Tag Archives: Harper’s

Organized Discontent

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Despite what I think to be the George Hamilton like tone I carefully nurtured with a secret combination of cooking oil, mesquite rub and deet during my weeklong absence, there seems to be rumours a-swirling about the “real” reasons I went awol during what The Grid’s Edward Keenan called “The most significant week at City Hall in a generation” (probably just to taunt me). Dudes. Check out the tan lines. I went somewhere sunny and warm because it was February here. I thought February was going to provide some downtime at City Hall. No one circulated the Special Once In A Lifetime Special Council Meeting memo in my direction. It was merely bad timing.

So no, I am not a Team Ford double-agent — working from the inside to try and discredit the opposition with my ludicrous and often times illogical rantings about the mayor — who simply couldn’t stand to be around during his darkest hours to date. I’dve given my eye teeth to be here but, Expedia being Expedia, the whole she-bang was non-refundable. And no, it was not a clandestine rendezvous with a certain councillor from Etobicoke whose seat in the council chambers also went unoccupied last Wednesday. I admire the lady. She’s got, what do you call it, the moxy. It’s just, we come from such different backgrounds. We’d never get past that whole urban-suburban chasm.

Also, there was no slipping away for some discreet elective surgery. While I acknowledge a certain none-to-subtle ageism within the ranks of those covering City Hall (witness the cutesie, self-satisfied back-slapping of the young in yesterday’s tweets between the aforementioned Edward Keenan and writer David Hains), I stand proudly by my 28 years of age and wouldn’t think of furtively seeking some desperate attempt to look even younger than I already do. Why no, sir. I am not an unpaid intern at an unnamed publication. But I am flattered you thought I might be. How old do you think I am?

The fact of the matter is, last week was the first of a semi-annual, enforced Magazine Catch-Up Retreat week. Get out of town, get out of your work head and get reading those damn magazines that are littering the place up. Either that or cut back. What?! And do without my McCall’s?! I’m sorry, what? It’s been called Rosie since 2001?! I thought that was my gardening magazine. And it hasn’t been published in 10 years!?!

You see what I’m saying here?

Thus, I found myself cracking into the first of the 2011 issues of a couple subscriptions at the same time I was already receiving March 2012 issues. I knew Lewis Lapham had stepped away from his Notebook in Harper’s but was unaware that Thomas Frank had become the permanent resident in that space with his Easy Chair. I’m not yet sure how I feel about that. Lapham wasn’t so overtly political. It rarely felt like you were reading a screed. It was patrician subtle. Frank is as partisan as they come right now. I don’t want that from my Harper’s. I can read my own stuff if that’s what I was looking for.

That said, I’m hardly appalled reading Frank’s stuff and did come across an interesting tidbit in his January 2011 entry, The Fatal Middle. He quoted Howard Phillips, one-time director of The Conservative Caucus, saying way back during the early Reagan era that the job, the role, the genius of the right wing was its ability “to organize discontent.” Hello? What was that again? To organize discontent.

Some thirty years on and nothing much has changed. Perhaps it took a little longer up here in our cosy little corner north of the 49th because true, visceral discontent first needed to be stirred up amongst the hoi polloi before it could be organized into a viable voting bloc. A recession or two. Draining of the manufacturing sector. The general gestation period needed for the seeds of subversive disinformation to come to flower.

But, good goddamn, has our right wing learned how to organize discontent. We now believe ourselves to be over-taxed to the max with all our money being spent on greedy, self-interested politicians, unions and the undeserving poor. The rest of us are all the struggling middle class unless, of course, you don’t share our particular discontent. Then, you are a downtown, champagne-sipping, latte lapping elitist/socialist, two steps left of Joe Stalin who reads, well, Harper’s or The Walrus (up to April 2011 issue currently) or that Toronto Star rag.

Discontent. Resentment. Division.

In three words, Rob Ford’s victorious campaign and modus operandi since becoming mayor. This city does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. (Discontent). The War on the Car. (Resentment). Those in the suburbs pay for everything and get nothing in return. (Division with a little factual incorrectness thrown in for good measure).

It’s the Holy Right Wing Trinity and fits in perfectly with their views on government as a destructive force that needs to be reigned in and shrivelled down to size except for its law and order, enforcement side. The beauty of it too is that it is self-fulfilling because the more ineffectual you make government, the more discontent, resentment and division you breed. Almost like a political perpetual motion machine.

The remarkably depressing thing about this is that it’s neither new nor particularly covert. This has been a staple in North America since at least Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority. That’s 44 years ago, folks. And somehow we haven’t found a way to counteract it. When conservatives stumble and fall out of favour, it’s usually to do with their own missteps not some brilliant and uplifting piece of political theatre by their opponents.

Look at what’s happening here in Toronto. The mayor is not really being out-manoeuvred or out-played. He’s simply fucking up, left and centre, his setbacks washing out any steps forward. The very notable victory he can claim with the CUPE 416 settlement has been lost in the noise of his illogical transit plans. It’s not a question of contesting but containing him and all the damage his ideology wants to inflict on the proper governance of this city.

The easy appeal to voter discontent, resentment and division means right wing politicians have a leg up when it comes to campaigning. It’s the only thing really that keeps them in the game at all. If conservatives were judged on what they do once elected, they’d never get near the levers of power again. They couldn’t even present a perception of competency. Our system and beliefs in it suffer because of that.

We have to learn to confront them before they get the keys to office instead of always having to clean up their mess on the way out. That means appealing to people’s better nature not their worst, instilling hope rather than despair and anger. It’s a tall order, for sure, especially since the public well has been so poisoned by ugly rhetoric and anti-social policies. But the alternative is continued degradation of our public institutions and way of life.

— imploringly submitted by Cityslikr

You Can’t Just Wish It Away

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I am over-subscribed.

My life is jam packed with magazines. They litter most surfaces of the office and accumulate by my bedside. Magazines cover up the piles of books I also haven’t yet read. The interwebs is not alone in creating an informational overlord overload.

There are some advantages to this. Months and months behind on issues, you become a very selective reader. Articles have to grab my attention PDQ if they want to be read. No time to be mildly entertaining or informative. Do you know how many magazines are vying for my attention?

More interestingly is the retrospective angle one is afforded when playing catch up. Was this writer bang on or completely full of shit? Has the issue at hand lingered in public discourse or has it faded from view? That’s right. I’m asking you, nameless Us scribe who predicted a long, happy and fruitful Kim Kardashian marriage.

So it was over the weekend as I was reading the October 2010 issue of Harper’s. Bookmarked (more or less) by an essay in the Readings section by Roger Hodge, author of The Mendactiy of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism, and a book review by Terry Eagleton of Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, it was as if I was trying to discover the genesis of the Occupy movement. Again, this was over a year before the tents were pitched and camps founded in cities around North America. In these two articles, plenty of reasons were stated why a grass roots disaffection was brewing.

Some snippets.

From Roger D. Hodge: “Corruption, in its institutional sense, denotes the degeneration of republican forms of government into despotism, and typically comes about when the private ends of a narrow faction of citizens succeed in capturing the engines of government… a corrupt citizenry is one that has allowed its private and narrow personal interests to trump those of the general public.”

Terry Eagleton on Tony Judt: “What matters is not how affluent a nation may be but how unequal it is.” ‘Public squalor’ versus ‘private affluence’. “Once the state hands over its functions of care…to private agencies, nothing remains to bind the citizen to the state but the fear of authority. The result…is an ‘eviscerated society’, one stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in social-democratic setups.” “Men and women have been politically demobilized and so are politically disaffected.”

Of course, I hear the critics immediately jump up and exclaim that that’s all about the United States not here in Canada. Here in Canada, well, everything’s just fine. No need to be protesting in our streets and cities. We look after one another. Our elections are fair and above board. Just ignore the growing income disparity. Disregard those frightening October job numbers. Pay no attention to extended time needed for the feds to balance the book. Never mind the woefully pathetic turnout for our elections. Nothing to see here. Time to pack up your tent and go home.

The nerve of some people to question the state of our democracy.

Because, wandering through the Occupy Toronto encampment at St. James Park over the weekend, I could not for the life of me figure out what other reasons there were for the increasingly shrill cry for the ousting of these people. Aside from the less than pleasing aesthetics of mismatched tents and tarps throughout the park, some mounds of refuse here and there, there was nothing unpleasant, intrusive or obstructionist about the gathering. It was easy to cross the park on the paths or you were free to meander randomly through the tent sites. No one accosted you. There was no unwanted proselytizing.  Try as I might, I couldn’t ferret out any surreptitious feet sniffing.

I stood on the north side of the park, looking across Adelaide Street at the restaurants. How exactly their customer numbers could be adversely affected by the goings on in the park was tough to say. Going about your business on the periphery of St. James, you could pass the gathering within it with little more than scant notice.

As for the noise complaints registered by local residents? Walking through the park on Saturday night, it was impossible to distinguish the din rising within it from the downtown traffic swirling around all 4 sides of it. In fact, the incessant drumming we’ve heard about was drowned out before I even left the park by the pounding of the bass out of a passing SUV full of Leafs’ fans leaving the game.

This is in no way meant to diminish or discredit the complaints. I’m sure it must be a minor annoyance and inconvenience to have had the park filled with people for the last month. I hate the streetlight that forces me to close the curtain in my bedroom every night. It just sort of comes with the territory. Urban living comes with unpredictability, both pleasant and unpleasant.

But those, to paraphrase Roger D. Hodge, are ‘private and personal interests’, they should not ‘trump those of the general public’. That is what this whole occupy movement is about, in the U.S., in Canada, internationally. Thirty years or so of private interests trumping the public good. If you’re looking for the message, you could do worse than that. Public space being occupied symbolically as a stand against the growing encroachment of private interests into every facet of our lives. Health care. Education. Dissemination of information. That fucking spot above the wall over an ever increasing number of urinals in public bathrooms. All to the detriment of most for the benefit of a very few.

Of course, I’m a little sceptical of the call for a clear and straightforward message. If you really don’t understand why there’s an occupy movement in the first place (here or anywhere else) and the tactics they’re employing, chances are you’re not going to be won over to the cause because somebody can sum it up in a pithy phrase. You’re comfortable in body and/or mind about the way things have been going and think everybody would be much better off if they just cut their hair, covered their tattoos and went out and got themselves a job. Pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Put their nose to the grindstone.

It’s an affront to these people, nothing more. A threat only by way of a question. Are we as a society on the right track, economically, equitably, sustainably? It seems like a reasonable thing to ask, given our current state of affairs even here in Canada the good. Denying people a little patch of grass to ask is an indication of moral and intellectual disinterest and failure. Essentially, a stultifying acceptance of the status quo.

— chidingly submitted by Cityslikr