...i'm gonna live forever...

This morning, in Stephen Elliot’s The Daily Rumpus e-mail (what do you mean you aren’t a subscriber? WTF? Hint: top right of the home page...), he talked about success, fame, and the inner sanctum of literary circles. He said (to everyone, not just the elites), “This will sound dramatic and cliché but the glass ceiling is beneath you. Try to break it.”

I didn’t watch the Oscars, haven’t had any interest in doing so since they finally gave Jackson a statue for LOTR. It has a bit to do with not having TV in our home, but that would have been an easy obstacle to overcome. It has more to do with my adverse reaction to fame, how I think that we’re a bit addicted to lifting them up and hoping they’ll fall for our amusement.


Jion Ghomeshi was talking with a panel of entertainment pundits on Q last night as I drove home from the climbing gym. They were lamenting how bad the Oscars were this year; How the show is so controlled and scripted that nothing magical happens anymore. They celebrated the actress (?) that dropped the F-bomb as an unscripted moment, and then turned around and suggested that it was the most scripted moment of the show, only the actress in question was the only one with that well-rehearsed version of it.

I love the movies, don’t get me wrong. Like all art, there’s the good and the bad, but when it’s good, it’s so very, very good. I wish movies were longer. LOTR is best watched back to back to back for the full effect.

I don’t enjoy celebrity train wrecks though. It’s sad that Charlie Sheen’s implosion is such heady fodder right now. Charlie’s story, whether you like him or not, is a tragedy, not a comedy byline. Talent and success shouldn’t be the keys to the fame locker. Talent plus success so often equal car crashes. I wish we could protect more people from it.

That’s not the fault of movies though. That’s a by-product of the industry that makes movies. It’s a symptom of a culture that wants so many of the wrong things.

Jion and company panned James Franco’s performance as host, went so far as to say he’d torpedoed his career to some extent. I have no idea if they’re right, or what Mr. Franco’s thoughts were, but I look at his body of work, the counter-intuitive choices he’s made, and can’t help but wonder if the joke’s on Jion.

I can’t help but hope that James was lampooning the whole paper maché farce that is the awards season. 

And then they said that the best, most sincere speeches were made by the writers. They said that they couldn’t understand how all these great actors could blow their lines and yet the writers could slip into the spotlight for their thirty seconds and nail it so purely. And I smiled.

I have a hard time imagining anyone, in a writerly sense, being under a glass ceiling that I’m standing on. But I am committed to stomping more now, just in case. At the very worst (or perhaps best?), I’ll end up in the basement.

All the good shit happens in the basement anyway.

fa lala lala

Here I am again, happy that I didn’t put “go to sleep at a reasonable time” on some list of things to do today (or yesterday, I guess).

It is December 24 and I’m caught in that strange limbo between my churchy upbringing and my decidedly anti-churchy adulthood again. I’ll be driving to Mom’s later today to partake in the family tradition of Eve celebration. Mom has a tremor in her hands these days. We think it’s a side-effect of the anti-anxiety medication, but we’re going to make sure and ask the doctor next visit, just to cover the bases and be sure.

We always did it this way, the Eve thing. Mostly, I think, so that I could have an extra bit of alone time with my new toys. That only-child thing came in handy as a kid – I was usually pretty spoiled. I was also a loner, so the 25^th tradition of hosting friends, or being hosted at friends’ homes, for the big tryptophan overdose was a chore. I was always much happier with the thought of making up imaginary stories for my action figures to battle through, or reading my new books, or playing my new games, than I was being social with kids that I didn’t identify with, or adults that I got even less.

I shirked off the illusion of Santa at an early age. Mom said I was three when I looked up at them one Eve and said that I knew the Santa thing was a crock, and that they didn’t have to pretend on my account. They laughed, she told me, but it was a sign of things to come.

That’s kind of how I feel about the religiosity of the whole season too, or rather, the attempt to impose a religious reason for the season. When I was eleven or twelve, around the same time that the church we had gone too unintentionally ostracized Mom for being in a failed marriage (how dare she!), I started to peel back the curtain and see churches for what they really were – country clubs for the religiously mobile.

I remember reading for the first time the opinion of scholars that December 25^th was an unlikely date for the birth of a Jewish messiah, if the little tyke had indeed been born during a census as the story goes. The Roman empire, being as continentally expansive as it was, included some pretty damned cold and snowy places, and the middle of winter would not have been a good time to ask all of the citizens and subjects to head back over hill and snowy dale to descend upon their home towns for the census taking. They were reasonable, those Romans, and conducted their censuses in the early spring, after the snow and before serious planting season. If there was a historical Jesus born in an historical manger in his foster-dad’s historical home town during a census, the smart money is on it happening some time in April or early May, closer to Easter than to this charade of a religious holiday in early winter.

I’ve never been able to take “The Reason for the Season” seriously since then. It was the first of many disillusionments when it came to all things x-ian. Others, like the fact that most of our Judeo-Christian holidays are simply neo-versions of pagan holidays superimposed over the old celebrations as a way to churchify the days people were going to celebrate anyway, or the fact that so many pre-Jesus pagan deities share so many instances of serendipitous coincidence with the Jesus mythology, just cemented the deal. The added fact that this holiday, more than any other, typifies our western obsession with turning everything into a reason to shop, helps my cynicism too.

It’s not that I’m a Scrooge. I enjoy the happiness that sometimes overpowers the stress of angry shoppers playing full-contact consumerism down the toy aisles. I take a bit of consolation in the fact that more of my friends do secret Santa variations instead of wholesale shopping one-upmanship. An informal survey of climbers at the climbing gym this week (I was covering so that my friend, the owner, could get some well-deserved R&R) revealed that more than half of the more regular and serious climbers do a present-sharing scheme version of some sort, limiting their over-consumption. This may be because we tend to be counter-culture a lot.  Or maybe because we’re simply less affluent than many. The two probably kind of go hand in hand. Either way, we’re all happy. Hell, we’re often silly we’re so happy.

But still, I have a level of frustration as I watch drivers share their xmas spirit by fingering each other as they race from mall to mall, or other friends participate in the race to see who is least cheap, and most “generous” (like it’s a competition or something), credit be damned, the stress of anticipated card bills already dancing like obese sugar plum accountants just behind their fake smiles.

I wonder if the sardonic humor I feel coursing through my veins is just a world-weary reaction to the foolishness I’m watching, or whether it’s something darker; something more Freudian.

When the first real experience of religious disillusionment kicked in, back in my pre-adolescence, I was angry about it; angry at the church and at god for the way Mom was treated so callously by the church; angry that god had simply not shown up in such a profound way. I stayed angry about it all through my teens – angry and depressed. Then, when I fell back into religion as an adult, through most of my marriage, I was told that god had not failed – I had failed; my faith had failed. I was encouraged to read Job a lot. Have you read Job? Wonderful morality tale, that Job is, if amazingly depressing, and a very sophisticated apologetic for the shitty things that happen to people. And for a while I believed it all again too, silly me.

When I walked away the second time, the curtain pulled back one more time to reveal the gears and machinations behind the holy veil, I vowed that I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. There are amazing things about faith that have nothing to do with religion at all. My faith remains a living, breathing thing. I’m not sure what my faith is in any more – certainly, it’s nothing to do with the specific mythology of western religion – but I can still feel a breath of belief in me. And a strong one too.

Like Ramakrishna, I now believe that all religions have truth in them, in their innate humanism. It isn’t coincidence that most world religions have a version of the golden rule. Science and atheism can’t explain everything out there any more believably than any religion can. In a sense, science can be a religion too, with its high priests in white garb, test tubes in hand – our gatekeepers to a better understanding. I don’t have faith in science, as interesting as new discoveries are, just like I don't have faith in religions with their old explanations. Both are corrupt, flawed by the need of institutions to control people, and control information, and keep people dumb and in the dark.

Faith, to me, is sacred: The ongoing search for an understanding of things as a whole. Science isn’t an answer – it’s a path. Same with religion. And all paths, potentially, even when they are corrupted by the intrinsic nature of institutions, can lead to the roof. That’s what Ramakrishna said. Who cares how we get there, so long as we move in that direction. 

I just prefer no path. I like bushwacking. A bushwacking kind of faith isn't very defined. It doesn't mean that you can't get anywhere - it's not being directionless - it just means that you have to scrape through the burning bushes, and wade through the seas. Nothing is done for a bushwacker - we do for ourselves.

I have faith in the knowledge that we don’t know everything. I have faith in the truism that the more we know, the more we should know that we don't really know. I have faith in the thought that empathy might win out one day, and that our species will actually become what we’re capable of being. I have faith in the ability of my fellow humans to transcend the bullshit, only occasionally sometimes, but at other time, in some people or in some places and times, on a scale that is truly miraculous and marvelous to behold. I have faith that we could do that more, and that if we could, it would change everything.

So yeah, I still have a semblance of faith.

Sometimes, when I think about how anti-tradition I am, it bothers me. I wonder if I’m just being kooky and unjustifiably recalcitrant. I wonder how much easier it would be to just go with the flow. I wonder if the reason that so many of the high profile atheists seem so goddamned angry all the time is because, like me, they still feel the sting of their lost religion and the comforts it provides. Is that why I’m prickly about this topic? Because I’m still angry that I saw behind the curtain and the truth robbed me of all my comfortable illusions?

Maybe it is. At least, maybe it still is a bit.

And then I remember that I’m not generally inclined to swim with the current at the best of times. Certainly, in the face of so much cultural and self-deception, it’s unreasonable for me to expect such behavior of my self. I’m that guy that goes up the down escalator some times, just because. This is who I am. I like being the wrench in the works, when the works need wrenching. Seeing behind the curtain, through the veil, was probably kind of inevitable. Seeing behind one too many times, in one to many milieus, has made me skeptical and cynical a bit, I know. I have to live with that.

Honestly, I try not to push it too hard. I'm no better at being an anti-church evangelist than I was at being a pro-church evangelist. Ask me, I'll tell ya. Otherwise, you probably would barely notice. I’m okay with mostly letting those around me enjoy the season. I’m not a humbug kind of cynic, but I don’t keep my mouth completely shut either. Christmas doesn’t make me sour, just thoughtful, and very observant.

And glad I don’t have to go to church.

So tomorrow I’ll go to Mom’s and help make dinner. We’ll open a couple presents (I’ve talked her into simple things with practicality, and no sweaters, but I can’t talk her out of it entirely). I’ll even have a little gift for her and Miriam to open, just cuz. And then, after they go to bed at their early hour, I’ll sneak up the stairwell and spend a bit of time thinking on the roof and staring up at the stars.

I’ll hope that maybe we’ll all reach out for our best selves a little more this year. I’ll wish for a pervasive empathy to settle like a swaddling blanket over the human race just a touch more than it ever has before. I’ll believe that we’re capable of it, and that, in itself, will be a little miracle for me. I’ll try to see things the way they really are and still be hopeful. Up there alone. On the roof.

Because that’s what matters – getting to the roof and having your eyes open enough to appreciate it when you get there.

At least that’s what I think.

Happy Seasons and Merry Greetings, everyone.

wikileaks and the cult of personality

I thought I was done. I thought that I said everything I wanted to say about this subject on Tuesday, but I guess not. Maybe today I can finish exorcising it.

I gave a whole paragraph on Tuesday to the concept of the cult of personality dynamic that is interfering so effectively with the larger, international political story. It wasn’t enough. I was influenced by my wish that, in spite of the side shows, the only thing we’d should stay focused on was the leaks. Not so much the content, but the overarching theme extant within them. The big picture.

So I said what I wanted to, for the most part, about that big picture story, the one that includes revelations regarding our leaders in public office and the undue obligation they seem to feel to preserving their own power and serving corporate interests. But I mentioned the cult of personality concept and, when the dust settled, I felt there was more to say about that. More to say about the concept of cult of personality, and more to say about how it specifically affects this story, with all of its high ideals and low behavior, not to mention the possibility of rape and coercion.

It’s hard to do that, stay focused on the big picture, especially when there's just so much information to process. There’s some major information overload happening on this topic, and so many story threads that it’s difficult at best to keep anything straight.

I’ve tried very hard, with lesser and greater degrees of success at times, to keep Julian Assange separate from the Afghan/Iraq/Cable leaks because I don’t think I believe in heroes. Just in general, there aren’t many individual people that can both be truly marvelous and aspire to the kind of notoriety that Assange aspires to. So I’m distrustful as a default position.

I was still disappointed when the allegations against Assange were made public this summer. There’s always a hope that somebody will live up to their own hype, right? It was clear fairly early though that Assange was just a human. Divisions within Wikileaks, narcissistic statements to the press, and then the accusations and the ongoing investigation; Assange was definitely just human, and maybe worse. If you haven’t heard what the allegations specifically are, this is from The Swedish Wire:

“The court heard Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner. The second charge alleged Assange "sexually molested" Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her "express wish" one should be used. The third charge claimed Assange "deliberately molested" Miss A on August 18 "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity". The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on August 17 without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.”

To be clear, in spite of the arrest warrant and Assange’s remand in the UK pending extradition hearings, these are still technically allegations only. No charges have been laid and Assange is wanted back in Sweden for questioning as part of the investigation. But they are really serious allegations.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, Assange and his lawyers suggest that the allegations are part of a smear campaign, and Assange has unequivocally denied any wrongdoing. And the specifics regarding how the investigation was started, then some charges dropped, the reinstated, and leaked to the press… it’s all very convoluted. And that’s only half of the story.

On the other side of the allegations are two women who brought the issue to the police. There are a endless theories drifting around the web regarding the reasons they spoke to the police. But they’re all theories, and theories and speculation in a rape case are just the wrong way to go.

It was not so long ago that not making criminals of victims, especially in a sexual abuse case, was held up as a pretty high ideal. Outside of this case, it still is (I hope). But inside it, suddenly it’s become okay to vilify the women who made the accusations and assume that they were either part of a giant intergovernmental conspiracy, or that their motives were purely personal and vengeful. Assuming that these women did anything but go to the police to express the perception that they were wronged and seek assistance in that regard is as unfair to them as it is to assume Assange’s guilt.

Let me say that again: Assuming nefarious intent on the part of the accusers is as wrong as assuming that the accused is guilty.

Some of my online friends have been very right in pointing out that fact, and also that we’ve been working really hard and for a long time as a society to change the mentality that victimizes victims twice. The vilification of Assange's accusers is a step backwards. My friends also rightly point out that progressive journalists and writers have been too quick to vilify the accusers in this case in the rush to defend Assange. I think that, to some degree, I'm guilty of that too and I have to own that.

That doesn’t mean that there are still lots of questions that deserve to be answered. The first one, though, needs to be whether or not there’s enough evidence for charges to be laid. If there is there will be the question, to be decided in a court of law, regarding guilt or innocence. If there isn't there may be other questions regarding motives, but it’s way too early for that. And either way, I think that there are questions to be asked regarding the actions and decisions regarding how the case has been handled by Swedish prosecutors. 

Regardless, I have limited hope that many of them ever will be answered. That seems to be how our world works, and it’s part of why I think what Wikileaks is doing is important.

I need to be really specific on that subject too. I believe that what Wikileaks is doing is important. Not Wikileaks itself. What they’re doing. Wikileaks is an organization that has taken collating, vetting and clearing whistleblowers’ leaks to the next level, but they weren’t the first. They most definitely won’t be the last. But they’ve raised the bar and changed the landscape, I believe, for the better.

I don’t believe this because I think that government should be utterly transparent, that every last bit of state craft should be completed in the public eye, but rather that it should be more transparent than it is. I believe that there is so much secrecy in this War on Terror world that it has become difficult, if not near impossible to trust our governments. Many people, including me, are left with a giant vacuum of trust where our faith should be. We don’t trust that our politicians are making decisions with anything like good intentions in mind.

I think that this kind of peak behind the curtain has a purpose: It can make us aware of the selfish, arrogant hubris with which our leaders conduct their affairs, driving home the point that we have to be far more active in governing our governors. It also reminds those in power that they aren’t immune or inviolate; that they are in power by the grace of our votes and will, and that they govern as extensions of the body politic. They exist to serve us. They need to be humble, and nowadays that means that they often need to be humbled.

And that’s why what Wikileaks is doing is important, or at least part of it.

But Wikileaks itself will become an institution in time. Perhaps, in some ways, it already has. Institutions often come into being because of a valid and righteous need. Somebody, or some group, sees the need and meets it. And then, over time, that organization, that movement, begins to be as interested in growing or preserving its own existence as much as staying true to the values and need that brought about its existence. And then it’s an institution, just as susceptible to corruption and hubris as any other institution.

At that point, the institution becomes as much a part of the problem as it is or was part of any solution.

I worry that this has happened, or did happen, to Julian Assange at some point. I see signs that he began to think he was more important than the idea, or the group effort. I worry that he made an institution of himself. I worry that he felt himself above others and above the rules that others have to abide by. I think that, whether there are charges brought against him or not, whether charges result in a guilty verdict or not, he was too casual and disrespectful in the way he treated those women in the summer. I think he started to believe his own press.

Fame and celebrity is a dangerous thing in this day and age. We’re vain creatures, we humans. I remember reading that the brain waves of our pets change dramatically when we pet them, approaching an alpha state, they are so euphoric at that touch, that attention. Fame can do that to us, I think. It certainly appears that way when I watch the behavior of the famous, purring under the spotlight, oblivious to the consequences of their actions or robbed of all common sense.

Julian Assange strikes me as, potentially, such a person. I worry that he was so caught up in doing something good, for good reasons, and became so obsessive about it that he lost sight of who he was and started to believe the newspapers and the fans more than the mirror he looked at every morning. I worry that he thought he could be careless with the lives around him and that it was okay to do so.

So, to be clear, I’m not a fan of Julian Assange. I think his ego pollutes what he’s trying to do. I think that he let his own desire to be front and center get in the way of something remarkable, and now it’s harder and harder to remove the one story from the other. I think that his apparent rock star belief that he could or should use his celebrity to be player was horribly misguided and kind of pathetic.

I’m not a fan of Wikileaks either, in and of itself, but I appreciate what they are doing. I think it’s important for this time and place. I’m not assuming Assange’s guilt or innocence, but I question whether he, or any one person, should be the ‘face’ of anything as big as Wikileaks. Giant, potentially world-changing ideas deserve better than one, frail human face.

I believe that criminal investigations and charges of rape should be treated seriously, all involved given their due respect until the investigation is completed and, if required, courts can render a verdict. Until that happens, all involved should be given the benefit of the doubt, treated as innocent until proven guilty, including and especially the alleged victims of abuse.

I believe that, if possible, when accusations against a person blur the line between personal behavior and the political actions of a group, when they muddy the water, we should try our hardest to separate the two issues and not conflate one with the other.

And I believe that I really hope that’s all I feel the need to say about this. 

‘Capable, generous men do not make victims, they nurture them.’ Julian Assange

Life is about making mistakes. Well, maybe not about making them, but they happen. I've made peace with that. Occasionally, I have really good days when I make good decisions in anticipation of the mistake it would be if I made another choice, hard decisions that are not efficient in terms of short term gain or ease, but rather work only when I measure in terms of how I want to look back on my life when I get to the end of it.

I was thinking about this concept on Saturday, both in personal and in societal terms, when I drove to Vancouver to participate in the CAPP solidarity march and protest demanding a full public inquiry in into the recent G8/G20 summit in Toronto. It was my own little thematic idea-track providing a context and mood to the day. I create these thematic playlists most days and, when the 'theme music' is good, when I can feel the kick drum, move with the syncopation, and lean into the melody and harmonies, I find myself edging into a sense of serendipity that I can only compare to good days in front of the keyboard clicking out the imaginary lives of the characters in my novel. It's a feeling of connectedness, something that approaches Epiphanical ecstasy at times, a dance of endorphins that makes everything feel just alright, if you know what I mean.

On these days, whether the insights feel optimistic or the clarity only provides confirmation for my pessimism, I feel like I'm in touch with something bigger. I don't attribute it to god or the universe. I know it's just a trick of biochemistry and psychological alignment, but I also don't care how or why. It's a powerful sensation and I'll take it any way I can get it.

I spent the morning walking through the Woodlands Memorial Garden. Woodlands Provincial Asylum for the Insane was an institution that operated between 1913 and 1996. At its peak it housed over 1250 people, many of whom died while incarcerated at the facility. Ideas regarding the developmentally challenged evolved a great deal through those years, but they were never really enlightened, even through the '80's and '90's when Woodlands was winding down and hundreds of patients were released without placement or support into the community. The impact on Vancouver's homeless population was enormous.

A plaque in the memorial states: “The memorial sculpture, Window Too High, represents the barred windows of the original Woodlands building that were set so high that the residents could not see out of them.” Over 300 people died while residing at Woodlands between 1920 and 1958, and were buried on the grounds. Later renovations actually desecrated these graves by using granite marker stones for patio and BBQ installations. In '99 the Memorial Garden was created and over 200 stones, only a portion of those removed, were reclaimed. Missing stones have been replaced with new plaques to commemorate and respect those that were once buried here. Only nine original graves survived the desecration. They are described as “silent sentinels” over this place that has been, in some small measure, reclaimed.

I was immediately struck, in light of that thematic sub-beat that was running through my head, by the dissonant irony that we seem to place so much emphasis on making things right in retrospect when we were (and are) so eager to participate in the desecration in the first place. I wondered how it was, in the '70's, that anyone thought it would be okay to use those stones to build patios? I wondered what failure of foresight could have justified such insensitivity.

Today, I wonder what can justify the failure of foresight we continue to practice, as individuals and as a culture, every day of our present. How do we not learn, when we are so often faced with the social and political necessity of reparation and reconciliation, to avoid the kind of callous disregard for each other that spawns the need for such campaigns of atonement?

I carried this feeling of intense species-shame into the afternoon and the protest. It seems like such a small thing to join with a couple hundred other people to walk three blocks chanting and shouting, sharing our communal outrage over the suspension of civil liberties that took place in Toronto during the weeks leading up to and through the G8/G20. A friend asked, very legitimately, “Does this really do anything?”

I found myself pondering again and again how it was that so many ISU officers thought it was okay to kick and beat people? How could McQuinty's cabinet enact the Public Protection Act with such cavalier disregard for the people they were elected to serve and then participate in the lies regarding its scope? How can Harper so consistently snub his arrogant nose at the Charter that his government is sworn to uphold? These are human beings, after all, whether that fact is always easy to remember or not in the midst of my frustration. They should be driven by the same basic understanding of respect and empathy as I am. We should all share a desire to see all people living with dignity. Is that such a radical concept?

How is it that, as a species, whether in the realm of politics, industry, finance, consumption, renewability, health care, or any of the other spheres in which we act with such short-sightedness, we seem to continue to make the same mistakes? How do we still justify decisions made in the interest of short-term profit or ease when the the obvious consequences loom at us over the horizon of tomorrow? Is our sense of duty to the future still so myopic that we think, “Oh well, fuck tomorrow. Our kids can put up a memorial one day. Let's make money and accumulate stuff while the sun shines”?

Yes, it is. That's exactly what's wrong. In our apathy or our sociopathic greed, we let these things happen. We have to own this, all of us. Getting past the self-inflicted denial is the first step.

In answer to my friend's question I had to admit that, in and of itself, the impact of the march on Saturday is marginal (especially when the mainstream media has admitted that they no longer desire to cover the G20 story and didn't even deign to send a single reporter to cover it).

But it does make a difference. After all, she came even though she hadn't heard about the march until I asked her to keep me company. We listened and learned together, shouted “shame” again and again as the three witnesses to the Toronto actions told their stories, listened to the social and NGO leaders and politicians, chanted our affirmations that, yes, this was what democracy looked like. We participated, as did the others, and the weight of our angst filled the street and Victory Park in its small way. Better that we were witness and remembered than that no-one did. Better to light a single candle, and all that, not giving into the apathy that seems to typify our culture. It is a big thing. And we were part of that.

We were part of saying that we will weigh our actions and their consequences in advance and with foresight. We will act in such a way as to not require memorial gardens one day to ease our shame. We will own it now, today, and make choices in hope of a better world and a kinder way of living. We will do this for ourselves and for our children and for theirs.

One day, maybe, our children's children will have better things to do than make up for our mistakes...

‘The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.’ Charles Bukowski

I was reading the news and came across the following stories about an activist being tried for hanging a banner, a brave whistle blower from the US military being court-martialed, and another activist turning himself in to face charges relating to G20 activities that seem, on the surface of them, spurious at best. In each of these cases there seems to be an intent  on the part of authorities to prosecute to a level that is punitive simply for the sake of retaliation, simply because these people have questioned the status quo and are thereby considered threats worthy of harassment.

The case of Mr. Manning and the accusations of leaking military video footage to Wikileaks seems particularly hypocritical to me. In any other industry other than the US military or government, Manning would be protected under US whistleblower laws. Why is it that the government and military feel they should be held exempt? (Of course, corporations feel that they should be held exempt too, but that’s another blog). I would think that they should be held to higher standards than any business. After all, they are supposed to be serving the people of a given country rather than the government of said country, are they not?

And in the case of both activists we have individuals who work tirelessly not only to support worthwhile causes, but who do so while also upholding some of the cornerstone rights upon which our ‘free’ societies are based; the right to protest, to show dissent and to question the actions of our governments and institutions; to hold accountable those in whom we have entrusted our civil liberties (because the mainstream media isn’t going to be doing it any time soon). Yet they are specifically targeted as dangerous individuals. Remember when we were up in arms about how China curtails rights; how Tiananmen was an aberration and a prime example of how the West was better than the East, democracy so much more free than communism, ‘us’ so much better than ‘them’?

I no longer believe that our politicians have anything even approximating our best interests in mind. When one does come along that actually stands for anything, stands for the people they represent and for concepts and morals that are universal, they too are singled out and driven into the mud. Libby Davies should be held up as an example of a politician that still actually stands for something. The rest just seem to bend over for anyone. Instead she’s criticized, threatened, demonized. Frankly, I’d take one of her over the whole lot of the rest of them.

And that ‘rest of them’ are the ones that have co-opted the police, those supposedly sworn to serve and protect us, and turned them into a pseudo-military force enlisted to preserve the plutocracy’s hegemony at the cost of our rights and liberties. This just will not do.

It prompted me, in a thread earlier today, to ask this: “I wonder at what point individual police officers, who might be 'nice people' and all that (and I know several), become responsible for the fact that they choose to remain working for those politicos and in support of obviously compromised institutions? Where does their moral responsibility begin and their job end? "I was following orders" hasn't been a valid excuse for 65 years or so now...”

That’s my question right now? At what point do people that are in positions to support our downhill slide ask, “Is what I’m doing wrong?”  When we look back twenty or fifty years from now, will we be looking at those who served on task forces like the ISU and be asking them “How could you?” in the same way that someone must have asked that guardsman at Trent State that question. How does a cop go to Toronto, beat up a bunch of unarmed protesters, and then go home to the wife and kiddies and look them in the eye? What has to take place in that mind to think that that’s an okay thing to do?

These are people after all, the politicians, the cops, the corrupt jurists and lawyers. Ostensibly they have the same DNA as us, the same propensity for humanism, for empathy, for decency. How do they ‘get there’, that place where threatening people with cameras is okay, and where threatening detainees with rape is appropriate? Hell, I know a few cops and, from what I’ve seen of them, they’re salt of the Earth, regular people that have to do an often incredibly difficult job going after real criminals, people that live with the nightmares of what they’ve had to bear witness to; of man’s inhumanity to man. The ones I know are great people doing a shitty job. And yet, they could very easily have been among those at the G20 smacking people with batons for no good reason, splitting their eyebrows open with shields just because, stomping seated protesters on the back with their boots in support of ‘leaders’ that don’t much care about us at all.

It tempts me to hate them for that. It takes an act of will to hate the system instead and realize that they are victims of it too, albeit willing ones. I’m just left wondering how much slack those individuals should get. When do they stop being unwilling employees or good soldiers and start being criminals themselves?

'I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.' Christopher Reeve

Like a lot of people here in Canada, I spent a fair bit of time keeping an eye on the G20 Summit in Toronto last weekend, and the road show that invariably follows it around. Occurring as it did over the days leading up to the anniversary of our national independence on July 1, the events that occurred in Toronto were cast in an especially ironic light. Anyone watching, listening or reading the news coming out of TO in the days leading up to and through the summit had to be struck by the grotesque largesse of the preparations and their associated costs. Anyone with a heart had to be dismayed by what they saw the police doing in the aftermath of the vandalism that took place on Saturday. Hopefully, we were looking close enough to notice more than just that vandalism and the 'reaction' to it, because there was certainly more to the story than the mainstream media was purporting, especially here in Canada. And while there were some good stories to come out of the weekend, a few reminders of what it is we hold dear and why we fight for our freedoms, it was a sad week for international diplomacy and a sadder one for Canadian civil liberties.

I'm not going to go into detail regarding what happened over the weekend. Suffice it to say that, as always, the mainstream media didn't cover the whole story. Frankly, I'm surprised that they covered as much as they did. No, to get to a closer semblance of the truth I spent time monitoring the alternative news sources online, looking for the stories that the infotainment industry doesn't cover, sharing little pieces with friends on the social networks, and I know that the truth is still something that you have to look for as much in between the lines as anywhere else. I'll also say this: While I don't support the Black Bloc tactic as a strategy (I think it misses the point, detracts from the primary messages, and provides too much of what the Security Forces are looking for as justification for their brutality), I don't blame them either. I believe that the Black Bloc provides the Police with their best opportunity to infiltrate and act as agent provocateurs. I think there's a better way, that when we adopt the piggish and brutal tactics of our enemies, then we become as bad as them. I think that's what Gandhi and King taught, and that works for me.

I was, in turns; profoundly moved by the courage of activists and discouraged by the actions of the police; frustrated by the Black Bloc tactics and nauseated by the actual violence perpetuated by the ISU; shocked by the callous brutality of too many of the security force and encouraged in small ways when I saw some of them obviously finding their duties distasteful; horrified by the suspension of civil liberties and enraged by the cavalier attitude with which the ISU went about flouting their disdain for those legal rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights; outraged at ISU lines charging a peaceful demonstration the moment they finished singing O Canada, and buoyed by video of two courageous demonstrators trying to stop the cruiser vandals or another making a looter drop the item he was about to steal. It was a weekend of ups and downs.

The vast majority of protesters were peaceful and loud yet the ISU rained down their violence primarily on these people. Over 900 arrested over the G8/G20 and over 700 released without charges – that says something. The conditions in the detention center were by many accounts horrible, and by some utterly horrifying, including threats of rape and cavity searches completed by ISU of the opposite sex and isolation of those 'identified' as members of the LBGT community. The 5-meter rule, a supposed amendment of the 1939 Public Works Protection Act that was secretly re-enacted by the Ontario cabinet, was touted by the police as a special temporary power granted them to tackle the extra security threat. That 5-meter law turned out to be a lie that the TPS Chief Blair chuckled about, but what it really means is that thousands of illegal search and seizures were completed over the weekend without probable cause.

The phrase 'Police State' was bandied about quite a bit, and if you read the stories, watch the videos, see the pictures, you might be inclined to agree. This was a disgusting display of arrogance and near-fascist hubris on the part of the Federal and Provincial governments and the ISU.

We should be ashamed. Lots of us are - of our country, our political 'leaders', our police forces. It was a very sad weekend for civil liberty in Canada.

It was also an amazingly empowering weekend to watch too. In spite of the brutality, the lies, the suspension of rights and the illegal detentions, there were still thousands of people willing to continue the fight. And the numbers grew as the weekend went on when regular folk saw what was happening and joined the protest. It carried over into the new week too with thousands more participating in solidarity marches in Hamilton, Quebec, Montreal, Winnipeg, Regina and Vancouver.

This is the way it works. Even when the politicians and police think they've tricked us into looking bad, they forget their own ability to make themselves look worse. Their abuse doesn't make people cower in fear; it makes more people stand up. Just like fighting un-winable wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, their hubris creates more enemies than it oppresses. And a tipping point will come in time.

I like to hope that the tipping point will occur peacefully when enough people open their eyes and see the world for what it actually is and decide, goddammit, that there must be a better way. Sometimes, though, I despair that the odds of a peaceful resolution to all of this will remain slim. And then I see someone stand when it would be easier to stay down, choose peace when violence would be expected, be courageous when it would be easy to run away, and I remember why people fight for these things: because they matter and because we know they do.

I'd like to think that we can aspire to something better than the world we live in because I see individuals doing it all the time. But I wonder if we'll hit that tipping point in time. Mostly we seem bent of self-destruction, like in the parable of the scorpion and the frog – it seems to be our nature. But I see the good too and think; maybe we can hold on long enough, yell loud enough, stand firm enough to get us through to that magic point where the sane outnumber the insane and we can actually start in a better direction.

Anyway, links are below if you missed it. It's not a comprehensive list, but it'll get'cha started if you're so inclined...

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2724231020100627
http://www.newkerala.com/news/fullnews-120259.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc
http://g20.torontomobilize.org/node/173
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=784lay9401U&feature=related
http://www.straight.com/article-331174/vancouver/black-bloc-smashes-windows-causes-mayhem-toronto-g20-meeting
http://videosift.com/video/Toronto-G20-the-Shape-of-things-to-Come
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/G20/2010/06/26/14525911.html
http://www.torontosun.com/news/g20/2010/06/27/14534051.html
http://current.com/news/92515480_video-compilation-of-police-violence-at-toronto-g20.htm
http://www.blogto.com/city/2010/06/police_trap_g20_protesters_at_queen_and_spadina/
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/06/29/g20-chief-fence571.html
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/statica/2010/07/g8g20-communiqué-journalists-attacked-police-g20-protests
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/06/29/g20-oiprd-reporters-complaint.html
http://jezebel.com/5575356/g20-journalist-threatened-with-rape-violence-in-jail
http://www.straight.com/article-332050/vancouver/vancouver-protest-planned-show-solidarity-g20-detainees-black-bloc-activists
http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/photo/g20-solidarity-rally-and-protest-against-polic-repression-g20-protests-montreal/4006
http://mynews.ctv.ca/mediadetails/2886697?collection=742&offset=0&siteT

‘Can this Onion Ring get more fans than Stephen Harper?’ Facebook Fansite Page, 02.04.10

Yesterday a Facebook group started asking this very question and inviting people to join up. By the time I found it yesterday afternoon membership had already exceeded 45,000. This morning it has exceeded 64,000 fans and is growing at a rate in excess of 1000 fans per hour.

‘We cannot be too earnest, too persistent, too determined, about living superior to the herd-instinct.’ Author Unknown (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

A couple things happened this week that made me think of this one, both of them while I was surfing around on Facebook, and both of them connected to the kind of viral diffusion that social networking is capable of. While that viral dynamic can be a powerful tool and is probably the last truly free form of expression and dissemination left to us, that same freedom carries with it potential for manipulation, desensitization, vapid distraction and the perpetuation of a continual state of irrational fear, even if said state is mild. In a closed environment it’s usually easy to filter out the crap, but in a free one we have to be more careful and discriminating or we can be overwhelmed by a combination of obtuse ignorance and intentional misdirection.

If we fall prey to the BS, we will end up just following the herd, and that’s both boring and disgusting. I mean, if you aren’t at the front of the pack, then your nose is crammed in someone else’s fuzzy butt. Who wants that?

Neither of the two catalysts for this rant was substantial or dramatic in nature, but both were potentially dramatically viral, commanding trends that were noticeable. The first was completely benign drivel, a viral marketing ploy dressed up to be a game in the form of a chain thread encouraging people to do a search on their name in a small, slang-style urban dictionary, and then re-post the directions, and the ostensibly humorous or felicitous result of the search, as their status. As I said: benign, possibly even funny except for the utter innocuousness of the ‘game’. I think, most often, that while these kinds of viral marketing campaigns are meant to drive site hits, they are also something that the marketers behind them take evil glee in, sitting back, watching the hit counters surge, and chuckling over the utter manipulability of the populace they are paid to dupe and coerce.

On those grounds alone, I object to the ploys and strategies and refuse to participate. In fact, I find that I enjoy the sardonic responses to these threads far more than the thread itself. For this one, as soon as I saw it start to trend, I posted a modified version encouraging people to follow the instructions and substitute ‘SHEEP’ for their name. The result describes exactly what this kind of viral marketing counts on: the behavior of a creature devoid of reason that follows the fuzzy ass in front of them just because, in all absence of self-possession or independent thought.

The second example involved a scare chain thread warning people that they should perform a search for a certain phrase in the security block section of their privacy settings. The entry brought up a list of names of people you would never have heard of and the post suggested that these people somehow had access to your profile and personal information. They didn’t. The privacy block field was just acting as a search engine, pulling up the names of people who had expressed association to a certain company on their profile. So tons of people were starting to block other people simply because someone told them to follow a few semi-arcane and techy instructions. The list of people to block, which started at around 20, was up to around 75 by the time I checked it out, growing because the search was starting to draw on the names of people that had posted the status warning and were subsequently associated by reference with the company mentioned. Yes, I checked it out, right after I Googled the topic and found out it was a farce.

This is a less benign form of viral dissemination. I can only make guesses regarding the intent of the original publisher, but I can’t see it being a positive one. Taken to an illogical extreme, everyone on Facebook could have eventually posted the status, become associated with the company in the search engine, and we’d all have to block everyone. Stupid. And all it took to find out that the scare was a farce was to do a one-minute search and read an article.

My point? I mean, really, neither of these examples was going to result in a complete collapse of society, and the first one even had the potential to be mildly diverting and entertaining, right? Okay, if you say so… Don’t get me wrong, I like having fun. And having fun in general, being occasionally diverted by a good movie, book, game, concert, whatever… can be a good thing. Hell, I want to be a novelist, so I hope I can be diverting enough to sell a few books. My point is that we need to be conscious of when attempts are being made to divert our attention. If we are being entertained, we need to make choices about how and when that happens.

If you do this, pursue your entertainment with a bit of conscious awareness, then you will be declaring open war on the marketers of the world, just so you know. Their intent is to keep you dumb and make your choices for you, manipulating your attention and usurping your freewill. And it’s not just about diversion either. This concept applies to politics, consumption, social conformity, religion, self-development, fashion, fitness, self-perception and body image… the list could go on and on.

Our time, our generation, has been called the Age of Persuasion by Terry O’Reilly. We are all about ‘getting to yes’ and learning how to ‘make friends and influence people’. What we rarely take the time to realize is that, while we’re running around increasing our influence, everyone else is doing it too. We’re all running around trying to get one up on the other guy, be smarter, sneakier, horde more. We’ve been duped into this self-defeating behavior by ideologies and marketing philosophies that treat people as demographic targets and potential revenue sources instead of, well, people. We are deep into the process, in a very real way, of abdicating our humanity in favor of ‘greater profits and mechanical amusements’.

I’m not saying that you should forgo all forms of amusement. I certainly don’t plan on doing that and I need every one of you to buy my book if and when it gets on the bookshelves. We need that diversion sometimes, a chance to decompress and laugh or sigh or cry. What I am suggesting is that you keep your eyes open. That’s right, open ‘em up. A bit more now. There. Keep them that way. You make your choices instead of letting them make your choices. You see through their lies instead of them leading you through the fog. Take control of your life and your mind and your decisions. It’s empowering, trust me.

You may not always like what you see when you stick your head up out of the herd, but it has to be better than the fuzzy butt you would other wise be staring at.

‘It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past, rather that the hope of creating the future, dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.’ Bertrand Russell

I was reading a critique of the US educational system, the focus of the article being on the alarming downward trend that was extant in US achievement standards over the last forty years in spite of the increased attention and funding that the system has received. (This trend, although perhaps not so dramatic, is extant in Canada as well, just so I’m clear that this isn’t some sort of nationalist argument.) The ultimate point of the argument was that the failure of the system to improve the overall educational system was no failure at all; rather, it was the original intent. The crux of the argument was that a government capable of over-seeing NASA and space flight, capable of mounting multi-billion dollar military campaigns, capable of facilitating a multi-billion dollar taxation system, would not be as utterly incompetent in the creation of a better education system unless the greater failure of that system was their intent.

Think about it for a minute: Why is it that our governments can be very successful at accomplishing those things that support their control and political infrastructure, but seem incapable of accomplishing anything that will actually benefit the public? I would suggest that they fail, at best, because our benefit is inconsequential to politicians who, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, are concerned only with their own security and comfort, their own consumption, and their own ability to affect some sense of power. At worst, it could be argued that the general ignorance of the greater population is a crucial aspect of a system designed to increase social and intellectual stratification. A dumb majority is more easily controlled.

We live within a secular system. That’s a simple fact. Our society, the world around us, our cultural values and the influence of all of these dynamics on the system itself are in a constant state of flux, ostensibly evolving in response to the pressures that are created within that system and affected upon it. It could also be argued convincingly that this social evolution has been co-opted in a short-term sense; that our secular system is currently engineered contrary to how it might evolve in the absence of a culture that uses as its primary impulse the generation of revenue, and worships as its primary deity the concept of free-market economy as the savior of the species. Of course, evolution will re-establish pre-eminence sooner or later, either when we smarten up and begin to establish a social construct that seeks a more harmonious state of equilibrium with our environment, and a truly democratic and egalitarian social system, or when we drive the global meta-system to the brink of collapse and drive ourselves to extinction. One of the two will happen, for the free-market commitment to profit at any cost is at odds with our long-term survival as a species. It’s a one-or-the-other dynamic.

To make the right choices as the fourth dimension exerts its influence over us, it is our children (perhaps their children too, depending on which version of climate change and social dynamic theory you adhere to) that will have to stand up, where we have and are not, and reclaim our future. And yet they are the very ones that are being subverted by the educational system to avoid free thought at all costs, to become sheep within the herd and focus on nothing more than accumulating the largest amount of the newest stuff possible – to focus only on the fuzzy butt in front or beside them, and be concerned only with doing as well as or better than that fuzzy butt.

In spite of all the work our governments are doing to undermine the educations system, there ironically seems to be a growing sense of discontent and this says more about the sovereignty of the human spirit than anything else. Young and old alike are standing up in greater numbers to say, “Hey, something isn’t right here!” or, “We know what isn’t right and we’re going to do something about it.” From the script of The Network, many are starting to say, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Our freedom starts where our trust of our current political and social institutions ends. They aren’t looking out for us, but the inclination to stand up for ourselves seems to be increasing. If the systems that educate all of us, from the education system to our daily fix of mass media, aren’t going to foster our potential, I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves, educate ourselves, motivate ourselves, and find a non-passive yet non-violent way to affect change, the change that we desire for the whole of our species and planet.

If those who are paid to serve us feel rather that we are here to serve them, then stop looking to them for inspiration and hope. It’s like looking to a rock for comfort, or maybe like looking to a shark for it. Instead, we should be looking within ourselves and, when we find that spark of hope, we should be passing it forward. It is our responsibility to inspire each other and the next generation; our right to stand and be counted; our dignity that is at stake; our survival that hangs in the balance. If the system won’t be inspired or inspiring, then I guess it’s up to us to look forward with realistic hope and pragmatic idealism to “be the change we want to see in the world.”

Honk if you agree…