On the last day of last month, I registered my extreme ennui with the weekend
by buying a Globe and Mail. Undoubtedly, this is the only English language
paper in Canada that makes an affectation of being serious and NY Times-like,
with the added attractiveness of not trying to ape and echo the routine obsessions
that burn in head-office America. For example, the paper doesn't pretend to
aspire to the Himalayan high ground with pithy pieces on Guiliani-on-Castro,
Hillary on universal health care, Tipper on rock-and-roll, and the defense
of the United States and world freedom from 'rogue states.' Also, the Globe
does not indulge in, like our Montreal Gazette, splash-page features on South-shore
pedophiles, Carla Homolka, or Nomad biker weddings and their Diva-erting guest
lists. I buy the Globe perhaps twice a month, but when I read this issue from
end to end, in a resto on the Main over two cups of not-so-fresh java, I knew
I had to bring it home: there was something lurking beneath the headers I
couldn't put my finger on.
The front page headlines stated gloriously that the Canadian Alliance had netted two Bloc-ists. Was I surprised ? Yes! And did I somehow also feel vindicated? Yes, of course! Because the Bloc, with its habilliments of crusading for social justice, the underdog, the homeless, the destitute and the rights of sex-workers, had managed to represent itself as being more left than the NDP. Camouflaging its chauvinist, near-xenophobic platform behind the facade of playing Her Majesty's loyal, socially conscious opposition, the Bloc-ists had been running chicanery.com with relative immunity. Until two disaffected members decided to couple with the rank and file of Bloc-well Day, Grand Wizard of Alberta and north of the 49th's chief Pooh Bah for the new 'compassionate' right. Unmasked at last? Possibly. The social agenda of the federal social democratic nationalists was finally unfolding.
Just below this main headline was the next caption: Toronto's application for the 2008 Olympics had been accepted. Big potential business boost for hog town, chortled the header. Clammy and puky was how I felt. Check out Ontario's record, lately. TO's housing crisis has led to a 1,235% increase in homeless shelter use in Barrie and a 98% increase in Peterborough. The well-to-do suburb of Oakville has just opened its first homeless shelter in 1999. There was a 158% increase in the number of families crowding into homeless shelters in Toronto. The minimum wage has been frozen since 1995. Low-wage workers are making less now in real terms than in 1995. Child poverty in Ontario has increased 6.3% since 1995. Welfare benefits have been cut. Ontario's poorest are even poorer. Squeegee kids and others are treated like pests. Social workers are hunted down and run to the ground like common criminals. Line-ups at food banks and rent delinquencies have skyrocketed. For how much longer will the 'common sense' revolution of Mike Harris continue to systematically obliterate the poor and make Toronto look like another American city, bereft of diversity and compassion? It requires Olympian obtuseness and callousness to pour 100ds of millions to transform a city into a globally applauded sports capital, while the city's indigent demand shelter.
I then traipsed over to the next headline about Moscow's' charred TV tower (the world's second highest man-made structure) and Putin's lament that it was a wake-up call for action to stem the rot in Russia's collapsing infrastructure. A few weeks earlier the Russians had abandoned 118 of their sailors in a state-of-the-art submarine 200 meters below the frigid waters off Norway. However, Russia's collapse had started long time ago and not just with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but when the Russians began to lose faith in their own achievements and decided to emulate the West in a shameless attempt at imitation.com. From a nation that took the bulk of the Nazi onslaught (a record twenty-five million Russians gave their lives fighting Hitler) Russia rose from the debris to develop into one of the most technologically advanced societies with no famines, no unemployment and relatively little criminal activity; children were healthy and educated and the elderly were looked after. And yes. There was no freedom, no democracy and rampant official corruption. But the only thing we hear today is that Russia's once mighty infrastructure is in ruins, that the country is a ghost of its former self, that it has to undergo a week of necessary ego-deflation therapy before it is able to beg help from tiny Norway for a team of divers to facilitate the rescue. Too late for the 118.
Off to China. A cornucopia of kitchen gadgets, novelty items, toys, designer shirts, household commodities, and pirated software; China is also the world's book binding capital. Here is a country that blew the living daylights out of every aggressor on its territory, (the Japanese, British and Americans), and came out of an opium hell and subsequent isolation to provide its predominantly rural population with guaranteed education, enormously healthy children and an abiding sense of social well-being. Here is a country that is "exploding with economic growth" while western nations are clawing at each other to gain access to this enormous market. But China does silly things - and all too regularly. After an 'astute' publisher from the US had a book of Clinton photos printed in Hong Kong, he sent it across to the mainland for binding, where Chinese authorities promptly seized it: the book included a photo of Clinton shaking hands with the Dalai Lama - the insurrection line had been crossed! Of course the Chinese were only following instructions. But when one picture of a departing debaucher shaking hands with an antediluvian religious leader can so easily unsettle such a large nation, it is an understatement to suggest that there is a major problem of intellectual insecurity here. And while western principles of democracy do not mix well with eastern thought, you would think that this minor ideological infraction would yield to the common sense of the intellect. Silliness can degrade one even more than corruption. Somehow, the notion that, by restricting the flow of information and ideas and images in this day and age, one can preserve one's national chastity strikes this reader as doubly unchaste, and allows Clinton to come out clean by comparison.
In a small corner of the Globe and Mail was also the news that the High Commissioner of India to Canada had pressured the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute to withdraw its support for a touring art show that projected the ruling party in India, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), in poor light. Now the BJP has a record of inciting and participating in religious violence across India. Its hateful campaigns against minority communities launched by proxy through its neo-fascist front organizations are known to everybody, even their own. And of course, they would not want their scum-laden underwear rinsed in public. The tragedy is that while in this Internet-crazed country that is India, with its million strong software whiz-kids frying their brains to become, de facto, the world's best and most sought after, the dominating culture of the ruling coterie is still comfortably feudal enough to resort to strong-arm tactics, bullying and whatever it takes to push through their agenda. Shameless again.
I actually kept this issue of the Globe and Mail for a week, amazed at the bridges and tunnels I had discovered linking the headings. Unsuspecting to the political editors of this very esteemed, very Canadian newspaper, I was sure I had uncovered meanings and methods where none was intended: that when partial or incomplete reporting pretends to be the final word on issues of significance, there is a display of innocent journalism that conceals the deliberate intent to influence public opinion by making news items awkwardly familiar. So much so that there is no need to investigate the history of the development of such a news item. What happened before? What was averted? What could have happened and did not happen? The brain-trusts behind the dot.com revolutions have been so taken in by their own sense of self-importance that like the alchemists of old they have come to regard their bullshit as gold.
But let me be clear about the point of all this; the press coverage I’m taking to task is not the enemy, but only one of many flash points symptomatic of a greater malaise: the acceptance of an intellectualism that has not been disciplined by ideology. We are now living in a dot.com universe where our best minds are unable to connect the dots that link Seattle, Prague, Palestine, Belgrade, Rwanda, the growing American presence in Colombia, and ozone depletion. Loss of ideology is typically followed by state sanctioned chicanery and public apathy which in turns leads to a disoriented opposition, which, however (if not inevitably) promises to create the necessary chaos as the condition for the next earth shattering event. Best said by the poet Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The Ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
THE END