Rock Star Obama

From Andrew Steele at the Globe and Mail:

The hype around President Obama’s brief state visit to Ottawa can only be described as embarassing, overwrought and – amazingly – failing to live up to the importance of the day. 
 
Obama’s visit was a media hurricane of the worst sort of flaccid, photo-driven pack journalism.

Oh wow the way people do dribble over him really freaks me out.  Simply put, it’s dangerous to see a politician as a rock star.  He’s not.  He can’t be.  He shouldn’t be.  The joy in Lloyd Robertson’s voice tonight.  Really.  Freaks.  Me.  Out.

Politics & The Writer

From Carolyn Forché:

The word politics presents more serious difficulties, particularly in the literary culture of the United States, where the word is most often applied pejoratively, and where politics is regarded as a contaminant of serious literary work. Our poets, most especially, are relegated to the hermetic sphere of lyric expressivity and linguistic art, where they are expected to remain unsullied by historical, political, and social forces. I speak to you today as a rather contaminated poet, but my understanding of the political is in accord with Hannah Arendt’s: “To be political, to live in a polis [means] that everything [is] decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. In Greek self-understanding) to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were pre-political ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis.” Finally, we are discussing the writer with a politics—and of this I can only say that it would be difficult for me to imagine a writer or intellectual who would profess to be without one. I live and write, however, in the administered world of a Western industrial state, where communicative thought and action are inhibited; where money circulates more fluently than verbal forms; where democracy does not extend beyond the scope of its institutions; where “total communication yields endless debate in stead of change” (Otto Karl Werckmeister); in an economy so deeply dependent on military production that the national consciousness has been colonized by war; where armament and disarmament are simultaneously professed; where intellectuals find themselves “aesthetically oversensitized and politically numbed” (Werckmeister); and where the enlightened powerless occasionally produce works that are serendipitously drawn into debates beyond the literary sphere.

Remembering Rosemary Brown

This is the first of my contributions to Black History Month.  I loved Rosemary Brown from the moment she hit the national scene in Canada.  I miss her voice so much and perhaps particularly now, when women’s rights are being sold out to an ailing economy by cynical politicians and economic inequality stemming from racism and sexism has created a great divide.

 

Rosemary Brown was elected to the provincial legislature of British Columbia in 1972, becoming the first black woman in Canadian history to be a member of a Canadian parliamentary body. A busy mother of three as well as an active member of the New Democratic Party, she ran for leadership of the federal NDP in 1975 but lost on a fourth ballot to Ed Broadbent. Rosemary served in the B.C. legislature until 1986, when she became a professor in women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

Born in Jamaica, Rosemary grew up on the tropical island. After emigrating to Canada in 1951 she studied at McGill University and the University of British Columbia, then pursued a career in social worker. A determined feminist, Ms. Brown worked throughout her life to promote equality and human rights. Her campaigns includes efforts to eliminate sexism in textbooks, increase female representation on boards and prohibit discrimination based on sex or marital status. Rosemary’s dedicated community service won her a multitude of honours, including honorary degreees from many universities and selection as an officer of the Order of Canada.

On the day of Brown’s death, the National Film Board of Canada completed work on a documentary/memoir of Brown and her “co-grandmother, Ruth Horricks-Sujir.  You can read a bit about it and view a clip here.  I’ve seen it several times – it’s wonderful.

There’s more about Rosemary Brown at the African American Registry and a great collection of remembrances by Penny Kome at section15.ca

It’s Not Ok

Chris Hedges with political philosopher Sheldon S. Woldin, author of Democracy Incorporated, the book in which he coined the term “inverted totalitarianism” to describe the form of governmnent we are headed towards in the West:

“The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are too powerful to be challenged,” Wolin told me when I asked him about the new Obama administration. “This is shown by the financial bailout. It does not bother with the structure at all. I don’t think Obama can take on the kind of military establishment we have developed. This is not to say that I do not admire him. He is probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that make it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in any ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium.”

Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle our vast and overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic collapse, is likely to result in inverted totalitarianism. He said that without “radical and drastic remedies” the response to mounting discontent and social unrest will probably lead to greater state control and repression. There will be, he warned, a huge “expansion of government power.”

“Our political culture has remained unhelpful in fostering a democratic consciousness,” he said. “The political system and its operatives will not be constrained by popular discontent or uprisings.”

Wolin writes that in inverted totalitarianism consumer goods and a comfortable standard of living, along with a vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive. I asked if the economic collapse and the steady decline in our standard of living might not, in fact, trigger classical totalitarianism. Could widespread frustration and poverty lead the working and middle classes to place their faith in demagogues, especially those from the Christian right?

“I think that’s perfectly possible,” he answered. “That was the experience of the 1930s. There wasn’t just FDR. There was Huey Long and Father Coughlin. There were even more extreme movements including the Klan. The extent to which those forces can be fed by the downturn and bleakness is a very real danger. It could become classical totalitarianism.”

Read It’s Not Going to Be Ok at truthdig

Iceland’s Lesbian P.M.

I want one too!

 

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Iceland’s next leader will be an openly gay former flight attendant who parlayed her experience as a union organizer into a decades-long political career.

Both parties forming Iceland’s new coalition government support the appointment of Johanna Sigurdardottir, the island nation’s 66-year-old social affairs minister, as Iceland’s interim prime minister.

“Now we need a strong government that works with the people,” Sigurdardottir told reporters Wednesday, adding that a new administration will likely be installed Saturday.

QotD

… so influential are those in the financial elite – and their hangers-on in think-tanks and economics departments – that they continue to appear on our TV screens, confidently providing us with economic advice, as if they’d played no role whatsoever in shaping our economic system for the past quarter century.

Of course, we’re told there’s been a major change in their thinking, in that many of them are now willing to accept large deficits in today’s federal budget, in the name of stimulating the economy.

While this does seem like a sharp departure from the deficit hysteria of the 1990s, a closer look reveals the change may not be that significant.

In fact, financial types have always accepted deficits – when they liked the cause. Hence their lack of protest over George W. Bush’s enormous deficits, which were caused by his large tax cuts for the rich and his extravagant foreign wars.

What they don’t like is governments going into deficit to help ordinary citizens – either by creating jobs or providing much unemployment relief.

Linda McQuaig at The Star

Pinter & Oppression

From Ariel Dorfmann at The New Statesman:

It was in Chile, some time in the early 1960s, that I saw my first Pinter play. That is where and when something in my work and life changed for ever. The play was The Dumb Waiter and it was immediately recognisable to me, almost Latin American in its familiarity, despite having been originally written in elliptical English by an author from Hackney, London. In the years that followed, Pinter’s plays showed me how dramatic art can be poetic merely by delving into the buried rhythms of everyday speech. He whispered to me that we often speak in order to hide, and perhaps avoid, what we are really feeling and thinking.

He understood that if you push reality hard enough, it will end up exposing under its surface another dimension – fantastic, absurd, delirious. He suggested that the worst hallucinations of fear are not immune to the pendulum of humour.

But all of these lessons in dramatic craftsmanship pale next to what he taught me about human existence and about politics. Though the characters in those first works were uninterested in changing the world for better or for worse, sad citizens of intimacy obsessed only with their own survival, the lives of those men and women revealed to audiences everywhere the many gradations and degradations of power with a starkness absent from other authors, even those supposedly dedicated to examining or denouncing politics.

All power, all domination and liberation started there, he seemed to be saying, in those claustrophobic rooms where each word counts, each slight utterance needs to be accounted for, is paid for in some secret currency of hope or suffering. You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

Read the whole thing here

Politics & Pity

From Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker:

No one has argued more forcefully than [Hannah] Arendt that to deprive human beings of their public, political identity is to deprive them of their humanity—and not just metaphorically. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she points out that the first step in the Nazis’ destruction of the Jews was to make them stateless, in the knowledge that people with no stake in a political community have no claim on the protection of its laws.

This is the insight that makes Arendt a thinker for our time, when failed states have again and again become the settings for mass murder. She reveals with remorseless logic why emotional appeals to “human rights” or “the international community” so often prove impotent in the face of a humanitarian crisis. “The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments,” she writes in “Origins,” “but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.” This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and what is happening now in Darfur. Genocide is a political problem, Arendt insists, and it can be solved only politically.

Read the article, “Beware of Pity”,  here

Ancient Greece & Now

Marcel Detienne:

It is commonly believed not only that both the abstract notion of politics and concrete politics one fine day fell from the heavens, landing on ‘classical’ Athens in the miraculous and authenticated form of Democracy (with a capital D), but also that a divinely linear history has led us by the hand from the American Revolution, passing by way of the ‘French Revolution’, all the way to our own western societies that are so blithely convinced that their mission is to convert all peoples to the true religion of democracy.

“The West’s selective reading of history” by Alain Gresh at Le Monde Diplomatique

QotD

From The Barefoot Bum, an argument that makes sense to me, amongst a lot of arguments that don’t:

I’m a revolutionary communist because my conscience is deeply shocked by the crimes perpetrated by our existing political system. I’m shocked by the suffering and oppression this system entails, proven by both empirical historical evidence and theoretical analysis. I’m no longer willing to work within a system that gives me only the choices between bad and worse. I’m no longer willing to remain silent about some suffering only to avoid even worse suffering.

Just asking for a little less oppression isn’t enough for me any more. I may be mistaken, but I believe that a radical transformation of society — and only a radical transformation — can end all oppression.

To bear witness to the way things stay the same is often depressing.  To continue to believe that the transformation is possible, that it is worth devoting oneself to, is evidence of profound and radical optimism and faith in humanity, a faith to which few “religions” aspire.