Tag Archives: politics

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Trust and Politics: I Believe Him

The past week or so, I’ve actually been around, with some time and some thoughts that I could have been blogging, but I just couldn’t bring myself to write when everybody in the tiny circle of my blogging world could think of nothing but the culmination of the past two years of perpetual election. I was going to hide until after talking about the election per se had become relatively passé, but it turns out, I kind of can’t.

I doubt I’m saying anything that hasn’t been said by many before, and better, but I’ve been seeing a lot of continued skepticism from some of the people around me. And you know, I’m under no illusions that now-president-elect Obama is any kind of radical leftist who will enact policies that will really fuck with corporate America or seriously revolutionize the status quo (which, in my world, are good things. Because I am a socialist, among other things). I’m also well aware of the limitations that are inherent in the office and the structure, and that there’s only so much one person can do from one seat, however powerful.

The whole campaign, listening to Obama speak has given me hope. Whatever else he is, the man has the capacity to inspire. To energize. To excite people. That shit matters. Having something to frame the fight around makes it possible to fight. I’m as frustrated and politically cynical as anybody, but the man is such a brilliant, skilled politician that I manage to forget all that. I believe him.

I was watching the results on NBC with some friends, and of course, after they came in, between McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s acceptance speech, Brian Williams et al were telling the narrative they had been handed for the Obama victory: Only in America. Anything is possible, but only in America. Many things will reignite my cynicism, and I have to confess, despite the circumstances, American exceptionalism is one of them. For one thing, only in America, what? Only in America can a black man be elected? Why yes, that is mighty gracious of you folks. Congratulations on not letting racism win. Again. This time. For now. Congratulations on taking the contrast between a mediocre politician who has run an exceptionally poor campaign and made it exceedingly clear that he has no real plan for dealing with the kinds of problems the US is facing right now and one of the most impressive leaders, brilliant rhetoricians, intelligent and skilled policy makers that has emerged on the world stage in a damn long time, and still ending up with a popular vote in the 50-50 range. Only in America can we…overcome everything that was fucked up about us? Well, it would have been nice if it could have been not fucked up in the first place, or if it hadn’t taken literally centuries, not to mention the fact that, obviously, it’s not anywhere near overcome yet, and oh yeah, plenty of other places in the world have been trying to do exactly that (South Africa comes to mind immediately). To be frank, it felt like NBC was giving the nation a giant cookie for the very basics in not being an asshole.

And I felt bad, because they brought out a congressman who had been seriously active in the civil rights struggle, and I found myself feeling cynical even at hearing him say these things, in that case because the line NBC was playing was that this battle is over. We can all pack up and go home, there’s no more fight to be fought. Inspirational? Hell yeah. Has something been overcome? You’re damn straight it has. This shit matters, I know it does. But at that point, NBC was setting the stage for us never to be able to talk about race again, because weren’t we there? It’s over. And I was cynical.

Then there was that speech. Yes we can. That absolute confidence, faith, and clarity of purpose. That refusal to pretend that any of this is easy. That constant focus on giving some direction. Going somewhere, and making damn sure that it’s forwards. He says “Yes, we can” and fuck, I believe him. I don’t believe any politicians. I don’t have a lot of trust for our political institutions, and I make my political choices accepting the reality of manipulation and near-constant bullshit from all sides. This guy? I believe him. I don’t agree with all of his positions, and he’s still far to the right of where I’d like my politics to sit. But I even believe him when he stands up there and says he wants to listen, especially when his consitutuents disagree with him. I even believe him when he raises the possibility of listening to the rest of the world.

Say what you will, but that shit matters. US friends: congratulations (I guess? What does one say about such a thing?). If you could please avoid starting to talk about 2012 for at least a year or so, I would really appreciate it.

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Idol-ization

As an introductory sidebar, I’m immensely grateful that I’m Canadian right now, since from where I sit, the Democratic primary looks to be bringing out the ugliest in a lot of people, and I imagine that offline, when you have to discuss your vote, your reasons, and the potential prejudices it reveals ad infinitum with family, friends and strangers on the bus, it’s even less pleasant.

The charged emotion and people taking positions on one “side” or another is bringing to the surface something that I see a lot during strong disagreements among passionate people – the tendency to create idols of various individuals (sometimes the candidates, sometimes just figurehead individuals involved in movements or political parties). In the narratives, these people are no longer human beings, but rather representatives of entire categories of ideals, faces attached not to bodies, but to concepts, statements, actions; in these cases, always to That Which Is Unquestioningly Good. On a grand scale, MLK is treated with this kind of pedestal-placement, and much analysis has gone into how this serves to whitewash his record, at the same time as a great deal of time has been spent trying to root out his imperfections, his possible infidelities, his missteps. If he can be proven imperfect, none of us will have to listen to him.

Since it isn’t possible that That Which Is Unquestionably Good is wrong, criticism of the figurehead, the representative, the idol becomes criticism of the ideals. I really liked this post of Octogalore’s on ageism, and how many feminists and other anti-oppression activists seem to miss that particular locus of privilege. I made a comment, but very shortly after I did, another commenter (smmo at 11:33 a.m.; Firefox seems to hate the idea that I want to link directly to the comment and crashes whenever I try) linked back to the debate between Gloria Steinem and Melissa Harris-Lacewell that took place after Steinem’s much-criticized editorial on race/gender oppression. After this comment, I honestly felt it was useless to try to weigh in on the conversation altogether (emphasis mine):

I remember watching it then and being enraged by H-L’s disrespect for Gloria Steinem. This is a lion of a woman, a hero, a legend, and she’s being told she hasn’t sufficiently considered questions of race and gender? Really? The hostility and dismissive attitude really comes out in the video. It worries me that this is coming from an Obama supporter. Move out of the way, old hags, we got NEW IDEAS here.

Now, I’m far too conflict avoidant a lot of the time, and my immediate reaction to dismiss the whole conversation out of hand is a classic example of my own tendency to throw babies aplenty out with all kinds of bathwater. But there are two factors in that very brief comment that are characteristic of so much of the conversation/commentary around this primary and around race/gender oppression in general (not just now). If Gloria Steinem’s arguments hold water, they need to hold water on their own, based on their own merits, not because they come with her name attached to them. Her legendary status and past heroics don’t change the content of what she said, and it really frustrates me that this comment was packaged around the issue of ageism. Steinem’s editorial and the commentary she gave during that debate were problematic at best, and it’s total bullshit to suggest that she’s beyond reproach – that makes her beyond humanity, an idol, an icon, a legend. For about the billionth time, an idol, an icon, a legend is not a person. The second reason that comment was so frustrating was the statement that “it’s worrisome that an Obama supporter should speak this way”, with its accompanying tones of presumed Kool-aid consumption or strategic willingness to dismiss others, and what I wouldn’t GIVE right now for people to be talking about American politics rather than American idols, icons and personalities who happen to be running for president.

I didn’t rewatch that debate just now, so maybe there’s a dismissiveness that I missed back in January, and Harris-Lacewell does, in fact, adopt a tone of “move aside, third wave coming through”, but honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if a relatively young academic weren’t just intimidated to be debating with the aforementioned “lion of a woman”, suddenly receiving a much larger stage and audience as a result of the name, and coming out more aggressively in order to compensate for that. The point is that Gloria Steinem deserves respect not because she’s a legend, not because she’s lived a certain length of time, not because she’s accomplished x number of things, but because she’s a human being. I’m not denying that ageism is a real phenomenon, but as was noted in the comments at Octogalore’s, it’s equally common for younger women to be dismissed as flighty, not capable of understanding complex ideas, not knowing their place, and for these women to be told to hold their tongues while the important folk do all the teaching.

What I can’t help but notice is that nobody’s talking to people anymore; they’re all talking to thoughts and ideas and faces tenuously attached to concepts, concepts as broad as “race” and “feminism” and “hope”. Sometimes people are being attached to attachments, as Harris-Lacewell is here, to that increasingly vague and nebulous concept called “Obama”. It’s all a series of interchangeable masks, each representing That Which Is Unquestionably Good, and the only point of the political process is to get more “people” wearing your mask.

I find the whole damn thing exhausting.

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Political Apologetics

We’ve now got our very own “caught on tape making insane homophobic slurs” political scandal up here in the Great White North. In this case, the offending comments in question were made in 1991, and have only now come to light because a video was left behind in the headquarters of Saskatchwan’s official opposition, into which the NDP have just recently moved. The speakers on the tape are all still involved in politics, and have in fact moved up in the world rather substantially.

Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski has issued an apology for the statements – CBC has video as well as commentary. What interests me is that it seems the spin that most (or at least many) commenters are latching on to is “Haven’t you ever said something you regret? Let it go”. Within the first five comments there right now, I see:

There are 154 comments on tihs story as I type. I wonder how many there would be if everyone who had said something that they regret in the last 16 years removed there comment. At least a lot of people recognize that saying something stupid is something that happens to a lot of people.

and

i’m not sure why something said 16 yrs ago should reflect a persons position on ANYTHING today… lets be honest, we ALL evolve in our thinking and understanding on a variety of issues pretty much every day

So already (after two days) we’ve hit the tired narrative of “the poor, put upon straight white guy who you crazy left-wing nutjobs just won’t stop hounding“. I should note that while I have seen near-constant calls to give the poor guy the benefit of the doubt, to not let his precious career be ruined over something as trite as dividing the world into quality guys like him as against those disease-ridden f*gg*ts, I have seen absolutely no evaluation of his position or record on GLBT rights over the past 16 years used to back up this benefit of the doubt that we’re supposed to be giving him. Now, granted, I haven’t looked that hard, but it strikes me that before leaping to the conclusion that because it was 1991 and he had a bad moustache back then, he can’t possibly hold the same bad beliefs and we should therefore accept his remorse at face value, we should maybe get some facts to back up the claim that he’s cleaned up his brain to match his face and his (public) rhetoric.

Well, conveniently, Lukiwski’s been a federal MP since 2004, which means that he was sitting in parliament when Bill C-38, redefining marriage as “the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others” (ie. eliminating references to “one man and one woman”) was passed in 2005. And the “Campaign Life Coalition” has ever-so-kindly (if a little revealingly) published on their website in easily accessible fashion a breakdown of how each MP voted on that very relevant gay rights bill. And three short years ago, our friend Tom fell into the “nay” camp on that one, so either his evolution has been more recent, or we’re all just supposed to be glad he no longer makes dirty fingernail references. On camera.

Of course I’ve said and done things I regret. And sometimes I’ve apologized for them, though admittedly, sometimes only after being exposed or at risk of exposure anyway. Sometimes I didn’t even manage to do that for years afterwards. The thing about apology and forgiveness, though, as I’ve written about before, is for it to be sincere, it can’t really be coming from a place of expectation. If I’m apologizing just for the sake of keeping my job, scoring (or avoiding losing) political points, or even hanging on to my relationship, I don’t really mean the apology. If I’m apologizing with no evidence of actual change, if my apology really is just all about me, me, me on every level, then why the fuck should I be forgiven?

These “apologies” have become a standard part of the political script, and I know we all know they’re bullshit. I know that, in this script, now that we’ve already skipped to the part where we feel sorry for the put-upon victim of the PC gestapo, the next lines have something to do with dismissing those of us who are unsatisfied with this soliloquy with statements like “WHAT MORE DO YOU PEOPLE WANT???”

Well, for starters, an apology that’s an actual apology. Evidence of change. The merest *hint* that he’s more sorry for the actual words than regretful that he left that goddamn tape where those goddamn socialists might find it sixteen years later. And if I’m starting onto the really wishful thinking, how about people running my government who demonstrate serious support for anti-oppression work, human rights legislation and equality? A media that refuses to forget stuff like this from our elected officials until there’s real evidence that there’s reason to forgive? A general public who doesn’t buy into the standard party line handed to them by the mighty white boys who want to stay in power?

Oh, and a pony.

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Same Song, Different Country

There have been several a few truly awful news stories lately referring to female voters as “swooning” and “screaming” and “fainting” over Barack Obama. As opposed to, you know, just voting for the guy. Silly rabbit. Everyone knows women think exclusively in terms of relationships.

Now, Barack Obama is (on top of being a strong politician and intelligent, big picture thinker) a skilled rhetorician and a charming man. So maybe, you say (where you = several coworkers of mine who, to be frank, don’t really think very much), this wouldn’t happen if it weren’t so easy to imagine him as the spark igniting the next Beatlemania.

Except that back in September, I made this point with respect to a CBC article on the Ontario election. And they were talking about Howard Hampton. This has nothing to do with who the politicians are. The American articles are being quite a lot more explicit about it than the CBC was, but the message is the same: when we think of female voters, it is natural–consciously or subconsciously–to think and speak about them using language that evokes a starry-eyed little lady idolizing her man, looking for that fabulous guy who will protect her and save her from having to do any of that pesky thinking stuff.

What. Ever.

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Canada on the US (and vice versa)

A recent poll has determined that 15% of respondents would give up their ballot in the next Canadian federal election in order to be able to cast one in the American presidential race. There have been a couple of commenters blaming that on the overwhelming media coverage of the race, and I’ve heard a few people shaking their heads and calling it some kind of crisis of national pride. Which is why I tend to appreciate this comment, by a guy identified only as Nathan from Alberta:

I’m rather bemused by some of the posts here. We all know how much Canadians (in general) despise Americans. We’re SO much better than they are. In fact, if asked to describe what it means to be a Canadian, most Canadians choose to contrast themselves to Americans….I hear so often about “arrogant Americans,” but my observation, both in this forum and elsewhere, is that we are “self-righteous and superior Canadians.”

The poll also determined that a large percentage (over half) of Canadians think that the US is a negative force in the world, and I suspect this commenter is fuming over that when he refers to our despising of Americans. But I do think he’s got a point in looking at how we keep thinking that bigger and more public must necessarily have a bigger impact on our lives. And obviously, the results of the US election will make a far greater difference to a far larger number of lives than anything that could ever happen in Canada. But you know…think globally, act locally and all that. There is something of an arrogance to wanting to be a small fish in a big pond, partially because I’m assuming it has at least something to do with assuming that eventually you’ll be a big fish. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, maybe we can fix America!

And what’s the thing the Americans are mentioning about us these days? Well, it’s a week old, but apparently “Canadian” is the latest racist euphemism. I’ve seen a couple of hypotheses as to why, including one that attributes it to the name of a river in Texas that sounds quite similar to “Canada”, but what’s left of my linguist brain tends to assume that it takes too many steps backwards to make that one work (not least because at some point, even if you are thinking initially of the river, you have to make the leap to referring to people with the same derivation that we use for actual Canadians). That residual linguist brain is pinging a little more strongly with a point made in the National Post article, which hypothesizes that it’s based on a sense of Canadians as the “other”.

I’d go a step further and suggest that it’s actually based on a sense of Canadians as completely and totally innocuous and irrelevant. Nobody can be offended to be called “Canadian”, because it’s kind of like calling you a stuffed animal. It will go absolutely unnoticed to be speaking in negative terms about anyone using the term “Canadian”, because what could be wrong with Canadians? I think in order to “other” a group, one actually has to care that the group exists, develop some characteristics that must be attributed to/projected onto that group, a bunch of features that one can describe the self as “not”. For all the blather in the NP and whatever other Canadian media outlets have noticed this story, the word has absolutely nothing to do with Canadians.

This is one seriously messed up codependent relationship we’ve got going on, here.

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What Is Wrong With You People?

I understand very, very little about the political implications of the Benazir Bhutto assassination. I’m of the general opinion that killing people is bad, and that murdering her and a dozen or so other individuals is pretty much just staggeringly fucked up. I just don’t know what to say beyond that. What I do understand well enough to talk about is the “what the hell is wrong with you people” factor of Time and CNN.

Time’s obituary for Bhutto uses the tagline

Almost an iconic figure in the West, the Pakistani politician never truly figured out how to exercise her power

What the hell does that even mean? I really want to unpack just that phrase, but I find it so convoluted, and in the context of a woman who was just murdered, more than a little victim-blaming. She never really figured it out? Like, she was just kinda slow on the uptake on how this “power” thing worked? Not that, you know, her power was seriously limited by the presence of people around her who were willing to go so far as to kill her in order to prevent her from “exercising” it.

And here’s the phrase from the obituary that fills me with boiling rage (emphasis mine):

However, in the final analysis, her career was an almost tawdry cycle of exile, house arrest, ascent into power and dismissal, much sound and fury and signifying little.

It’s like the American news media just has to see things as soap operas. Like their/our brains have been so addled by casual entertainment that exile and house arrest, the constant presence of violence (having seen multiple family members executed or murdered), threats, rampant misogyny and innumerable other insanities have to be slotted in to a narrative style that makes such things trite. Tawdry. Ho-hum. I saw that on Days last year–couldn’t you people write a better storyline? Exile went out with Napoleon.

Not to mention that again, there is some serious victim-blaming going on here. As though she actively engineered such a tawdry career. The woman was just murdered, and already we have to talk about why she wasn’t good enough, why she didn’t do enough, how all she could do was act as a figure, an icon. Sound and fury.

Well, this is a tale told by an idiot.

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Electoral Structures and Media Narratives

In an abstract academic sense, I’m fascinated by the election process in the US (in a human sense, I’m horrified and depressed by it, so I suspect that the academic distance aspect is a defense mechanism). Leading up to the Ontario election, I realized how the whole show seemed somewhat diminished to me. Part of that, I think, is simply the way we tend to think of “bigger” as “more important”, meaning that national elections manage to capture the imagination more than provincial ones, even though most of the issues that affect our lives most directly (health care, education, welfare) are within the provincial jurisdiction. I remember finding myself taken aback, however, to actually recognize that there was far more attention being paid–even considering the proportional populations–to the US presidential election, which is still over a year from taking place, than there was to a local election even weeks before the event.

A question an American friend asked recently about the workings of the British electoral system got me wondering about a couple of things. First, I’m not sure just how unfamiliar most Americans are with parliamentary structures and elections, so trying to explain the system often forces me to recognize just how different it actually is from the US version, because I try to really get at the basics, including the kinds of things I completely take for granted. And then in turn I question whether the system itself, not just our relatively small population and world relevance, makes it a hell of a lot more difficult to construct these sweeping narratives of heroism or falling from grace. There are certainly cultural elements at work, but I’m wondering about the chicken-or-egg aspects of those cultural ideals as well. It’s getting to be more and more the case that people vote because they believe in and trust certain parties (and by extension, party leaders) rather than individual candidates in local ridings, but the system is premised on a much more localized, bottom-up model. It’s tough to create mythologies of lone heroism, of individual leaders who single-handedly steer the country through major challenges, with that kind of political basis.

I’m not saying there’s no space for leadership, and we certainly have a couple of historical larger-than-life figures (Trudeau comes immediately to mind), but for the most part, we seem to see movements and events as almost autonomous cultural forces. Preston Manning was among the major driving forces behind the creation of the current political right-wing in Canada, and he actually was quite visionary about it, but the way we talk about it has a great deal more to do with “Western alienation” as a concept. I suspect if the US actually assumes any kind of universal health care model, the name of the president who pushes it through will be etched in the memories of the American public and, by extension, the world, ignoring the multitudes of politicians and activists who have been laying the foundation for decades. I couldn’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken to who don’t recognize the name “Tommy Douglas” even after he was selected as CBC’s “Greatest Canadian” (and, incidentally, after I’ve in the process discovered that he was Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather).

We’ve had a female prime minister. For about twenty minutes, granted, but the process by which she became PM–getting the leadership of the Conservative party when Brian Mulroney retired while in office–is inherently way less dramatic than what’s happening with Hillary Clinton right now (whether she manages to win even the nomination or not). Maybe it would have been different if Campbell had been chosen in a situation in which it wasn’t already apparent that the party was going to be decimated in the election no matter how she ran her campaign, but I can’t imagine it would have been quite like this.

I’m kind of tossing a bunch of ideas together here, and I don’t really have a good way to wrap it up. Sometimes I forget I’m Canadian, so much does the American process consume me via the blogs I read/TV I watch, and sometimes that becomes incredibly disempowering, but having this basic outside-looking-in perspective is admittedly kind of fun at times.