Archive for the 'Politics' Category

O Canada

By: Paul Aitken on March 4, 2010. 0 Comments

The Harper government has suggested this week that it might take a look at revising the lyrics of “O Canada” in order to make them more gender neutral. Specifically, they are looking at replacing Robert Stanley Weir’s line “in all thy sons command” (to my recollection, this line is often rendered as “in all our sons command”), with the line from Adolphe-Basile Routhier’s original poem “thou dost in us command.” I think that in an ongoing effort to recognise the centrality of music in social and cultural life, this deserves comment.

This, of course, is a pretty valuable discussion to have, and one with at least a twenty year-old history. Indeed, why should patriotism only be associated with sons and not daughters? While we’re at it though, we ought to take it further and ask important questions about the music that is supposed to represent the people of this country. Let’s look at the French version, and begin the process of eliminating its gender specificity (“nos aieux” = “our forefathers”). Moreover, let’s ask ourselves whether a country whose indigenous population was largely polytheistic, and whose contemporary population is a grand mixture of people of many religious and non-religious backgrounds, needs an anthem that so prominently features the Christian deity, in both languages—they are, after all “His” sons. One step further.  Let’s acknowledge the troubled history of national anthems themselves as emerging out of a violent, colonial, oppressive nationalism, a violence that is reflected in “Car ton bras sait porter l’épée” (“As in thy arm ready to wield the sword”). And finally, we might just take this opportunity to re-examine the term “patriot” itself, and acknowledge its Latin and Greek roots: pater =  father. [1] I’d say that this is one way to harness the debate and hold the Harperites to the letter on this move. Then we can have a proper discussion about the notion of national political and cultural representation.

In a move sure to cause a vivid debate, I certainly don’t take this as a signal that the Harper government has all of sudden put gender issues on the table as part of its message. No. This is the same party and leader who have objected to same sex marriage and benefits for same-sex couples, who advocated disallowing women to appeal for pay equity, oppose national childcare, cut funding to Status of Women Canada, who wage a vicious war on the poor that disproportionately affects women, and who generally espouse conservative “family values”…the list goes on. Changing a word is unlikely to have material effects on the lives of Canadian women or anyone else.

But what is perhaps most subtly disturbing about this is that it comes at the very same time as a federal budget. As politicos are fond of calling it, this is an example of “deflective” or “deflection” politics. DeBord called it spectacle. The idea is to seed a story so perfectly well-suited for “person on the street,” populist “analysis” that members of the mainstream media simply cannot help themselves; they simply HAVE to cover it, it’s news. It’s also much easier to get a reporter out on the street with a microphone to ask people if they think nouns or pronouns [2] ought to be replaced in the national anthem than it is to ask people what they think about, say, a $3.25 a week increase in Child Tax Benefits ($3.25!?), continued promotion of “corporate welfare,” increased efforts in securitisation (which is, interestingly, also included in a chapter about “Supporting Families and Communities”)…and this list goes on. Especially after the Olympics, this is the perfect topic to deflect attention away from the budget; it is downright entertaining to see people speak passionately about “owning the podium” and how much it meant to “us” to have the national anthem played more times than any other host country had theirs played. It’s significantly less entertaining to have dry economists point out the failings (or successes) of a budget.

By nature a deflective tactic is also presumed to be less important than the issue from which it is supposed to divert attention; one wouldn’t deflect with something more crucial, that would draw unwanted attention. There is rarely any intention to move forward on the actual substance of the deflection. In this case, I think it would be fair to say that there will be a 50/50 split amongst those people polled who care about the issue, it will gain no real political traction, and it will thus have served its purpose as an entertaining piece of theatre.

But I don’t mean to suggest that the issue is not actually important, in fact, I argue the opposite. Using gender as a deflection is further evidence of this government’s contempt for progressive social issues. They have cravenly manipulated the intense feeling of pride held by many who live in this country over the great successes of hard-working, talented athletes; they have instrumentalised the supposed sanctity of the national anthem; and they have trivialised gender issues as a means to deflect attention from a budget that appears at first to be business as usual, but which I am sure, upon further inspection, will yield further damages for people, and further gains for corporate Canada. For me, this shows ultimate disrespect for each of these important issues. In addition to playing classic divisive politics (they are ignoring people affected by the many other problematic issues in the anthem’s lyrics), it seems to me a typically chauvinistic approach to suggest that issues affecting women could be addressed by paying attention to “aesthetics” rather than to material concerns.

So, what do people think about this?

Links:

http://www.budget.gc.ca/2010/plan/toc-tdm-eng.html
http://www.policyalternatives.ca/
http://www.rabble.ca/columnists/2008-stephen-harper-vs-feminism
http://www.newstalk650.com/story/20100304/30241
http://www.thespec.com/News/BreakingNews/article/732997
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/03/04/the-government-delivers-an-empty-almost-flippant-budget/
http://www.stephentaylor.ca/2010/03/stakeholder-reaction-to-the-2010-budget/
http://www.pch.gc.ca/pgm/ceem-cced/symbl/anthem-eng.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Canada#Proposed_changes_to_lyrics

[1] Thanks to Valérie Savard for bringing up this point.

[2] Interestingly, this is probably one of the only times we’ll see debate over grammar occupy a front and centre position in the mainstream media!

Tags: , . Categories: Music, Politics and Rant

Commonwealth

By: Paul Aitken on January 3, 2010. 1 Comment

Alex has begun his summary of Hardt and Negri’s latest work Commonwealth. My response, in the comments, is this:

1) This notion that “contemporary capitalism enables an ontology that is at least partially grounded in the common,” as you note raises some interesting possibilities for seeing alternatives to what, if we listen too much to Zizek, Agamben, et al., too often seems like an impossible situation. However, it also raises what I think are some crucial questions, which so far as I can tell are unanswered in the first section of the book. That is: are H&N proposing that this thinking in terms of the common is a wholly new development, contingent first on the globalisation of capital? Is the contemporary situation the only situation that could give rise to an ontology of the common? Is it possible that this is the re-emergence of “commons” thinking (and here I am thinking, as I do, of notions of gift-cultures developed by Mauss and others, in which “property” was less individual than collective – or even trans-individual.) Also, would it have been possible for a commons-based paradigm to have emerged out of alternative political-economic paradigms?

2) Related to the above: if it is the case that capital sets up the possibility for a new (or even renewed) sense of the common, then there is a possible, though I think in the end minor, issue that appears in their assessment of the “second stream” of interpretations of Foucault (pp. 57-58) (Agamben, Derrida, Nancy) in which they seem to take a shot at Holderlin’s notion that “where ther is danger/so the rescue grows as well,” which Heidegger also picked up on in his notion of the “saving power.” I realise that they are suggesting that these theorists don’t do enough to see the possible affirmative possibilities of the saving power, but it seems that H&N could have done a little more to acknowledge that their thesis begins from a similar perspective if only inasmuch as they locate the power of the common from within contemporary developments in globalisation.

3) I really like their comparison of Badiou and Foucault’s differing notions of the event. One thing that has bugged me in my reading of Badiou (and it is nascent) is the problem with how one knows whether or not what one is doing counts as an event? With Badiou you don’t know until after…and if after all your efforts you discover that it wasn’t an event, then what? This is what makes Zizek propose the refusal thesis I think, maybe because it is assured that doing nothing does something (?). Their reading of Foucault is more to my liking in that it doesn’t require hindsight – biopolitics is an event pure and simple; the trick is, as they suggest, this needs to be organised in some way. If not, it seems that simply accepting the reality of biopolitics as an event leaves the door open for complacency of the sort we find in the armchair activism of Gap purchases, Starbuck’s charity, and Green consumption.

Tags: , . Categories: Academia and Politics

Chris Hedges “Globalization Goes Bankrupt”

By: Paul Aitken on September 24, 2009. 0 Comments

Had the pleasure of seeing Chris Hedges speak last week for the release of his new book  Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. His talk was sermonesque in quality as he spoke of the global financial system and its relationship to mainstream media’s reliance on spectacle. Invoking DeBord and Boorstin, he neatly outlined the smoke and mirrors job done by powerful elites as they try to claw what profits they can before it all comes crumbling down. A recent article appears here.

Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy.

Tags: . Categories: News and Politics

Michael Geist on the Canadian Copyright Reform Consultation

By: Paul Aitken on September 8, 2009. 0 Comments

Michael Geist notes the rock and hard place situation in which Canadians who desire a sane copyright law find themselves. The strategies employed by powerful lobby groups in order to shut out the voices of educators and consumers of creative works are of particular interest. Those in support of strict copyright laws, including “three strikes” laws for Internet users

turned out en masse for a public town hall meeting in Toronto late last month, resulting in multiple interventions from record label executives (four from Warner Music alone).  Packing the room ensured that there was virtually nothing heard from education and consumer groups, many of whom could not even attend the town hall since all the tickets were scooped up in less than five days.

See the full post here.

Tags: , , . Categories: Media, Music, Politics and Rant

YouTurkey

By: Paul Aitken on March 7, 2007. 0 Comments

I read today that the Turkish court has banned Turkish Internet users from accessing YouTube. The reason is that recently there has been a “virtual war” of sorts between Greeks and Turks who are using YouTube to post videos that insult each other’s cultures. The offending video reportedly insults Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s early 20th C revolutionary founder.

The CBC appropriated a disappointing Associated Press article on the matter and ends with the following:

“It’s not the first time YouTube has been banned. The Australian state of Victoria recently banned it from government schools in a crackdown on cyber-bullying after a gang of male students videotaped their assault on a 17-year-old girl on the outskirts of Melbourne.”

It is already troublesome to see that schools are banning YouTube access, danah boyd writes on similar problematic practices involving the Deleting Online Predators Act in the United States. It is always unfortunate that, as my grandmother would say “one bad apple has to spoil the lot”.

However, I think the linking the particular instance of assault to the large-scale restriction of communication technologies because a video was taken badly by a government that sends people to prison for “Insulting Turkishness”. I recoil at the notion of the assault on the 17 year old, and certainly would want the perpetrators to come to justice. But I certainly don’t equate posting a video of someone hurling an insult at a historical figure in the category of a crime, and certainly it doesn’t warrant restricting the freedoms of the Turkish citizenry to free access to the Internet – but unfortunately the Turkish government does.

This illustrates the very slippery slope that comes with considering too heavy-handed regulation of communications technologies.  At points it may be useful to monitor activity (such as porn in schools, or bullying) but not to the point of shutting down access to these sites.  In the case of the Turksih, it’s just another excercise in exerting control over the population, a common practice inTurkey, where the events of early 20th C Armenian Genocide are not even taught in Turkish schools (not even without the term genocide) thus prohibiting informed debate.  If governments shut down access to the opinions of those with whom they disagree, then effective debate is nullified – which, of course, would be a reasonable goal if you were into controlling your citezenry.  Of course internet restriction is nothing new at the level of the nation-state, remember Google China’s capitulation? See the difference?

Todayszaman, an English-language Turkish newspaper had the following headline in their online version: “YouTube broadcasts Greek marches full of hatred toward Turks”. This reads like it lays the blame for the videos at the feet of YouTube, as if they had a content meeting and decided “Yes, yes, we’ll lead with the Greek anti-Turk marches today.” The article goes on to translate the lyrics of a song reportedly videotaped as sung by a Greek military unit:

There was a ship, a tank-carrying ship. It left from Volos to plant fear. It goes to the shores of Little Asia (Turkey). To spread fire and ashes all over Turkey. It was full of sea marines. They blew the heads of any Turks they could find into the air. The heroes died opening the road to Hagia Sophia. I will march to Hagia Sophia, take off the Turkish caliphate sign and plant a cross there. Only then will God shed light on İstanbul and the Greek national march will ring from every corner.

I don’t really know what much of that actually means, but it certainly sounds like a little religious nationalism to me!

The Guardian indicates that there were other insults, including accusations that Ataturk was homosexual, and that so are the Turks themselves. So not only is the Turkish government against insults in general, they also have a deep-seeded homophobia, which of course doesn’t surprise me since they are willing to enact bans on communications technology, deny genocide, and imprison dissenters.

So after reading all of that, I found this blog, a pro-Turkish tourism site where the writer has used links to YouTube videos in order to promote tourism in Turkey.

I guess the YouTube execs should have led with those.

Or this. (and read the comments, they’re priceless)

Tags: . Categories: General, Media and Politics