on a campus shuttle bus and stabbed her. When the bus driver intervened, he also got stabbed. The wounds were not life-threatening, the woman was treated at the scene for a laceration to the top of her hand and the bus driver was taken to hospital for his wounds. The suspect then fled across the street and jumped in his car and escaped. This all happened about 150 yards from the campus police station, and the suspect fled past the station. Campus police then pursued him, but gave up the chase for safety reasons.
The university community was apprised of this about an hour later in an email sent out to everyone. I give the university full credit here. When I was in undergrad, there was a serial rapist on campus. The campus police and the university administration did not consider that to be information that the students, staff, and faculty had a right to know. Times have changed.
About half an hour after the email, someone resembling the suspect was spotted on campus. This led to a lockdown, or “shelter in place”, as it’s called, beginning around 12.30pm. For the next two hours, there were police crawling around campus from both the campus and city forces, there were at least two helicopters in the air (whether media or police, I don’t know) and there was a generally tense atmosphere in my building. My colleagues and I speculated on whether or not the suspect might have returned with guns. Who knew?
Around 2pm, classes were cancelled for the rest of the day and evening. About half an hour later, the lockdown was lifted. No one had any idea as to whether or not the suspect had been captured, but we presumed he had been.
But. A few hours later, it became clear that this was not the case, as an arrest warrant had been issued for the suspect, who had obviously fled. This morning, we learned from the news that he was arrested a couple of hundred miles away from here in Upstate New York.
So, in essence, campus experienced a two-hour lockdown and students, staff, and faculty experienced an unnecessary trauma. Looking at the suspect’s mugshot, he’s pretty generic looking and one can see a dozen or two young men who look vaguely like him on any given day around campus. It’s easy, of course, to conclude that the campus police and the administration over-reacted.
But did they? I’m not so sure. What happened yesterday on my campus appears to be the end result of terror and terrorism. Since 9/11, Americans have obviously become much more vigilant. And with mass shootings happening at an alarmingly frequent rate in the past couple of years, this only makes people, military/police/civilians, all the more vigilant (as an aside, I’ve noted the media, especially in Canada, likes to point out that gun deaths are down in the US, which is true, but then this is used to argue that mass shootings are no biggie. That’s false, there are more mass shootings now than ever). And, in pursuing this vigilance, the campus police and the administration yesterday erred on the side of caution, calculating the chance of a real threat to the campus community. The suspect had apparently attacked his victim(s) completely randomly. Thus, the threat was real, if he was indeed back on campus, he could conceivably randomly attack again. Or maybe he had a more destructive weapon?
And this is how terror and terrorism works (yes, I consider mass shooter and those who enable them terrorists). It causes terror, and it causes massive overreactions like we had yesterday because it is better to be safe than sorry. What if the campus police and administration did not react in the manner they did yesterday and the suspect had returned to campus and caused more damage? Imagine the lawsuits and negative reaction.
I’m not saying I like this, but I am interested in how terror works like this. I am presently teaching a course on the History of Terror. And while the course is centred around the very fundamental fact of the terror of history, that we’re all going to die, terror on a smaller scale (like 9/11, the Boston Bombing, these massacres) works the same way and makes us more vigilant, easier to scare, easier to over-react.
It’s all rather depressing, yeah?
The New Yorker and Serbian Aggression: Re-Writing History
September 12, 2013 § 5 Comments
I like reading The New Yorker. It’s generally a pretty good general interest magazine and I appreciate its particular slant and humour. But sometimes I read things that are profoundly stupid. Like in the 2 September issue, in a profile of the Serbian tennis player (and world #1), Novak Djokovic. Djokovic grew up during a difficult time in the former Yugoslavia, as it disintegrated. And he grew up during a difficult time for Serbia, while it was committing genocide. So, when the author of this piece, Lauren Collins, casually mentions that NATO began bombing Belgrade, without any context, I was left gobsmacked. Belgrade was bombed by NATO during the Kosovo War, during which the Kosovars fought for their independence from the remaining rump of Yugoslavia, which was really just Bosnia.
Serbian troops, with their wonderful record of genocide in Bosnia/Herzogovina (in conjunction, of course, with Ratko Mladic’s Bosnian Serb army) were suspected of committing genocide, or at least engaging in genocidal massacres, against the Kosovars. Hence, NATO, as it had done in 1995 during the Bosnian genocide, stepped in. In the end, it turns out that Serbia wasn’t exactly committing genocide in Kosovo, merely “”a systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments” (to quote from the BBC), the Serbian army sought to remove, not eradicate the Kosovars.
Whether NATO was right or wrong to drop bombs on Belgrade, Serbia has a history of committing genocide and other crimes against humanity. There’s a reason former Serbia President Slobodan Milosevic died in prison in The Hague whilst on trial for war crimes and former Serbian general Ratko Mladic is presently on trial in The Hague.
Clearly Collins is trying to engender a sympathetic audience for Djokovic, who, as an 11-year old boy had nothing to do with Serbian genocides, and it is largely an entertaining article. Nonetheless, she is guilty of a gross misappropriation of history in describing the bombing of Belgrade in an entirely passive voice: “When he was eleven, NATO began bombing Belgrade…”, she then goes on to explain the young Djokovic’s means of survival. She goes onto write “In the aftermath of the war, as sanctions crippled Serbia’s economy, Djokovic’s family struggled to support Djokovic’s ambition [to be the world No. 1 tennis player].” Again, this is a tragedy for the Djokovics, but there are very real reasons why Serbia was hit with economic sanctions by NATO and its allies, and that’s genocide.
The New Yorker and its editors, as well as Lauren Collins, should know better. It’s that simple.
Bono Vox, Corporate Stooge
June 26, 2013 § 2 Comments
In today’s Guardian, Terry Eagleton gets his hatchet out on Ireland’s most famous son, Paul Hewson, better known as Bono, the ubiquitous frontman of Irish megastars/corporate behemoth, U2. Eagleton is ostensibly reviewing a book, Harry Browne’s, Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power), which sounds like a good read. Eagleton’s review, though, is a surprisingly daft read by a very intelligent man, one of my intellectual heroes.
He takes Bono to task for being a stooge of the neo-cons. For Bono sucking up to every neo-con politician from Paul Wolfowitz to Tony Blair and every dirty, smelly corporate board in the world in the line of his charity work. Eagleton even takes a particularly stupid quote from Ali Hewson, Bono’s wife, about her fashion line, to make his case. Now, just to be clear, I think Bono is a wanker. I love U2, they were once my favourite band, and The Joshua Tree is in my top 3 albums of all-time. But Bono is a tosser. He can’t help it, though, he’s like Jessica Rabbit, he was just made that way. Eagleton, for his part, essentialises the Irish in a rather stupid manner as an internationalist, messianic people, and says, basically, Bono and his predecessor as Irish celebrity charity worker, Bob Geldof, were destined to be such. Whatever.
I’m more interested in Eagleton’s critique of Bono as a corporate/neo-con stooge. It’s a valid argument. Bono has coozied up to some dangerous and scary men and women in his crusades to raise consciousness and money for African poverty and health crises. But, I see something else at work. A couple of years ago, there was news of a charity organisation seeking to use Coca-Cola’s distribution network in the developing world to get medicine out there. I thought it a brilliant idea, but, perhaps predictably, there was blowback. Critics complained that this would then give Coca-Cola Ltd. positive publicity and that it did nothing to stunt Coca-Cola’s distribution, blah blah blah. Sure, that’s all true, but perhaps it would be a good thing if needed medicines were distributed through Coke’s network, especially since Coca-Cola Ltd. was more than willing to help out? Maybe the end result justified the means?
And so, reading Eagleton on Bono today, I thought of Cola Life (the charity working with Coke). And I thought, it’s certainly true that Bono has worked with some skeezy folk. But, if the end result is worth it, what’s the problem? If working with the likes of Tony Blair (hey, remember when everyone loved Tony Blair?!?) and Paul Wolfowitz and Jeffery Sachs actually can lead to positive developments for Africa and other parts of the developing world, is it not worth giving it a try? Or is it better to sit on our moral high grounds in the developed world and frown and shake our heads at the likes of Cola Life and Bono for actually trying to work at the system from within for positive change?
I’ve always been struck by a Leonard Cohen lyric, the first line of “First We Take Manhattan”: “They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom/For trying to change the system from within.” Cohen there summed it up, working within the system for change and revolution is boring, it’s not glamorous, it’s not glorious. But my experience has taught me that it works, and more positive change can be affected through pushing from within the system than from without it. It doesn’t mean it’s always all that ethically clean, either, sometimes you have to get dirty to do a wider good, and I think that’s what Cola Life and Bono are doing on a much bigger, grander, and more impressive scale. And I think the Terry Eagleton’s of the world are living in the past, with their moralistic tut-tutting, all the whilst sitting on their hands and doing little to actually do something to bring about positive change.
Ten Thousand Saints and the Nostalgia of the Record Store
March 12, 2013 § 2 Comments
Last week I read Eleanor Henderson‘s excellent début novel, Ten Thousand Saints. This was a book I randomly came across, and, like most books I randomly come across, I was lucky. Ten Thousand Saints tells the story of Jude, a disaffected teenager in Burlington, Vermont (disguised as Lintonburg, for reasons I don’t quite understand since the rest of Vermont gets to keep its names), a sad sack little city about two hours from Montréal on Lake Champlain. Jude, I should also point out, is about a year older than I am. His best friend, Teddy, dies of an overdose on New Year’s Eve 1987, after he and Jude huff pretty much everything, including freon from an air conditioner, but Teddy also did coke for the first time, introduced to him by Eliza, Jude’s step-sister, who’s in town for a few hours from NYC. Teddy’s older brother, Johnny, also lives in NYC.
The novel then follows Jude, Johnny, and Eliza through the hardcore scene in the NYC underground in the late 80s (looking at Henderson’s picture on her website, she does not look the sort who would). Jude transforms from a pothead huffing high school dropout in Burlington to a straight-edge hardcore punk in NYC, frontman of his own band, the Green Mountain Boys (a clever play on their Vermont roots and Ethan Allen during the War of Independence). Henderson does a great job of illuminating the culture of the hardcore scene of the late 80s, both in NYC and around the rest of the East Coast, as well as issues of gentrification on the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, especially around Tompkins Park in Alphabet City, where Johnny lives, and around St. Mark’s Place, where Jude sometimes lives with his father.
Ten Thousand Saints made me nostalgic. At the other end of the continent, in Vancouver, I was starting to get into some of this music, if not yet the scene. Many of the bands Henderson references were in my cassette collection by 1989-90, a couple of years after Jude and Johnny were rocking out in the Green Mountain Boys. Though I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why the standard bearers of the straight edge scene in the late 80s, Fugazi, are not mentioned, though Ian McKaye’s earlier band, Minor Threat, are the gods of Jude, Johnny, and their crowd. What made me nostalgic was record stores. This is how Jude got into the scene in NYC in the first place, hanging around the record stores of the Lower East Side.
As I mentioned in my last piece here, on the Minutemen, Track Records in Vancouver was where I began to discover all these punk and hardcore bands in my late teens. Track stood on Seymour Street, between Pender and Dunsmuir, and as you went up the block, there was an A&A Records and Tapes, then Track, then A&B Sound, and then Sam the Record Man. Two indies and two corporate stores. And between the four of them, you could find anything you wanted and at a reasonable price. Zulu Records also stood on West 4th Avenue in Kitsilano, a short bus ride from downtown on the Number 4 bus. Of those stores, only Zulu remains. I’m in Vancouver right now, and I think I’m going to make my way over there today.
But it was in record stores that kids like me learned about this entire universe of punk and alternative music in the late 80s. In places like Track and Zulu, we heard the likes of Fugazi and the Minutemen, as well as the Wonderstuff and Pop Will Eat Itself and the Stone Roses playing on the hi-fi. This is where we could find the alternative press and zines, I found out about all these British bands from the NME and Melody Maker. You’d talk to the guys working in the stores (and it was almost always guys, rarely were there women working in these stores), you’d talk to the older guys browsing the record collections about what was good. Some of these guys were assholes and too cool to impart their wisdom, but most of them weren’t. And then you’d rush home to the suburbs and listen to the new music, reading the liner notes and the lyrics as you did.
For the longest time, I held out against digital music. I liked the physical artefact of music. I liked the sleeve, the liner notes and the record/cassette/cd. In part, I liked it because of the act of buying it, of going into the record store, even the corporate ones, listening to what was playing in the store, looking around and finding something. There’s not many record stores left. The big Canadian chains are all dead and gone. Same with the big American ones. In Boston, the great indie chain, Newbury Comics, isn’t really a record store anymore. The flagship store on Newbury St. has more clothes, books, movies, and just general knick knacks than music. Montréal had a bunch of underground stores up rues Saint-Denis and Mont-Royal, but they’re slowly dying, too. And here in Vancouver, the only one I know of is Zulu (though I’m sure there’s more on the east side, on Main, Broadway or Commercial).
I miss the community of music, it just doesn’t exist anymore. I suppose if I wanted to, I could find it online, discussion groups and the like. But it’s not the same. There’s no physical artefact to compare and share. There’s just iTunes or Amazon.
Canada and the North American Triangle
January 5, 2013 § 3 Comments
Twice in the past few weeks, I have been caught up in discussions about the role of the monarchy in Canada with Americans. These discussions rather astounded me, I have to say. In all my years, I have never really thought all that much about the role of the Queen and her representatives in Canada. Sure, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state in Canada (as well as everywhere else in the Commonwealth), but her actual role in Canadian politics is close to nil. Governors-General have been little more than figureheads, responding to the whims of Prime Ministers since the 19th century, not the Queen.
For my American interlocutors, however, the Queen was a big deal for Canada. They’ve all spent a fair amount of time north of the 49th parallel, and they’re all insightful people. The argument goes something like this: Canada has been prohibited from achieving a full sense of independence of its own because of the on-going association with the former colonial parent through the person of the Queen. Because Canada is not completely sovereign, it cannot be a fully independent nation. It will always be beholden to the United Kingdom. To a person, they all argued that Canadians (at least Anglo Canadians) are very British, in all manners, from our dry sense of humour to our stiff upper lips, and even down to our accents. I was dumbfounded.
I argued that the Queen means very little to Canadians. Aside from the hardcore monarchists, she’s just this grandmotherly woman who pops up on TV now and then. I pointed out that Americans are actually more obsessed with the royal family than Canadians, as evidenced by the marriage of Prince Receding Hairline to whatshername last summer. Sure, the Queen is on our money, but how is that different from Washington and Lincoln being on American money? And certainly Washington has reached the status of a monarchal icon in the USA by now. I argued that, despite the fact that the Queen is the head of state, the Prime Minister is the one who wields power, and quite a lot of it. The Prime Minister decides when elections are to be held, what the policies of government are, etc. In short, sovereignty lies in the Canadian people as expressed through our elected representatives and the Prime Minister; the Queen has nothing to do with this.
But then one of them brought up Prime Minister Harper’s underhanded attempt in 2010 to avoid an election by asking Governor General Michaëlle Jean to prorogue Parliament. He argued that we had an unelected representative of the Queen deciding the fate of the Canadian government. Good point, I conceded, but, the Governor General in 2010 acted in accordance with established constitutional law in Canada and the entire Commonwealth; she acceded to the wishes of the Prime Minister. This wasn’t good enough, the fact remained that the Governor General is unelected. Full stop. And this is proof of Canada’s lack of full sovereignty.
Now I certainly do not buy into the argument that Canada was born on 1 July 1867. As far as I’m concerned the date that we chose to celebrate the birth of our nation is entirely arbitrary and artificial. I have also argued on this blog that Canadian independence has been achieved piecemeal. From the granting of responsible government in 1848 to the patriation of our Constitution in 1982, Canada has inched towards independence. I’d go so far as to argue that in many ways, 1982 is the true date of Canadian independence, as finally our Constitution was an Act of our own Parliament. I certainly do not buy the argument that Canada is doomed because the nation wasn’t born in violence and a war of independence like our American neighbours.
There is also the argument that Canadian unity can never be, due to the fact that upwards of 40% of the population of the second largest province (at any given time) wish to separate from the nation. And, for this reason, Canada is an artificial nation. I think this is a simplistic, and even stupid, argument. It assumes that all nations were born of the nationalist movements that swept across the world from the early 19th to the late 20th centuries. The continued existence of massive multi-ethnic nations such as Russia and China bely this. So, too, does the on-going persistence of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, despite the continued threat of the Scots nationalist movement. Instead, I argue, Canada is successful precisely because it is not a national nation, it is post-national and can house more than a single nation. Indeed, this is what makes Canada not just bi-cultural, but multi-cultural, as we learned in the 1960s, whatever government policies of the day might be.
So I’ve been left stewing over the role of the monarchy in Canada, thanks to my American interlocutors. I’ve also been stewing over different conceptions of democracy. Britain is the modern birthplace of democracy. It is where the people slowly gained control over their nation from the monarchy. At one point, the House of Commons was filled with men hand-picked by the king and his minions, true. But by the 19th century, this was no longer the case. In the UK, the Queen is little more than a figurehead, just like in Canada. But, of course, Elizabeth is English, she’s not Canadian. Thus, she is a foreign queen, according to my American friends. But it’s not that simple. That is an American argument. American democracy works very differently than British or Canadian democracy. And notions of what democracy mean differ as well.
To wit, a few weeks months ago in the Boston Globe, the resident conservative columnist, Jeff Jacoby, was making the argument that the best way to determine whether or not gays and lesbians should be granted rights was through referenda. Only by giving voice to the majority could we determine whether or not a minority should be granted civil rights. That, concluded Jacoby, is how democracy works. To my Canadian mindset, this idea was shocking and appalling. Pierre Trudeau once opined something along the lines that the best determinant of a free and open society is how that society protects its minorities. In short, the rights of minorities should never be left up to majorities. That is what democracy is.
And maybe that’s what this argument boils down to: Canadians and Americans have very different ideas of what democracy is. And for that reason, whilst my American conversants were appalled that Canada would have an unelected, foreign queen, I, a Canadian, could care less. The Queen has no real impact on Canadian life and politics. Her “representative” in Canada, the Governor General, is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the Prime Minister. And the Governor General has, since 1848, deferred to the wishes of the Canadian Prime Minister. Canada is no less a sovereign nation for this.
And Canada’s inferiority complex has nothing to do with this relationship to the UK, it has everything to do with being the junior partner in North America with the United States and Mexico. Canada is the smallest of the three countries in terms of population, and ranks only slightly higher than Mexico in terms of the size of its economy. The only way in which the colonial relationship with the UK actually does matter is in the sense that Canada has never had the chance to fully stand on its own. It WAS a British colony. And today, it is by and large an American colony. I mean this in terms of the economy, Americans own more of Canada’s economy than Canadians themselves do. And we currently have a governing party, the Conservative Party of Canada, that acts like a branch plant of the American Republican Party.
Reappraisals and the Forgotten 20th Century
May 21, 2012 § 1 Comment
I picked up Tony Judt’s Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century on somewhat of a whim at Montréal’s last independent Anglo bookstore, Argo Books on rue Sainte-Catherine, a few months back. Since then, it’s been buried in the knee-deep stack of reading next to the bed. But, after finishing Jerry White’s meditation on 20th century London, as well as a short novella by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two defining writers of the 20th century, I thought perhaps it was time to crack the binding on Judt’s book.
I am all 7 pages in and have already read more food for thought than I do in most of what I read in a month. Judt’s main point is that in the West, but especially in North America, particularly the United States, we have done exactly what Mike Edwards, the frontman of the disposable pop band Jesus Jones said we were doing 20 years ago, “waking up from history.” Except, whereas Edwards was optimistic, and Francis Fukuyama was loudly and proudly declaring we had reached the End of History (seriously, how the hell does Fukuyama have ANY credibility after that?!?), Judt is more concerned. He says we’ve lost our way, we live in a society focussed on forgetting, of ignoring the lessons of history.
Judt is particularly concerned with the States, his adopted nation, and where he died in 2010, after a battle with ALS. In particular, he writes of the triumphalism of the States after the end of the Cold War, despite the defeat in Vietnam and the stagnation of Iraq (and Afghanistan) when he was writing in 2007. He notes how the United States is the only Western nation that still venerates and celebrates its military history, a sentiment that disappeared in Europe after the Second World War. He writes:
For many American commentators and policymakers the message of the last century is that was works. The implications of this reading of history have already been felt in the decision to attack Iraq in 2003. For Washington, war remains an option — in this case the first option. For the rest of the developed world, it has become a last resort.
I’m not entirely certain this is indeed the case, given Tony Blair’s hitching of his horses to Dubya’s war machine in 2003, but it certainly does give pause for thought.
It also brings the Harper government here in Canada into sharper focus. Canada is a middle power, and that might be generous, actually. And yet, Harper is hell bent on celebrating Canada’s military history, one that by and large ends with the Second World War, and denigrating our proud history as peacekeepers (including the very simple fact that Lester B. Pearson invented peacekeeping). I wrote about this, somewhat tangentially, with the return of the Winnipeg Jets to the NHL last fall.
And yet, here we are, a minor middle power in the world, striking a more bellicose tone than even the US in some cases, most notably in our support for Israel. This is not a discussion of whether Israel deserves support or not, this is a discussion about the role of military history and veneration in public discourse. Harper has used Canada’s proud (and distant) history as a military power, and Canada’s excellent record in the two World Wars to bolster and justify his muscular vision of Canadian foreign policy.
In this sense, then, while the US remains a major military power, and indeed the world’s major one, Canada remains small potatoes. And all I can think of is an episode of The Simpsons where Bart, Milhouse, Rod, Tod, Nelson, and Martin head into Shelbyville for reasons I can no longer remember, and they decide to break into teams. Bart and Milhouse, Rod and Tod, and Nelson and Martin. As they make their way off, Martin dances around the big, burly Nelson, who is somewhat reluctant of his role as the enforcer, singing his friend’s praise and celebrating his prowess. In my vision, Obama is Nelson and Harper is Martin. Kind of sad, really.
The Cavalier Middle Classes
May 19, 2012 § 3 Comments
I am in the process of reading what is generally an excellent book, Jerry White‘s London in the 20th Century, itself part of a recently completed trilogy on London. The 20th century came first, in 2001, followed by the 19th century in 2008, and the 18th a few months ago. It’s an intriguing read, as White is adept at pulling together disparate strains of the history of the city in a compelling and very readable narrative.
But sometimes, he gets hard to take seriously. For example, in discussing homelessness and begging in London in the 1980s, one of the toughest decades in English history due to a global recession and Margaret Thatcher’s scorched earth economic policies, White writes:
London experienced a begging revivals in the 1980s, especially among the young homeless and squatters, to an extent probably only paralleled in some of the bleakest years of the nineteenth century. In the absence of children, dogs had always been a useful prop for beggars to squeeze that extra penny from a sentimental public. In the 1980s and 1990s the small dog on a length of string was a required fashion accessory for the young beggars of Stoke Newington Church Street or Islington’s Upper Street or Camden High Street and probably every other high road of inner London.
Yes. Right. Because being homeless is really just a career choice, complete with the same fashion accessories of the London City banker. Except instead of the Brooks Brother suit, Rolex watch, and Porsche, the beggar chooses ratty clothes and a mutt on a string to get that extra bit of change out of the public. Obviously White is being sarcastic here, injecting some humour into his narrative. But it’s inappropriate humour.
White strikes a similar chord in discussing the fate of the Port of London and the Royal Opera House, two unionised work places in the 70s and 80s. Here, he calls the unionised workers, and the unions, “stupid” because they were unable to see the long-term and to protect their jobs (and their industries). Indeed, this is a pretty common attitude amongst historians of late in discussing the deindustrialisation that struck Western Europe and North America in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Unions were daft because they refused to accept their fate. For that matter, we see the same discourse surrounding the plight of Greece today, those dumb Greeks refuse to see reality.
It’s not that simple, of course. The critics of the Greeks aren’t experiencing what the Greeks are experiencing, quite obviously. It’s very easy to preach and be judgemental from Berlin, London, New York, or Toronto. Of course, what those observers also have is a view of the bigger picture, and can no doubt see the forest, rather than just the trees.
It’s the same thing with the historians looking back at deindustrialisation. Sure, from where we sit today in the early 21st century, it’s easy to see the bigger picture of the process of deindustrialisation in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. But, know what? It wasn’t so easy to see that from the position of the working classes in that era. These people were fighting for their jobs and their livelihood. What else you expect them to do? Lie down and take it? To allow the system to run them over, dispossess them? To settle for less than they thought they deserved? How many people do that? Right, approximately zero. Sure, they were wrong. But for them it was a personal fight, not some abstract discussion of the economy and projections, stagnation, and inflation.
It wasn’t pretty. The 80s were a horrible decade for the working classes of North America and Western Europe. Jobs disappeared as the world’s economy globalised. When Free Trade came to Canada at the end of the decade, it had a direct impact on my family. My old man lost his job, victim to Free Trade, because his company realised that a welder in South Carolina could do the same work for far less money than he did in Vancouver. Not only that, but unionisation was a lot less likely in South Carolina. And so on.
The process of deindustrialisation had very real human costs. End of story. Historians would do well to remember than when discussing the process, rather than dismiss workers and their unions as “stupid” or “daft.”
Ann Coulter is an Idiot
March 23, 2010 § Leave a comment
Ann Coulter is an idiot. A true, complete idiot. Never one to let facts get in the way of a good story, Coulter sounded off yesterday, on the eve of a tour of Canadian campuses, saying that “The provost of the u. of Ottawa is threatening to criminally prosecute me for my speech there on Monday – before I’ve even set foot in the country!” Dream on, Annie. What happened is that the provost informed her that she might give some thought to Canadian hate speech laws before opening her mouth here. Coulter, of course, is famous for provoking Muslims, feminists, gays, lesbians, Catholics, and pretty much anyone who isn’t like her. Of course, she is merely symptomatic of the larger problem of polemicists and idiotlogues, like Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, and Michael Moore. Lies become truths when spoken by the likes of them. It’s 1984 all over again.
On Race, Haiti, and New Orleans
February 8, 2010 § Leave a comment
Watching the Super Bowl yesterday, we were inundated with stories of redemption and New Orleans (something I hope to return to in a post later this week, stay tuned), but something in my brain clicked when images of the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were shown, including the scene at the Superdome, the home of the New Orleans Saints, and I thought of coverage I have seen of the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake last month.
In both instances, there were wide-spread reports of looting and violence in the aftermath of these natural disasters. In both cases, media coverage was overwhelming negative of these events, with a strong hint of moral condemnation (one headline in The Times speaks of “retribution” against rioters). This coverage, it seems to me, is intimately tied up with questions of race and power.
In the aftermath of Katrina and the earthquake, large cities were destroyed (New Orleans and Port-au-Prince), meaning the survivors had no homes, no food, no shelter, things that humans require. Basic requirements of life. In both cases, aid was slow to arrive on the ground (David Letterman on the Super Bowl: “And the New Orleans Saints’ fans, I’m telling you, they have waited a long, long time for their team to get into the Super Bowl. Not as long as they waited for FEMA, but still, it’s been a very long, long time”). This seems to me the very defintion of a desperate time calling for desperate measures. Hence, the turn to violence to get the basics of life. It is neither surprising, nor, really, as far as I see it, wrong (at least to a certain degree).
But coverage in the media is universally negative. In New Orleans, the media focused on African-Americans who were engaged in looting. Haitians are also black. It would seem to me that nothing beyond racism fuels the apocalyptic coverage provided by the mainstream media in the US, UK, and Canada.
Cross-posted at Current Intelligence.
Matthew Barlow 