Family and politics: a great holiday mix!
On Monday, the minority Liberals will finally have their squirrelly hands pried from the Speaker's mace, and Canada will descend into an election campaign that no one will notice until after the hangover clears on New Years Day.
Many are complaining about a winter election. Perhaps this is simplistic, but what kind of Canadian complains about anything being too cold? It's like a Swiss guy saying something is too chocolatey, a Japanese fellow whining about a crowded subway in Tokyo, or an American arguing against military spending.
Really, Canada, what better timing could there be for an election than over the holidays? While you're waiting for your child to visit Santa's lap, you can wander to the next booth and spew off your own Wish List to the local Liberal candidate in the elf costume. You're already in the mood for watching the exact same version of It's a Wonderful Life on TV, so the repeat of the 2004 leaders' debate fits in nicely. And just think of the hours of entertainment inherent in watching canvassers approach your door before you salt the driveway!
The only problem is that Future Shop doesn't take returns on broken governments during Boxing Week. [e]
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Sex and torture...
Two concepts that are sufficiently vague to Americans are that their Presidents can grossly violate their marriage vows and human rights, respectively, and get away with it.
The CIA recently rejected claims that it uses “torture” – only a “variety of unique and innovative ways” to forcibly extract information from its non-Geneva-Convention-subject captives. However, it does concede that the Senate-passed ban on “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment would exclude some of their favourite techniques. Evidently you'd be surprised just how cruel, inhuman and degrading you can get before you cross that thick line into unacceptability. Indeed, the U.S. – bully of the global village – has rewritten the dictionary of military ethics since it self-exempted from the Geneva Conventions in 2002 by labeling its captives in the war on terror as “unlawful combatants.”
Although numerous international conventions and domestic U.S. laws prohibit torture (and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights bars inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment in all cases), the recent Human Rights Watch report on the tactics of the so-called “Murderous Maniacs” of the 82nd Airborne Division outside Fallujah shows how far the U.S. military bends the definition of torture. It could only get worse if captives were forced to continuously watch an alternating stream of George Bush speeches and MTV reality shows: the sheer stupidity of their true captors would permanently maim their self-respect.
I've always seen a degree of irony in having gentlemanly rules for an activity that involves blowing people up: “Go ahead, kill the guy. Heck, kill hundreds of 'em. But if you catch 'em, make sure they get enough to eat.” Rules appear to legitimize war as a sport, which of course it is not. So perhaps the U.S. is right: their enemy is cheating, so they should be allowed to have a bit of “latitude” when it comes to the rules, too. But they can't have it both ways – when you leave the high road, you lose your claim to wear the white hat in the cowboy movie that is global politics.* The “good versus evil” dichotomy becomes just two buttheads fighting, with the rest of us looking on and shaking our heads while avoiding trigger-happy U.S. checkpoints** and ducking the suicide bombs.
And since that's really been the true essence of the war on terror since its inception, we can only hope that the U.S. administration will get off its high white horse and 'fess up: “The only thing free we're fighting for is our access to Middle East oil, and we're willing to lie, torture, and blow up civilians to get it. We have plenty of low-income kids here who'll do anything for a college education, and most of them are black or Latino, so all the better. And the best racket is the blowback we get for paying Dick Cheney's buddies at Halliburton twice: to blow stuff up and then to rebuild it again. We know that God's on our side as much as She helps the Philadelphia Eagles win football games. Oh yeah and we know we're causing climate change and we love it. Screw you, world.”
Indeed, one has to question the sanity of a nation that impeaches a President for misdeeds leading to orgasm, but so far appears unwilling to remove a dude whose misdeeds have killed 2,000 of his own soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, condoned a reasonable facsimile of torture, and left a gargantuan deficit, to name but just a few. Given that this same nation censors boobies in movies but not graphic violence, we remain unsurprised.
* Actually, for all of us who saw through the inherent racist BS of the western film genre and subsequent white-black symbolism in American pop culture, and who have always rooted for the Injuns anyways, maybe the white hat is quite appropriate.
** Five more innocent Iraqi civilians – three of them under the age of four – were mowed down in their minivan by shaky American soldiers last week. U.S. officials claim that the soldiers, fearing a suicide bomb attack, fired warning shots when they noticed the van driving erratically. It seems that Iraqi families don't understand that firing rifles into the air means “pull over,” and American soldiers don't understand that driving erratically means “my kid spilled some milk on the back seat.”
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The American PEOPLE do NOT condone torture (but are into assault weapons)
Beside the 91 U.S. Senators who oppose torture (and the fact that 9 Senators do not is disconcerting, no?), 19,000 regular Americans came from all corners and all ages to Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the notorious and disgraceful School of the Americas.
Slyly renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” in 2001 after the annual protest raised enough embarrassing public awareness, the SOA has trained military leaders from Latin America for decades in the art of “counter-insurgency”, aka brutally beating union leaders, priests and nuns, desperate farmers and any other poor people who oppose the U.S.-backed government into submission to neo-liberal economics.
In 1990, an American priest staged a hunger strike outside the school to protest the 1989 murders of six Jesuit missionaries and two workers in El Salvador by nineteen soldiers who graduated from the SOA. The protest has become an annual event in which dozens of protesters cross over the line (now marked by two fences topped by razor wire), get arrested for trespassing and spend six months in jail. Among them are elderly men and 50-something mothers.
As an indication of how seriously the American media takes issues of torture and its government's violent intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states to push its oppressive economic domination, the New York Times fondly labeled the SOA protests as “a staple of fall [as much as] the Alabama-Auburn game.” To be clear, the college football game in question does not involve mass executions of indigenous villagers or the forceful displacement of farmers from their land to grow bananas for Thanksgiving dessert in Georgia; but it IS a fierce rivalry in the Southeastern Conference because the winner often goes on to play in the Tostitos Banana Bowl.
Not to be outdone by this year's adorable protesters, the good folks in Fort Benning held their own “anti-rally rally” to express support for the base's troops overseas who are fighting bad guys to win the protesters' freedom to protest. To show the world just how misguided the SOA protesters are, the anti-rally rally boasted a country music concert, carnival rides, and – this is not made up – Huey military helicopter rides and booths displaying hunting knives, machine guns and assault weapons. [e]
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No more Mr. Nice Guy: Is this progress?
Women scored an historic week in electoral politics, as both Germany and Liberia elected female Heads of State. However, Christian Democrat Angela Merkel's victory as the first female head of the German-speaking world since the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa also represents a sharp conservative shift from Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder. Meanwhile, Africa's first female Head of State Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is an economist with the same World Bank that heavily funded the violently repressive Doe dictatorship in Liberia in the 1980s. Its pushing of monoculture cash crops in the 1990s – like massive rubber plantations owned by local fronts for European multinationals – has created only poor, slave-like employment while leaving Liberia's environment and domestic food production in ruins. This June, the World Bank threatened to withdraw its financial support unless the transitional government instituted economic reforms as dictated by the Bank.
To be sure, these victories are welcome symbolically in a still grossly inequitable world with tremendous barriers to power for women. However, still reeling from the setback of the neo-con war hawk Margaret Thatcher, women may be anxious to see if Merkel the very conservative Christian Democrat and Johnson-Sirleaf the World Bank economist will spark genuine progress toward gender equality in politics or further ingrain the convention that women must adapt to the masculinity and conservatism of the political game if they want be allowed to play. [e]
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Feature: Off with his head!
The only thing missing in Ottawa's remake of the French Revolution is the storming of the Supreme Court. We have an ineffectual monarch unfortunately placed at the end of a tired dynasty, operating under the false impression that he still holds absolute authority and surrounded by inbred courtiers oblivious to the coming storm. Dissent is overflowing from the wealthy princes on the right and from the unwashed masses on the left, a rare confluence of revolt that even a deeply entrenched system of venality cannot assuage.
The Finance Minister, in the role of Marie Antoinette, has shoveled out carriage-loads of cake in an effort to stem the tide of change, but the heads will soon begin to roll.
A dirty, ugly campaign seems inescapable. It will incite snickers at G-8 meetings, send beavers wincing to their dams in shame, and suck from Canadians any remaining hope and optimism about the relevance of our political system. However, just as the 18th-century French version lasted several years, Canadians may have to endure a Conservative Reign of Terror for nine months and wade through a bog of political entrails in the streets of the capital to realize true Revolution and genuinely move forward to a better country.
The modern Liberals have decisively proven that election promises mean absolutely nothing, yet remain cunningly adept at mongering fear about the alternatives. And so again, Canadians will be voting overwhelmingly AGAINST something in 2006: expect both rationality and genuine policy debate to join the groundhogs in slumber until February. The only good news is that, just like Days of Our Lives, you can safely ignore it all over the holidays and tune in around mid-January without missing a thing.
These will indeed be dark winter days in Canada. But they are necessary to stir the requisite anger within the Canadian electorate to at last incite a revolutionary paradigm shift in Canadian politics: away from empty rhetoric, combative positioning, slimy lobbying and murky decision-making; and toward substantive and open policy debate, creative problem solving, and cooperative and inclusive decision-making in the public interest. This shift requires a wholesale change in every political party, from the leader on down. New hope can only come with new faces and new attitudes that restore our collective faith in politics.
Our new political leaders will have to convince Canadians that they are interested in solving problems instead of maintaining power. They will have to devise new ways to listen to Canadians and incorporate the needs of everyone into policy instead of hearing only those with lobbying offices in Ottawa (staffed by former politicians, staffers and bureaucrats). They will have to act swiftly and produce results instead of make promises, excuses, and half-way progress.
Our new leaders will have to inspire Canadians with a vision for a healthier, more equitably prosperous, and more sustainable future. They will have to boldly challenge the entrenched conventions that stand in the way of such a future: myths about economic growth, competition, and the tax burden; family-farm-killing big agribusiness; throwaway consumption; non-precautionary drug, chemical and food approval; car-biased urban planning; and the “cancer establishment”, to name just a few.
To help us on our way, edSpective will be doing its best to ignore the bullshit of Election 2006 and begin throwing out some creative policy solutions that include the needs of all Canadians, that challenge flawed convention, and that inspire. PLedFORM 2006 begins next week with Health Care.*
Canada needs new, young, courageous leadership. If we have to endure a painful winter of watching the Old Regime of Parliament writhe in its death throes, so be it. Take the holidays off, Canada. But come 2006, we have to start asking far more of our political leaders than just keeping their promises. We have to start insisting on new leaders who reflect the best – and not the worst – of who we are, and who are capable of leading us into the future we deserve.
* The promised tax system issue has been delayed for personal disclosure reasons that will be... uh, “disclosed” as soon as appropriate. [e]
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Action Items:
E-Mail:
(1) No one in Ottawa will be answering e-mail, but that doesn't mean they won't be getting it! Keep the e-mails flooded with whatever you feel strongly about. Mention that you vote according to this issue, and watch the replies roll in!
(2) Prime Minister Paul Martin (pm@pm.gc.ca) – Next time you speak to George Bush, get as tough about torture in secret U.S. detention camps as you did about softwood lumber. Insist that he “close the School of the Americas or whatever you're calling it now” to let him know his little renaming trick didn't work on Canadians. Oh and bring back Sheila Copps – now THERE would be a great female Head of State. Come on, Paul, you won't be Prime Minister very much longer – start working on that legacy!
Vote with your dollars:
(1) As always, buy fair trade in Canada and the U.S.
(2) Don't forget to boycott McDonalds on December 3rd for those two crazy Western Canadian ten year-olds! (See last week's edSpective for details)
Vote with your... vote!
(1) Let 'em hear it on the election trail! Talk policy, and insist that candidates do the same. Tell them to fire their leaders and bring in some new blood. Tell them to bring civility, cooperation, and the public interest back to federal politics as priority number one!
(2) Ask a Liberal how she expects you to believe ANY of their election promises this time.
(3) Ask a Conservative how she expects you to believe that Stephen Harper's eyes weren't either forged from the blood of Satan or stolen from the set of Michael Jackson's Thriller video.
(4) Ask a New Democrat how she expects you to believe that our economy won't crumble and burn and we'll all descend into a communist dictatorship without massive tax cuts for rich people and big corporations.
(5) Ask them all to do a Maritime jig for you or else they don't get your vote. See if they'll do it and e-mail edSpective with the story! [e]
Good News Story of the Week
(1) The world's eyes will be cast on Montreal this week for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. Youth from around the world met in advance to press their selfish, “We want the planet to exist in thirty years” agenda on Conference participants. The bad news is that youth in their early twenties – some of the most fertile, freshly-educated, and creative minds on the planet – will be patted on the head and told to go play while the adults plan how to write long enough documents that release them from doing too much. The good news is that Canada can't hide from the world the fact that all it's done on climate change since 1999 is hire Rick Mercer to play a wise-talking sheep coaxing individual Canadians to turn their lights off,* while letting our biggest corporate polluters and auto makers entirely off the hook. A whole whack of wicked people are hosting parallel gatherings across Canada, including marches and teach-ins. I hear Montreal is “spewing with energy.” Check out events in your area. [e]
* Rick the Sheep is onto something, though. Turn off your lights and take the One-Tonne Challenge. Hey, if the corporations won't do it, somebody's gotta.
** E-Mail me to be added to the Weekly “edSpective is up!” e-mail ListServe ** edspective@yahoo.ca
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