Privatizing CHAN

I saw this on an email list and it occurred to me to comment, but I was too busy at the time and then forgot. Then a friend in Hamilton emailed it too me again the other day, and I couldn't resist.

The article is one in a regular series of updates about municipal issues produced by a group called CATCH, an acronym for Citizens At City Hall. The first paragraph gives the essence of this particular update:

A community agency that has coordinated access to social housing for the last seven years has been dumped by the city in favour of a private company with links to local politicians. The Community Housing Access Network (CHAN) was faxed information on Tuesday that it is being replaced by Fengate Property Management, despite wide agreement that CHAN has been doing a good job.

The rest of the article goes on to point out the support that CHAN has in the community, and the fact that Fengate was a major contributor to campaigns of various local politicians. I agree that the process sounds fishy, and in general I would favour a co-operatively structured, not-for-profit way of addressing a social need over a private, for-profit one. I certainly see no reason why Fengate would do a better job than CHAN.

But I think where CATCH and other defenders of public services in Hamilton (and more generally) need to be careful is the last phrase of that paragraph: "despite wide agreement that CHAN has been doing a good job." I think that phrase shows a great deal of selectivity in terms of whose opinions are being considered. The housing providers think CHAN is doing okay. A lot of the other social service agencies don't have a whole lot bad to say. But I would be very surprised if you found a majority of people who have had to use CHAN's services who said the same thing. I base this suggestion on having spent some time in the CHAN front office and observing interactions between staff and those using the service, and also on things I have heard from people who have used the service.

I think the root causes of this dissatisfaction are much broader than issues of CHAN's structure or of its staff's conduct, though I have heard complaints about both. Rather, a lot of it comes from the fact that there is such a woefully inadequate amount of social housing in Hamilton, so waiting lists are disgustingly long -- not getting what they need will frustrate people and some of that will be directed towards CHAN, which manages the waiting list, even if that isn't a particularly appropriate target. And it can't be easy for CHAN workers to spend so much of their time telling people in need that they are not yet able to get that which they need.

As well, that very role played by CHAN is offensive: Its job is to interface between real people with urgent and complex needs and a bureaucratic system over which those people have no power whatsoever, either as individuals or as a class. The compulsion to fit into arbitrary bureaucratic systems which are not flexible and which care more about their own rules than about people is a fundamental feature of the lives of people living in extreme poverty in developed countries -- answering to a social worker here, a social worker there, a housing access clerk somewhere else, a welfare clerk in yet another location, when all of these professionals must (on pain of losing their jobs) be first and foremost concerned with filling out the right forms and making sure all proper process is observed, and who don't have the power to address the barriers that their "clients" are facing to a healthy and happy and stable life anyway.

Turning the management over to the private sector will not, of course, address any of this. If anything, it will make the management even harsher and less transparent. I support the basic call to keep this activity out of the private sector. But what does it say about our movements for supposed social justice if we do not ground what we say and do in the experiences of those on the receiving end of injustice? In this case, that would mean showing a willingness to complexify the liberal/social democratic narrative of "noble public service being thrown to the private sector wolves" by including in some way real criticisms of the system as it exists grounded in the experiences of those with less power.

This isn't some abstract concern with political correctness, either -- movements for social justice are not going to gain significant ground without mobilization of and buy-in by poor and working-class people, particularly women and men of colour and white women. Social welfare systems as they currently exist need to be defended from further degradation of their ability to meet basic needs, but we can't lose sight of the fact that, at the same time, they are basically oppressive systems whose purpose is to ensure that the larger oppressive system in which they are embedded can continue to function. And this is becoming ever more true as states are transformed on the neoliberal model.

They Came Before Columbus

This book, by Ivan Van Sertima and originally published in the mid '70s, presents evidence for travel by Africans to the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. I don't know enough to comment on some of the more nuanced kinds of evidence about specific facets -- things like linguistic patterns, cultural commonalities, seed drift, and so on -- but I am convinced by the overall thesis. It isn't the most engagingly written book of history I've ever read but just the fact that it was pouring some content into the huge blank spaces in my head that largely enompass history of non-European parts of the planet before contact with Europeans kept me turning pages. Read it!

Giroux at McMaster

I had read this before but forgotten it until I encountered this interview: world reknowned scholar of critical pedagogy Henry Giroux is now on faculty at McMaster University, the institution I attended in Hamilton, Ontario.

I think in the interview he is soft on Canada and soft on McMaster, which despite a reputation for innovative education (particularly in the health sciences) is a pretty conservative and corporatist place. Mind you, a friend of mine was on the committee that hired the new Dean of Humanities that Giroux mentions in the article, and she sounds pretty cool. Perhaps she is succeeding in injecting some critical energy into the place. Certainly Giroux's presence is a boost in that regard -- the number of radical faculty at Mac is pretty minimal.

Experience and Politicization

As part of my oral history project I have done 47 interviews with long-time Canadian activists, and in almost all of them I started out by asking people how they became politicized. Given that, and given that any attractive vision for social change necessarily involves the politicization of ever-increasing numbers of people who are keen on creating change, I have been thinking about this subject a lot.

One theme that I have been pondering is the complex connection between experience, particularly experiences of oppression and privilege, and politicization.

I think it is important to make a distinction between at least two different ways that people can be said to understand things -- I think it's more complicated than just these two, but they are a start. The first kind of understanding is intellectual, which has to do with facts and arguments and in-your-head beliefs. The other I have been thinking of as "commonsense" (a usage I have adapted from Playing The Race Card: Exposing White Power and Privilege by George Dei, Leeno Karumanchery, and Nisha Karumanchery-Luik, though I'd imagine it is used more widely than that). It is a more embodied kind of understanding -- our instinctive reactions, our gut feelings, the unarticulated whole which informs what we do and how we react to things in that 90% (or 99%?) of the time when we aren't explicitly applying our intellectual filters. Of course these two do not exist in isolation, but are constantly in interaction with one another.

The mainstream understanding of politics tends to treat it as at best an intellectual position or belief or at worst an identity-related brand. Some people who disavow interest in or discussion of politics are responding to this; what they are really saying is, "I see no point in being involved in bitter arguments over competing brands, which seems to be the core activity of politics, when it has no real relevance to my life." Even people who are actively engaged in politics, even in radical politics, can fall prey to this misunderstanding -- I've met people who are members of campus-based Marxist groupings who treat their political affiliation as just as much of a brand as the mainstream does, and who think signifying their "revolutionary" label around campus and getting in loud arguments is the essence of actual social change (let alone revolution).


I think this tendency is related to the tradition of Western dualistic thinking, to seeing mind and body as completely separate and the former as the natural residence of politics -- politics are the position you take in an argument down at the pub, they the careful deliberation before casting your vote, they are a segment of identity that has been deliberately chosen.

All of those are part of politics, of course, but it neglects the fact that politics are also very much embodied. A person's politics are not just the summation of all of the relevant "I support...", "I oppose...", "I endorse...", "I think..." statements that are applicable that person. They are also the summation of all activity which is political in a private or public sense. Politics is inherently something that is about interactions between human beings so it makes sense that the ways in which positions are translated in small and large ways into impacts on other people, the world, and the institutions that structure society should be recognized as part of the sum total of things that comprises a person's politics.

Another consequence of recognizing the embodied nature of politics is valuing not only their embodied expression but their embodied origins. That is essentially a recognition that what I do is not just a product of rational deliberation, but of instinct and gut feeling and the sum of my past experiences. In other words, my thoughts on and actions in this world (i.e. my politics) are a product not just of my intellect, but also of my commonsense, and that is very much shaped by experience.

Various strands of anti-oppressive politics also recognize the importance of experience in shaping our politics and our lives. For example, some feminists reserve the term "feminist" to apply to women with feminist consciousness and use some variation on "pro-feminist man" or "pro-feminist ally" to designate men who are involved in the struggle for gender equity. This is to recgonize that actual experience of sexist oppression creates a position from which anti-sexist struggle can be waged that is distinct from that of someone who supports the struggle but lives with unearned male privilege. Both positions must play a role (though opinions vary on the details and on their relationship) but they are not the same.

It might be possible to quibble about the semantics, but my own experience, and what I have heard from people I have interviewed, corroborates the importance of experience. The only thing is, I'm not sure I have more than a vague understanding of how it works. But here's a first attempt to figure some of it out, at least in some very general ways:

Experience of oppression requires those who experience it to develop, at the level of their commonsense, an understanding of power, and necessitates the development of strategies for resistance and survival at the individual level. In this sense, as some interview participants pointed out, being (for example) born Black or Aboriginal in North America means being politicized from the start, as a requirement for survival in a white-supremacist environment. The mainstream narratives which are easily available in the culture to contextualize these experiences of oppression tend to devalue them, make them culturally invisible, and/or say they are natural and inevitable. The individual response at the level of commonsense can take many different forms, including some that are very depoliticizing (in a slightly different sense of that term) and which reinforce the painful cycle of that oppression being internalized. Politicization, in this context, means oppressed people taking that disjuncture between inherited mainstream narratives and their own commonsense, and in a variety of ways constructing a consistent counter-narrative attached to collective, liberatory action.

This general process can be seen as being at the centre of the liberation model of social movements. This model involves groups of people who all experience a particular kind of oppression getting together, sharing experiences, collectively changing their own and each other's consciousness, and moving on to action together.

It is important to emphasize again that the connection between experience of oppression and politicization is complex. As I said above, the suffering and deprivation of resources (both material and psychological) imposed by oppression make it a perfectly understandable outcome for people who experience oppression and therefore have an understanding, in their commonsense, of some of the structures of that oppression to respond with individualized resistance focused on coping and survival. This path may or may not be conscious, depending on the person. Other people might become active around oppressions they do not experience and not around those they do, to avoid the pain of dealing with those issues. Still other people might engage in collective action around the oppression they experience but be resistant to broadening their consciousness to include awareness of and resistance to other oppressions. There are many other writers who are much better equipped than I to talk about various kinds of consciousness and resistance, both individual and collective, among the targets of what bell hooks calls "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy."

But what about politicization which is not directly grounded in experience? At first blush, this question is most directly relevant to people like me -- people who are, by and large, on the privileged side of pretty much all of the ways in which power and privilege divide our society. (My class privilege is middle-class, not owning-class, but it is still privilege.)

One clear difference from the liberation model of politicization roughly described above is the relationship between commonsense and intellectual understanding. In the liberation model, part of the process is building an analytical framework under which the commonsense derived from experience of oppression can be understood in a way that is not self-blaming and that leads towards collective action for liberation. Impetus down this path comes from both intellect and commonsense, but there is opportunity for grounding it in commonsense because of the experience that has shaped it. But for those of us who have a commonsense built mainly around experiences of privilege, in a lot of cases understandings of struggles for justice and liberation are reached intellectually first, and can only be integrated into commonsense slowly over time, and even then only to a limited degree.

On a little more reflection, however, this question is of interest to more than just straight, white, middle-class, male leftists. Obviously people who are politicized in connection with their experience of oppression very often are politicized (have consciousness and take collective action around) issues beyond their experience.

But how and why does this happen? How can we make it happen more?

I have no clear answers to these questions, just a few general ideas.

One factor can be a willingness to allow intellect to override the naturalization of privilege that comes from a commonsense forged in the experience of privilege, a willingness to translate the intellect into action and therefore into new experience which ultimately modifies your commonsense (in limited ways). Though this can be very productive, it can also be dangerous -- much evil has been done in the world in the name of ideas that were intellectually perceived to be good, in some abstract sense, but that were divorced from real human experience. Still, I think some variant on this plays a role in politicization for many people in areas where experience of oppression is absent.

Another important factor is human connection -- the innate tendency of human beings to want to connect to other human beings, and to be able to engage in imaginative empathy with them. It is important to stress that it is not the job of people who experience oppression to educate people who do not; we all must take responsibility for educating ourselves. Nonetheless, one way to learn in a way that impacts not just our intellectual understanding but also, in an indirect but still real way, our commonsense is to hear the experiences of others. This is, I think, least effective in terms of generating imaginative empathy (and is politically and personally offensive) if it is voyeuristic and if the human connection through which it happens is purely utilitarian (i.e. it exists only to get this information). It can be very valuable in the context of mutual, wholistic, genuine human connections in which solidarity and affection or even love are shared.

I think partially shared experience can also be important. I don't have a lot of evidence of this from other people, but I know in my own case, I think some of my openness to feminist analysis in later years (however perpetually partial its incorporation into my commonsense might be) relates to experiences in my family of origin that weren't particularly my experiences but which still had a huge impact on the atmosphere and an indirect impact on me.

None of that is very satisfying, though. Nor is it necessarily all that useful if your goal is to try and further politicization in others. After all, there are lots of resources out there, both published works and generous, amazing individuals, from which to learn about thes things. Yet most of us who benefit from privilege tend to resist seeing such things even at an intellectual level, let alone trying to truly recognize them in our commonsense, let alone taking action based on them. Interpersonal empathy and intellectual argument can be important for learning under the right circumstances, but they are hardly a magic answer.

This also leads to various questions at a larger scale than individual politicization processes, with respect to how movements organize themselves. I recently read Masculinities by R.W. Connell, an excellent analysis of masculine experiences in the current gender order. In one section of the book Connell points out that a movement based on the liberation model was tried by pro-feminist men in Western countries starting in the '70s. Over time the use of techniques like consciousness raising groups led the movement and many individuals within it towards depoliticized understandings of gender, and in some cases to reactionary ones that reinforce patriarchical institutions and male privilege. He argues that it is foolish to try and construct a movement based on the liberation model around a shared experience of privilege rather than oppression. But then how are pro-feminist men to engage in political action? I don't get the sense that he is particularly happy with the way he answers this question, but it is still useful: an alliance model. In other words, pro-feminist men engaged in struggles around other areas in which they do experience oppression can work with feminist women to ensure that, in that context, women's liberation issues are addressed. He gives the examples of the trade union movement and the anti-racism movement as places where this can be a useful way for pro-feminist men to engage in political action for gender justice.

I don't have a rip-roaring conclusion, I'm afraid. The thinking that went into this post is still very much in progress. But I would like to say that I would be interested in hearing from readers about this -- I know there aren't many of you out there, but there are a few. If you feel comfortable doing so, I'd like feedback (either by email or through posting a comment) on how all of this relates to you and how you were (or were not) politicized. Does any of this make sense? Is any of it just dumb? A mischaracterization of the world? Missing the obvious? Offensive? Let me know!

Hamilton Bath House Raid

Heard about this from a friend back in Hamilton: The city's only gay bath house was raided by the cops recently.

Depressing Iraq Curiosity

I'm very curious, in a despairing kind of way, where things can possibly go in Iraq. I don't see anything positive that seems very likely right now. Here are some facts that lead me to feel this way:

(1) The United States effectively lost the political struggle to control post-Hussein Iraq in April, by simultaneously provoking escalation of conflict with Sunni militants in Fallujah and setting off a chain of events that sparked armed struggle based in the Shia population. The military struggle rages on, but whatever goodwill was left in the non-Kurdish Iraqi people towards the U.S. occupiers was lost at this stage, and with it any chance of a U.S. political victory.

(2) The situation is, from the U.S. point of view, worse now, and getting worse still. And obviously that means that things must be unbelievably awful from the perspective of Iraqi civilians.

(3) In Vietnam, another occupation of a country in which the U.S. lost the political struggle early on but kept up a military fight for more than ten years, the U.S. killed two or three million Southeast Asians before they finally realized they had lost.

(4) Iraq matters to U.S. interests far more than Vietnam ever did. Vietnam was largely about the "threat of the good example" -- making it clear to peoples seeking liberation from colonialism that an economically isolated nationalist model or a Communist model was not going to be tolerated. Despite rhetoric about other dominoes falling at the time, the actual importance of losing Vietnam to the "red menace" was pretty marginal. The long-term presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, however, is crucial to the control of Middle Eastern oil, an absolutely vital element in the competition between the U.S. and the other major economic powers in the world (Europe, Japan, China). This is more true than ever before, given that the world has already or will soon reach peak oil production, and in the coming decades availability will go down and the price will go up, which will have all kinds of implications for the world's political economy.

So what's going to happen? What they'd like, I'm sure, is for the Iraqi resistance to be pacified and U.S. media/public attention to turn elsewhere, so that Iyad Illawi can go about his assignment of turning Iraq into a country that is stable, undemocratic in any meaningful sense, and slavishly devoted to U.S. geostrategic interests and to neoliberal economics. What many peace and anti-occupation activists would like is for the U.S. to pull out tomorrow and to figure out some way to pay huge sums of money to the Iraqi people for many years to come to at least try and make ammends for the more than a million deaths caused by two wars and a decade of sanctions.

I don't see either of these happening any time soon. The occupation cannot (thankfully) win politically and the resistance can't win militarily. So what will happen?

A lot of dead civilians. An increase in power for fundamentalists and reactionaries on both sides. Anything else?

Sigh.

T-Shirt of the Day

Seen on a thirty-something woman in Santa Monica:

"I (heart symbol) pro-choice boys"

Air Quality and Lung Function

This just in: Air pollution hurts children's lungs!

This study is published on the California Air Resources Board web site and was also in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers followed 6000 children in 12 different communities in Southern California while they were between 10 and 18 years old. They found that "children's lung function growth was adversely affected by air pollution, new cases of asthma and asthma exacerbations were associated with ambient air pollution levels, and school absences from acute respiratory illness followed rises in [ground level] ozone levels. We conclude that current levels of ambient air pollution in Southern California are associated with clinically important chronic health effects that have substantial health and economic impacts. These findings indicate the need for cleaner air for our children to breathe."

Divorce your car! Support green energy sources and green economic practices!

Racial Profiling in U.S.

A new report from Amnesty International states that a "staggering number of people in the United States are subjected to racial profiling...Aproximately eighty-seven million Americans are at a high risk of being subjected to future racial profiling during their lifetime," and 32 million have already experienced it.

A problem which used to be most commonly referred to in a short-hand way as "Driving While Black" is now, according to the report, best characterized as "Driving, Flying, Walking, Worshipping, Shopping, or Staying at Home While Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, Muslim or of Middle Eastern Appearance."

More on Nonviolence in Palestine

Here is another article in response to Arun Gandhi's visit to Palestine. It's generally pretty interesting, although it does a few times fall into the trap of not treating nonviolence seriously...for example, it recognizes that there was violence (both in India and in Europe) that contributed to the "nonviolent" struggle for Indian independence, but then mocks the idea of nonviolence in the Cuban Revolution by asking if "Batista would have given up his dictatorship if Fidel and Che had done a protest fast in a Havana public square?" Well, obviously not, but would he have given up his dictatorship if many thousands of Cuban workers in the urban centres hadn't staged mass strikes?

Another piece that's often missing from these discussions is one that I picked up from a very disappointing book I read recently, which I may eventually get around to reviewing on this site: Unconquerable World by Jonathan Schell. He points out that even the most unreprentant supporters of armed struggle, from Trotsky to Ho Chi Minh, recognize the centrality of political strength and political victory even when guns are in hand -- the Vietnamese did not drive the U.S. out of their country by having a stronger military, they did it because the National Liberation Front was politically unbeatable in Vietnam. Most authors, regardless of where they situate themselves with respect to the nonviolence/ambivalence to violence/advocacy of violence debate, often neglect this crucial fact.

Election Malaise

One of the items in my plus column as I anticipated the life-changing move from Hamilton to Los Angeles was the opportunity to be immersed in the political culture of the United States as the bizarre spectacle of the 2004 presidential election unfolded. Admittedly, this was more a question of morbid fascination or a perverse kind of voyeurism ("How could they do that?") than a serious expectation that meaningful learning would occur, but even considering that I have been somewhat disappointed so far.

For one thing, campaigns at this level are mostly media-driven these days, and the availability of the relevant media and my consumption choices with respect to media are much the same now as they would have been in Canada. As well, both parties have decided that California is a wrap for the Democrats, so neither are wasting much time or money on it. I've seen a handful of signs about congressional races, but little more than that. However, I have had some contact with lifelong denizens of this particular political culture, so being in LA has offered some opportunity to understand things differently (if not exactly better).

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have much to say about the whole affair. The mechanics of it seem to be both inane and insane, but that observation is itself fairly obvious and trivial. I am puzzled and put off by the visciousness of the Anybody But Bush versus Cobb versus Nader camps raging among people (who seem to be mainly white progressives) over a rather trivial percentage of the vote. I am amazed at how incompetent John Kerry's campaign seems to be, despite the resources at his disposal. I am flabbergasted at how Iraq is a non-issue but Vietnam is being constantly refought (in a weird way that manages to avoid any actual substantive discussion about that horrific murder of millions of people in South East Asia by U.S. imperialism.)

I have some quibbles about details, but the analysis of long-time activist Eric Mann with respect to the elections sounds reasonable, if a bit too drenched in the language of the Old Left. The movement that he has helped found, Progressive and Independents to Defeat Bush, also seems to make a certain kind of sense.

I have a few questions and nits to pick, of course. I'm not sure why he disagrees with the analysis that California is a "safe state." I also don't think that the left really has much to contribute to supporting the effort to oust Bush, nor do I think the Democrats would benefit much from our support. I suppose that given the lack of resources allocated by the national Democrats in many areas where they are guaranteed to carry the presidential vote -- areas where progressives are likely to be stronger -- the left's contribution to such a united front might be more with respect to local races, but I don't know if electing slightly more progressive Democrats in local races is really worth the effort Mann is proposing. I suppose it is more the fact that the visceral hatred of the Bush agenda among the constituencies Mann proposes to target is too good a springboard to miss as a way to boost left organizing -- why should the Democrats be the only ones to capitalize from the disaster that is the Bush presidency? Not that they seem to be trying very hard to do so.

Even so, for an exercise that will have a far from trivial (if still very limited, in many ways) impact on the world, the Kerry versus Bush contest is hard to get very interested in, because it is just so dumb in so many ways. I agree with the predictions that forsee a low voter turnout, even for this country. Regardless of who wins, I hope delusional optimism over what Kerry might (won't) do or deserved despair at "four more years" of Dubya don't suck the wind out of the sails of social movements, because they are going to be more desperately needed than ever.

Petition to Support War Resisters

Here is an e-petition calling on the government of Canada to allow war resisters from the U.S. to have safe haven in Canada, much the way they did during the Vietnam War. Please read it and sign it!

Tariq Ali Interview

An interview with Tariq Ali in the International Socialist Review. It's about six months old, but still lots of interesting stuff...particularly see the section on the role of poetry in the political cultures of various Islamic countries.

Sky Dragon

Check out the Sky Dragon Centre, a worker co-operative that some comrades back in Hamilton are trying to get up and going.

Babysitting Co-op

It's not the sort of alternative structure that will ever become a basis for counter-power to challenge capitalism and the state. It's not even the sort of collective that is likely to lead to its participants politicizing one another and turning gradually towards action. Still, I'm quite excited that, two evenings ago, we hosted at our apartment the first meeting of what will become a babysitting co-operative.

It's not explicitly political, and probably most of the people who are going to be part of it would be puzzled or even uncomfortable by it being understood in this way. However, I think any opportunity to create groups of people who are meeting one another's needs through non-market, non-state mechanisms is a good thing, and any opportunity for people to practice the skills of functioning in non-hierarchical small groups (something that even many people in social movements don't recongize as being something most of us are not that good at) is a good thing. And, hey, it means that Stacey and I can go out on dates once in awhile, so what's not to like!

The dynamics of the meeting were interesting, too, for me. I'm no stranger of being in social contexts where I am the only male in a group of females, right back to the group that I hung out with in the second half of high school. But this was a bit different, because it was really my first time as the only dad in a group of moms, and that does seem to matter -- I don't really understand how, yet, but I suppose it has something to do with the gendered ways in which parenting is incorporated into identity and social practice. As well, this was not my first experience as being the only male in an activist context, but it was probably only my second -- lots of other experiences in male-dominated contexts, and some in fairly gender-balanced contexts, but I think some of my time in the Waste Reduction Working Group at OPIRG was the only other obviously female-dominated collective I've been part of. I'd have to reflect on it further to say anything about how gender shaped the work of that group, but certainly at the meeting a couple of evenings ago, gendered ways of work did seem to be playing a role in how the social and "business" portions of the get-together were conducted and integrated. (And to be clear I am not, of course, proposing some sort of essentialized difference here.)

Nonviolence in Palestine

A friend forwarded me this article questioning the emphasis that at least some commentators put on the need for the Palestinian resistance to embrace nonviolence, and distinguishing between at least two different agendas that different advocates of this position can hold.

For some reason the title of the article, "Overstating the benefits of Palestinian nonviolence" had me expecting something much more critical of nonviolence than I found it to be. Though not quite in these words, it criticizes the tendency of privileged North Americans (and others) to treat nonviolence as an exercise in abstract purity by pointing out that the famous nonviolent change in the past has often been very mixed with violence. An important corollary that isn't mentioned is the important role of nonviolence in many instances of radical change that have a historical reputation of being violent. In other words, the question of the roles of violence and nonviolence in social change are more complicated than some people claim. As well, the article points out the way that concern over tactics (i.e. nonviolence over violence) can be a rhetorical device to mask opposition to the goals of the movement in question, and it is often those who use their supposed advocacy of nonviolence in this way that ignore the real complexities of social change and anti-colonial resistance on the ground.

Outfoxed and Bush's Brain

In the last couple of weeks I have watched in the theatre a couple of nonfiction films about politics in the U.S., Outfoxed and Bush's Brain.

Outfoxed looks at Fox News Network, its extreme right-wing bias, and its impact on the national media environment and political scene. Bush's Brain is about Karl Rove, George W. Bush's chief political advisor, and is based on a book of the same name. Like any watchable nonfiction film, they are both a mixture of documentary and polemic.

I'm glad I went to see them but I think it is important to see their limitations: Both flow from the same analysis, the same narrative, and it is one that is distinctly limited in its vision for change. This narrative says, more or less explicitly, that the Republican Party and other arms of the right in the U.S. are breaking the accepted rules of politics to their own advantage and the detriment of everyone else. The unspoken corollary of this narrative is that "the rules" are the historically accepted conventions that facilitate competition among strands of acceptable elite opinion while excluding options and agendas that fall outside of that consensus range.

In terms of the North American mass media, terms like "objectivity" and "balance" have been defined (not through conspiracy, but through the way the related institutions function) in reference to this range of elite opinion, to the exclusion of historically marginalized voices and oppressed people. This has been heavily documented in Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and lots of other places. The essential message of Outfoxed is that Fox News has the nerve to "cheat" by using different standards for what constitutes acceptable knowledge and different ways of defining balance in order to marginalize not just those people who the mainstream media marginalizes all the time anyway but also one part of that spectrum of elite opinion. The film shows some of Fox's excesses, but does so largely in a way that is uncritical of and therefore ultimately supportive of the elite-centric consensus frame that passes for objectivity in the rest of the mass mainstream media. (If you look closely, you can see that some of the people interviewed in Outfoxed actually do have the more rigorous, more radical critique of media, but that was not explored at all by the film, and not really distinguished from the "they don't have enough Democrats on" whine of the rest.)

In Bush's Brain the focus on machinations in electoral politics, and the bottom line seems to be that Rove's dirty tricks are dirtier than the acceptable level of dirtiness found in most other campaign managers' dirty playbook of dirty tricks. Though the glimpse it provides of the operation of power at this level is interesting and instructive as far as it goes, the lesson that Dubya is able to do bad things because Karl Rove is a very smart, very bad man is really rather narrow. There is not even a hint of critique of the systemic context that allows Rove's skullduggery to so impact the fate of the world.

It reminds me of an observation I once read about Watergate -- I don't remember where I read it, but I think it was made by Noam Chomsky. He pointed out that Watergate was treated as a scandal by the media because it was one elite institution (the Republican Party) engaging in behaviour beyond the normal conventions for political competition (by spying) against another elite institution (the Democratic Party). He points out that the Socialist Workers Party were targeted with this kind of behaviour and worse for decades by the FBI, despite being a legal organization that did not engage in or advocate criminal activity, and this was not only okay but not even worthy of notice because their politics were outside the range of elite consensus.

I want to reiterate that both films are interesting as far as they go. I had never watched Fox News so Outfoxed gave me the opportunity to see Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly in action -- is it just me or do they remind you of muppets? Really nasty muppets without much of a sense of humour, that is. And though Karl Rove is a key figure in the shadows of the current administration in the country in which I know reside, I really didn't know much about him before I saw Bush's Brain.

In engaging with these films, I'm actually thinking of things that Z blogger Justin Podur said about Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11, particularly in response to a critique of it by Robert Jensen that I linked to in an earlier post. Podur asys:

The reason I am very happy to see the film getting the response that it does isn't because it reflects my politics. It doesn't. But, agreeing with all of Robert Jensen's criticisms, I found it to be far less of an assault on my dignity than the nightly news with Lou Dobbs on CNN (we don't get Fox News in Canada), and I found it outright refreshing in parts.

I don't think of Michael Moore as part of the 'left'. He is part of the mainstream, and, to my mind, the healthiest part, the part that is genuinely trying to be decent. That's why I think of him as becoming the 'official opposition' in the United States. Of course we need to go well beyond 'official opposition' and Michael Moore's movie. But on the spectrum of developments in mainstream, white America, I think the massive popularity and visibility of this film is a positive development. Of course I would much rather it was the 'left' reaching all those millions of people than the film, but that we aren't isn't Moore's fault, but our own.

The response might well be that I don't understand mainstream America or the 'left' very well, that my expectations of Moore or the 'left' or the US are far too low. It could be that I watch too many bad movies and too much bad television and have developed too calloused a skin for the racism and sexism in all of it that I just filter it out and look for what's good. But really, what I like best about the movie is that Michael Moore doesn't need the left to rally around him (he doesn't deserve it either -- the part where I agree with Jensen -- but that's a different issue). He will do just fine without any such rallying. And so, while I wouldn't even think to lift a finger to rally around the film or Moore, I do wish both well.

Outfoxed and Bush's Brain are also from the part of the mainstream that is trying to be decent and healthy, and they more or less contribute to the role of official opposition that is being spearheaded this election season not by the Democratic Party but by Farenheit 9/11. But though I wish them well, I also wish even more fervently for success in the ongoing efforts of those of us who wish to assemble facts and create narratives and analyses that go beyond the limited goal of "official opposition."

Conflict Over UUism

This morning we attended, for the first time, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Santa Monica. Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religious community that requires adherence to no particular creed or dogma but bases its unity on a set of fairly general ethical principles. My mother is a member of the congregation in Waterloo, and I have attended the occasional service there and in Hamilton.

I am conflicted about whether I want this particular institution to be a regular feature of my life. On the one hand, UUism is definitely ethically engaged and sometimes socially engaged, and this particular church has an active social justice committee. On the other hand, the politics that UU churches tend to embody are not my politics. The congregation in Santa Monica appears to very white, very middle-class, and despite being officially welcoming to queer folk, there seemed to be fewer people (I only saw one, in fact) representing a queer sexuality in their personal aesthetic than in Hamilton or Waterloo. Of course, I am white and middle-class and straight, and it would be snobbish and unproductive to dismiss other people because they share that identity. However, a clustering of identity among self-selected members of an institution can be a useful indicator of the institution's practices and politics -- when few of those members are members of historically oppressed groups, that can be quite telling.

The service was presented by a guest minister who is executive director of an NGO devoted to mobilizing Los Angeles' faith communities in support of low wage workers. Her sermon was on an important local labour struggle, which is pitting low-wage hotel workers against their multinational employers. I heard her speak on KPFK last week, in fact, and it sounds like her organization (founded and still chaired by Rev. James Lawson of civil rights movement fame) does some great work. However, there was a hint of self-righteousness and noblesse oblige to it all that I find icky -- not to her organization, but rather to the framing of social justice issues within the main body of this specific congregation. Not that I'm feeling very confident these days with my own ability to advance a political practice that combines the privilege inherent in my identity with effective, radically grounded social change work, but given my feelings of lack in that area right now is this really a place where I can find what I'm looking for?

An illustration of the positives and negatives was the story that one of the members of the social justice committee read to the congregation's children as part of the service. It provided a brief history of labour and Labour Day. There aren't many institutions of any sort that make a point of including any working-class history in education for children. But the history that was presented omitted what is for me one of the most important features of Labour Day: The North American labour hierarchy advocated for its adoption as labour's holiday instead of Mayday (even though Mayday's origins as a significant day for labour around the world come from events that took place in Chicago) in an effort to distance itself from the more radical labour movements elsewhere in the world.

Another example: The latest newsletter of the social justice committee had a short essay on prison reform, as they are thinking of adopting that as an issue in the future. I think that's great because prison reform is often something that gets neglected by progressives with privilege. But the essay did not once mention the issue of racism, which is central to prison issues on this continent -- a vastly disproportionate number of those adversely affected by the right's law and order agenda are people of colour and Aboriginal people.

So I'm going to wait and see. I think it's a question of more clearly defining for myself what I might want from this institution before I can decide if some part of that can be found there. One positive discovery was that there is a weekly peace vigil in a park just a few minutes walk from where we live now, so I'll definitely be checking that out on Friday.

Press Coverage of Anti-Immigrant Study

This article is an analysis of the lousy media coverage of a study recently released by an anti-immigration, far right think tank.

Ruminations on Internet Deprivation

As my complaining in two recent blog entries has detailed, we were without easy, home-based internet access for a period of approximately three weeks. I was able to get online briefly on some days outside the home, to take care of a bare minimum of internet-related activities, but I was essentially without access to this particular infrastructure for that period of time. This had a larger psychological impact on me than I was expecting, and certainly larger than I am proud of, and I have been thinking about why that might be.

One reason is fairly obvious: I am living in relative social isolation in a relatively new city, and as someone who is not a big fan of the telephone, the internet is an important tool in maintaining social connections at a distance. It is not a replacement for other kinds of integration-of-living (a made up term of my own to capture the idea of deliberate practices that people in a relationship engage in on a regular basis as the substance of relationships) but it does allow for integration-of-living of a range of intensities and intimacies, depending on the desires and efforts of the people involved. Of course being deprived of this tool under these specific circumstances was less than thrilling.

However, I think my distress at being briefly deprived in this way is also a reflection of a certain flavour of middle-class, North American masculinity. (And my use of the word "deprived" should be seen as having a certain self-mocking intonation, since I fully realize that this was a temporary inability to access a privilege and not much of a deprivation at all when seen in any kind of a social context.)

R.W. Connell writes in his classic book Masculinities:

This class process alters the familiar connection between masculinity and machinery. The new information technology requires much sedentary keyboard work, which was initially classified as women's work (key-punch operators). The marketing of personal computers, however, has redefined some of this work as an arena of competition and power -- masculine, technical, but not working-class...Middle-class male bodies, separated by an old class division from phsyical force, now find their powers spectacularly amplified in the man/machine systems (the gendered langauge is entirely appropriate) of modern cybernetics. (Masculinities, pp. 55-56)

Though I am a little odd in not connecting them to the income I do or do not earn through them, I am fairly typical of North American males in that significant parts of my identity are connected to my productive activities. What I do varies with my specific circumstances, but it has fairly consistently been about facts and narratives. The internet gives me ways to access many facts and narratives produced by others, as well as ways (including this blog) to express those chosen and produced by me. It therefore makes sense that losing access to this major mechanism for enacting this aspect of identity was frustrating.

Beyond being raw materials for and expressions of my productive life, I think that facts and narratives accessed over the internet also function in my life as distractions. More than one feminist woman in my life has observed (with amusement or exasperation, depending on the context) that I live too much in my head, and I do acknowledge that, at times, I use external facts and narratives as a distraction from the visceral realities of day-to-day life which can't help but be occasionally unpleasant and frequently boring. I don't think this is intrinsically bad if it is part of life in a balanced way; after all, almost everyone enjoys this kind of enterntainment/escape in one form or another. Still, it's another reason why lack of access to the riches of the internet can be difficult to take for someone accustomed to them.

There is something potentially unsettling about our increasing tendencies to prioritize technologically mediated connection with our fellow human beings and the world. I don't think I have a complete handle on it yet, but I'm pretty sure a part of what might be worrisome is its impact on our practices of connection that are local. I'm not sure I really see how indefinite deprivation of tools to connect at a distance might directly impact my local practices of connection here in L.A. Nonetheless, I can see that my expectations of physical distance are shaped much differently than those described in stories heard before we left, from my partner's grandfather. He talked of some of his many sisters and brothers moving away to get married and going for years and years without really interacting with them. Of course the experiences of his youth are much closer to most of humanity's current experiences in this regard than my own.

I'm not very confident in my abilities to enact this, and I'm conscious that such ability to deliberately leave and enter various communities tends to be connected to privilege, but I do at least in principle prioritize a commitment to attaching to the local. But the presence of technological mediators of connection at a distance play a huge role in making local connection optional by providing an alternate outlet for the human hunger for connection. Many people (often professionals with class privilege, for example) have no real interest in enacting specifically local connections with other individuals or with community.

I know I was startled a number of years ago when a good friend told me that she thought that, other than issues of distance from existing intimacies, what city you lived in didn't matter. Given that this was in the context of a discussion of Hamilton and Toronto, and my own growing consciousness at the time of the vastly different cultures of community and political engagement in the two cities, I was quite shocked. My experiences of Los Angeles are causing me to appreciate even more strongly that such sentiment is predicated on a certain kind of disengagement from the people and world that immediately surround you, as I come to appreciate more keenly the role of local physical geography (distance within the city and related public transit networks, in this instance) in shaping connections to other individuals and to community.

So that's where I'm at for the moment -- I'm still a little abashed at finding my net-free weeks to be such a frustration, relieved that they are over, and somewhat reassured that at least they have made all of these things a little bit more visible for me.

Bush by Numbers

Just a quick link to start with, to an article in the Indepdent painting a picture of the Bush presidency through numbers.

Finally Back

Hi.

We finally have internet service again. I may have time to do a more thoughtful post later this afternoon or this evening, but for now I just want to rant about what a frustrating experience this has been.

We ordered phone and internet service in mid-July, to start in our new place on August 10. On that date, the phone service started but we had not heard anything about the internet service. Some investigation revealed that the order that had been placed had been cancelled because some bright bulb over at Verizon decided to implement our DSL before we actually had an operative phone line, and when s/he couldn't do that, decided the only thing to do was cancel the order. And it somehow made the most sense to do that without telling us. This was only discovered after a great deal of time on the phone. A new order was entered into the queue. In an effort to be helpful, a customer service person got its implementation moved up. Again, on the day it was supposed to begin we found we had no internet and no communication from the company. More time on the phone with various company representatives established that there had been another screw-up. We ended up having to wait again, not only to the original service start date for our re-placed order, but a week beyond that.

Our internet service finally began yesterday morning. The Verizon start-up software only works on Mac or Windows, so I got it going under the Windows partition on my machine just to make sure everything was working. But for some reason I couldn't get the connection working under Linux, which was very distressing because I use Linux almost exclusively at home. It was a very frustrating day. I only found out this morning, thanks to a helpful netizen on a Usenet group, that in fact the very first question I asked of Verizon tech support yesterday (to get basic information on how they set things up) was answered incorrectly so I had spent my day trying to get the connection working the wrong way.

It is now working, with one minor hiccough that should be cleared away soon enough. I have a bunch of backed up correspondence and work to do that will probably take me the rest of the day and perhaps into tomorrow, but I hope to resume posting regularly to this site in the next day or two. Not to mention getting back to the work I should have been doing yetserday and today.

We are getting three months of free service, which I suppose is nice but I would still have rather been able to connect the day we moved in.

Pfui.