Red Sheep, Blue Tribe

I normally stay away from writing about politics. I’ll give you two reasons.

• The noble reason: I like to think I’m above the fray, and I’m not interested enough to stay on top of every issue.

However, I don’t really consider this a political post. Because American politics is no longer political, it’s cultural.

For your consideration, here are a few snippets of so-called political discourse culled from Twitter in the last couple of days:

• “Michelle “Shaniqua” Obama Bin Laden Proven To Be A Racist”




• “Please keep coming back to Philadelphia, jackhole”(in reference to McCain)




• “…if Obama was white, he would have been laughed out of the primary runoff.”




• “Talking Barbie said ‘Math is Hard.’ Talking Caribou Barbie says ‘Foreign Policy is Hard.’”




• “…tell me Sarah Palin isn’t a pigf***er.”.

What is wrong with you people? What is wrong with all of us?

Why do we act like soccer hooligans when it comes to politics? There is no civility any more, no critical thinking. Both sides see in black and white. Listen to the pundits on TV or read the bloggers. They cannot say a single good word about someone on the other side. The “strategists” have an excuse; spin is their job. But for the rest of us: has our diet of sound bites made us so intellectually lazy that we just swallow all that?

Everyone on the left is a hippie, a terrorist, or an anarchist. Everyone on the right is evil, stupid, a hypocrite, or just plain out of touch. Are we that different from each other?

Or are we just preaching to our own choirs in our own echo chambers, having forgotten how to have intelligent discourse with someone who doesn’t think just like us? We hide in our red-state or blue-state tribes, and we have lost the ability to relate to people outside of our little boxes. The ideals of those on the other side are lunacy to us, because we don’t know anyone who thinks like that.

We surround ourselves with people who think like us, talk like us, look like us. Thanks to the Internet, if we don’t live near anyone just like us, we can still be friends with them on Facebook. We don’t have to talk to the neighbors next door if we don’t like their bumper sticker. But on Twitter, or the blogs, we can be pretty certain that we’re among “friends” and everyone’s going to agree with everything we say. If not, well, it’s easy to call people names with a keyboard.

So much for the marketplace of ideas.

I promised you two reasons I don’t like to write about politics, didn’t I?

• The honest reason: I’m afraid it would alienate me from 99 percent of the people in my tribe. I have a college degree. I write and I build Web sites. I use a Mac (and you can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers). You tell me who I’m supposed to vote for.

The problem is, I have a few too many Red Tribe values that, as far as I can tell, aren’t shared by the leader of the Blue Tribe.

But you know what? Who cares?

In truth, I’d take either candidate at this point. All four people in the race are amazing human beings with admirable qualities: courage, dignity, wisdom, spunk. Or do you have so little faith in our political system that you think only one side of the machine turns out decent products? George Bush is the worst president ever. No wait, Bill Clinton was. No, I’m pretty sure it’s the next guy, whichever one it turns out to be.

Besides, this country is not a dictatorship (no, not even after the last eight years). One President does not make or break the country. People complain that it’s hard to get things done in Washington. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s why I hold my nose and cheer for the two-party system.

America needs people that stand up for the little guy and make sure everyone gets their fair shot at the dream. America also needs people that want the government to get out of the way so that individuals can achieve the dream.

I swear it’s a coincidence that I started writing this post on September 11, but God help us if it takes another one of those to put us all back on the same side of the fence.

Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competitiveness for Society's Benefit

an article by David Brin, Ph.D.

This unusual article looks at how truth is determined in our four 'accountability arenas' -- science, democracy, courts and markets. It was lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000.

Copyright © 2000 by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

Dr. Brin's the 3-part article:

I. The Need for a New Kind of Dispute Resolution

II. Toward a New Dispute-Resolution Process for the 21st Century

III: A Concept for Implementation

What is Stephen Harper Reading?

by Yann Martel

'The Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute, certainly not. I don’t think he even looked up. The snarling business of Question Period having just ended, he was shuffling papers. I tried to bring him close to me with my eyes.

Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares little for the arts.

But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.

For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.'

Yann Martel

Book list to date

1. Book Number One: The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy
   
2. Book Number Two: Animal Farm, by George Orwell
   
3. Book Number Three: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie
   
4. Book Number Four: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart
   
5. Book Number Five: The Bhagavad Gita
   
6. Book Number Six: Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan
   
7. Book Number Seven: Candide, by Voltaire
   
8. Book Number Eight: Short and Sweet: 101 very short poems, edited by Simon Armitage, published by Faber and Faber
   
9. Book Number Nine: Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel García Márquez
   
10. Book Number Ten: Miss Julia, by August Strindberg
    

Culture & Multiculture 9: What the Meaning of Tolerance Isn’t

Happens sometimes. We get lots of premises all right –- yet the conclusion wrong as can’t be. Not just sometimes. Happened to me plenty times. On March 8th, 2007, it happened to Haroon Siddiqui. Someday it’ll happen to you. If it hasn’t yet. So, no particular intention targeting Haroon Siddiqui. Would not have read his March 8th article -– Don’t give in to prevailing prejudices -– were the Toronto Star not available free up at York University. Would never even have heard of him. No big deal. Happens. Happening right now to reputed professionals at locations near you.

Better address his argument, though. Not because he got everyone so wrong when it came to banning hijab wearing from some Quebec soccer tournament. Water under the bridge gone way out to sea. That’s not why. Rather, because his argument is hazardous in and of itself. Hazardous as false bridges over heaving troubled waters.

Culturally troubled waters. Unlike most, Siddiqui gets that. Gets it just fine. That the trouble in the world today is not between materially conflicted nations and peoples seeking subjugating each other to any material advantage. He gets that the trouble is between cultures clashing over ideas, ideals, ideology and intangible principles. Cultural principles. Clashing to potentially universal terminal disadvantage.

Nor does Siddiqui deny or lament cultures clashing over mere intangibles -– over ideological opiates. He seems to appreciate that ideas are not mere reflections of the world in human minds. That ideas, ideals, ideology and intangible principles counterfactually shape the world, define us as peoples and -– when clashing in fundamental principles –- ever too often launch us at each others’ throats. Siddiqui gets how mere ideas bind community, root identity, trigger and inflame conflict regardless material commonality or difference. How paramount pivotal imagination and ideas are in foundation of society, of culture, of any and all significance whatsoever.

Siddiqui very much seems to appreciate all that. No surprise, then -– his urging we don’t give in to prevailing prejudices. His urgent headline to that effect. Why not? He gets the significance of cultural principles. He, far more than most, seems to appreciate our vital cultural principle of tolerance -– so amply expressed by Canadian democracy, Toronto multiculture and what Siddiqui refers to as “the honourable Canadian tradition” of “finding reasonable accommodation for a myriad of minority practices.” So why not? Uniquely appreciating as he does our principled tolerance defining the Canadian way –- why should he not stand guard for that?

Not that he just stands around guarding. Not when he writes,

The world looks up to Canada for its multicultural achievements. Here in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Commission, people routinely invoke Canada to counsel member-states to learn how to achieve integration the Canadian way.

That’s right. The world looks up to Canada. Our principled tolerance –- the Canadian way. Siddiqui’s not just standing guard. He’s declaring the world would do far worse than realizing and attaining for the Canadian way. Siddiqui’s suggesting bridges ought get built. Bridges aiding other societies over culturally troubled waters. Bridges getting the Canadian way across.

Everyone could –- and should –- pursue the Canadian way. Even among the world’s freest, most democratic and multicultured societies –- as in the European Union. Since Canada does it better. So Siddiqui, quoting Jan Niesen, confirms:

Canada does this much better… You have done very well in getting past issues of race, skin colour, ethnicity and religion -– something Europe is yet to fully come to terms with but simply must.

Canada does it much better. Makes nothing but sense –- Siddiqui looking to get the Canadian way across. Just one problem.

One fatal problem. Those particular bridges Siddiqui’s suggesting get built -– to get the Canadian way across? They’re all false. Each and every one of them. Apt only to collapsing underfoot. Soon as feet get stepping. Soon as some breeze blows in dispute. Pitch us headlong in the thickest heaving troubled waters. Because, much and uniquely as Siddiqui appreciates and guards the Canadian way -– he doesn’t get it. Doesn’t understand the meaning, significance, source and origin of that which defines it. Our principled tolerance.

Happens to everyone. To me, to you -– to reputed professionals everywhere. On March 8th it happened to the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus. Got it all wrong. Got the meaning of our principled tolerance all wrong. So -– what did Siddiqui profess the meaning of our tolerance? He didn’t. Said nothing whatever about it. But he must have got it all wrong. Must have. Since his claim concerning what it is we don’t tolerate was false in all particulars and every regard.

Siddiqui claimed we no longer tolerate Muslims since 9/11. Claimed we’ve become Islam-phobic. That we got so freaked, we can’t help ourselves from discriminating and interfering with Muslim religious freedom. According to Siddiqui, it’s “.. the panic that’s driving our democratic societies in this post-9/11 era.” That post-9/11 panic making us “..rationalize discrimination..” and making us “.. routinely invoke contrarian Muslim voices to lecture Muslims on how they should practise their religion.”

What unmitigated nonsense. In all particulars and every single regard.

We haven’t become Islam-phobic since 9/11. That myth becomes increasingly absurd each day it persists. In the relatively tolerant West –- nevermind in Canada –- we don’t go around mistaking or stereotyping all Muslims as the militant fundamentalists responsible for (not only) 9/11. We know far better. But since 9/12 through 9/whenever -– that’s different. We’ve seen the collective 9/12 dancing in the Middle-Eastern Muslim street. Seen it on T.V. Seen it on Al-Jazeera and CNN. The 9/12 collective rejoicing. We tried laughing it off –- like with those non-Muhammad cartoons. Tried laughing Islamic fundamentalism off as we would Christian fundamentalism.

There’s no laughing off Islamic fundamentalism. We get it. Still doesn’t mean we stereotype all Muslims as militant fundamentalists. Not since 9/11, not since 9/12, not since 9/whenever.

Sure we flinch from burqa –- even hijab –- at times. But not because we have become Islam-phobic. Just because some of the hatred we’ve heard expressed on the subject of feminine modesty is so nauseating. As reported in The Australian on October 26th, 2006: Muslim leader blames women for sex attacks. About when Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, senior Muslim cleric mufti of Australia –- not Iran –- declared:

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?

That damned, spoilt, impure, rotten meat. According to Sheik Hilali, of course the blame lies with the meat. With the uncovered female meat. “If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.” Otherwise -– serves her right. Women are “weapons” of “Satan” used to control men.

So. Australia’s Sheik Hilali taught his followers that as uncovered meat is eaten by cats, so uncovered women are raped by Muslim men. And no doubt hatred such as his contributed to our flinching from hijab or burqa. But for hatred such as his, hijab or burqa might yet denote tolerance and good-will. But for hatred such as his we’d welcome hijab or burqa. As we welcome sari. As we welcome even the worst habits of nuns. Like we welcome Santa Claus –- and he dresses funnier than the Grim Reaper. But, other than in jesting, we don’t much welcome the Grim Reaper. Grim reaping costumes do not denote tolerance.

Sure we flinch from such hatred. But panic to the point of rationalizing discrimination and hysterical stereotyping? No way. No Canadian way. We haven’t become Islam-phobic. Not ever -– nevermind since 9/11. We can’t even begin believing anyone would follow Sheik Hilali’s thinking. Of course we don’t give in to prevailing prejudices. The prejudices prevailing with Sheik Hilali. We can’t conceive how anyone could be persuaded by such ravings. Therefore we do not conclude that as cats eat meat, so Muslim men rape –- or maim or murder –- whomsoever offends them. We do not conclude that all Muslims are militant fundamentalists or that any Muslims actually follow Sheik Hilali. As Canadians we know way better.

We are not phobic and we are not hysterical. Nevertheless, there are definitive limits to our principled tolerance. Precisely because our tolerance is principled. Case in point -– When rights collide with freedoms -– reported May 28th in the Toronto Star. Adi Abdul Humaid killed Aysar Abbas. Stabbed her in the neck 19 times with a steak knife. Subsequent to conviction for first-degree murder, he appealed –- on rather outlandish grounds. Argued his wife had been unfaithful. Not that he’d intended divorcing but mistakenly killed her, though. His appeal was more outlandish than that. Her adultery wasn’t grounds for divorce. Far as he was concerned, it was grounds for murder. Because he was a devout Muslim and had to protect his family’s honour.

Perhaps Mr. Humaid’s argument might have found merit elsewhere -– under Sharia law. Perhaps. No point even speculating if so. The extent to which Muslim wives constitute chattel under Islamic law. Whether first-degree murder can mean anything in relation to chattel. No point speculating, debating or even acknowledging Mr. Humaid’s argument. Because no speech purporting to justify crimes against human beings on grounds of their -– sufficiently or entirely -– lacking humanity qualifies as argument. Such speech qualifies as hate -– not argument. And, as hate, it was properly rejected by the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Of course it was rejected. The point, though, is what Superior Court Justice J.A. Doherty wrote about Mr. Humaid’s religious beliefs:

The alleged beliefs are premised on the notion that women are inferior to men and that violence against women is in some circumstances accepted, if not encouraged. These beliefs are antithetical to fundamental Canadian values…

Antithetical to the Canadian way. Antithetical to fundamental Canadian values. Values including –- but not limited to –- gender equality, reasonable accommodation, Canadian freedom and democracy or multiculture as in Toronto. And what defines the Canadian way? What distinguishes values which are fundamentally Canadian from those which are inconsistent – contradicting the Canadian way? Our principled tolerance, that’s what.

That’s what Haroon Siddiqui doesn’t get. The meaning of our principled tolerance. For if we apply Siddiqui’s reasoning to this case in point, we must conclude Justice Doherty panicked. That the Justice rationalized discriminating Mr. Humaid’s avowed devout religious beliefs, denying his religious freedom because of “.. the panic that’s driving our democratic societies in this post-9/11 era.”

Intolerant panic? Absurd. How could Justice Doherty not have rejected such beliefs as antithetical to the Canadian way? Not conceivable, tolerating such intolerant beliefs and actions. By the very meaning of our principled tolerance, there’s no tolerating such hatred-verging intolerance. Not without losing the Canadian way as if we’d never found it.

What does Siddiqui think the meaning of our tolerance is, anyway? What does he (mis)take our tolerance for? Weakness? Putting up with just anything? Submission to all with stronger religious beliefs –- regardless how hateful? No point speculating. Point is, he’s obviously wrong when it comes to tolerating Mr. Humaid. There’s no conceivable Canadian way to reasonably accommodate Mr. Humaid. Beliefs and actions that intolerant contradict the meaning of our principled tolerance intolerably – and absolutely are antithetical to the Canadian way.

Very doubtful Siddiqui would argue we ought to tolerate and accommodate Mr. Humaid. Fair enough. However much a case in point, that’s a special criminal case. Could Siddiqui be right in some more general sense, then? That we’re in some sort of panic to discriminate against how Muslims practice their religion? Is he right declaring we wouldn’t dare criticize Christians –- of whatever stripe –- or Jews as we criticize Muslims?

While we dare not cite, say, dissident Catholics or Jews to rationalize discrimination against practising Catholics and Jews, many people routinely invoke contrarian Muslim voices to lecture Muslims on how they should practice their religion.

Not right in the least. For not only aren’t we in any panic to discriminate. We are way past unconcerned with how anyone practices their religion. We take religious freedom as a right. We take lack of concern with religious practices as basic common sense. However. When religious practice grows so intolerant to verge active and aggressive hatred –- we do start getting concerned. Not because we care how religion should be practiced. Be difficult us caring any less about that. We care only how religion ought not to be practiced. That it never be practiced in active aggressive hatred. That it not threaten us with militant fundamentalism.

And it is utterly, ignorantly false that we take greater liberties lecturing Muslims how they should not practice their religion. Precisely the reverse is true. We hesitate to criticize militant fundamentalism in Islam as we would never hesitate with Christian militant fundamentalism. Of whatever stripe. Fact is, we don’t much wait on militant fundamentalism in order to criticize Christianity. We remember how militant fundamentalist Christianity turned on us. Back in our darker ages. And ever since we started following the chief materialist prophets of our enlightenment –- Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Darwin –- we’ve pretty much criticized Christianity to death. Criticized Christianity so thoroughly we’ve killed god and destroyed the temporal power of the Christian church.

We’ve been –- more or less politely –- ridiculing Christian fundamentalism for hundreds of years. Laughed it out of governance. Out of schooling. Laughed it right out of competent society. Mostly we don’t bother even thinking about it any more. No longer relevant. But there’s no laughing off Islamic fundamentalism. We get that.

As with Rosie O’Donnell’s view –- “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam” –- Siddiqui couldn’t be more wrong. Radical Christianity used to be just as threatening. It no longer is. Nor has been for hundreds of years. Not after the Christian church got laughed into oblivion so profound it hardly dares peek noses into public affairs – nevermind threaten. Unlike O’Donnell, however, there’s plenty Siddiqui gets right. And the particular way he’s wrong supplies an essential clue to the meaning of our principled tolerance.

Siddiqui appreciates our principled tolerance entailing the Canadian way. But he does not get the meaning of our principled tolerance -– maintaining, falsely, that we are too critical of Islam and accepting of Christianity. Truth is, it’s particularly Christianity we’re grown so at ease criticizing. Particularly Christianity we’ve criticized near to death. What better question to ask, then, than how our criticism of the Christian church has entailed the meaning, significance, source and origin of our principled tolerance?

That’s the question. But before asking it, there’s something we should know no questions asked. We did not directly inherit our principled tolerance from the Christian church. As if Christian heritage entailed love and peace -– while that of other religions entails hate and war. Totally not. That much we ought to know no questions asked. Rosie O’Donnell knows that much.

Culture & Multiculture 8: The Democratic Imperative

Part of an ongoing series interrogating cultural issues in light of Toronto’s unsurpassed multiculture – and Canada’s role as one of the world’s most free and democratic societies

Be a little longer. Before searching the meaning and origins of our tolerance. What it is making Toronto multiculture and Canadian freedom and democracy so exemplary. Just a while longer. Not much point starting while there’s so much denying going on. Such denial of our multiculturalism, of our freedom and of our democracy.

Case in pointless. Few days ago, Harper pressed Putin on democratic behaviour. Made the Friday, June 8th Globe and Mail headline – Harper presses Putin on democratic behaviour. Friendly advice from one arctic-circle neighbour to another. Don’t go flipping cartwheels when criticized. Be cool, man. Chill. Putin, though, was like – Oh yeah? You ain’t so cool. You aren’t that democratic. Canada gets all kinds of criticized on human-rights and democracy.

Unfazed, Harper totally admitted it. Near bragged about it. Yes, indeed Canada gets criticized. But that’s just it when it comes to democracy. Not flipping cartwheels. Rather than flip out, “.. we’re prepared to listen to it and be open to it, and allow that kind of debate to occur in our society. That's the real test, not whether we're perfect, but whether criticism can happen and is tolerated and is part of the political process.”

No telling Putin’s reaction. Globe headline didn’t say. If he even got the point. Globe readers, though – seemed they didn’t get there was a point. Going by most commentary, Globe readers lost all critical faculties at first mention of Harper’s name.

Cases in pointless. Gary Mulcahey wrote, “’Harper presses Putin on democratic behaviour'… Aaaah, ha ha ha ha. That's rich. Pot, meet kettle.” Andrew S. wrote, “Given Harpo's trackrecord of secrecy and authoritarian rule, shouldn't Putin be pressing Harpo on democratic reform?” And Cryin Outloud wrote,

Canada has never in my opinion been a democracy. Until every person is voting and counted we are not a democracy. Until I and everyone else has a say in every policy that is being made for me and my country we are not a democracy… If Harper is the best a 'democracy' can do then we are not a democracy!

That’s how it went with readers commenting. Mostly. With but rare exceptions – such as C. H. Oakley’s: “As if Harper's refusal to speak with inconvenient journalists is somehow the same as Putin's murdering them. Get a sense of perspective, folks.”

Perspective indeed. Not on Harper nor Putin – how cool they may, may not or might have been. Perspective on our democracy. Better get some. That’s the whole point.

And fair enough. Canadian society isn’t genuinely democratic. Been saying so for over a decade. It’s true. True since, in putatively free and democratic societies such as ours:

Genuine democracy is constitutionally guaranteed,
But only Representative democracy is practiced –
And representation is not genuine.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thus, representative democracy practiced here isn’t genuinely democratic.

Seriously. Despite constitutional guarantee, Canada is not genuinely democratic. Only represents itself democratically. And we know too well how genuine representation isn’t.

Representation is not genuine – therefore representative democracy is not genuinely democratic. Not only is it true – that representation is never genuine. In fact, it’s so blatant we can’t help knowing how true it is. No matter how we try, it invariably keeps getting too blatant to ignore. What is it we find each time we open the morning paper or turn on the evening news? What do we encounter near every single time? Corruption. Scandalous corruption oozing from every seat of governance. Are we ever surprised any more? Hardly. We expect it.

Can’t help knowing about it. Because in our representative democracy we don’t go speaking for ourselves. Must elect others speaking on our behalf. And can we – the people – hear our representatives properly speaking for us as pledged? In our best interests? Speaking on our behalf faithfully, devotedly, reliably – even at all adequately? As if. Were they all saints then maybe – just maybe we’d hear them speaking for us instead of themselves. But saints is precisely what our representatives aren’t. Our representatives are politicians. They promise speaking on our behalf in order to get all our say. So how much say have we really got in our lives? How genuinely democratic is our representative democracy? Given how we’re all spoken for by politicians – not saints.

We’d never stand for taxation without representation. But taxation with false representation? Well, that’s alright.

But, if so, then have we got no say in our lives at all? None? Does nothing distinguish Canadian society from totalitarian regimes? Can’t be. Plainly and obviously not. Too obviously, to those of us originating from totalitarian regimes, from where thugs with machine guns rounded every corner. The difference glares so obvious it’s hard even to describe. Where to start? There, in totalitarian regimes, questioning authority or merely speaking out of turn provoked potentially fatal consequences. In places like that, where people had no say whatsoever in their lives, there was no going around questioning, “Hmmmm.. how much say do we have in our lives? C’mon. Honestly. How much say have we really got?” Nope. Questioning how much say one’s got in life where there’s none permitted – one wouldn’t long survive the answer. Wouldn’t have much life remaining to speak of. Wherever people got no say in their lives, they neither speak nor go asking questions about it. They know the answer far too well and ever too intimately. Intimately as fear.

The difference is entirely too obvious to those originating from totalitarian regimes. Not only, though. It’s plain enough for all. No need to have been hit over the head and crushed beneath curtains of iron. Like C. H. Oakley said. It’s plain as the difference between not speaking with journalists – and murdering them. It’s plain as the difference between borders designed to keep anyone from getting out – and borders designed to keep everyone from rushing in.

What is it, though? What is this plain and too obvious difference distinguishing totalitarian regimes from our not genuinely democratic society? Not so much – in theory. Nothing but pretending.

We are fully prepared to agree with our representatives ruling us – just so long as they keep pretending to represent us. We don’t expect public servility. They can go right on ruling. Break each single promise they ever made getting us agreeing with them ruling. Fine. Just so long as they don’t get totally blatant about it.

When our pretend representatives get too blatantly arrogant about ruling – about not representing us – that’s when things get revolting. Right? Like when Mulroney got too blatantly arrogant. Leading us around with his chin the way he did. Quite ruined conservative political partying for some years. Or when the liberals began tossing our public purse around like it was their private cookie jar. With Chretien shouting stuff sounding too much like “L’etat c’est moi!” from the side of his mouth. Far too much. No option but liberal de-throning.

Must at least seem like trying to represent the peasants – um, the people – in order to rule around here. It’s impossible, of course – but must look like trying. Must pretend. That’s what our representative but not genuinely democratic society is all about. We all pretend and gladly keep pretending. Sure, we know better. We know we can’t expect our representatives to actually be representing us. But, so long as they do a decent job pretending representing us – fine, we’ll gladly run along pretending too. We don’t demand they succeed. We only demand they do a decent enough job pretending.

It’s only when our representatives don’t even bother doing a decent job pretending representing us that we get all scandalized. Can’t they even manage pretending? We’re not surprised by perpetual corruption – we know they’re just pretending. But of course we get scandalized when they don’t even bother finding rugs to sweep it under. When it starts squelching our feet. Reeking in our faces. When our representatives make such total mess and mockery of representing us, we have no option but getting scandalized – when there’s just no pretending any longer. If we can’t even pretend then we’re right back to having our justice, legislation, even constitution mean no more than words, words, words. When we can’t even pretend, the plugged nickel of our non-genuine democracy comes unplugged. Then we altogether agree someone else should pretend representing us for a while. Anyone else.

Like, what’s wrong with these people? Can’t they even manage pretending to represent us? If they can’t even manage to play pretend then for sure they’re not competent to be in charge. Hell, if they can’t even manage pretending then how do they manage tying their own shoelaces? Are they even toilet trained? If they can’t manage pretending, can they manage anything for real? Anything at all? Who knows – but no way are they getting their filthy, corrupt, incompetent say in our lives any longer.

That’s the difference between totalitarian regimes and societies that aren’t genuinely democratic – like ours. Just pretending. Doesn’t sound like much in theory. The tiniest of steps. In practice, though, it’s huge. The vastest of leaps. In totalitarian regimes there’s no credible pretence that people have any say in their lives. Kings, dictators and Dearest Leaders rather tend to bragging about it: “L’etat c’est moi.” Not so in Canada. Here, those in power must keep pretending they aren’t. They must pretend they’re subject to the people – that they’re only representing the people.

There’s such a long way to go. Such a long way – and chances all stacked against arriving. Against our ever making it to what genuine democracy entails. Having every say in our own lives. We’ve now officially got two nations, one state in Canada. How about the First Nations, then? Rather overdue. And why stop at many nations, one state? How about countless nations – no state? How about self-representation for all? How about sovereignty association for each, every and single one of us? How about an end and a riddance to the legitimacy of coercion? A complete final realizing that what’s written at the end of a gun is never truth?

Such a long way. But it’s in Canada we’re finding paths and blazing trails. Where else but Canada? Two nations, one state. Where else are states sufficiently democratic to cohere any plurality of nations – absent threat of terminal force or the universal bloodletting so historically definitive of statehood? Not even in the United States – wouldn’t have remained united, when pushing got shoving, but for Civil War. Certainly not in the former Soviet Union – or Yugoslavia. By no means in China, Tibet and Taiwan. Nowhere in the Islamic Middle East. Not so very much in Africa. Nor that plainly in Basque Spain. Maybe in Northern Ireland. Just maybe ever so recently.

For sure in Canada. Blazing trails to more genuine democracy. And right here in Toronto. Thriving our multiculture from countless nations. Increasingly concerted in common identity by our cultural principle of tolerance. Such long ways remain to go. But it’s here the trails are blazed.

And that’s just it. What the opponents – the ideological enemies – of democracy deny. When agitating claims against Canadian democracy they don’t mean to say we blaze trails but fall short of genuine democracy. To the contrary. They mean to claim Canada as seat of subjugation – and Canadians as victimizers.

They’d rather we stop speaking of Canada as any kind of free or democratic – even if only in relative terms. Way they think it, positive speaking of Canadian democracy contravenes some or all following: past European imperialism, broken native treaties, assimilation and residential schools, menial labour of Carribean people, menial labour of professional southeast Asian people, and any sort of social inequality whatsoever.

Any sort of social inequality whatsoever. The Irish had a hard go when first arriving. See? Canadians aren’t so tolerant. Italians were totally discriminated against when first arriving. So much for the multicultural mosaic myth. Heard about the Chinese head tax? What kind of free and democratic society does that? And how about Japanese internment? There. Rampaging discrimination, prejudice and bigotry. Canadian intolerance rampant over fields, streams and entire domains of oppression. Flying bells, whistles, banners and streamers of subjugation and suppression. No justice – no peace! Silence is violence!

Fair enough. No denying social inequality in Canada. However. There’s no denying social inequality anywhere at any time throughout human history. There’s no denying subjugation throughout human history. What people have not been oppressed?

Most of all, it is pointless denying the ideological roots of subjugation of any one people by another. Since the very identity and cohesion of collectivity, of all people is rooted in ideas, ideals and ideology. In cultural principle(s).

Not just pointless, denying the ideal and ideological roots of identity. Utterly and perpetuatingly destructive. Since it is from ideological divergence that oppressive, coercive conflict unremittingly arises. And so long as the ideal and ideological roots of conflicting identities are not realized – nor admitted – subjugation shall continue unabated and not understood. Unavoidable. Nevermind effectively resisted.

The ideological roots of conflict. Divergence and inconsistence in ideals, ideology and cultural principles from which conflicts can’t fail but arise. Differences entailed by commitment to divergent ideas – ideas which reflect no description of the world that is but rather meanings, definitions and principles of worlds that ought to be. Differences which reflect cultural not-understanding or ideological disagreeing but which, provided sufficient tolerance, may prove enhancing. Like, what if all peoples experience conflict when regarding each other as strangers but, provided sufficient mutual tolerance, they may become friends? What if, provided sufficient tolerance, they become one? United as a singular people particularly by the cultural principle of tolerance?

That’s what sets us apart as Torontonians and Canadians. Not that once we were strangers. Not that we’ve had conflicts – as if anyone anywhere hasn’t. It’s principled tolerance distinguishing us – our multiculture and our relative democracy. It’s tolerance so enviably enabling resolving our conflicts. Bringing about our uniquely reasonable accommodating. As Haroon Siddiqui wrote in his March 8th, 2007 Toronto Star article – Don’t give in to prevailing prejudices – it’s the “.. honourable Canadian tradition...” That’s right: “..finding reasonable accommodation for a myriad of minority practices.”

That’s what sets us apart. And look. Canadians of Japanese, Chinese, Italian descent – they’re not doing so bad any more. Some few even have become established. As for the Irish.. well, there’s nothing so wrong a good stiff drink won’t fix. Silence is violence – but liquor is quicker.

Bottom line. The deniers of our relatively free, democratic, multicultural society seek to disable the language of democracy, self-determination and responsibility – and perpetuate the language of victimhood. But our best – our only – hope transcending conflictual subjugating emerges from our cultural principle of tolerance as democratic behaviour. What point, then, in overtly denying our democratic behaviour? Much suspicion has the denial motive as seeking to perpetuate subjugating. That by endless agitating putative oppression and victimization, the deniers seek not to combat subjugating – but to get their so long and bitterly overdue turn at subjugating. Which turn at subjugating is, of course, necessarily consistent with their ideology of class struggling. Their ideologies of subjugation, of warfare by economic class or gender or race or any potentially politic material difference whatsoever.

The French Connection

They say politics makes strange bedfellows. So they say. Never realizing the half of it.

Politics. Got pretty exciting when Bob Rae became Premier of Ontario. Due to my originally hailing from beneath the iron curtain. Got excited like most everyone else in my shoes. Imagine that. Coming halfway round the world to this free and democratic society. To this very city of tolerance. Only for that vast abomination to come curtaining and dragging after. As if some colossal iron tar baby had spontaneously generated from all those factories of corruption. Scuttling beneath the ocean, creeping up the St. Lawrence and emerging just offshore in Lake Ontario. Waving tourist flags and propaganda pamphlets. Leaning on the CN Tower. “Greetings, comrade. Step back please. Make room for me.”

How bad could it get, though? This wasn’t some prairie province. Or some derelict collective farm. This was Ontario – the economic engine of Canada. Back then it was, anyway. Still. Very likely Ontario remained free and democratic. Whatever got voted for could as easily get voted against. So maybe it was a good thing.

It was all good, I eventually figured. All my Canadian friends – none of whom credited the irony of totalitarian curtains – would get a little learning experience. Have a tiny little taste. Sweet.

So, when they started trawling for public reaction at CFRB, I called in. And since the announcer seemed quite celebratory about it, I played along.

“Hi Peter. How do you feel about the unprecedented NDP victory?”
“I’m delighted, Jim.” Or was it Bob? Whatever. “I’m probably even happier about it than you are.”
“Really? Why is that? You must be a long-time NDP supporter.”
“NDP supporter? God, no.”
“Well.. why are you happy, then?”
“Because I’m from Romania.”
“Alright. Care to elaborate?”
“Sure. Nobody believes me when I tell them what kind of horror-show life behind the iron curtain was. So now, maybe they’ll start believing.”
“Let me get this straight. You think the NDP victory is a disaster – and you’re happy about it?”
“Sure it’s a disaster. But not unmitigated. Takes a while for the sky to cave in. And by when it starts seriously caving it’ll probably be in good time for the next election.”
“Oh, come on, Peter. How bad can it get?”
“That’s the whole point, Jim. That’s why I’m happy. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But give it a couple years and you’ll start getting clues. Finally.”
“Let’s be serious for a moment..”
“Nah. That’s all I wanted to share. Got’ta go celebrate. Bye.”

Anyhow. It didn’t play out like I’d expected. Indeed, Ontario had a little taste of Marxist governance. Nowhere near enough. Not nearly enough for my so-called friends to start believing me. And then the NDP got turfed like bad window treatment – way before any real harm got done. Way too early. If anything, even that tiny taste of Marxist governance overtaxed Ontarians. Next thing there was a conservative majority. And then another. Mike Harris’ common sense revolution. Yeah, right. Revolution. As if Ontarians had endured tribulations. Trials by fire. Some tremendous rite of passage. As if. There hadn’t been time enough for proper harming even to begin. What common sense revolution? More like common sense premature reaction. Premature convulsion.

Nothing whatsoever against Mike Harris. Turned out precisely as authoritarian as pledged. Exercised precisely the authority we voted and expected him to. He’d promised what we asked for – and then walked his talk. Ironic, though. How Ontarians loved despising him. How, to this day, many revile him as fascist. Yet we kept voting him to save us. Whereas Bob Rae, whom we heaved in reflexive premature reactionary discharge – well, he’s our posterity boy for cuteness and cuddling. There’s some irony for curtains.

Nothing against Mike Harris. To me, he was just what Bob Rae dragged in. Nothing to talk radio about. All my friends, though – they were talking nothing but Harris. What a fascist he was. Yet recall – but dimly – how it went one night busking on Queen Street. Trying to busk, anyway. Went something remotely like this.

“Come on – sign the petition,” he kept saying. Nudging my saxophone with his clipboard.
“Step back, man. I mean it.” I meant from the saxophone. Musical instruments grow dear regardless how cheaply bought. “What for?”
“Against Harris fascism.”
“Seriously?” Like, in event of fascism, circulate petitions?
“Damned right. Bastard cut my funding.”
Funding? This guy funded by the government? Unbelievable.
“You think he’s personally acquainted with your work?” By which I meant that I was regrettably acquainted with the guy’s trash in progress. And that no society ought conceivably have funded it. No sane society, anyhow.
“It’s his policies. He’s a fascist.”
“Seriously?”
“Everyone knows he’s a fascist.”
“I can’t tell. Never lived in a fascist country. Just a communist one. Maybe he is. You do realize, though, that Mike Harris is Ontario’s answer to Bob Rae?”
“Whatever. Will you sign the petition?”
“Sure.” By which I meant good luck defeating fascism by petition. Also, that I fancied the notion of Mike Harris as fascist. Would have meant that, however indirectly, Bob Rae’s damaging might yet prove somewhat lasting. Not entirely trivial or easily repaired. Just harmless fancy – the remote idea of Bob Rae triggering fascism. Satisfying regardless how obviously false. This was the umpteenth anti-Harris petition I wound up signing. Some in broad daylight. Right out in the open public. Never got arrested once. Even my funding was secure. Not because my trash was in better progress than the petitioner’s. Just because my funding was from the floundering after-hours crowd on Queen Street instead of Queen’s Park.

Seasons came and went. Years kept going by. Fascism got no second thoughts from me. Until shortly prior Sarkozy’s election in France. When everyone was alerting against it. Saying if Sarkozy got elected it would give rise to fascism. That’s when I gave it a second thought. Like, so what if funding ceased for entire loads of trash? Might prove socially useful. Economical, even. Thus went my second thinking – about Sarkozy fascism. But then the famous Quebec sovereigntist Segolene Royal was headlined threatening riots if Sarkozy got elected. Threatening violence and brutality would be unleashed if he won. And when he did, there was. Violence, brutality, riots in French streets.

Had to think yet again. Violence, brutality, riots – somewhat at odds from when Mike Harris got elected. Could it be petitioners in Paris got carried away? That Paris petitions got carried out more expressively, more passionately than in Toronto? Or was there actually something to riot over? Something more significant to fascism than I’d realized?

Perhaps. Certainly when relatively free and democratic societies sustain sufficient trauma – be the harm military, criminal, economic or too spectacularly corrupt – authority figures gain popularity. Authoritarian figures get crusading and far more likely elected. By pledging turning military tables, hunting criminals to justice, redistributing economic property or getting large brooms sweeping corruption under the social fabric.

In relatively free and democratic societies we’ve managed making some of our own decisions. Managed having some say in our lives. Only some, though. For when progressively traumatized we start yearning heroes – increasingly parental authoritarian figures pledging sweeping our troubles away. Not quite so with societies remaining totalitarian since forever – where there’s been no turning away from figures of absolute authority in the first place. Nor is it necessarily childish nightmare or fool’s parade. Might be some authoritarians cut sweepingly dashing figures. Promising everything we secretly desire. Or just what we ask for. And then go walking their talk into glorious sunsets. Could happen.

However. Roads to glorious sunsets are fraught. Twisting and too likely turning entirely to darkness. Some civil liberties curtailed, perhaps. Some unwarranted surveillance, maybe. Possibly requiring a few internal passports. All temporary, of course. Like for homeland security. What decent citizen could ever refuse? Only temporary. But how much temporizing does it take between curtailing civil liberties and totally curtaining democracy, at any rate?

Each step down glorious sunset roads twists and trends to darkness. No preventing falling into totalitarian darkness should we step too far. Invariably, those leading us down such roads maintain they must break some eggs to make an omelette. What comedians. Like we didn’t know that already. Who raises the chickens? Who carries the eggs to and from market? Who cooks with utmost care not to needlessly break eggs? Some of us are literate. Not as easily confused as we used to be. Glorious sunsets no longer blind us to those indiscriminately breaking and confiscating eggs – or baskets or farms or whatever we plant in our gardens. We know precisely how many eggs it takes to make an omelette. How endless many it takes to feed corruption. How infinitely many it takes to sustain armies of egg and head-breaking thugs. Breaking our eggs to make an omelette. Yeah. It isn’t an omelette those indiscriminately breaking our eggs are making.

But there recur unfortunate times. Times at which we become shocked and confused by dreadful headline news. Traumatized. And at such times we seek for authorities telling us where to go. Down what roads.

No helping some unfortunate times. But most unfortunate times? Those we bring on ourselves. Like unfortunate times we forget the meaning of responsibility. Or dignity. Or when we forget the meaning of productivity.

Imagine that. Forgetting the meaning of productivity. Seen it happen, though. Most spectacularly. Due to my hailing from beneath the iron curtain and all. Even seen it start happening – not spectacularly or long enough – right here in Ontario. As when Bob Rae got elected. Nevermind in France. Might no longer matter who gets elected in France. Since Marxism has excavated France as its private trench.

When we start seriously social crediting Marxism, that’s the sign we’re forgetting the meaning of productivity. And whenever we elect Marxist governance, signals flare that we’d rather just forget about it. Rather just forget the meaning of productivity.

Because Marxism is – not just economically – inexorably corruptive. Crippling corrosive. Marxism is definitive concerning means of production as the bone of absolute contention – and that diverse human classes necessarily struggle at the bone mindlessly as rabid dogs in the streets. Mindlessly because, far as Marxism concerned, it is never understanding or ideology which determine who we are, what we stand for and what we aim to do. Mere opiates. Rather, we are entirely and only determined by material causes. And this – economic, historical, dialectic – materialism is axiomatic to Marxists. They say it is scientific. But nevermind how wrong they are. Nevermind that cultural – and ideological – principles define who we collectively are, preceding even the possibility of society – or economics – as sunlight precedes vegetation. Nevermind that they are wrong in fact. Marxists are incoherent in meaning. For what is Marxism but an ideology? Nothing but. An utterly dogmatic, absolutely not scientific, self-refuting ideology which dismisses itself as mere opiate.

Nevermind that either. What’s telling is that since Marxists can’t stop obsessing the means of production – as root cause and bone of material contention – they can’t even conceive the meaning of productivity. Standard voluntary employment relationships, for instance, are not voluntary. Not to any genuine Marxist. Not conceivably voluntary or collaborative – since employers profit from employees’ labour. There can be no meaningful mutuality of profit or profitable mutuality. No constructive co-labourating. None. By their very definition of exploitation – profiting from another’s labour – employees and employers are enemies. Class enemies. Struggling mindlessly rabid at the bone. The Marxist means of production bone. Eradicating all meaning of productivity.

Profitable mutuality, which we think best for all, Marxists consider the worst. By their ill-laboured definition, profit means exploitation. Mutuality, if admitted, only makes it worse – since multiple wrongs make nothing right. Profit means exploitation, exploitation fundamentally expresses class enmity – and Marxism is the fundamentalist dedication to finally, however violently resolving class enmity. Thus, where Marxist dedication grows culturally entrenched, gutted societies remain to rot.

The poor must fight the rich until all become sufficiently impoverished. Impoverished to death. It must be so. There’s no voluntary agreeing – as in private employment – permitted. Not permitted since, according to Marxist dogmatic materialism, such would constitute endorsing exploitation. Therefore labour must be made collective; and collective labouring must get re-enforced by authority – even if at gunpoint. Collective gunpoint forced labouring in order to ensure exploitation – i.e., voluntary working as in private employment – is extirpated. But what gets extirpated, of course, is everything voluntary. Including voluntary working. Eventually, no work remains voluntary. All work is at gunpoint. If not at gunpoint – well, they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.

Thus do the axiomatic Marxist means of production deny the meaning of productivity. Economies crushed beneath curtains of iron were not mismanaged. They were managed precisely as if productivity had lost all meaning.

Trauma may get inflicted on us. When our principal residences or trade centres get blown up, for instance. Mostly, though, we traumatize ourselves. When we become sufficiently corrupt to forget the meaning of responsibility. Or when we forget all meaning of dignity and start fighting amongst ourselves. Or when we forget the meaning of productivity. Hard even to imagine such absurdity. But it keeps happening round the world regular enough to set the times by.

Marxism traumatizes as it grows increasingly entrenched. We may well respond to that trauma by turning to authoritarian leadership for rescue. Worse case scenario, Marxism becomes fully entrenched as state communism in which case governance becomes fully totalitarian. And that’s no different from fascism. Totalitarian by any name. Marxism either may lead to fascism, or – if actualized as state communism – becomes indistinguishable from it. That’s the incestuous intimacy between Marxism and fascism. The bed they’re in together. The depravity they seek to consummate. The darkness they seek to raise. Together. Regardless how they carry on against each other in public.

Marxism has destroyed generations. And it has lost all credit and credibility among those surviving state communism. But among those who have not experienced the consequences of unrestrained Marxism, who have not been crushed beneath curtains of iron, it proliferates.

We aren’t ready to let it go. We can’t just laugh it off. Not yet. We fear that, absent Marxism and its endless derivatives – i.e., we’re determined not by economics but by gender; or race; or historical accident; or geographic coincident; or etc. – we shall be crushed under weight of our own selfish self-involvement. Marxism provides us the sole credible-seeming, materialist-sounding alternative: a duty of utter altruism.

God is dead and we’ve conceived nothing reliable and less absurd than Marxism to save us from the common tragedy of our selfishness. Fair enough. It’ll take some – long – while reconsidering the nature of truth. Won’t be overnight that we realize how un-self-involved an expression of identity selfishness may become; nor how identity emerges from forms of idealism rather than materialism. Forms of idealism, principles, theories, stories – even ideologies like Marxism, ironically enough.

We’re stuck with it for now. For as long as we dismiss understanding itself as an opiate. For as long as we remain fallen in materialism – most all of us, not only Marxists. Doesn’t mean we have to go overboard, though. Doesn’t mean we must drown in it or get crushed by it.

Perhaps it is too late for France. To salvage without severely curtailing liberties. But in Canada – or Ontario? No problem. Too much common sense for spinning revolutions over here. Particularly in Ontario. Still. Should large quantities of Marxist opiates find their way into our drinking water, should the NDP get a few turns actually running the country – I shall be celebrating. As if there would be no tomorrow. Which there might not be. Just because sometimes only seeing and personal experiencing is believing. And justified true believing is the best opiate of all.

Toronto Culture and Multiculture 6: How to Make Canadian News

Oil industries pandered our convenience regardless environmental impact. Tobacco industries dealt nicotine addictions entirely blasé to public health. Now, big media over-stages cheap sensations – in our own homes – despite degrading discourse and distracting all understanding who we are and what we stand for. So much the better should our entire attention get captivated by spectacular insignificance. It’s just good business as usual. Show business.

Gets hilarious, the way bigger media blames it all on smaller media. Blames it on tabloids, on a radio talk-show host, on rappers and now, in that big way, on small blogs. So misleading But nevermind more general examples. Not particularly the point.

The particular point is Canadian democracy, Toronto multiculture and how we – Canadians and indeed Torontonians – may begin tutoring far and worldwide re tolerance. Except that our own media denies it. Denies Canadian tolerance. So, most particularly right now, the point is how and why our media misleads us when it comes to our own tolerance.

Pretty obvious why. Canadian media shares shock values with its larger cousins – despite acting relatively bashful about it. Also, Canadian media has rather fewer juicy gossiping opportunities. Has to scramble more when it comes to news making – while acting like it never scrambled a day in its life. But wait. Opportunity does come knocking. Tolerant as Canadians are, not much else can so reliably be counted on shocking us as accusations we aren’t. So, since tolerance denying reliably provides high-rating shock values, our media goes scrambling after tolerance denying opportunities. That’s pretty good news making – for Canadian media. Simultaneously covering both tales and trails.

How does our media mislead when it comes to tolerance? Not too hard to uncover. Harder scrambling trails than tales. Here’s one scenic trail. During the final weekend of February, 2007, a referee ejected 11 year-old Asmahan Mansour from an indoor Quebec soccer match because she refused to remove her hijab – religious headscarf. The story of Asmahan’s ejection was seized upon in brazen – i.e., scarcely at all muted – glee by Canadian media. The story was inflated at such meteoric pace that, by early March, it had expanded from local – through provincial and national – to international proportions. This story of Canadian intolerance.

This misleading story. How misleading? Plenty. Of the dozen checked, most articles never disclosed how the ejecting referee was Muslim. Muslim as the ejected player. Most articles never disclosed how not only Quebec but FIFA’s International Football Association Board – that’s right: international – upheld the referee’s decision. And not one – single – mainstream Canadian media article divulged how Google-searching headscarf and soccer reveals the issue arising repeatedly and, yes, internationally. Like in Morocco, even. Like, the first hit on Google-searching headscarf and soccer? An April 27th article titled Soccer game called off over headscarf. Not April 27th next week in Quebec’s future. April 27th, 2004. In Australia.

That’s how misleading. Not remotely legitimate as a story of Canadian intolerance. Not particularly Canadian – whatever international soccer refereeing issues with headscarves may or may not be. Only our media’s scrambling – scarcely muted – seizure at Asmahan’s ejection was particularly Canadian. And it didn’t stop there, our media seizure. The trail goes on.

For instance. On March 8th, 2007, the Globe & Mail published an article titled Soccer headscarf incident sign of intolerance: Egypt. The article began thus:

Egypt warned against racism and intolerance in Canada after a young Ottawa-area girl was expelled from a soccer tournament in Quebec for insisting on wearing an Islamic headscarf, the foreign ministry in Cairo said… Ihab Fawzi, a senior official at the ministry.. express[ed] concern over "mounting signs of racism and intolerance in Canada"…

Egypt? Well, maybe it’s not quite entirely absurd as it sounds. Conceivably, Egypt has sincere legitimate concerns for democracy and multiculture – for Canadian tolerance, even – despite experiencing setbacks practicing the principles. Setbacks walking its talk. At least since the fundamentalist Islamic assassination of Sadat. Since Mr. Mubarak might understandably prefer not getting similarly assassinated. Since Mr. Mubarak likely does some service to tolerance by not tolerating fundamentalist intolerance. Since his intolerance is in self-defence. To which – self-defence – he’s entitled. Obliged, even. Especially if he’d actually prefer tolerance. If he’s one of the good guys. Absolutely. Conceivably, anyway. But still. Egypt?

Just conceivably Egypt’s concerns with Canada’s alleged intolerance are legitimate. Legitimate and, however ignorant, arising through no fault of Egypt’s. Arising entirely from scrambling Canadian media. Scrambling to deny Canadian tolerance. Egypt’s concerns might conceivably be legitimate. But Toronto Canadian media seizing at factual incompleteness – incompleteness however far and poorly fetched – scrambling to deny our tolerance? And then seizing upon yet farther fetched, genuinely ignorant – if even at all legitimate – international reaction? Reaction fomented by Canadian media misleading in the first place? Might as well have titled this article How intolerant are we – even Egypt rebukes Canada. No. Not legitimate. Not even conceivably. Except by archingly grasping shock values. Or from ideologically definitive – fundamentalist – perspective. The sort of perspective so readily flouting at Globe & Mail’s Comment section. Like the perspective of Democratic Dictatorship from United States:

yes i support the fact that the egyptians one of the main human rights abusers have actually told canada that they are abusing their citizens. How blind are we , that a country which regularly abuses human rights has to tell us...

Do testify, Democratic Dictatorship. The press is free. But can we say amen to that? Should we shout no justice – no peace? Ought we shriek silence is violence? Perhaps not. Time is money. And liquor is quicker.

Not to suggest all perspective at Globe & Mail’s Comment section is tin-foiled. Lucid visions do glimmer there. Some. Rarely equal to Stephen McIntosh’s from Winnipeg:

My father's father's father immigrated from Scotland, and my mother's mother's mother moved here from Russia. I am not Scottish, I am not Russian, I am Canadian. And I will welcome anyone who would like to share in the great life we have here. Because in three generations the refugees from abroad will be as Canadian as you and me, but they will remember their ethnic origin and they will honour it. You must be tolerant of others because that is what being Canadian is all about.

Wonderful perspective. Can’t stop to admire, though. Not yet. The trail goes on.

Very same Thursday, also on March 8th, 2007, an article by Haroon Siddiqui – editorial page editor emeritus – appeared in the Toronto Star. Don't give in to prevailing prejudices. Seemed a relatively thoughtful article on first reading. Relative to most other media seizures at Asmahan’s ejection. Siddiqui wrote,

… in Australia and across Europe, several nations have decided that their failure to integrate Muslims because of widespread racism is, in fact, the fault of multiculturalism, a policy they never had, in the sense you and I understand it, namely, extending equality and the dignity of citizenship to all people, regardless of race, religion or ethnicity.

An interested reader, after having read the Globe’s contribution that Thursday morning, might well have thought, “Yeah, right. Who’re we supposed to take our cues from when it comes to tolerance, then? Egypt? Sure. Why not go all the way – for our cues – to Saudi Arabia or Iran?”

But Siddiqui wasn’t saying where to go for our cues. He was saying that even the world’s most tolerant nations are kind’a cueless – and need to be taking cues from us. That when it comes to the principle, our practice of tolerance stands exemplary even among those countries all flee to instead of from. He was saying it’s our job now, schooling not only Egypt but even Australia, Germany, Britain, Sweden or the United States. Sure sounded he was saying so when he wrote,

The world looks up to Canada for its multicultural achievements. Here in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Commission, people routinely invoke Canada to counsel member-states to learn how to achieve integration the Canadian way.

Right on. Stand up for your principles, Toronto Canada. Stand tall and take a bow.

Like Stephen McIntosh from Winnipeg, Siddiqui gets the big picture. The principle. Tolerance. What being Canadian is all about. Which makes it far more difficult comprehending what Siddiqui was talking about when it came to Asmahan’s headscarf case. When he wrote,

In the soccer case.. it has been pointed out by some that the referee in question was a Muslim. That fact alone is supposed to have legitimized his decision… We would not adopt such a tribal assumption about referees of other faiths. We would not presume that their decisions were motivated by their religion.

What a kicker. Siddiqui’s not troubled with so few mentioning the referee was Muslim. Siddiqui’s troubled that anyone mentioned it at all. But why so troubled? This general media seizure wasn’t about any random player ejection. It wasn’t about any random headscarf. It was about a Muslim player. It was about a Muslim headscarf. The media seized at how Asmahan was ejected for being Muslim and wearing a Muslim headscarf. Putative Muslim ejecting was the whole, entire and only issue. Nothing but. Muslim ejecting. So why ought the media seize at the ejected person being Muslim, at her headscarf being Muslim – and utterly avoid all mentioning that the ejecting person too was Muslim?

Why not mention it? Because, according to Siddiqui, it would be intolerant to presume the referee’s decision was motivated by religion. It would be a tribal assumption – inconsistent with Canadian tolerance. Inconsistent with what being Canadian is all about.

Indeed. It would be. Nobody remotely tolerant would assume any such thing. On finding out the ejecting referee was Muslim too, those tolerant in slightest principle would conclude the ref was simply doing his or her job. Entirely and only exercising proper discretion as a referee. Properly and totally regardless to whether any particular player was Muslim – like the ref – or Falun Gong or even atheist – unlike the ref. That’s the tolerant concluding. Like, the ref was Muslim too? Well then, obviously only had soccer issues with the headscarf. No way the ref took issue with Asmahan being Muslim. Or the headscarf being Muslim. No more than the ref would take issue with being Muslim him or herself.

Nobody tolerant in slightest principle would assume the ref was motivated by religion. But Siddiqui believes we’d all think just that. That since religion must necessarily have been the motive for ejecting Asmahan, the ref must have been some sort of self-hating Muslim. That’s what Siddiqui believes and was spelling out when he wrote:

While we dare not cite, say, dissident Catholics or Jews to rationalize discrimination against practising Catholics and Jews, many people routinely invoke contrarian Muslim voices to lecture Muslims on how they should practise their religion.

So we’d better not mention the ref was Muslim too. Because that would be amplifying the ref’s contrarian Muslim voice. That would be rationalizing discrimination. That would be promoting Muslim self-hatred. Egads. How can Siddiqui understand that being Canadian is all about tolerance – while simultaneously believing we’re all out promoting Muslim self-hatred? It makes no sense at all, Siddiqui not understanding we’d conclude the ref was just doing his or her job. Knowing the ref was Muslim, doesn’t Siddiqui conclude the ref was properly job performing? Doesn’t Siddiqui conclude that the soccer ref’s voice must have been a contrarian soccer voice only – rather than a contrarian Muslim voice – since the ref was Muslim too?

Maybe not. Maybe it’s Siddiqui himself making the tribal assumptions he deplores as inconsistent with Canadian tolerance. Maybe Siddiqui himself believes Asmahan must necessarily have been ejected for religious motives. That if the ref was Muslim then no way was the ref properly job performing – and hence that the ref must have been some sort of self-hating Muslim. Out to punish Asmahan for being a Muslim. For daring to wear an Islamic headscarf.

Couldn’t be. Could it? Siddiqui is the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus. Says so right under his article. No way he’s projecting tribal assumptions – precisely those assumptions he deplores – onto his readers. No way.

Way – and no maybe about it. Siddiqui really is out to stop us from giving in to prevailing prejudices. Except, those prejudices he’s out to stop us from giving into? Yeah. Those are prejudices prevailing for him. Not even for the marginally tolerant among us – his Canadian audience. And he doesn’t just want to stop us in the audience, either. He’s out to stop the entire media from giving in to his own prejudiced tribal assumptions. Since he projects his tribal assumptions as liberally onto the media as onto the audience:

The media are an unwitting partner in this dirty game [of making prejudiced tribal assumptions about Muslims]. The quickest way for a Muslim to be quoted these days is to attack fellow Muslims or, better still, Islam.

So there it is. Siddiqui gets some things right on. Like what being Canadian is all about. But otherwise, he comes across almost pathologically unwitting. As if he regards himself doing public service partaking, co-leading this headline grasping media seizure. This misleading story. Misleading and slandering Canadian tolerance both at home and abroad.

Just unwitting. Siddiqui’s not out to deny our tolerance. He affirms it. But Siddiqui does declare that Muslim ref – and the rest of us and the media – guilty of making prejudiced tribal assumptions about Muslims. Not likely he’ll change his mind, either. Sounds like he’ll make sure not to discover those prejudiced tribal assumptions are his own. Won’t be talking to that ref anytime soon. Doesn’t want any of us talking to that ref. Far as Siddiqui’s concerned, that ref’s a rotten bad apple. A self-hating Muslim. Siddiqui came out loud, clear and definitive – how that ref’s contrarian Muslim voice couldn’t conceivably have only been making a soccer call. Definitive how that ref was attacking fellow Muslims or, better still, Islam. Could be that ref was a witch. Ayuh. Could be. Even if Siddiqui’s too polite to say so himself. Someone’s got to.

Why no single report to be found of anyone even attempting talking to the ref? Perhaps because it would interfere with misleading news making to do so. Perhaps because Siddiqui is right about Canadian media playing a dirty game. Except the game isn’t about making prejudiced tribal assumptions. That’s Siddiqui’s – hopefully unwitting – dirty game. The media plays professionally and all too wittingly. Tolerance denying makes the news. And making the news is just good business as usual. Show business.

Our job in the audience is nothing but clarity. To see through the news making once in a while. To not entirely forget who we are. To not forget what we stand for. To remember what being Canadian is all about. Tolerance.

[Toronto Culture and Multiculture 5]: How to Make the News

Warning: this got out of control. Kept getting longer and longer. More and more theoretical. Nothing much to do with Toronto or Canada, either. What happened was there were a couple general ideas I wanted to start out with by way of introduction. Oh well. Here’s the introduction. Actual article to follow in a few days.


It was August 11th, 2005. I remember it like yesterday. The day Wolf dropped the bag and let all the cats loose.

Happened while he was interviewing Bill Clinton. Sort of interviewing, anyhow. Wasn’t like Wolf Blitzer gave hoot or howl what Bill had to say. Old Wolf, he just wanted Bill to come right out and declare what a big mistake the Iraq war was. And Bill, he was getting mighty vexed. Also irked, peeved and just plain bothered. Would rather have talked about his initiative to help with the AIDS epidemic in hard hit places like Africa. Everyone already knew what a steaming botch the Bush administration had made. Bill wasn’t about to get catfighting – Bush-fighting – at Wolf Blitzer’s instigating. How to stop Wolf, though? That was the trouble. No stopping. Wolf had Bill’s scent, was going just about rabid in Bill’s tracks. Old Wolf wasn’t after taking prisoners that day. Nevermind taking any Bill’s hints to back off.

Wolf: .. [W]e're going to get to all of that [stuff you’d like to talk about] in just a moment, but let's talk about the biggest issue facing the United States, arguably right now. That would be the war in Iraq. Looking back, with 20/20 hindsight, was it a mistake?

Bill: … [T]hat's really not relevant anymore… we got to try to make this work. I still think there's a chance it could work, and it's the only strategy that will work.

Wolf: The reason I ask was it a mistake because in our latest CNN/"USA Today"/Gallup poll, we asked this question, has the war in Iraq made the U.S. safer from terrorism? Thirty-four percent said yes. Fifty-seven percent said no. How would you answer that question?

Bill: … I would agree with that. But independent of that, we are there now, and there now are terrorists operating there. And there is a clear majority of people in Iraq who are supporting the idea that their country should be free, independent and at peace. And they're trying to come up with a constitution and we're trying to train the security and the military forces. So I think – that's what I hope we can do, and do it successfully. And if we can do that, then our people can come home.

Wolf – dogging the bone: So I assume that the answer is, yes, the war was a mistake. Is that your answer?

Bill – losing what little remaining patience: You're trying to get me to make news, and I'm trying to educate people. It doesn't matter whether it was a mistake to go in or not at the time… My answer is, whether it was a mistake or not, we are where we are and we ought to try to make this strategy succeed, support that strategy. It's the only option that will get us out in an honourable way, having made these sacrifices mean something.

Wolf – flustered, looking for that bag he dropped, looking at all the cats running loose, looking anywhere but at Bill: That's my job. I'm a newsman. That's what I try to do, is make news. And you try to avoid news. That's your job.

That’s right. As seen on TV. As heard on CNN. Must believe. News people cease all restraining when it comes to reporting news. They’ve transcended mere reporting. Now they are making news.

Poor old Wolf. So inadvertently admitting, almost bragging his news making. It’s slapstick – when paid professionals fall so clumsily inadvertent. How, afterwards, they pretend it never happened. The way Wolf Blitzer yet simulates impartial objectivity. So factual. But oops – too late. Inadvertence happens. Happen it did. And for those that saw and appreciated it happening – live, on the air – it’s become difficult keeping straight faces when Wolf comes on. Because ever since, whenever Wolf tries coming on as reporting, he more effectively comes across as comedian. Far more effectively.

Ever since, Wolf coming on when we’re watching provokes total comic relief.

“Look Amy,” I say, “it’s Wolf Blitzkrieg.”
And Amy asks, “Is he coming at everyone live, from the stimulation room?”
“Sure is,” I say.
“Is he stimulating?”
“Not sure,” I reply. “Can’t see his hands.”
“Where are his hands?” she asks. “Under the table again?”
“Seem to be. What do you think he’s doing?”
“Well, what else? He’s a newsman. He’s making news!”

Slapstick. Not because news mediators are necessarily laughable when they go above and beyond the facts. Going above and beyond can be admirable. Nothing wrong with inference drawing and editorializing. To the contrary. So long as there’s some semblance of competence. So long as facts don’t get too transparently exaggerated, curtailed or otherwise deranged to conveniently fit hyperbolic inference. So long as incompetent news making does not get concealed in plain sight as just plain facts. As just reporting. As if the incompetence never happened. Because deadpan inadvertence is just laughable. That’s what slapstick is – outrageous deadpan inadvertence.

Got to be that over-reporting and under-reporting – transparent exaggerating and curtailing – in the news seemed like incompetence. Seemed like systematic incompetence, since it kept on pretty much non-stop. The audience started heckling. Started inventing media conspiracy theories. Grey team. Left-wing conspiracy. Right-wing conspiracy. Fifth columny.

Just audience heckling, though. Sure, would’ve been appalling if true. Would’ve been curtains for any semblance of democracy had news making – not mere reporting – turned out ideologically concerted. Media power is such that no democratic electing could survive the demise of media ideological plurality. But that’s just it. Why the audience was only heckling. News making could not be conceived as concerted consent manufacturing since, absent ideological plurality – like under totalitarian regimes – media is powerless to make or manufacture anything. Ideological plurality is the soil from which media power grows in relentless and inexorable profusion. Eliminating plurality desolates the very soil from which media power grows. Lays it sterile barren waste.

Obliterating plurality – ideological, cultural, personal – is first totalitarian priority. Most especially and particularly media plurality. When it comes to consent manufacturing, slashing, burning and salting any soil where media power might grow is what it’s all about.

Not so in relatively open, relatively free and democratic societies. Here, in untrammelled soils of prolific plurality, media power grows inexorably. Media grows overpowering. Overwhelming.

It’s like night and day. Here, media variety grows ever noisier and more pandemonic. Not so there, under totalitarian regimes. While as many television channels might well be available there, those do nothing for variety. Since there but one channel gets credited official. The rest are all unofficial. And when citizens turns to unofficial channels, the announcer looks up, glares and starts screaming.

“Back! Back to official channel, citizens! We know who you are! We’ve got your numbers!”

It is a joke. There’s no comparing. There’s no middle ground. There’s no manufacturing consent absent either reliable consistent truth or, alternatively, force. Making the news – crying Wolf, instigating catfights, exaggerating, curtailing, misleading – manufactures no consent. Neither false making nor even making false news manufactures consent. Even outright lying won’t do for manufacturing consent. Lying sows confusion – and when confusion prevails it can only mean dismal failure manufacturing consent.

Wherever consensus may be realized without being purchased, there’s an alternative between two fundamental, categorically irreducible kinds of consent manufactories. Either genuine imagining, searching, re-imagining and re-searching truth by increasing plurality; or enforcing official falsehood by obliterating plurality. No middle ground. Not for long. Precisely because, regardless how outright and intentional the falsehood – like in propaganda – lying doesn’t cut it. Outright lying best accomplishes the opposite: sowing confusion and, thereby, manufacturing dissent. Thus, when discarding truth, manufacturing consent demands enforcement turn increasingly imperative. That’s the totalitarian imperative. That’s the point of forcing, the meaning of truth at gunpoint. Maintaining lies as-if true. It’s the maintaining that’s imperative, not the lying. That’s what cuts it when it comes to manufacturing consent spiting and disregarding truth. For truth never ceases struggling to emerge. And whenever, inevitably, truth-manufactured consensus arises in opposition, then truth disregarding, force-manufactured consensus must mow it down. Cut it and cut at it until it ceases twitching. Cut and cut again everywhere it twitches to re-emerge. Otherwise force-manufactured consensus maintaining the big, sacred, official lies, falters and fails.

Truth never ceases struggling to emerge. Though not for universal love of truth. Were it only so. Mostly, merely for the inevitable longer-term consequence. Force-manufactured consensus is at both competitive and evolutionary disadvantage. Relative to truth-manufactured consensus it fails to both produce and reproduce. Be it ever so keen and tempting a short-cut, absent continual re-enforcement it dulls, tarnishes and rots. And, in event continual re-enforcement persists too long, force turns from means to ends. It’s total curtains, when force turns from means, to ends, to the only end in itself.

When consensus is manufactured by truth, right makes might. When consensus is manufactured by force, but forcing yet conceivably remains as means to credible ends, might increasingly makes right. When forcing becomes the end in itself, no possibility of consensus manufacturing remains. None. Only obedience and belligerence relative to force. For when powering, overpowering, super-powering become ends in themselves, then there remains no right but might.

So. However overwhelming, news media is not ideologically concerted. Independent whelming by the media hinges on media independence – plurality. Were media merely an appendage of state or other power elites, there’d have to be gunplay forcing us to consensus. Absent gunplay, endless repeating party lies would mean nothing but confusion. So – that’s a relief. Knowing it isn’t ideologically concerted media lying independently subverting our public spheres and partial democracies. Knowing that, rooted in ideological plurality, media influence grows overwhelming. Knowing what lush new feeding grounds the internet medium opens wider for trolling. Knowing that every brand of crock-potter is eagerly at liberty to disseminate lies and nonsense farther and wider than ever before.

Ideological plurality has never been more assured. Yet, as media influence grows increasingly overwhelming, media lying mounts worrisome even if not ideologically concerted. It drives us to confusion. It manufactures ceaseless petty dissenting. It obscures issues, drowning significance in vast-flung mud slides. It degrades all discourse. While amounting only to mischief as yet, while doing nothing to directly subvert public spheres, it is mounting worrisome. The sort of mischief that saps from within. On one hand inflating public spheres. On the other, degrading discourse. Time may come the centre will not hold. Time may come we lose all centre, all sense of who we are and what, once, we stood for.

Not at all suggesting that news media engages in outright lying. Not for a moment. Not as if the pictures were all forged. Way it used to be with the tabloids. Back when you’d see baby Jesus riding three-headed cows at supermarket checkout counters. News making isn’t outright lying. Still. The difference is in degrees, not in kind. Who’s surprised when media images get enhanced for dramatic impact? Who’s surprised when footage turns out to have been repeatedly staged? Who’s surprised how many blind eyes the media turns to veracity?

Nobody’s surprised what media does for ratings. We get to watch daily news making. Especially on slow news-days. When the news is not a pin dropping. Then they get churning. Paula Zahn special reports that everyone’s more comfortable with familiar-type faces; and therefore that we’re all racist. Sure. As if racism were reducible to stimulus-response flinching from the unfamiliar. Then, months and several special reports later, she discovers people tend to self-segregate. Eventually, she may come to appreciate that some of the more thoughtful prefer to dissociate. These are wonderful realizations for a young person to have. But headline news? Only by inference that she reports racism. As if. And Lou Dobbs. Goes American crusading against undocumented workers. Yeah. Against people risking life and limb to work in America. Against people prepared to subsist as outlaws and risk all for the privilege. To work in the land of opportunity. In America. The land whence Lou Dobbs pontificates. At no risk to himself. Against those that so love America, they’d risk anything to work there. But hey, what to do on slow news days? Got’ta make the news. If there’s none other to pontificate against, Lou Dobbs can be depended on to pontificate against those that love America better than he. No point agitating against undocumented workers lacking documentation. Far better making headlines agitating against undocumented workers working. Far better vilifying and scapegoating those working without documentation as if destroying – i.e., destroying American values and valuables. Now, that’s making news. Headline news. And, of course, there’s Anderson Cooper. On slow news weeks, he’ll go exploring the world. Exploring with all the insight of a precocious six year old. That sign, blowing away before him? Must be a sign of really, really strong wind.

Crying Wolf, exaggerating, enhancing, curtailing, misleading, absurd pontificating. Sowing nonsense and confusion. Nevermind issues. Nevermind signifying. Must make better rating news. Wouldn’t be too bad were there laugh-tracks. Lots of ratings to be had for comedians. Even though honest comedians ridiculing events tend to be far more thoughtful than news people about it. And funnier, of course. All the more reason for laugh-tracks. Avoid all the confusing. Stop pretending to be so serious. So factual. What’s wrong with honest comedy?

Alright then. What’s any of this got to do with Toronto, Canada? Fair deal. Since there’s even more slow news days and weeks in Canada. And our military activities don’t much help making news. Certainly, we have casualties. But nothing spectacular like the steaming botch in Iraq. To the contrary. Our men and women in Afghanistan are making us proud. Actually helping things out. What to do? Try to amplify Jack Layton’s bugling that we aren’t talking to the Taliban? No go. Smart alecks in the audience started yelling the Taliban only wants to talk about how and when we’ll surrender. Started calling Mr. Layton Taliban Jack. Though sad, it wasn’t news. How about later, when Mr. Layton tried bugling that we’re spending way more on military security than reconstructing? No go. Audience heckled that there’s no reconstructing without security. So much for making military news. What then? Stick to local news? Not consistently good enough. So.. provincial. Get some Canadian comedian to ridicule American events? Maybe. Might work. Too bad it doesn’t. That guy’s happening like disasters not waiting.

What to do? How to make rating news in Canada? How to sow some that home-grown confusion, commit some head-lining, rubber-necking mischief? There are ways. Particularly one to be explored next instalment.

Toronto Culture and Multiculture Part IV: Sitting with the Gypsies

I was so stupid. Sitting with the gypsies and failing grade one. In a way it was all my fault what happened. The entire misunderstanding was my fault. That entire, horrible misunderstanding.

No way was I looking to mouth off asking too many questions. I was just trying to understand. Why this, why that, why not do it different. Why not do it how I thought was better. Wasn’t mouthing off. Kids didn’t go mouthing off behind the iron curtain. Just wanted to understand by authority what reason things were to be done that way. So stupid – me never realizing things weren’t done by authority any reason. Never realizing how most everything was done entirely by reason of authority behind the iron curtain.

So there I was, sitting with the gypsies, failing grade one. Not smart. Not good. The good smart ones sat fronting each row. They were the ones getting all perfect grades. Also kept order. Like orderlies, I guess. Snitching the rest of us was officially their job. Didn’t bother with me, though. Not back there with the gypsies. I was beneath their contempt. Too far back to see, nevermind snitch on.

Sitting with the gypsies didn’t make me one, either. The gypsies didn’t speak much Romanian – and I sure didn’t speak Roma. Even if I had, I don’t think they would have spoken to me. Yet, even had they spoken to me, it wouldn’t have done me any good. No conceivable incantation could have meant I’d get away unbuttoning my collar, slouching back from sitting at attention and join with them just marking time. Their immunity to the pecking orderlies wouldn’t have translated for me.

Official orderlies didn’t bother me. The wan’na-be orderlies did. The sore and persecuted ones seven or eight seats back from the front – one or two ahead of me. No hope getting up front for them. They’d have lied, cheated, stolen and killed indiscriminately to get ahead a couple seats, though. And that meant if my fountain pen smudged one line in my notebook, I got reported. If I squirmed a tad from sitting at attention, I got reported. If I even creaked my bench funny – yeah. Reported.

Got so I didn’t much have to sit at attention or fear creaking my bench any more. Because many days, I wasn’t sitting. I was standing. At attention, by my bench. Except when everyone went for recess. Then I’d get to sit back a while. Just me and Tovarisha Diriginta – Ms. Director. I’d put up my hand and she’d go on with whatever she was doing. About once a week, if I managed keeping my hand up all recess, she’d look at me with her marble eyes.

“Is there something you would like to say?”

Stupid me, there always was. Some objection. Some idiot question. How to make things better. Which, of course, just made things worse.

Finally, one day late that year, the waste hit the fan. Tovarisha hadn’t looked my way for weeks. Another recess ended. It got to be too much. My arm hurt and I couldn’t bear lowering it empty handed in defeat no more. Got to be too much. If I had to put my arm down in defeat again then rather down the throat of that orderly girl returning from recess. Put it down her throat and see how far down I could reach. Had I been thinking, it would have been along lines that if I was gon’na do that kind of time, better go ahead and commit some crime. But it got too much and I wasn’t thinking. As everyone was returning from recess I got up, grabbed my books, advanced two benches – and sat.

And then there was silence. Nobody went reporting to Tovarisha. Just all stared amazement at me.

Seconds passed. A minute. Another. Tovarisha looked to see what everyone was staring at. And she didn’t much react. Almost like she’d been expecting it.

“It’s just an animal,” she said. “Doesn’t know better.”

She came around, grabbed my ear and led me back. Not back among the gypsies. Four or five benches further. All the way back behind empty benches, where nobody sat or could be conceived to sit. So I became nobody.

Didn’t seem too bad at first, being outcast. Even the out of school drubbings stopped. Only the gypsies craned back my way once in a while – like they couldn’t believe what an idiot I was and almost pitied me. Seemed alright, at first. I wasn’t to speak or be spoken to – and it seemed a relief. But not for very long.

One particular day, it became imperative to use the facilities. What to do, absent voice and mobility? Nothing. Endure. And so I did. Most of that vividly particular day, I endured. But not long enough.

Afterwards, I was sent for a bucket and mop. The custodian returned with me. The bucket had been heavy and I’d wound up making another mess in the hallway. Anyway. Everyone stood in a circle while I was cleaning. Like visiting the zoo right there in the classroom. With Tovarisha, eyes of marble, tour guiding.

“See? That’s what happens when animals get out of control. We must teach it to not soil itself. Teach it to not soil our classroom. Teach it to not soil our school. Teach it to stop soiling our splendid socialist society! Teach this animal better!”

It happened only days after that. Less than a week, anyhow. A group of them from my class cornered me in the building I lived. By the huge, black cast-iron entry door. My hand was forced into the hinge. The door was shut. And the group vanished like they’d never been there. Which, of course, they hadn’t been. Not officially.

Found out, later, that throughout some twenty minutes the entire building heard me screaming. Can’t recall that part. Don’t remember anything but flashes. Alarming snapshots from some pitch of darkness place I’d never been – because it couldn’t have been me trapped there. How far from reaching the door handle was. My grandfather’s face. So many stairs to the second floor. How my thumb was hanging. How my thumb and arm were bandaged in place. And then a murky kind of twilight, a dim and endless boredom when entertainment was peeling dried blood off my arms. Like glue.

Months later I was able to twitch my thumb. And it was back to school. Grade two.

Not the end. Were this short story tall tale, it would be. Protagonist hears last nail hammered in his coffin. But there’s more point to this tale than woe. And it’s not that I’ve enjoyed peeling glue ever since. Or how I loathe buckets and mops.

Second grade was different. I was different. Couldn’t conceive questioning. All was obedience, no questions asked. Not by me. Not ever.

Started out sitting with the gypsies again. Soon enough, Tovarisha rolled her marble eyes at me. My obedience was impeccable, though. Impeccable to tiniest detail. It was her questions answered by my posture at attention – rigid as exclamation marks. Rigid as blades and cast-iron spikes facing her eyes.

My grades went from failing to perfect. I was moved up, one seat at a time, until I was second in row. Tovarisha announced that, should I continue sustaining such heroic progress, it was just a matter of time until I’d be first – in row, in class, an example to all.

My immaculate socialist rebirth was stained but once. There was this sad little man. Came around once every month to teach us art. He’d been inappropriately kind to me in first grade – got himself rebuked by Tovarisha. Never failed me when he should have. Justifiably should have. Art was one subject I ought to have failed. Couldn’t even get stick figures right when time came to drawing. Never could and still can’t. In any event, he was no longer sad when he came round our second grade classroom. He was pathetic. Stooped and trembling. Cringing.

We were to draw the school-yard. I did my best. But the art teacher insisted I hadn’t. Took my drawing and tore it.

“Why can’t you ever follow instructions?” he demanded while grabbing my ear and. pummelling me around some.

I didn’t bother trying to answer. Didn’t bother explaining that following instructions no questions asked didn’t mean I could figure drawing from sticks. He was nothing – I wasn’t there to answer his pathetic questions. Besides, I was more interested how come that orderly girl left class without permission.

Once the art teacher calmed sufficiently he took my grade-book, marked in a large 4, and returned it. That got to me. Standing at attention, staring at the row of perfect 10s culminating in a 4. I looked up from my grade-book, thinking, “This is an animal. It doesn’t know any better.” And I saw Tovarisha standing in the doorway. With the little orderly girl at her elbow.

And Tovarisha called out that pathetic art teacher into the hallway. Closed the door. We heard the shouting anyway. Both were shouting for a bit. He was much louder, initially. As I now realize hearing in hind-sight, hysterical. Soon, it was just Tovarisha shouting. Nothing more from him but a single sound. Sounded like a moan.

He came back in. Not trembling any more. Shaking. Injured like any other animal. Stood swaying a moment, searched and found me through watering eyes. Advanced. Tottered groping at my bench. Grasped my grade-book. Rummaged in his pockets. Pulled out a razor blade. Opened my grade-book and scraped at it with the razor. Placed razor back in pocket, cast about, found my fountain pen, made entry in grade-book, put fountain pen and grade-book down and stumbled from the room.

Never saw that pathetic art teacher again. Didn’t matter. His final entry in my grade-book answered every question I’d ever asked. Not that I was asking any more – but when I saw what he’d done, there wasn’t anything left to asking. Because grade-books were official documents. Had to be triple counter-signed – grading teacher, Tovarisha and parent. Forging signatures or altering grades once entered – totally illegal. Yet that pathetic art teacher had scraped away his original entry. Using razor blade much as I’d once used a bucket and mop. And his final entry in my grade-book was a perfect 10.

And the answer to all my questions – whether or not asked? Why like this and not like that? Why this way and not that? First and foremost and always: fear. Over, above and prior to all else, fear. Reason, as needed, might cower beneath and far behind. Far enough behind to ensure absolute, reflexive, blind flinching obedience. Otherwise, should reason dare questioning authority, reminders were ever crushing close at hand. Reminders how like animals those disobedient were subject to physical rupture, emotional shatter and spiritual fracture.

The point? Merely this. Simple-minded as my not realizing how intolerantly totalitarian life behind the iron curtain was, it is yet simpler minded – and more hazardous – not realizing how relatively tolerant, multicultural, free and democratic life here in Toronto, Canada is.

But for isolated flickers, state society governance has and continues to be by might – not by right. Might made right in the past. And increasingly, it does so again. Might, however, is not established by tolerance. Precisely not. Might is established by totalitarian intolerance to opposition.

What matters the specific character of totalitarian intolerance? What difference whether opposition be exterminated by communism for putative class enmity, by fascism for putative inimical inferiority, by fundamentalism for putative heresy or infidelity to God’s truth? It matters naught. Reason ceases signifying when intolerance turns totalitarian. There’s no reasoning – or questioning – when truth is re-written at gunpoint.

Not so here in Toronto, Canada. Building from cultural foundations in principled tolerance, we demonstrate to the world that right makes a greater might. We serve by example to the world truths and possibilities of multiculturalism and democracy elsewhere remaining unrealized.

Toronto hockey might let us down. But Toronto cultural diversity is unmatched. Toronto multiculturalism isn’t just world class – it’s a beacon to the world. And so, increasingly, is the freedom and democracy of Canadian society a light in the darkness. Wasn’t so until quite recently. But it is so becoming. We haven’t changed – not in any way radically – but we seem to have in the eyes of the world. Because the star-striped backdrop we’re inevitably seen against has turned inside out like over exposed negatives.

United States used to be the bastion of democracy. Now, it’s on a rampage. Since becoming the sole super-power and since the tragedy of September 11th, 2001, the United States has taken to overpowering. Taken to super-powering. More like an angry bear than the eagle far above – striking swift and deadly effective only when it must. So taken by super-powering, the United States becomes lost to it’s own founding democratic principles. There is no imposing democracy. Like a garden, democracy is cultivated – and, when absolutely necessary, defended. Democracy, like a garden, must be preserved and defended from coercion. No conceivable way can it be established by offensive – military or any other kind. Only by defensive. Democracy means cultivating free say in human life – precisely not coercing, ever, other than vital defence. To stop coercing.

Canada will not replace the United States as the bastion of democracy. But contrasting as a free and democratic beacon – illuminating what cultivating democracy in all reason demands? Increasingly.

Rooted in tolerance, we cultivate our free, democratic, multicultural society as a garden grown increasingly dramatic – and not only by contrast. Just one problem. We fail to appreciate the source and significance of the very principle of tolerance we are culturally rooted by. And this lack of cultural self-identification – this cultural self-disrespecting – means worse than Toronto living in no one’s imagination. It means worse than Canada living in no one’s understanding. Not only do we fail appreciating who we are – we fail guarding what we stand for.

The conquerors in history, the mighty of the world – they make no apologies. Not when they win. Totalitarian intolerance? Absolute oppression? Genocide, even? Too bad. When they win, they win. And since might makes them right, they require no reason but overpowering force. Since might makes them right, victory becomes self-evidence their gods are stronger, their destiny more manifest, their ideology more justified, their ways more precedent.

Not so with us. Rooted in tolerance, we do eventually grow mightier than the mighty of the world. For they live by the sword. And die by it. They rise and expand, they decline and fall. As they gamble the fortunes and misfortunes of war, we cultivate consistently. And so long as we stand adequate guard, so long as we cultivate our garden just long enough, we ultimately win simply by default of not losing.

But that’s the problem. We tend to forget standing guard. We tend to forget defending the garden we cultivate. Why? Because we don’t appreciate our own tolerance. Not in principle – we’re too materialistic to understand principles. More importantly, because the very principle of tolerance rooting our culture and guiding our democratic, multicultural ways leaves us prey to guilt. Debilitating, easily invoked guilt. It’s because we’re so committed to tolerance in principle that charges of intolerance, however spurious, get us wheeling – cartwheeling – right off the edge of reality.

We must start appreciating, understanding, even celebrating who we are and what we stand for. We must ask some better questions about the meaning of our tolerance and where, in principle, our tolerance comes from. Lest we fail guarding who we are, what we stand for – and decline, stumble and fall instead. We owe it to the world as much as we owe it to ourselves.

Toronto Culture and Multiculture, Part III

Being Torontonian means having nothing to declare. Took me a long time discovering it.

My second year in Toronto, there was this particular boy in school. Particularly self-assured and a little scary. Had that inscrutably hazardous Stone Cold Clint Eastwood character mix to him. Nobody knew who he was. Everyone knew not to ask. Anyhow, one day he showed up with a rather nice tennis racket. Nothing extraordinary – but all the other boys acted like it was. Acted like that tennis racket was some kind of holy grail. They kept on and on about it. Where’d he get it? How much did it cost? How was it different from their tennis rackets? How was it different from his old tennis racket? On and on.

Me, I didn’t get what the racket was. Like, who gave a flying tennis ball? Most of them didn’t even play tennis. What was so spectacular about it? Why did it matter? Was it supposed to make him more special, somehow? What annoying nonsense. Got so irritated I blurted out: “Yeah, he got it at the Household Finance.”

One moment’s utter silence. Next, like every pin and second shoe dropping at once, the entire class cracked up. In hysterics. Falling out of chairs, rolling on the floor. That’s how hard they were laughing. All but two. Stone Cold Clint of the new racket was alternating glaring at me as if his food had turned poisonous bugs – and muttering to all else that alright already, it hadn’t been entirely that funny. Sure didn’t help him any. Between gasping, all kept assuring him that it had, indeed, been that funny. Funnier. Funniest. Laughing all harder at his expression. Laughing in his face. Laughing at him like they’d never stop.

And I wasn’t laughing either. Not for fearing getting my head bashed in by that damned tennis racket. However likely and totally deserved, getting bashed seemed relatively trivial. I wasn’t laughing because I still wasn’t getting it. Sure, when anyone looked my way I plastered what I hoped would appear a roguish, knowing grin on my face. Like I’d meant it all along. Like I might do it again whenever whim breezed. Anytime at all. Better watch out for me, boys and girls. But I hadn’t a clue.

Reason I’d blurted out “Household Finance”? Between not having yet mastered reading English, struggling with bouts of agoraphobia and flipping over 13 television channels – I was fast becoming a T.V. vegetable. A strange plant, hydroponically nourished by cathode rays. And possibly most overplayed, right then, was the “Household Finance” commercial. Couldn’t get that “Household Finance” jingle out of my head. That’s why I blurted it. No other reason. I’d gotten so irritated I had to blurt something – that’s just what came out.

Hadn’t a clue back then. Decades later, though, recalling the episode, it was obvious what happened. Clear as aquarium glass. That damned racket was nothing extraordinary. Stone Cold Clint was. Extraordinarily inscrutable character. And all those other boys would start asking themselves who to be – not when they’d grow up, but right away whenever Stone Cold Clint was around. Reasonably enough – he was so mysteriously extraordinary, couldn’t help but make them feel inadequate in who they were by contrast. Couldn’t help but make them question themselves – they certainly weren’t about to start questioning him. What wasn’t reasonable was those boys expecting to become more like Stone Cold Clint if only they got themselves tennis rackets just like his.

Not reasonable at all. Absurd. Pathetic. Too pathetic to put up with. But what could I say? That Stone Cold Clint’s new racket was nothing special? No way. Those boys figured Stone Cold Clint was so special, his gear had to be special too. Would have been heresy, questioning their faith in the sympathetic voodoo of product placement. Nor could I have asked if they truly believed superficial emulating – regardless how special he was – would really make them be somebody. Somebody really special. Coming from a nobody like me, that would only have served as confirmation.

But blurting out that Stone Cold Clint’s clan had to finance that tennis racket? Wow. Had I known then what I do now – and were I cleverer – I might have added that they got it no money down. Nevermind. The absurdity was punctured. Not knowing who he was, the mere suggestion he might be an overcompensating, posturing nobody got those boys wondering whether Stone Cold Clint’s new tennis racket didn’t better belong with the emperor’s new clothes. Got them realizing most likely it did. Got them realizing how preposterously they’d been fawning. Soon as absurdity burst, realizing flooded.

So – what’s the point? This: it was absurd those boys believing they could get personal character superficially emulating Stone Cold Clint’s behaviour; and it’s no jot less absurd us Torontonians believing we can get cultural character by merely – superficially – sharing experience. Those boys were either too childish or had uncritically bought into the voodoo of product placement. Us (not only) Torontonians are too behaviouristic, positivistic, materialistic in our beliefs to know better. Different reasons – identical absurdity.

That’s the point. That’s why I say being Torontonian means having nothing to declare. We are completely fallen into materialism. But, culture isn’t material. Culture is a kind of understanding. And there’s no getting any kind of understanding by transitive osmosis of experience – shopping all the right places. Getting any kind of understanding requires appreciating the meaning – the significance – of experience. It requires getting the cultural principles entailing and entailed by significant interpretation of experience. So I say being Torontonian means having nothing to declare as reminder how completely we discount understanding the significance of experience – whether or not shared – while believing culture is merely sharing experience.

That’s why so many repeat that Toronto lives in no-one’s imagination. We’ve discounted understanding – and imagination – to such extent, we don’t believe there’s anything like cultural principles to declare when it comes to who we are. We’ve got nothing to declare. Nothing to understand. Nothing to imagine. We expect getting to know each other – even to agree with each other – merely by making small-talk and eating each other’s food. Admiring each other’s tennis rackets.

That’s why, finally, (not only) Toronto fragments into monocultural communities. There are no over-arching cultural principles for us to agree on. Since we so absurdly believe culture is not entailed by and does not entail principles in the first place. There’s nothing to understand. Nothing to imagine. Nothing to declare. There’s just lots of different menus to order from. Thus, much as most all of us would like to discuss, debate, agree or even disagree what in principle makes us Torontonian – too bad. Nothing to discuss. Nothing more in principle than small-talk. So, sooner or later, of course we fragment. How are we to get to know each other? Learn about each other? Figure out who we are and what we stand for ourselves? No way. Not through small-talk. It’s not through small-talk we learn and get to know each other. And while small-talk makes not knowing bearable, insisting on nothing but small-talk is insisting not knowing. That can’t go on forever. Remain strangers long enough, sooner or later we won’t bother talking at all any more. Happening as we – don’t – speak.

Interestingly, Amy Lavender Harris ceaselessly demonstrates the wealth of Toronto literature. However, I don’t see Toronto’s literary wealth enlivening Toronto in our imagination. Just the contrary. So long we persist with nothing but small-talk, Toronto literature vanishes without cultural trace. Like stones dropped in a lifeless, inert lake – making neither splash nor ripples. Unless it’s in a classroom, on a talk-show or some publicly mandated forum, we don’t discuss, debate or celebrate meaning and significance of our literature. Literature? We don’t even discuss implications of newspaper articles outside the sports section. So much for imagination. So much for understanding. We’ve resigned all that to remaining strangers. Not good enough any more.

Coexisting as strangers can’t do indefinitely. The more diverse we become multiculturally, the less we can depend on culturally impoverished coexisting. We must discover those principles most significant to reversing fragmentation. We must discuss, debate and eventually celebrate understanding significance of those principles. And there is one (not only) I consider most significant: the principle of tolerance. We hold to this principle like nobody’s business. Unfortunately, we don’t realize it. It has precious little life in our imagination or understanding. It is my hope we will begin appreciating it –start understanding how it informs who we are. Perhaps even, eventually, celebrate how it pulls us together.

Toronto Culture and Multiculture, Part II

In Toronto we'd like to think our multiculturalism has made us culturally rich. What other city provides such opportunities for tasting the world -- as when crossing Toronto? Yet, at the same time, in the very midst of Toronto's unrivaled multicultural diversity, we feel culturally deprived. We say, repeatedly, that Toronto lives in no one's imagination. The Globe & Mail said it. The Toronto Star said it. Toronto Life said it (twice). We say so as a matter of fact. We mention it as we might snow in winter or puddles after rain.

It’s puzzling, though. Why would we feel culturally starved by the banquet of Toronto multiculturalism? What is culture, after all, but shared experience and tradition – including culinary tradition? And, since we share such diverse experience and tradition in Toronto – how could we possibly feel culturally starved here?

It’s totally puzzling so long as we believe shared experience to be the source of culture. It isn’t, though. Came to me a couple years back – while lecturing, of all things. Very much in passing, I’d said that culture doesn’t come from shared experience. At lecture’s end, one of the course directors demanded I reveal where culture does come from – if not from shared experience. I tried not answering. With the tide of almost 200 students fidgeting to leave, I tried laughing it off. Said that was another lecture – for another day. But she insisted. Vehemently. And the students had stopped fidgeting. Tide halted mid-stride. As if they actually wanted to know. What to do? Had to say something. So I said culture comes from shared principle. I said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Which it was, after I’d said it. But, regardless how obvious now, I haven’t forgotten that moment. Mostly due to her shocked reaction. Dramatic expressing that the very notion of culture emerging from shared principle rather than experience not only flies in the face of materialism – but gives it a spectacular shiner to boot.

Why we starve for culture surrounded by such diversity of experience as Toronto offers can’t cease puzzling while we believe culture emerges merely from shared experience. Fact is, shared experience is to culture as the visible tip of an iceberg is to the glacial sheet from which icebergs shear. Culture is tectonic. It is shared interpreting the significance of experience – regardless whether the experience itself be shared, orally told or posted on YouTube. Culture is shared signification in light of common principles. Culture is shared meaning. Far beneath and beyond ways of people coinciding, it is the very identity of peoples. Culture is who we are and what we stand for. It is the nation building mortar of common thought – and the often devastating bondage of common thinking.

Total fiction – culture emerging merely from shared experience. Yet, for Toronto, it has proven a highly useful and convenient fiction. For seating diversity, Toronto is front row centre. Progressive as it gets in terms of multicultural diversity. All that and more. While elsewhere, far less spectacular diversity has been feared to cause trouble. Like, pretty much everywhere in the world. Thing is, we don’t fear such trouble in Toronto. Got nothing to fear here. We’re culturally rich and fear no culture clashing – that’s how progressive we are in Toronto.

Hardly. We’re multi-culturally diverse – not culturally rich. Culturally, we’re starved. Toronto lives in no one’s imagination. Being Torontonian means having nothing to declare. What’s there to declare? So long as we maintain culture as nothing but shared experience, habits and traditions, there’s nothing to declare. Were we to admit culture as identity signifying shared principles, there’d be plenty to declare. Our cultural – maybe even personal – principles. But, while only we keep from admitting it, we reduce culture to shared experience fictions. Including culinary shared experience. Like taste-testing each other – instead of declaring who we are and what we stand for. As if who we are were reducible to what, when and how we eat. As if it came down to what’s in our spice-racks. As if. Yet, thereby, we may continue congratulating ourselves on spice variety in Toronto life. As if spice variety sufficed making us culturally rich – not just multi-culturally diverse.

Very convenient fiction – culture as merely shared experience. Enables our believing variety of experience available sharing in Toronto makes us culturally rich. Perhaps more importantly, it encourages our illegitimating those persisting declaring themselves. Since there’s nothing to declare. Right? Maintaining culture as shared experience, we look very far down our noses at them going on about who they are and what they stand for. Wan’na get included in legitimate cultural exchange? Shut up and stop declaring. No faster way getting disqualified from Toronto life than walking the streets declaring who you are. Shut up, stop declaring and open a restaurant.

More than just convenient – our fiction of culture as shared experience. Safety measure, too. The more diverse we become, the more hazardous should too many of us start running the streets declaring ourselves. Declaring who we are, where we stand, what we run the streets for. Because, if too diverse many of us run streets declaring inevitably contradictory principles – well, sure, it might lead to culturally enriching discourse. It might get us thinking a little more about who we ought and might yet be. But far more likely, if we run the streets declaring ourselves, it’ll just get us clashing cultural principles right there in the streets. And most of us would rather avoid that. Much rather. Most of us escaped here to get away from the consequences of precisely that.

So we’re mostly agreed. Culture is just shared experience. We require nothing but multicultural diversity to enrich us culturally. Nothing cold about Toronto but occasional weather. We aren’t culturally starved here. Most of all, we don’t hold with all that declaring. We’ve got nothing to declare here. Far as we’re concerned, too much declaring illegitimates culture. Yet more personally – too much declaring illegitimates character.

It has worked well for us. Though impoverished culturally, we’ve enjoyed unrivalled multicultural diversity – without fearing cultures clashing. It’s really something, how much we don’t make the (bad) news when it comes to cultures clashing. But we’re running into trouble now. In her February 8th Globe&Mail article (Do ethnic enclaves impede integration?) – Marina Jimenez warns: “Canada’s famed multicultural mosaic has morphed into a series of monocultural neighbourhoods. And she cites some shocking statistics. Apparently, in 1981, there were only six “ethnic enclaves” in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. By 2001, however, there were 254.

Sure sounds like trouble. But what sort? Should we look to a future when all our neighbourhoods become so thoroughly and pervasively monocultural that they proclaim independence and demand sovereignty association – or worse? Of course not. Neighbourhoods can’t secede. Trouble is, though, that they can – and increasingly seem to – withdraw into monocultural enclaves. Which, taken to eventual extremes suggested by Marina Jimenez, would mean irretrievable cultural fragmentation. City and country wide cultural fragmentation. In other words, an end to viable continuity across city and country – to be replaced by culturally segregated communities regarding one another with increasing suspicion and through increasing mutual alienation. Finally, there would be hostility – cultures clashing in the streets.

But it’s not that monocultural enclaves impede integration. That’s not at the root of this trouble. No. It’s that we’ve gone too far maintaining the culture as merely shared experience fiction. We’ve culturally impoverished ourselves too much in Toronto, Canada. We’ve starved ourselves to the point where there’s no culture remaining to integrate with, other than the kind of multiculturalism we encounter at food festivals, festivals that leave us hungry because their sustenance only a shadow of a meal. In Toronto, Canada we’ve lost all clue who we are and what we stand for. Thus, it’s only natural for those who retain some however residual identity in former cultural principles to seek each other out. Yes, they have come here searching better lives. Yes, they have materially improved their lives coming here. But not culturally. Much as 'they' might wish to join with 'us' culturally – there’s nothing here for them to join. So why should they impoverish themselves as we have?

We must figure out who we are and what we stand for. Not so that our cultural principles preclude or even occlude those of newer arrivals. Precisely not that. To the contrary. It’s about finding such mortar as will preserve our cultural mosaic from fragmenting entirely. We must figure out what it means to be Canadian – and Torontonian. We must so that those arriving will at least have something declarable to integrate with – beyond recipe sharing.

Toronto Culture and Multiculture, Part I

Posted for Peter

Could Toronto be the world’s most multicultural city? Hard or impossible to measure. Might be, though. Far as multiculturalism goes, Toronto might be better than world class. Might be in a class of its own.

Be only sensible, then, expecting so top-notch a multicultural city to glitter cosmopolitan and sophisticated. Be only sensible expecting Toronto to prove culturally vibrant. And it is. Relative to Barrie, anyhow. Otherwise, world-stage wise, talk about false expectations.

Like a strange double image, multiculturally top-notch Toronto seems lifelessly inert. Culturally profuse yet precisely not vibrant.

There’s no doubting the cultural profusion. Crossing town via Bloor then Danforth, one can taste the world. Yet, as recently as a year ago essaysists in uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, Vanity Fair and the Globe & Mail declared that Toronto lives in no one’s imagination. And although the reference was to Toronto literature, it could as easily have been Toronto culture, since decent literature is as culturally significant as sincere artistic expressing gets.

There’s no doubting Toronto’s cultural profusion. So why say Toronto lives in no one’s imagination? Like, not anybody’s? Could that be even remotely true?

Amy Lavender Harris doesn’t think so. Reviewing particularly Toronto literature and teaching a course called “Imagining Toronto” at York University, she’s been arguing for years there’s deep, broad, all year long literary profusions here. As if Toronto culture were veins of ore thrumming underneath and streets, buildings, the very city literarily outcropped expressions of it.

It’s a lovely vision. Few try and none succeed denying it. Yet, nobody seems to believe it, either. Last fall, Amy gave a talk on Toronto literature at a speaking series called Salon Voltaire. The audience expressed each and every cue receptivity and appreciation required - and then some. But come time for audience questioning and commenting -- well, all audience questions and comments were the singular same. How and why Toronto literature dies of poverty. Amy might as well not have bothered. Absolutely, the audience had enjoyed their guided tourism to deep wells, founts and wealths of Toronto literature. Nor had they doubted what they’d so unerringly been guided to. Thing is, it didn’t register. Such literary profusions in Toronto? Such cultural wealth? Why, that’s wonderful news. Really, that’s magnificent. So sad all Toronto culture dies of poverty. Why is that do you think?

Far as any Toronto audience is concerned, it’s incontrovertible. Toronto lives in no one’s imagination. But why is that? What’s with the strange double image of multiculturally top notch yet culturally inert Toronto?

It hasn’t been very long since I found out. There’s this greatly admired fellow here in the Junction, a Vietnamese electronic engineer. None recall his real Vietnamese name. We call him Gem. And there’s nothing like getting together after business hours at Gem’s. Because Gem single-handedly creates culturally vibrant multicultural community. How he manages this is another story -- how any man can be so much larger than life. What he manages, though, is to get everyone expressing their most fundamental passions, beliefs and principles. Even those of us that have forgotten -- -perhaps never realized -- the principles we live and would die for. At Gem’s, people hailing from every corner of the world talk for real. And almost always, when done talking, even those discovering themselves standing opposed in fundamental principle yet appreciate one another like nowhere else I’ve seen -- especially not in Toronto.

It’s unique in Toronto. Gem, of course, had no clue how unique. Not until a couple years ago. When I told him. Shouldn’t have. But how not? Talking with Gem demanded expressing one’s realizing -- one's understanding.

Gem, as so often, had finished recounting how he’d repeatedly demonstrated what he stood for by fiercely extolling: “Declare who you are!” But I felt sad, suddenly. Because, much as I’d once believed in it myself, long ago, there was no hope of that in Toronto. So I told him the way it is here -- that being Torontonian means having nothing to declare. He didn’t want to believe it, of course. Scoffed the very idea. But there was the beginning of that long sadness in his eyes. Curtains began falling and lights blinking out.

Being Torontonian means having nothing to declare. It’s our cultural principle. Took me years to realize after first arriving here. That the more one declares who one is and what one stands for, the more one gets discounted in Toronto. And it was certainly painful realizing it. I used to think there was something terminally wrong with me. Suffered bouts of agoraphobia over it. But it wasn’t me. It was the anti-cultural bias of Toronto multiculturalism.

Thing is, however painful Toronto bias against culturally vibrant, even forceful expressing who we are may be, it’s nevertheless been good and necessary. Culture’s a big deal when it comes to both building and wrecking nations -- not just cities. And Toronto’s anti-cultural multiculturalism has proven a viable alternative to less tolerant approaches. Old Soviet-style forced dislocation of entire peoples, for instance. Or even American identity melting into the common patriotic pot. Trouble is, it’s starting to crack seams.

Good as it’s been, it’s no longer good enough. Multicultural Toronto now fragments into mono-cultural community shards. It’s not just refusal to integrate by one or even two communities. Were it so, we could reasonably blame them. But it isn’t just one or two. Not any more. It’s fast becoming the rule. And should it become the established rule, that would certainly spell the end for Toronto. Whether culturally, multiculturally or in every other wise and way.

To be elaborated next week: Toronto multiculturalism is historically significant. It might even constitute an historical stage -- or minimally some evolution -- toward the emergence of tolerant yet principled community. Be the community village, city or nation. Be the village local or be it global. But multiculturalism can hope but to usher the task of tolerant yet principled community. It has no hope fulfilling what it seeks to usher on its own.

What would fulfill it? Not sure yet. Working on it -- and looking forward to what I'll say about it next week.