When I was a little kid, the teachers at our school didn’t
make us special kits for looking at solar eclipses like some kids got, they
didn’t key us into the wonders of science and the universe, and they didn’t try
to explain to us what it meant for the moon to pass between the sun and the
earth. Instead, knowing that it was
dangerous to look directly at the flash of the eclipse, they took us all out of
class 30 minutes before the event—they marched out everyone in the school,
class by class—and locked us in the windowless gym until the moon had passed
and our eyes were safe again.
When I was a kid, our grade six teacher used to wheel in a
TV on one of those rolling stands (this was before people even had VCRs,
really; we used to watch movies in class on super 8 and the film would always
melt half way through because the projectors were so shitty. The films were held together by enough scotch
tape to keep Christmas going for half a year) …our grade six teacher rolled in
a TV and put on the Phil Donahue show.
“Sooner or
later you kids are going to have to learn about what it’s like in the real
world.” He would say. Then, as we sat
watching Donahue interviewing pimps and serial killers and pregnant fathers
from the Philippines,
our teacher would sit at the back of the class and read the Toronto
Sun.
“It’s the
only paper that tells the truth about what’s going on.” He would say.
Maybe the Sun did tell the truth about what was going on in
those days. After all, that was the time
when this country still had such a thing as independent media and also
journalistic integrity. Those concepts
are long gone. The Sun, which used to be
a left leaning, pro-labour rag, is now owned by a giant corporation and works
as hard as it can to sell a hard-core right wing agenda to working people. It tries hard to convince people that the
corporate agenda is the only thing that can protect them from the decay of the
land. I’m not sure if this effort is
successful or not because I blocked out the Sun from my life a long time ago.
One thing the Sun Media group (a subsidiary of Quebecor) did
this week was shut down the Montreal Mirror.
They shut it down with no notice.
They stopped running the paper and they vanished the website. All the archives and everything written for
this paper were gone in a flash. There
was very little reason given other than it was economically untenable to
continue.
The Mirror was a place where independent journalism
happened. It was a place where artists,
thinkers, radicals, and people with alternative ideas about how life should be
lived all had a voice and a listing of the cool under-the-radar events that
were happening in town. The
disappearance this week of the Mirror creates a vacuum that Quebecor couldn’t possibly
care about because none of the people effected represent any kind of potential
business or profit for the corporation.
Part of the agenda—and I do believe it is an agenda, no
matter how badly planned it has been—is to sever the conduits by which smart
and thoughtful people in this country think and share their ideas. Scientists have been muzzled, funding for
arts programs has been cut, the cost of education is becoming increasingly
prohibitive. The death of the Mirror is
yet another element of this. It just
makes it that little bit harder for people of like minds to find each other.
People like to talk about George Orwell and his assessment
of how totalitarian societies operate.
It’s almost a cliché now to talk about something being “like 1984”. In a sense, the accusation is so overused that
it approaches the same degree of speciousness as accusing someone of being like
Adolph Hitler. All the same, a girl who
was quietly reading 1984 on the Metro during the Grand Prix a few weeks ago
(and during the police clampdown on the Metro that accompanied it) was
forcefully ejected from the Metro as an agitator for having the book in her
hand.
I’m mentioning Orwell with this apology (although, really I
shouldn’t have to apologize for what I’m saying here, regardless of what you
think of George Orwell being used as an example), because I want to mention
something about the principle of Newspeak that is described in 1984.
The idea of Newspeak (this is to say the reduction and
simplification of the language, and the eradication of words that could reflect
negatively on the actions of the state) is that if people do not possess the
vocabulary with which to describe what they think is wrong with a situation
then they lack the tools to fight against that wrong. The key to resistance is communication and the
expression through sharing of ideas. The
Conservative government of Canada is not actually shrinking the language (as of
yet—although they are restricting severely what government employed scientists,
employees, and even journalists at the CBC are permitted to say), but they are
attacking the key areas that we use to share information and ideas that may
conflict with their policies.
The Mirror is gone.
At the same time Canada’s
international broadcasts and shortwave radio programming is gone. Employees at the CBC are now being asked to
pledge an oath of allegiance to the government and to not say anything that
will make the government look bad. When
we lose our capacity to talk to each other, then we lose our capacity to
discuss what is going wrong. People may
feel that things are bad for them in their area, or in their own life, but they
risk losing the broad national sense of discontent that is everywhere right
now. This makes the problem seem a lot
smaller and less significant than it actually is. The situation is bad.
There have been hundreds of thousands of people in the
streets in Montreal for the last
few months. There have been many
marches. There was a march that filled
the downtown up last week—if you were to see an aerial photo you would see an
entire main street of the city filled with a procession of people that
stretched for miles—yet no paper reported this, no news truck from a major
network was on hand with a camera. It
was though all this discontent passed by and was gone. It makes it seem like it is nothing, but it
is not.
The media takes us all out of our classrooms and locks us up
in the proverbial gym because they don’t think it’s safe for us to view these
events. The possibilities of motivated
human masses is too dangerous a prospect for young eyes—even with the proper
optics provided.
Even when these events do get reported, the press is usually
negative, and any attempts to correct the fallacies of the story are swamped by
the hate mongers in the comment section (are these people employed by the
government?). The hate mongers reduce
everything to basic yeses and nos. This
further stultifies debate. If the only
possibility can be that, if you believe in the blue party, everything you say
is right and, if you believe in the red party or the orange party, everything
is inhumanly wrong, then there can be no room for compromise.
There can be no way forward when the conversation is full of
phrases like “you are a typical ‘dipper’” [ i.e., supporter of the NDP, a.k.a,
a “left wing loony”], or “you are just another ‘CON-hack’” [supporter of the
CPC], etc. When one accuses a person of
being just a parrot for a particular political party and then refers to the
party not by its proper name, but by an insulting moniker, then all possibility
for intelligent debate is lost. This is
not political debate, this is systematic dehumanization. Decisions here are made not with the
confidence of logical and reasonable superiority (such as one might find from
using facts and statistics to prove points against one’s opponent—our Prime
Minister, by the way, has gutted statistics Canada and the environmental
protection agency so that he need not be bothered with facts), decisions are
made here with the confidence of moral superiority.
21st Century Canadian Political philosophy made
easy:
1)
I support party X because party X
is always right.
2)
Because party X is always right,
those with opposing views must be wrong.
3)
Because your views oppose those of
party x, you must be wrong
4)
People with such poor judgement
should not be allowed to make decision for this country. Therefore I support an attack on your
happiness, comfort and security at ever turn.
It is the only way to stamp out sub-human types like you.
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