Mobile vulgus.

"If Hillary gets in, I myself I'm (sic) ready for a revolution because we can't have her in."



The woman who said this to a reporter possibly knows little history, may never have studied the roots of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution. I’m pretty sure, though, that her comments were energized by an emotion similar to that of the bearers of pitchforks and muskets in earlier sociopolitical upheavals; rage at the consciousness of living under the real or perceived oppression of those whose wealth and power has freed them from the muck and pain of life in the “real world.” A perfect mix of jealousy, frustration, indignation and visceral rage, a brush fire stoked by the winds of mobile vulgus, “‘the fickle crowd,’” [and] from which the English term ‘mob’ originally was derived in the 1680s.”

We have names for it that don’t require a knowledge of Latin: populism is what it’s being called in the news these days: a population seeks to wrest control from corrupt rulers. “Populism is a political ideology that holds that virtuous citizens are mistreated by a small circle of elites, who can be overthrown if the people recognize the danger and work together. Populism depicts elites as trampling on the rights, values, and voices of the legitimate people.”


It’s not surprising that those who own power and wealth should fear populist upheaval. Neither is it surprising that the relatively comfortable “middle classes” should fear it; better the devil you know then the devil you don’t, and most of us between the extremes have already contented ourselves with life in relatively warm, fuzzy niches.


What’s happening in America—that would make a lower middle class woman in Alabama use the word “revolution”—doesn’t strike me as unusual given the history of humankind. That democracies have routinely failed to deliver promised fairness and equity is one of the real frustrations of our age. America, Canada, Britain, Germany, etc.—as democratic in their makeup as any country has ever been—have nevertheless developed a socioeconomic layering that wouldn’t have to be! As surely as the ostentatious, privileged lives of France's  Louis the 14^th or the Romanov oligarchy of Russia produced a festering that would eventually burst forth in revolution, so the political, economic elites of modern democracies should be more aware that creeping class structuring, escalating privilege can’t possibly weather the storms of time untouched.

The mob that drives revolutions can bear almost any political, social, even religious stamp. What`s happening in the USA is not really reminiscent of the Peasant Revolts of the 16^th Century in Germany where economic, religious and social dissatisfaction boiled over simultaneously. (One-third of the estimated 300,000 individuals participating in the uprising were slaughtered by the ruling classes and their armies.) What do the supporters of the changes currently rallying behind Donald Trump have in common? 

What’s the nature of the glue that holds them together? We’re told the current Trumpian phenomenon owes its primary support to angry, white, middle-class men. Is it then little more than a Freudian striking back against feelings of castration and the blaming of this emasculation onto foreigners, ethnic minorities and a conspiracy of economic elites? That wouldn’t explain the masses of screaming women waving “lock her up” protest signs at Trump rallies. Does it have to do with the fact that the opposing candidate is female and that the majority of men are deathly fearful of the “Samson haircut?” and that certain women have never overcome their antagonism to counterparts who manage to gain stature and power in a society where they themselves have neither?


It’s not enough to say that the revolution shaping itself in the USA is the product of ignorance and pettiness, although both are displayed in abundance in every utterance of Donald Trump. The American Doctor Jekyll invented and constructed the Mr. Hyde it’s currently struggling to control. Past policies must always be looked to when current “revolution” threatens.


Will November 8^th initiate another violent revolution as some are predicting? Certainly there are pitchforks (read handguns and assault rifles) enough to make mayhem and the shedding of much blood a possibility and even the most squeamish can come to welcome it given the visceral energy that builds in mobilus vulgus movements.


In the German Peasant Wars, the revolutionaries were defeated because they were vastly outgunned technically, but also because they turned out to be battlefield incompetents; mob bravado is normally just that, it dissolves quickly when the mob is scattered and individuals begin to fear for their actual lives.


The last party I’d be loathe to mess with is the American military machine.

From Sea to Shining Sea

From sea to shining sea

I watched the US Presidential Nominees debate with that kind of anticipation that causes one to run toward a fire or a plane crash. I expected candidates to shoot themselves in the foot, the arm and the torso like they appear to be doing regularly right now; bickering their way through an overlong nomination process occupying the electorate for a year—and coming up with two people whom almost nobody can comfortably endorse as their next president. 

You’d think they could save themselves a great deal of anguish—and come up with more amenable nominees, probably—if they ran a Presidential Nomination Lottery (PNL) on which anyone could buy tickets.

As far as the debate goes, it amazes me that we’ve applied the zero-sum game mentality to our politics as we Westerners tend to do to everything else from music to sports to art to, well, just about everything where we decide who won and who lost. ((Zero-sum Game: In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participants: Wikipedia)) If Trump “wins” the debate Hillary “loses”. Give him a plus one for winning and her a minus one for losing, “sum” them and you get zero: the Zero-sum principle in game theory.

Applying that principle to the debate is absurd: the whole world won, if learning about the fitness for office of the candidates started out as the purpose of pitting them against each other face to face. In similar fashion, the final choice will not be zero-sum . . . unless Americans make it so; their federal government exists for the unity and the benefit of the citizens, and the selection of a president without a civil war will guarantee the continuity of democratic government as the founders of their nation visualized it. The fact that either of the candidates could be elected or not according to the ballots cast is the test of that democracy, at least when so many presidents worldwide gain office through fraud, intimidation and/or brute force.

 

Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists or Libertarians will all continue to be beneficiaries equally of the benefits inherent in a democratic federalism; there will be no “losers” unless the followers of the unelected candidate decide not to abide by the democratically-determined majority decision. The eruption of violence should  Trump “lose” is not unthinkable; the fact that so many lethal weapons are in private hands makes the emergence of dissenting militias with lethal means an eventuality that shouldn’t be off-handedly discarded.

 

Seen in this light, the American electorate appears to be headed toward a precipice. Choosing between a Clinton who can’t possibly be separated from her establishment, status-quo, been-in-Washington-forever image and a belligerent, combative billionaire who sees everything and understands nothing much beyond loophole business, the urge to stay home on November 8^th must be powerful for many.

 

I sympathize with our next-door neighbours, but at the same time, I can’t help thinking that the old adage fits: You made your bed, now lie in it. 

 

Unfortunately, we lie in a double bed with them and must always be in fear of being crushed whenever they decide to roll over.

 

As to the debate, I suspect that if you’re a doctrinaire democrat, you’ve decided that Hillary wiped the floor with Trump; if you’re a Tea Party Republican, it was definitely the other way ‘round. It’s another downside of applying zero-sum game theory to politics: each side appoints its own umpires and referees and the rules are made up as the “game” progresses.

 

And there’s no arbiter to decide objectively when the puck is actually in the net. 

 

Except for the ballot box angel. Without her, the demons are bound to creep in.

American Demons

Every time I go out to coffee row these days for a bit of java and gossip, the talk swings around to Donald Trump. I’m beginning to believe that old Hollywood shibboleth that all publicity is good publicity. In other words, whether your goal is to become a celebrity or its cousin in the political world—a president or governor—it’s not necessarily what you do or say that’s critical. Rather, it’s the number of times your name is mentioned, the number of times your face is on the screen that effectively furthers such an end.

It’s a bizarre turn of events. If telling streams of lies and half-truths as Trump is doing these days serves to gather support, then the world has inadvertently turned itself inside-out, up is down and the other way ‘round.

I’m currently reading Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence by Walter Wink. Although published in 1985, it might have been written for exactly this time. Wink makes a compelling case for the existence of “demonic forces,” but sees these forces as emanating from within the souls, minds and habits of cultures and individuals. Demons from outside of us don’t afflict us, according to Wink, unless we tolerate them, allow them to live and, finally, to dominate our thoughts and actions.

In the public’s attraction to the liar (who among other things, lies about his opponent’s honesty), America is displaying a collective demon that they’ve allowed in and need desperately to exorcise.

I’m reluctant to name their demon because I’m not sure what it is, but it seems to me that if it had a name, it would be something like “F**k all of you; my ignorance is worth just as much as your wisdom.” (I should acknowledge the person who said something like this, but I can’t remember who it was . . . he/she didn’t use the “F” word. I apologize for using it, but it seemed to fit.). Donald Trump wouldn’t say—for instance—that Hillary Clinton started the “birther” myth and that he was the one who ended it . . . unless there existed a large and growing audience that’s willing to accept that lies are bullets, and the establishment is due for a big dose of buckshot. So bring it on!

But America hosts another demon, one that may have given rise to the first. Public education of high quality for all citizens just hasn’t been a priority. Ignorance, illiteracy, illogicality are all demons. 

It’s no outside, horned beast that causes us to be content with superficiality in these crucial components of competent citizenship. It’s the invitation extended by a lax and lazy populace in which the tripe churned out by Hollywood is eulogized; it’s a culture in which mediocrity has for too long been excused; it’s a society in which the possession of lethal weapons and the right to own and use them are considered to be a right. Worst of all, it’s a society that has allowed materialism to trump spirituality to the point where talk of love, of service, of generosity is swallowed up in the quest for stuff, for the cheap thrill, for freedom from social responsibility, for wealth and recognition. A society where free speech includes the right to emasculate, eviscerate, slander and libel other persons or other people . . . who aren’t ME. Where lying can be a legitimate political tactic.

America is not alone in having admitted this legion of demons, but America is the country at present whose demon-possession is on display. If I had to name just one similar demon in Canadian society, I’d have to point to our inability to discover a way to mend the injustices we’ve perpetrated against our indigenous population, to set the settler/indigenous relationship on a wholesome path. One of the demons preventing it is racism, but like the demons that drowned with the Gadarene swine (Mark 5:1-20), a renewal of that relationship is probably hindered by a legion of demons we’ve 
allowed in and are fearful to name.

My next post will be about exorcising the demons; but I haven’t finished reading those chapters in Wink yet.

Get a Job, You Lazy Bum!

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

“Get a job, you lazy good-for-nothing!”

Generally, that admonition means, “Find employment; search out a person or company that needs someone to do work you can do and for which they are willing to pay . . . and stop expecting others to feed, house and entertain you while you sleep late and pick at your navel.”

There was a time when our self-sufficiency was directly tied to our work, when eating a potato followed planting, hilling, hoeing and harvesting that potato. When buttering your bread followed milking a cow, separating the milk, churning the cream and adding the right amount of salt. Whether a long day’s activities included catching some fish, hunting down a few rabbits, nailing boards together for a shelter or pulling weeds under a hot sun, our time and our energies had to be given to jobs, and the thoroughness and efficiency with which we did these jobs paid off directly in our well-being.

 

People who slept late fared poorly; people who worked hard had good shelter, good food and probably a surplus they could trade for luxuries.

Except that with the industrial revolution, the view of people as production inputs initiated a new view of humanity that tied people to the factory, to a dependency on the "charity" of the owners of the means of production. 

The drive in research and development has always been to produce more with less work. It appears that as a human species, we abhor work, that we acknowledge less and less the premise that our food, shelter and recreation must come at the expense of work, of putting in time at a demanding, possibly tedious job for someone else. But in a world, finally, where robots build self-driving cars, where tons of flour can be milled in a day by one man sitting in front of a console, where giant machines with a few operators plant and harvest our food crops, where computers and printers can churn out perfect copies of all the great literature of the world with a modicum of work (as we used to think of it), getting a job can become more and more uncertain.

 

Physical work, particularly, is not needed nearly as much as it once was. Granted, mental work is still required in the communications/technology and service areas but there too, the drive is toward rendering jobs an obsolete concept. Finally, a super computer can build a far better system in far less time and with far less effort than can a bunch of people on a factory floor or office complex juggling widgets, typing in data for 48 hours a week. (The only sectors I can think of where work is increasing and jobs are still offered in agreeable measure are the service and hospitality sectors; with an aging population and the increase in leisure time, healthcare, education, travel and fast food are thriving.)

So where are the newly unemployable to go to earn their daily bread?

Because we currently measure the health of an economy by Gross National Product, Trade Surplus/Deficit, Employment, House Prices, Stock Market Indicies and other statistical data, the true purpose of an economy is easily forgotten. An economy is—in the final analysis—the means for distributing resources among people so that the necessities of life are made available to everyone. Were we to plan our economies on this basis, our world would look much different.

The need to patch up the failures of our economies through food banks, soup kitchens, social assistance grudgingly and skimpily given, “free” health care, etc., provides a far more pertinent measure of our economic success/failure than does the Dow-Jones index. As good as the charitable act may feel to those who are able to perform it, there is no way to avoid the degradation the recipient experiences. The indignity of accepting the necessities of life through charity because one is unable, unwilling or unprepared to earn what one needs . . . is unavoidable.

Charity—in the end—produces the need for itself. If meaningful jobs are the standard of worthiness, of the deserving of the necessities of life, then we have missed the point of economy. At the same time, we’ve sacrificed our insistence on dignity, self-esteem for everyone.

What’s better: handing out clothes to a person who can’t afford them when winter sets in, or enabling the individual to walk into a store and choose the clothing he/she will wear? The cost economically speaking is the same; the politics of the choices is very, very different.

As job offerings and opportunities change, as the spread between those who have means and those who don’t widens, we need to pay close attention to the reasons and the consequences of what we allow and don’t in our economies. In a world where a single government policy can undo a mass of charitable effort, the principle that Christians, for instance, ought first of all to be economists and politicians if they wish to emulate Jesus’ concern for the poor surely presents itself. To be “in the world, but not of the world” is, in the end, a doctrine of spiritual self-preservation.

As Christians (and all others who embrace a spiritual understanding of life), we need to continue to be at the forefront of charitable endeavour, especially as it relates to natural disasters and desperate populations. But our focus must include a working toward the end of the need for charity.

 

Progress has been made: we no longer have poor houses, debtors’ prisons, beggars in the streets. We do have Old Age Security, Child Benefits, Income Supplements, Universal Healthcare, Social Assistance, a patchwork of remedies for destitution caused by sickness, poverty, age or handicap. 

A guaranteed annual income could eliminate all these supports at less cost, with less administration and with the prospect of greater self-worth, dignity for all.

Let’s, at least, talk about it.

12 Questions about the Olympics

Twelve questions I have about the Olympics: after reading Olympic canoeist Tom Hall’s excellent article in Walrus.

1. Why is Canada so preoccupied with amassing more medals than other countries when the Olympic motto is about achieving personal athletic excellence?
2. Is it right for federal support for Olympic sports to be weighted heavily toward those sports and individuals that are most likely to reach the podium?
3. Does “Own the Podium” express an attitude that is more about nationalism than about the spirit of athletic achievement?
4. Does the rash of arrests and dismissals—for improperly using positions on the International Olympic Committee for personal gain—have anything to say about the games themselves?
5. Are the enormous amounts spent on Olympic venues (that can’t be sustained, maintained after their brief days of glory) justifiable?
6. Do star athletes’ multi-million-dollar endorsement contracts with corporations have anything to say about the stated objectives of the games?
7. Have we got the right funding priorities when Olympic and international-sport funding is increased while funding for amateur participation in a sport is cut?
8. If 60% of the National News is about the Olympics, what stories of real significance have been cut to make space?
9. Why don’t competitors compete naked like they did in the original Mt. Olympus contests? (I know the answer to this; I’m grateful that they don’t.)
10. Do the Olympics contribute to international good will, or do they accentuate antagonisms?
11. What is it with doping? How can it even be considered a legitimate adjunct of sport, Vladimir Putin?
12. Why can’t I think of a twelfth question to make it an even dozen? (Oh, sorry. I just did.)

Here are the latest News

Once upon a time this was news, to someone.

Do you watch the evening News? Do you subscribe to and read a daily paper . . . daily? Do you check out the News on your smart phone regularly? I mean by going to a News channel and reading what’s offered.

I’ve no idea who first called the publicizing of the day’s events, News. “New” is an adjective, not a noun. It’s not grammatically eligible for pluralization by adding an s. If there can be a day’s News, why not a day’s bigs, or smooths, obeses, wets? The day’s wets would be all about events like floods, drinking water boil advisories, contamination of rivers, rain. It would be about events that are wet, just like CBC’s The National is all about things that are happening that weren’t happening yesterday. Events that are New.

But then, objecting to the nounification of an adjective could certainly be taken as a sign of obsessive, ludditeful Englishteacherism. Humans invented their first words, and we’re still making new ones. Like prioritize, which came in to use in my lifetime although priorize already existed for use on occasions where rank just wouldn’t do. So why not orderitize, simplifitize, managetize?

Just wait. They’re coming.

But back to the news. “Here is the evening news,” the TV announcer intones. Shouldn’t it be “Here are the evening news,” now that News is a plural noun? You don’t say, “Here is my sister’s twins.” Or do you, and have I been left behind . . . again?

George Carlin has noted that there’s really only bad news. Good news aren’t news. In one of his monologues (you can find it on YouTube) he puts into words what all of us know but aren’t prepared to admit: when we turn on the news, we want to hear of immense conflagrations, wars, floods, many people killed. We want to hear about crime, about powerful people being destroyed, of people we don’t like being masterfully humiliated by people we do like. As much as news are increasingly less able to command our attention, who on earth would tune in or read the evening paper if all the stories were about success, achievement and peace?

“An Air Canada Boeing 747 Saskatoon to Winnipeg flight took off at 7:00 am as scheduled and arrived in Winnipeg without incident an hour and twenty minutes later. The captain, Arnold Pansyfoot, and his co-pilot, Diana Gottago reported that the weather was fine and “it was clear sailing all the way.” Rounding out the crew for this flight were flight attendants Danielle Perkyhat and Orville Getarealjob, a native of Edmonton. When interviewed, passenger Jonah H. Fishbait said: “The peanuts tasted really fresh!”

Good news just isn’t. Sorry.

Lately, it seems, the news have become overburdened with a need to provide what people want to hear as opposed to what they ought to hear. News are paid for by advertising, mostly, and advertisers want to see large audiences, and so even the mainstream newspapers and broadcast media have been leaning toward the most sensational, bad news. I call it tabloidifying the news. (Or should it be tabloidicizing) “Hey folks! Follow us. We ferret out the worst news our world has to offer . . . with pictures. Parental Guidance strongly advised.”

Donald Trump is well versed in two areas: 1. knowing that there’s a huge audience for bad news and, 2. understanding that the media have an insatiable thirst for bad stories. They have to have such a thirst; their very career lives depend on it.

Here are a few news for Sunday morning: I’m still in my bathrobe at 8:00 am and, I’ll be going to church later. I’ll bet you’re hungering to hear that I crashed my car en-route. Well, maybe not you, but certainly all the news junkies out there.

If I do, it will be on the evening news. If I don’t, it won’t.

Pokeman Go and the local Museum

Do you know this great man? Do you know what he said . . . and did?

We’re always elated to see visitors in the Mennonite Heritage Museum. Especially those that ask questions, ponder the meaning of exhibits and chat among themselves and with us about the subjects we present.

So when I went to open the museum yesterday, I was excited to see four people already on the steps. Waiting for the place to open . . . I assumed. Silly, Luddite, ever-hopeful me. They were in fact four teens with cell phones gathered in by the “Mennonite Heritage Museum” sign where a PokeStop has been placed by the virtual-world “Holy Ghost” that guides the inner workings of Pokemon Go.

I’ve heard it touted as a virtual game that gets people out and about: exercising, breathing fresh air, meeting real people and making new friends. The dozen or so drawn by the game to our front yard have been uniformly oblivious to their surroundings and/or have harboured too little interest in things historical to engage with me or the museum. (I’m pretty sure I appear historical to Pokeman Go enthusiasts!) Those I’ve seen haven’t been doing any real exercise; they strolled, and lolled; one lay down on his back and held his cell phone up, arms extended for about ten minutes. I tried to engage the four yesterday in a bit of conversation; they weren’t having any of that nuisance—not with me, not with each other.

So is this new—and probably short-lived—virtualized version of geocaching a “step in the right direction” for kids who are hooked on gaming and social media? You tell me.

We see our humble museum as a classroom, a classroom where curious people can come to learn useful things, like how they and their friends came to be here, what their ancestors did to make possible the life they enjoy, what Martin Luther King meant when he said, “We don’t make history; history makes us,” or words to that effect.

The good functioning of any democracy—be it a family, a church, a community or a country—is dependent on its participants being knowledgeable about the realities of their world. Isaac Asimov has said, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

My experience with Pokeman Go is minimal, confined to a few encounters and the reading of the game rules on Wikipedia. It doesn’t take a knowledge of logic to realize that the time Pokeman Go consumes could have been spent in other ways, like actually exercising, actually meeting and getting to know people, actually learning about the world, how it came to be what it is, what it means to wrestle with its future.

Marshall McLuhan coined the media phrase, “the medium is the message,” an insight that has supported our suspicions about TV, for instance, being more than a tool for acquiring information and entertainment; the TV in every house changed the culture irrespective of what programming was chosen to be broadcast. The car, the phone, the computer and the internet have all in their turn reshaped our culture, our politics, our socialization.

 

Pokeman Go is just another game? I don’t think so. If it were designed to be educational or even informative, it might well be a medium whose message is constructive in our culture, country, communities. But I can’t see that message there at all. The message, I fear, will again be the enrichment of a few highly-knowledgeable entrepreneurs through the further addiction of the not-yet-knowledgeable young masses.

If it would ignite enthusiasm for museums, galleries, libraries and actual travel, I would endorse Pokeman Go. If it should turn out, after all, to have this effect, I will humbly apologize—and then eat the Mennonite Heritage Museum, one brick, one exhibit at a time.

Brexit, Ad-blocking and the Blaring Trumpet.

What are you seeing from up there, Mr. Crow?

Two news stories this morning:

1. Users of the internet can buy ad-blocking software that eliminates most advertising from showing up on their mobile devices. If we all bought the software, ad revenues that pay for the production of what we use on the internet would dry up and Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. would disappear, along with a myriad of research sources, amusement sites, etc. etc. In short, the death of the internet unless its consumers would be willing to pay large fees to maintain it.       We’ve long been able to watch nearly-free television because the pesky ads paid for it for us. Same principle.
2. Britain has decided to exit the European Union. A lot of the Brexit hype stressed the economic and legal strictures the union put on Britain and the perception that such “globalization” benefits the wealthy and powerful and impoverishes the rest, and that softened borders makes it too easy for undesirables to get into the country.

Both stories are gloomy. They remind us that our unhappy marriage to corporate wealth and power is insoluble unless we’re willing to give up stuff we cling to like barnacles on a ship’s hull. The protestors against fossil-fuel dependency have to grind their teeth at the fully-justified accusations that they drive cars, fly in airplanes, use petroleum-sourced products routinely. We surely know that if the production and use of fossil fuels were made illegal right now, our lives as we know them would tank, bite the biscuit, kick the bucket, be flushed down the toilet.

      At present, only corporate or communal wealth and power is capable of building a car, manufacturing a smart phone, running a communications network, producing the necessary supplies of food, drugs, consumer goods and leisure opportunities that we either need or desire.

      Our local Lion’s Club is not about to take over the production of computers if IBM and Apple are defuncted. Churches and mosques, temples and synagogues would build lousy roads even if they were willing to attempt it.

      A commentator said that if we give people the choice of doing what’s right or doing what’s free, most of us will choose free . . . virtually always. No matter how much we rail against the tyranny of corporate wealth and power, we are bound to neglect the fact that it was our needs and wants that made them what they are, to forget who it is that fulfills our dreams. Let’s look to our own ethics first.

      We don’t want to know that the problems of climate change, earth degradation, wars and political conflict, etc., etc., are products of ours and our family’s and neighbours’ choices.

      Donald Trump is promising to take back America; his backers love the phrase but I’d venture to guess that most of them (including Trump himself) haven’t the faintest idea what that noble-sounding phrase actually means in practice. Brexit has started Britain on a road to “taking back their country.”        

     They will undoubtedly find in the end that “taking back the country” in the way they’ve visualized through rose-coloured glasses will be the equivalent of the proverbial “shooting oneself in the foot!”

      To my mind, there’s only one viable way to own both the resources necessary to provide us with the goods and services we need while keeping control over the excesses corporate wealth and power currently tend to admit, encourage. Shareholders guide the actions of corporate wealth and power, presumably, and if the shareholders are all of us—as is the case with SaskEnergy, SaskPower, SaskTel, for instance—we share in the direction setting and in the blame when mistakes are made. In such an environment, the need for a Brexit, for ad-blocking, for Donald Trump and his ilk wouldn’t arise to fuel our rage and imagined persecution.

       We should be able to kick out the management (our elected government) if the efficiency AND/OR the ethics of our corporations don’t pass muster!

      Unfortunately, private corporations now own the media, by and large, and we’ve been cajoled and “tricked” into choosing the governments that suit the wishes of private corporations even as we rail against them.

      There are plenty of photos of our real

enemy, people. They hang right above the sink in each of our bathrooms.

      For God’s sake, READ SOMETHING.

The Hooligan Temptation

Creation is hard work, destruction is easy

Gangs of Russian, English (and other) hooligans are fighting it out in the streets at the Euro Cup of Soccer in France taking place right now, Hooliganism has become an adjunct of soccer, it seems, and its participants rehearse for battle, set out with mischief-making in mind, and equip themselves to practice their deviltry, the soccer game being little more than an opening for a greater goal—the perpetration of as much mayhem as possible.
      But hooliganism wasn’t invented by soccer fans. Free Dictionary includes a couple of definitions of the word, what it’s come to mean: reckless or malicious behavior that causes discomfort or annoyance in others; the termination of something by causing so much damage to it that it cannot be repaired or no longer exists. I would probably add, “the organized creation of straw men in order to experience the longed for, orgasmic high that comes from the act of attacking and burning them down publicly.”
      I think we all recognize the biology of hooliganism intuitively. It’s not only the good deed, the making of something wonderful that can bring about the physical and emotional euphoria our minds and bodies crave. Euphoria can be had—given the appropriate circumstances—from the destruction of the good deeds and wonderful inventions that others or we have created. Typically, we attempt to escape this fact by assigning blame or praise—as the case may be—to God and the Holy Spirit or to the devil who “made me do it.”
      I’m sorry, folks, but it’s all built into us by the very creative process that made us. Fight or Flight are defensive mechanisms for our protection, the adrenaline that fuels them lives on even when danger has to be invented—the straw man. It’s why we have games like hockey and football, where danger and battle are replicated in an attempt to achieve biological euphoria, even if only vicariously. But direct participation is limited and in the need to be a part of it, fandom emerges, and it doesn’t take much beyond Psychology 101 to predict that hooliganism will break out among those for whom the vicarious experience no longer totally satisfies.
      But even if soccer hooliganism can be controlled by policing and public indignation, there exists a hooliganism that’s far more sinister, that threatens—particularly in peaceful times—to erupt and grow to uncontrollable proportions. It can be characterized as it was in a bumper sticker during the Vietnam protests as “Have patience, you say? To hell with that. I’ve got a gun and I’m gonna kill something!” (My paraphrase; that would make a far-too-long bumper sticker.) The NAZI vendetta against Jews, Gypsies and gays was hooliganism developed to its logical and predictable conclusion; the diatribes and threats against the Notley government in Alberta is the thin edge of hooliganism showing itself; the rise of Donald Trump as a legitimate (politically) candidate for president of the USA is a result of neglecting, nurturing and then legitimizing hooliganism. The method of Trump hooliganism is “ the termination of something by causing so much damage to it that it cannot be repaired or no longer exists. The support Trump is getting from the National Rifle Association is completely fitting; the very act of purchasing and owning an automatic weapon is the entertainment of the possibility of hooliganism.
      ISIS, to my mind, epitomizes well the concept of hooliganism. There comes a point where achieving euphoria through acts of mayhem becomes habitual. There comes a time when—as Shakespeare’s Macbeth puts it—“I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.” When you’ve beheaded ten innocent men and women for a video, pushed 20 homosexual men off the roof of a tall building, burned a pilot in a cage and videotaped it, what likelihood is there that you will say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was wrong. I’ll make it up to you and mend my ways.” Returning would be as tedious (read, impossible) as going all the way.
      ISIS is a criminal gang; we need to think about it as massive, organized crime rather than as a war of ideals. The Mafia, ISIS, Abu Sayyaf are not, in the end, ideologically or religiously driven. They’re Hooligans who’ve stepped in blood so far that the way back has become impossible. In for a penny; in for a pound.
      But here’s my ultimate concern: when followers of Christ and other prophets of peace, love and non-violence begin to compromise their own principles, begin to ignore, condone, excuse or applaud the hooligans, begin to take their euphoria from words and deeds of belligerence and de-struction, the way back is dangerously close to becoming impossible. When Christians start “packing,” I fear for tomorrow’s children. I fear for all minorities. I fear for women. I fear for the witness of the church, the witness of peace-loving Muslims and Jews, the witness of gentle-minded Hindus and Buddhists.
      Have we stepped in so far that returning would be as tedious as going all the way? 
     I sincerely hope not.

Honour treaties: the key to Reconciliation

Fort Carlton - site of Treaty 6 signing.

I just watched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s short video summary of the TRC process. It ends with Shawn Atleo’s tearful assessment of what needs to happen: 1) indigenous families and communities must forgive themselves and each other for past failures and 2) they must determine not to let the pain continue.

The second item may be the toughest for—in my case—all of us who live under the Canada/First Nations accord that we call Treaty 6. It requires change. Not just superficial, surface change but a fundamentally-new way of doing politics that allows and/or forces change to happen. Figuring out how to do that is the challenge.

I live in a settler’s community—Rosthern, Saskatchewan—very near two reserves: Beardy’s Okemasis and One Arrow. There is regular, if distant, interaction between the settler folk and their indigenous neighbours, but it’s primarily commercial: some residents of the reserves shop in Rosthern. On the cultural, social level, there’s not a lot going on. The question is, should there be, and if so, would it even the playing field for indigenous families, or just put it on a friendlier basis?

To some people I meet, this is key. I’ve come to disagree. It’s essential that our day to day commerce be fair, friendly and that it respect the dignity and autonomy of everyone, but that isn’t key; it’s only essential. More an outcome of equality than a prerequisite for it.

The key lies in the guarantees for everyone that we “settler folk” have long taken for granted: decent housing, water, education, health care, etc., and access to a fair share of the resources that are required for quality life circumstances. Turns out that the treaties signed by the crown and the First Nations although well intended, were short-sighted. They should have ended with a rider that would say that adjustment of the provisions of the treaty would be commensurate with changes in population and needs from time to time.

Let me explain.

The treaty specifies “reserve land in the amount of one square mile per family of five,” and I doubt that the size of reserves has been seriously adjusted with population increases, or whether the “family of five” stipulation has ever been revisited in any meaningful way. In other words, the provisions of the treaty were colonial in nature; they made it too easy to say “a medicine chest” means what it says, rather than accept the implicit understanding that it means health care commensurate with the times . . . ongoing.

Furthermore, the $5 “gift” every treaty day, although a month’s wage at the time. now buys a pop and a chocolate bar . . . barely.

The last item in the treaty should have said “The Crown and the First Nations of Canada will each elect/appoint an equal number of representatives every five years to meet as needed to determine current implications of the treaties, and with power to enact legislation binding upon municipal, provincial and federal governments.”

The debacle of the residential school system was made real through the TRC for anyone who was listening and I won’t go into that. Except that I have this nagging question: why did first nations parents, councils and leadership not tell the Canadian government to GO TO HELL when it’s petty officials came to collect their kids? Perhaps this is what happens when starvation, abject poverty and subjugation has so cowed populations that they assume a posture and expectation of helplessness.

I can’t believe they didn’t care about their kids.

Of course, let’s all cultivate friendlier relations with indigenous neighbours, but let’s not assume that change will happen without insisting that it do so . . . to the halls of power.

Write your MP and your MLA today.

Now that would be a hopeful act of reconciliation!

the reason for government

Coming soon to a garden near here (High today, ZERO)

The basic tenet of a recent Facebook post was that since many Albertans were losing their jobs, the premier of the province—Rachel Notley—should lose hers. A silly syllogism if there ever was one, but expressive of the frustration many Albertans experienced when they woke up to realize that a social democratic government had been elected . . . by them.

      The post drew responses in the hundreds, some applauding the suggestion and some exuding unbridled hostility and rage: “we should band together to turf the b***h out!” Most however, were rebukes; how can you lay the economic problems of Alberta on Notley when the root lies in Saudi Arabia and the downturn was well underway before we ousted the Conservatives?

      Think, people, think!

      But logic and fair judgments don’t dominate discourse in a democracy based on a party system. Makes you wonder if we wouldn’t be better off under a theocracy or a dictatorship; under such governance people might be united . . . if only by their hatred for the dictator. As it is, we are systematically encouraged by our electoral system to like or dislike each other according to predispositions toward anything and anyone that isn't us, relatively stable prejudices nurtured over years.

      “Government by the people, for the people” can’t simply be assumed to be all good, all of the time.

      How we judge party A or B seems to depend much more on our attitude toward their brand than it does on their actions when in power. It makes me wonder why in this country anyone would aspire to leadership: we generally elect our governments with fewer than 50% of the vote which means that a party assuming power must realize that more than half the population will chastise and oppose them no matter how pristine their motives. We effectively elect—most of the time—a government we don’t want, as long as majority rules is how we decide stuff.

      I’m certainly not the first to say this, but it’s becoming clearer that what we have learned to like or love—and what we have learned to dislike or hate—plays a far greater role in our political choices than our thoughtful judgment ever has. We’re most attuned to hearing any sliver of evidence supporting our loyalties, castigating our adversaries.

      Tabloids prey on this tendency in us. They do best when they pick a side and hammer away at the “other side” with mixtures of information and misinformation . . . and their followers naturally lap it up. Take Fox News as an example.

      It’s one good reason for revising our democracy. Proportional representation means that no matter how we vote, our vote affects the outcome. True, this often results in a minority government, but minority governments only work if the parties cooperate, if the government is vulnerable to opposing opinions and interests. Cumbersome as such a change might be at first, the habits of consultation and cooperation could be given some hope of developing in time.

      What we endanger under the current system is the consciousness of our unity under the overarching goal that is the reason for government in the first place, namely that all citizens should enjoy their short lives: well fed, well sheltered, well educated and in peace and harmony with their neighbours.

      Rachel Notley should not be forced to resign; the hostility she faces is a consequence of the fact that our electoral system so starkly focuses on the zero-sum, winners and losers game paradigm.

      It shouldn’t have to be like this.

Donald Trump vs. the Spirited Horse

Shekinah Flood, 2013

I wouldn’t write about this except that the enormity of the American phenomenon that is the Republican Party in disintegration compels me to think about its meaning—at a minimum. Something odd is going on. Although it’s hard to separate genuine fed-upness-with-the-established-order from mass hysteria at times, the fact that a man like Donald Trump is seen as an acceptable focus of the collective rage for so very many is remarkable.

       Some would draw a parallel between the rhetoric of Adolph Hitler in the early 1930s with the venom Trump spews on a daily basis. If you’re familiar with Mein Kampf and have been watching US news, you’d probably agree that the similarities in message and the enthusiastic responses to it are startling. Both begin with the assumption that the nation is in the toilet and that it’s time to make it great again. Both assign the nation’s demise to the presence of aliens—Jews and Gypsies, communists and homosexuals in the one; Muslims, Mexicans and "bleeding-heart lefties” in the other. In both, the rhetoric is confrontational in the extreme; bellicose language gets thrown out to great applause; the applause—in turn—encourages escalation of the tone.

      I can’t imagine that all this will actually result in a Trump presidency, and when I think about it logically, I’m not sure such an event, should it happen, would be as catastrophic as some have predicted. US checks and balances system of governance has so often meant that the electorate installs an opposition to the president via the congressional elections. Electing Trump might be a catalyst motivating Americans to take a closer, more reality-based look at themselves, their structures of governance and the comical—sometimes tragic—symptoms that emanate therefrom.

      Sometimes hitting rock-bottom leads to repentance and rebirth.

      And what’s the source of the rage coalescing behind trump? From spending some time in Indiana and reading and listening to the news, I’m thinking a listing of grievances could be made something like:

• Homosexuality being not only tolerated but being granted legitimacy—all the way to same-gender marriage which is probably the straw that broke the camel’s back on this issue for many,
• Granting of choice to women on the abortion issue which many consider murder of the helpless,
• The unwillingness to be arbitrary and decisive regarding the entry and expulsion of illegals,
• The protection of America’s Muslim population who are seen as a present and future threat,
• Movement toward a more “socialistic” approach to health insurance under Obama,
• The reluctance by the Obama administration to use lethal force in the Middle East.
• The separation of religion and public education (banning of school prayer and Bible reading) characterized as an attack on Christianity,
• The suggestion that there ought to be some form of arms control, contrary to “the right to bear arms” in the constitution.
• And all the above enclosed in an envelope of moral outrage: America is sliding down the slope toward moral decadence.

These are some of the complaints I’ve been hearing. The hope that some strong man will be able to kick the ducks into orderly rows is obviously naïve, but fed by mob dynamics, Trump has been able to cast himself as the messianic answer to the frustrations of the right-wing mind.

      If venting is good for the soul, Trump may have provided the exact therapy America needs. Even rage of the most vitriolic sort eventually tires out, subsides. Let the deportations, the closed borders (to Muslims), the wall on the Mexican border, the canceling of Obama care, the re-criminalization of abortion, the re-criminalization of homosexuality begin and let the carrying of weapons become mandatory. All this will, of course, fail, but in the attempt, the reasons for liberalization as the common good may become clearer.

      In the end, retrenchment always gives way to liberalization; it’s the spirited horse on which human social evolution rides. It’s the only way humanity can survive in a world of burgeoning populations, changes due to climate warming and globalization.

      I think it was Karl Marx who said, “Progress is a spirited horse; we either learn to ride it or it will throw us.” And, no, I am not a communist and if Karl Marx didn’t say that, then attribute the quote to me.

      I know it wasn’t Pope Frances nor the Archbishop of Canterbury. If spoken to the scribes and pharisees, it might have been Jesus, although he would likely have substituted "renewal" for “progress.”