We listened to this endlessly when we were little tots. Strangely, my eldest brother was named Peter, and the sourpuss who couldn’t quite get the flying thing was ceaselessly exhorted to “think lovelier thoughts, Michael”, that being the name of my other elder brother who, being analytical from a young age, tended to express rather cynical thoughts on many scores. So over at The Tyee, Bill Tieleman posted a piece in which he points out that, upon meeting some political foes, he discovers that they have some common likes and that they might be human just like him and that perhaps we ought not to demonize these folks.

Perhaps demonize is a little too strong a term for what needs to be our outlook and how we ought to guide our actions, but a quick scan of the misery and misrepresentation spread by Jim Flaherty, I find that a shared liking for the Group of Seven isn’t enough to want me to treat him particularly kindly, that his behaviour is any more worthy of compassion than petty thugs (who at least can often plead need for their predations, or impulse). There is such a litany of double-dealing, prevarication, greed and grand larceny on the part of so many politicians, and so much of it fits a recurring pattern that belies the possibility that simple stupidity might be at the root of these misdeeds, that it seems difficult to avoid concluding that these folks have knowingly and intentionally engineered schemes to redirect public funds into private pockets and then to smile and cook up a wealth of rationalizations and justifications to cover their real intentions.

Therefore, we needn’t demonize these people: they’ve done that by themselves and anyone who treats them with deference and respect is putting on a display of connivance, or complacency, or ignorance, or some combination of the above. We might want to keep this little quip from Charles Dickens in the back of our minds as we deal with the current régimes in Victoria and Ottawa (and beyond):

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

—Charles Dickens

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

—Samuel Butler

In relation to most of our governing hierarchy and the corporate pyramid that supports the hierarchy, I have often wondered what these people learned from their parents and subsequent interactions with schools, faith organizations, business connections and general interactions with other members of society. A quick look at the ideals that are plastered all over every surface of our society would call for an empathy quotient sufficient to apportion opportunity, wealth and societal value according to some criteria other than Al Davis’ infamous “Just win, Baby!” Such seems not to be the case when the cadres holding the reins of political and economic clout clearly suffer from a deficit in their EQ and a blindness to reason that might show them that they are taking us (some of us kicking and screaming) down a path to oblivion (the original category of post pertaining to World Spiralling Toward Hell was originally meant as a bit of nasty silliness, but has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy). They seem to be incapable of hearing that sucking sound as they and theirs go down with the rest of us in what will clearly be the pyrrhic victory to literally end all others, or, if they hear it, they are plainly incapable of anything like a competent interpretation of the signs around them. It is a truly Herculean undertaking to educate the expediters of doom, and perhaps even more daunting to contemplate awakening the legions of their victims, those who cheer as breeches are opened in their own hulls, and the walking dead who blithely continue down the trench of consumption, blind to the cesspit into which we are all about to plunge.

I’ve been delaying reading this piece because of the anticipation of sheer pain at another shot at someone trying to do something to ensure that we have a planet to live on a couple of decades down the road. I can understand that Margaret Wente, as an apparently very well-off US citizen living a fairly cosseted life as a columnist in Toronto, might take exception to the existence of the economic system that set her up in the life of Riley, but her column was written without, apparently, the benefit of reading the actual book.

(Full disclosure: I, too, hold US citizenship, and lead a different version of that cosseted life out here in the last remaining low-rent district on the Wet Coast. Neither have I read Naomi Klein’s latest tome, though it’s on the list. Unlike Ms. Wente, I came to the conclusion long ago that we are staring down both barrels of the apocalypse on a number of counts and have been actively engaged in local initiatives to do something about the endless wars, resource extraction follies, over-consumption and possible disasters related to food/water shortages and disease.)

MW’s contention is that Klein is clueless on a number of questions relating to both capitalism and climate change and in the rather snide way of discounting the thought that went into the book, labels her the It-Girl of climate change, rather a low blow for someone with pretentious to intellectual status. I was curious to see what the mood was amongst the commenters ( I didn’t get too far, but was surprised to see how vehemently the commenters protested Wente’s not having read the book and proceeded to point out flaws in her argument, specifically that Klein hadn’t addressed issues relating to China and India, stating that those who read the book would find that it was all there. The sad thing is that the Globe and Mail would leave the impression that Wente was on the right side of it all, except for those intrepid enough to dive into the comments.

I’m glad that I delayed reading the piece and glad to get this thought out where I can now ignore it. We all have some pretty important tasks to attend to.

Socialist In Name Olny

Like many, the early days of the Obama presidency brought with them expectation that we had lived through something of a nightmare and that it was time to move on to rebuild the shattered community. the economic landscaped, the tattered diplomacy and the crumbling environment that characterized the Bush years. Sadly, the glory of the Obama presidency has been more of same, the odd sop to progressivism and sound ecology, but more war, more torture, more violation of rights and more inequality. This situation is reflected all over the world, for me particularly in a land for which, thanks to my Dad, I have a strong predilection, France. There, following the disappointment of the two terms of François Mitterand, nominally a socialist, the French got two terms of Chiracism, the new crony capitalism in its nascent form with a strong dose of self-perceived De Gaulle ego. This was followed by the nastiness and arrogance of a term of Sarkoland where the lords of the towers of money really established their preeminence and life for the general populace seemed to spiral down the crapper. Sarkozy was removed in the general election of 2012, when François Hollande came to power with, of all things, a parliamentary majority, and with the support of the EELV, the greenies of the Hexagone. The greatest achievement of this formation has been the Pacte de Responsibilité (just what it sounds like) which bestowed some forty billion euros worth of breaks on the business sector without any established quid pro quo in terms of creation of employment or any other measure to improve the lot of the  working folk. Of course, the idea is to increase the competitive level of French business in relation to the rest of Europe and the World, meaning more stuff being made in France and more jobs. Sounds like straight Strauss to me and some of the elected Socialist Députés felt the same way. including the Minister of the economy, Arnaud Montebourg, who, this week, had the audacity to say something about it. Manuel Valls, the Prime Minister appointed by Hollande five months ago, wasted no time in inviting Montebourg and a couple of his colleagues to leave the cabinet. Montebourg was replaced as Minister of the Economy with a chap named Emannuel Marcon, a product of the Rothschild banking concerns. From this, we can see easily why people are more than a bit disappointed by the Hollande government and has a lot of people divorcing themselves from the political manoeuvres of both the Socialist Party and the UMP, looking to find solace in the arms of Marine Le Pen’s Front National or just calling a pox on all their houses.

As our own next federal contest approaches, I find myself asking if there is a choice worthy of a vote: Harper has devastated, physical, social and spiritual landscapes here in Canada, contributed to a new Dark Age of Ignorance, doomed to planet to war, pestilence and climate dislocation and created inequality in Canada on an unprecedented scale. Justin Trudeau wants to cast himself in the rôle of Saviour from all of the above, but is still a champion of pipelines, of the investment community, big pharma, the arms industry and a hawkish Israel and NATO. Mulcair seems unwilling to tell the nasty truth because he knows it won’t bring him to power. The prospects for responsible government seem to fade with each day. We can only hope that Mr. & Ms. Every(wo)man will begin immediately to scratch some part of another of the collective anatomy and utter the polite Canadian equivalent of WTF before starting to school whatever politician of whatever stripe about being accountable to those with little to lose and an allegorical pitchfork stowed somewhere in the closet.

(belongs to info wars.ca)

Title from an article on the Globe & Mail’s site. I’m not going to read it:

The rise of the drones: Do privacy concerns outweigh the benefits of this burgeoning technology?

The obvious answer is yes, but not just drones: our lives are interlaced with a plethora of different technologies and their associated gadets, some of which may enhance our lives, but many of which have too much downside, and the sum of which amounts to an addiction to veeblefeetzers and goldbergian claptrap. We’ve been sold a load of not-so-goods that channel the way we live and bind us to the culture of consumption. It would be interesting to know what portion of the Earth’s human population is employed in the development, production and marketing of what are essentially toys: civilization seems to have structured itself to choke itself on stuff to the extent that our escape route is not entirely clear and becomes less so by the day.

I suppose the radio and television set the tone early on in the last century, a brilliant way of extending communication and a possible step in improving the human condition. What we got was the best pavlovian Bernays sauce of conditioning through limited discussion and debate reinforced with tsunamis of emotional drek and lowest-common-denominator views of society and its discontents. What started with the promise of a vehicle for the improvement of culture and the broad dissemination of information and analysis, became, with the television, the complete medium for the perpetration of a scheme of lies and salesmanship, promoting consumption, covetous desire for baubles and meaningless status, and the preeminence of an American dream built on the pillaging of other peoples’ resources. The culture, debate, information and analysis was there, but it took a skilled and dedicated seeker to connect with it,a task that became increasingly difficult as a compliant school system largely failed to give students the requisite questioning skills before trying them loose to be good producers and consumers.

I have been good at this sort of compliance, even in the face of an education, part of it in school, a lot of it from reading, from social interactions with peers and family and, finally, from recoiling from some of the anomalies in what I was hearing/seeing, and what I perceived to be a version of real events. Here I am working on a somewhat passé computer, using a browser and blogging software, so I haven’t escaped unscathed from the onslaught, but the ad below, for our provincial political masters, one of the sleaziest governments I’ve ever encountered in person or in story tells me that we haven’t learned much. We haven’t learned that any technology can be bent to the rules of crass commercialism  in the service of colonization by capital. The Internet, like radio and television, seemed to start out as a medium of contact and discourse, but has evolved into a maze of pornography, cute cat videos, a shitstorm of political venom and yet another bully pulpit for oil lobbies and other destructive groups.

This is not to say that there isn’t a ton of good material and fine journalism and rhetoric out there, that there aren’t loads of inspired images and sounds, some that go beyond simple entertainment to provoke thought and engage the viewer in a constructive interaction with others, but without actually putting the thesis to the test, a browse through a day’s Facebook posts seems to confirm it, as do the frequent arrests of people from all walks of life for charges relating to porn.

It is yet again an instance of doing what comes easily to us rather than tackling what really needs to be done.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to a video of the late Charlie Haden playing with none other than Ginger Baker (who’d-a thunk it) and Bill Frisell: