Sunday, October 30, 2005

Protesting Legislated Hunger in Hamilton

“If you or I were on those benefits, you wouldn’t think twice about applying for anything you can get because you’re so starved and your kids are so starved and your health and their health is being undermined all the time by a lack of fruits and vegetables—a lack of even enough food,” says an impassioned [anti-poverty activist Wey] Robinson. “I think anybody in the general public should be outraged if they come to understand what’s really going on. The system is outrageous. And when you think about 25 per cent of Hamilton’s kids living in poverty and a huge chunk of those kids are in families that are on social assistance, it’s intolerable.”


That comes from an article in this week's View Magazine, the independent weekly in Hamilton, Ontario. It talks about the pending provincial crackdown on a provision activists have been using to help make sure that social assistance recipients have enough food to stay healthy, and includes lots of lengthy quotes from anti-poverty advocates.

Robinson, incidentally, as well as being someone I had the pleasure to work with myself when I lived in Hamilton, is one of the participants in my social movement history interview project.

(Article forwarded by WR.)

Katrina North

I just got back from being in southern Ontario for 8 or 9 days. While there, a friend I was out for a drink with, a Mohawk woman, observed with twinkly eyes that the Sudbury to which I would be returning is a better place than the one I left. She was, of course, referring to the arrival in Sudbury of the thousand Cree people evacuated from the Kashechewan Reserve near James Bay.

In a spirit of solidarity rather than just charity with those forced to abandon their homes in yet another twist of colonial circumstance, here is an article by Charles Demers of Seven Oaks. With reference to the outpouring of disdain among Canadians for the U.S. state's horrible and racist bungling of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, he says:

The fundamental question for us now is this: In the face of the equally foreseeable, calamitous and racialized circumstances that led to this week’s emergency evacuation of the Kashechewan Reserve in Ontario, will we carry over our indignation at the negligence with which African-Americans are treated by their government into a justified and constructive rage over the treatment of the Cree near James Bay?




Wednesday, October 26, 2005

CBC and Blindness

Growing up, I had many opportunities to listen to CBC radio, and I retain a certain affection for it even though I am conscious of its shortcomings and I don't really listen very often these days. This morning, however, I happened to hear a segment of the broadcast, and I was particularly struck by some aspects of the first news segment.

The sequence of stories included two related to natural disasters, hurricane Wilma and the earthquake in South Asia. What interested me was the ways in which Canada was visible and not visible in these two stories. In the story on Wilma, which came earlier in the segment and was therefore awarded greater significance, the focus was Canadian tourists who had been trapped in Cancun. While relating what happens in the rest of the world to people from Canada isn't entirely unreasnable for a media institution based here, it is interesting that the only mention in the entire story that people who weren't mostly-white North American tourists might be present in areas of Mexico targeted by the hurricane was a clip from one returned tourist praising the hospitality of the Mexican people and talking about how much they love Canadians. Not a word about the neocolonial economic arrangements that result in the phenomenon that is labelled "tourism" in the context of Cancun, and an assurance from a fellow white Canadian that the racialized and neocolonially exploited "others" in the global south just plain love us.

In the story on the earthquake, Canada was completely absent. It reported on a conference of donor nations called by the U.N. in an attempt to increase the level of humanitarian assistance being given in response to the quake, which is far below the actual need at this point. No information was provided on Canadian contribution levels, and certainly no context that involved comparisons to levels of Canadian spending on our military in general, on subsidizing the occupation of Iraq through participating in the occupation of Afghanistan, or in the ongoing colonial remoulding of the Haitian state, and of course nothing about the way that Canada benefits from a world economic order that is the cause of South Asian nations having to seek resources so urgently from North America and Europe.

There's nothing exceptional about these stories -- this is how world news always gets told in the dominant media. I just happened to have an opportunity to notice, this morning.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Quote

The human being has the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play. He [sic] has a need to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, and the need to gather these perceptions in a "world." To these anthropological needs which are socially elaborated (that is, sometimes separated, sometimes joined together, here compressed and there hypotrophied), can be added specific needs which are not satisfied by those commercial and cultural infrastructures which are somewhat parsimoniously taken into account by planners. This refers to the need for creative activity, for the oeuvre (not only of products and consumable material goods), of the need for information, the imaginary and play. Through these specified needs lives and survives a fundamental desire of which play, sexuality, and physical activities such as sport, creative activity, art and knowledge are particular expressions and moments, which can more or less overcome the fragmentary division of tasks. Finally, the need of the city and urban life can only be freely expressed within a perspetive which here attempts to become clearer and to open up the horizon. Would not specific urban needs be those of qualified places, places of simultaneity and encounters, places where exchange would not go through exchange value, commerce and profit? Would there not also be the need for a time for these encounters, these exchanges?

--- Henry Lefebvre

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Bartolucci's Office Occupied

Earlier today, eighteen members and supporters of Sudbury's Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee occupied the constituency office of Rick Bartolucci, Ontario Minister of Northern Development. The group was demanding that he speak up in cabinet against proposed social assistance rule changes which would make it harder for people whose health is being affected by inadequate welfare rates to get the money they need. These rule changes could be enacted as early as today, though probably won't be made for at least another couple of weeks.

Here is the text of the media release for the event (largely written by me):

Bartolucci must help hungry people eat and not stand by as his government takes food out of their mouths.

October 19, 2005 -- Rick Bartolucci nees to decide: Will he help hungry people eat or will he stand by as his government takes food out of their mouths? The people of Sudbury need him to use his voice in cabinet to defend the Special Dietary Supplement provision of Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program, and make sure every single recipient gets the money they need to eat well and stay healthy.

Social assistance rates in Ontario are too low for people to live healthy lives. According to the Sudbury Board of Health, the cost of nutritious food for a family of four in Sudbury has shot up by 8.3% since 2004. In a recent Toronto Star editorial, Michael Oliphant, direct of research at the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto, was quoted as saying, "There is absolutely no question that people can't buy nutritious foods living on social assistance or if they are among the working poor."

If you can't eat well, you can't be healthy. This is common sense, and there is lots of medical research that backs up the fact that chronic poverty and food insecurity are harmful to your health.

The Special Dietary Supplement is based on providing extra income to recipients who have medical reasons for needing to improve their diet. Given the inadequacy of social assistance rates, everyone on OW or ODSP has valid reasons for receiving this money, and it is on this basis that the Ontario Common Front (OCF), including the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee here in Sudbury, has been trying to sign up as many people as possible for the Supplement and get much needed food money directly into people's hands.

This has only been possible because more and more medical professionals are also recognizing and acting on this connection between chronic poverty and poor health. The Sudbury Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Penny Sutcliffe, recently co-signed a letter to the provincial government which argues, "As poverty is one of the strongest risk factors for serious illness, it constitutes a legitimate, and preventable, 'medical condition', justifying the prescription of the full supplement to every person on social assistance."

The campaign by the OCF has been endorsed by the Toronto Board of Health and many medical professionals across the province, as well as organizations like the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto, the Canadian Auto Workers, and the Social Planning Council and United Way in Peterborough.

But now the provincial government is set to take away the only hope that thousands of families have for being able to afford a healthy diet, by changing how the Supplement works. Under the new rules, medical need as decided by a qualified medical professional will no longer be enough. Instead, provincial bureaucrats will decide in advance what kinds of medical needs deserve to get met and what kinds will be ignored -- in other words, which people deserve a chance to eat healthy, and which people will have to continue living with lack of access to the amount and kinds of food they really need.

The Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee calls on Rick Bartolucci to stand up in public and in cabinet and demand the Special Dietary Supplement rules stay unchanged and that the Supplement be awarded to everyone on social assistance.

For more information about this campaign and about the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee call XXX XXXXX at YYY-ZZZZ. We will also be holding a clinic to sign people up for the Supplement in Sudbury in the next few weeks.


L (age 26 months) and I attended the event, but until the last few minutes we were there we waited out on the street -- I kept watch for the arrival of police (who never came) and L pointed out passing trucks and trains. Both of us enjoyed some yummy rice cakes.

Inside, from what I understand, a statement very like the media release was read by an HCOC activist who is on Ontario Works and has been screwed around by the bureaucracy with respect to getting the level of Supplement a medical professional decided she needed to stay healthy. We successfully sought that our demands be personally received by Bartolucci. Statements were also made by representatives of Mine Mill/CAW Local 598 (this local has donated funds to support HCOC, and the CAW is supporting the campaign at the provincial level) and of the Students' General Association of Laurentian University.

Media presence included the local CTV television station, both English and French language CBC radio, the Laurentian student paper, and the Sudbury Star. We'll wait and see what the coverage looks like.

L and I left after the occupation had lasted close to an hour, and the event was winding down. Most participants were still in the office at this point, so it is possible that there have been further developments since then. I will post links to any published media accounts or action reports by other participants.

Other OCF groups have also been taking action around this issue -- on Monday, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty occupied the ministerial offices of Sandra Pupatello, the minister responsible for overseeing social assistance, and yesterday there was an action in Belleville.

Snow!

L and I just spotted the first snow of the year!

Yes, I know, a seasonsed veteran of the north would just grunt and ask what took it so long, but we spent last winter in Los Angeles, so the first snowfall feels a little bit more worthy of note, this year.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Handbook For Bloggers

This handbook is produced by Reporters Without Borders. Now, I've read some things in the last year that make me dubious about some aspects of RSF's political orientation and independence -- sorry, don't have those links handy -- but I would imagine that this might be a useful resource to publicize regardless of those reservations. So check it out, see if anything in it is of use to you!

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Heroes and Hopelessness

I've been thinking more about stories.

Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci, in his writing from prison between the World Wars, was the first to use the term "hegemony." It conveys the idea that the social grouping that is on top in a given time and place, rather than using direct coercion most of the time, exerts control over the rest of society mostly through its ability to shape the landscape of ideas and language and common sense. This leads to those in other social groupings having little choice but to understand the world from the standpoint of those on top, perhaps completely or at least enough to make significant action for change unlikely. Gramsci was all about class, so originally the term was intended to convey the means by which the working class was lead to accept the inevitability of a social order that exploits them.

Later theorists have adapted the concept in various ways to include structures of power organized around factors beyond just class, and to try and capture the idea that knowledge and ideas and culture are not just dictated from above but are shaped by struggle. Both of these things seem like improvements to me. Others have taken these ideas about culture and power and distanced them from anything that can reasonably be called materialism, which seems less useful. I feel like I have a lot to learn about how power interacts with and is channelled through knowledge, ideas, and culture, but I am confident that such interaction takes places, and that knowledge, ideas, and culture are very real terrain for struggle (albeit in a way that is tightly linked to the material world).

I am not sure how all of that links to what I am about to talk about in any mechanistic way, but I still suspect that the link does exist.

Something you learn early on about writing is that if there isn't some kind of conflict, then there is no story. It can be within a single heart, between individuals, between nations, even the among the gods themselves, but if there isn't some sort of difference or dispute then you may have a collection of prettily crafted scenes, but you don't have a story.

In mass culture, the conflicts we see most often turned into stories are internal or interpersonal. Will she run away from home to escape the abuse? Will Joe get the promotion, or Vince? Will they end up together as the credits roll?

But we still can find lots of examples where the conflict involves one or both (or all) sides existing on a scale larger than the individual. Our world is the site of many conflicts that occur on larger scales, so it is important that we be able to tell stories about them. On the other hand, that presents a difficulty in terms of storytelling: Human beings tend to empathically identify much more readily with other human beings than they do with institutions or states or collectives. This means that getting significant reader/listener/viewer buy-in to a story often has to mean putting individual human beings at its centre. But how do you do that? How do you tell a story that is simultaneously about individual human beings and about things that are on the scale of society as a whole, or at least on some sort of larger scale?

Well, I think there are a number of answers to that, and I'm not going to try and give all of them. What I am interested in at the moment is one particular answer that seems to be very common in our popular culture, or at least the niches that I frequent.

One way to do it is to have an individual on one side opposing some enemy that is on a much larger scale than individuals, but give the former individual some sort of capability that makes it an even match. Make it seem somehow reasonable for the action hero to face down an entire army with only his M-16 that never runs out of bullets. Focus on the person with power, the president or the general, so that the entire conflict is personalized into (usually) his hands. Or make your focus someone who may not be at the peak of pyramids of power but who has been placed in a critical role by circumstances, like the submarine captain who must escape detection and launch the missiles, or not. Or enter the terrain of speculative or fantastic storytelling and give the central figure or figures facing down the forces of darkness some kind of superhuman powers so that their enemies can be huge and horrible yet they can be overcome in the end mainly by the actions of our heroes.

I'm sure this approach to telling stories has always been with us. I happen to really like at least some of the categories of stories that commonly use this device. But what is its impact?

One of the psychological challenges of social change work is dealing with the fact that the effort a single human being can put in is on an unbelievably drastically incredibly smaller scale than the problems we face. I mean, one person's effort can make an impact on struggling against a particular instance of workplace harassment, say, or one specific boneheaded city council decision. But no individual's struggle, on its own, will decisively transform the patriarchy or, likely, even the sexist realities in a single large workplace; and no individual's struggle will eradicate the drive to environmentally idiotic development by neoliberal capitalism that lies behind the city council's decision. It is this difference in scale that means that social change work has to be collective to be effective in any non-trivial way.

This, of course, can be very disheartening. A recognition on some level of this disparity in scale between the effort one person can put in and the change that is needed shapes how those who see the oppression and exploitation and environmental destruction in our society respond to it. For those who experience oppression directly, and who therefore have no choice but to struggle against it, it can shape choices about how to struggle and discourage engagement with more collective approaches. For those who are more privileged, it can stop us from doing anything at all beyond tuning out, insulating ourselves with our privilege, and getting cynical. And even those of us who try to stay engaged with collective forms of resistance can find this reality pretty freakin' disheartening from time to time.

Stories are a way for us to understand and deal with the world. Our mass culture has very few stories that are directly about collective resistance to structures on a larger-than-individual scale. But beyond that, so many conflicts of any kind that our stories centre on involve an individual protagonist who can make a huge difference. What impact does it have on our collective psychology when we are told that the struggles which matter, the struggles which deserve recounting and celebrating and telling, are those in which an individual can face some larger something and win on their own? How does that shape our gut reactions to the prospect of engagement with collective social change work, in which the Big Bad cannot be defeated by a single noble act, a single superhuman effort, a single cunning plan? How many of us say, "Well, this situation doesn't allow for a Harry or Buffy or Frodo, and how the heck else do you struggle against evil and expect to win?"

Monday, October 10, 2005

Vote For Teachers' Right To Strike

Online polls are of questionable significance as either measurement of opinion or political intervention, but when it only takes one click, then why not? Today's poll at the Globe & Mail is about teachers' right to strike, so please go and vote to support that right! (After October 10, you can go and check out the results.)

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Serenity's Coded Anti-Imperialism

[WARNING: SPOILERS FOR SERENITY BELOW!!!]

With a few exceptions, other than in periods in which significant sections of the U.S. domestic population are in active revolt, the only way to say much that challenges power via Hollywood is to bury it so deeply as to make it irrelevant; it becomes of interest only to hardcore fans and cultural studies professors because it doesn't present the challenge blatantly enough to force those viewing the film to deal with it even if they disagree.

Cultural products can only be meaningfully understood by looking not only at the narratives and imagery of the text itself and those of the broader culture but also the material conditions of their production. Hollywood movies don't spring from nothing. They are the result of a very specific set of institutional circumstances embedded in capitalist relations of production in a white supremacist and (hetero)sexist society that is the current hub of imperial domination in the world.

The most notable recent exception was, of course, Farenheit 9/11, a film at the progressive edge of mainstream opinion. It had far from ideal politics but it played the very important political role of challenging lots of ordinary folk about certain key issues in ways that otherwise would not have happened. Some liberal disgruntlement (bordering on despair, really) plus Michael Moore's propitious placement in terms of money and prestige made it possible, and while it opened a niche for a series of other fringe progressive documentaries leading up to the November 2004 U.S. elections, the mainstream of Hollywood remained largely closed to openly challenging content.

This occurs not because of conspiracy but because of economics. A studio invests tens of millions of dollars in a feature film for no other reason than to make its money back plus as much more as possible. A passionate vision by an auteur may be there, but if the bean counters don't approve then the vision stays unrealized; thus are the gates kept. To make back that much money, you need to appeal to a mass of people. The first way that gets in the way is because oppressive understandings of the world are widespread, and even without further meddling there might be some assertive disinterest at least from a chunk of prospective customers to material that challenges this. This could render difficult assembling a sufficiently large customer base to make your money back. Now, personally I don't think most people are as closed to well-done, entertaining material that challenges their preconceptions as common sense (also known as "hegemonic discourse") would have it, but there are other factors as well. One goes back to the institutional gatekeepers, both the studios themselves (who decide what gets made) and the wider media (who award or withhold the kind of buzz that makes or breaks a film financially). These media institutions function to make a profit, and the buzz-making tends to favour that which does not challenge power, while the openly challenging gets trashed. Again, no conspiracy and it's far from absolute, but somehow, in general, elite sensibilities about such things tend to filter down the structure of media institutions along with the pay cheques.

Perhaps most importantly, social movements that are active and organized and in motion can influence such things. Unfortunately, the most active and organized and best funded social movements in the United States today are the very opposite of progressive. They can raise a righteous ruckus about a couple of lesbian farmers appearing unobtrusively in the background of a kids show and manage to get it pitched by PBS, as well as a hundred other sickening examples of even very modest, liberal "diversity" being shouted down, let alone anti-oppression, anti-capitalism, or anti-imperialism. Politicians, companies, and media institutions fear them, even when those entities are themselves inclined towards liberalism.

All of this, of course, limits what Hollywood is going to make. A feature film about the daughter of an Iraqi Communist murdered by the Baathist regime who runs away to join the nationalist resistance to the U.S. occupation, for example, just ain't gonna get made. Nor is a riveting drama about a U.S. soldier ordered to torture prisoners in an Iraqi prison who decides to try and claim conscientious objection and ends up in jail for many years. In fact, anything openly grounded in a standpoint outside the strange and narrow spectrum of what is permissible in mainstream news in the U.S. is unlikely to get made. Not impossible, but unlikely, at least until years after its direct relevance has passed.

This takes us back to where I started: The only genuine dissent which can make its way into Hollywood product most of the time, and certainly in our current period, is so deeply coded that it becomes worthless as political intervention and is really more trivia (to fans and academics) or an exhibition of frustration and cleverness (to the person in charge of the film). It is in this category that the anti-imperialist message of Serenity falls.

Serenity is an unlikely genre-bending sci-fi/western (don't jump to judgment, it actually works) written and directed by Joss Whedon, of whom I am a fan. It is based on his television series Firefly, which did not even get to finish its first season but which was kept alive as a franchise by very vigorous DVD sales. The premise is a humans-only multi-planetary kind of universe set a few hundred years in the future. The heroes are a bunch of misfits on a rickety spaceship who do moderately dirty deeds for hire (mostly thievery and smuggling). The captain (Mal Reynolds) and first officer of this craft are veterans of the losing side in a war in which the civilized central planets ("the Alliance") conquered a federation of less-developed worlds that were keen on doing their own thing. Among the passengers is a young woman who has been tortured and changed into a weapon of sorts -- she is psychic, a superhuman fighter, and psychologically broken -- and her brother, who sacrificed his fortune and his medical career to rescue her. The Alliance is hunting her down because of potentially damaging information buried in her mind.

As a piece of entertainment, I found the film very effective. There were a few points where the cow-poke dialogue grated, but for the most part Whedon's playfulness with language is among the best things about his writing. There are also a few places where the set-up isn't quite as effective as it could be, though I'm not sure in the two-hour feature format much could've been done about that. But for the most part the mix of humour and darkness, the pacing, the acting, and the action are all top notch. I appreciated the fact that the brutal violence that gets labelled "action" in popular culture was shown in a more realistic way than is customary for the genre -- characters we care about get hurt and suffer and die, rather than remaining miraculously unscathed while picking off baddies by the dozen.

One premise of this universe is that Anglo and Chinese cultures have sort of melded together, and everyone speaks both languages and cultural imagery from both are prevelant. Characters even deliver the odd line in Chinese. This is a neat idea, both because it has a certain plausibility and it provides a rich environment for storytelling, but unfortunately its use doesn't really go beyond an exoticizing kind of orientalism. In series and film, despite the emphasis on Chinese culture, there are central characters who are people of colour but, strangely, none of them are East Asian. Chinese culture seems to have been used mostly as a source of exotic imagery to be appropriated rather than as a basis for grounding stories in different social or narrative spaces.

But at last we come to the promised whiff of anti-imperialism. Insight and lessons and warnings and analogies can be buried in stories without the author intending. The author can simply be bringing together bits and pieces that feel instinctively like they are going to make a good story, and, what do you know, readers see configurations of images and narrative elements that can plausibly be related in unexpected ways to the real world or to other stories and texts. But there is a feel of a certain deliberateness in this instance. Beyond a vague progressiveness and an avowed pro-feminist stance, I have no idea what Whedon's politics actually are. A throw-away line about a history teacher named "Mr. Chomsky" in the pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is perhaps food for thought, but I'm not arguing that the politics outlined below are Whedon's, just that there seems to be some sort of deliberate inclusion of material that can lead to this reading. "Trust the tale, not the teller," as Whedon himself once wrote.

To begin with, early in the film the "who's who" of the major social forces in question begins with a flashback to a child's elementary school class deep in the privileged enclaves of the Alliance. The Alliance is described as a "beacon of civilization" while the rebellious outer planets are referred to as "savage" -- the mainstream North American vision of "us" and "them." Children in the class betray ignorant and oppressive prejudices about the "others" and the teacher praises the "social and medical advancements" that these rebellious outer planets could acquire if they just gave up. One student opines that they resist because, "We meddle...we tell them what to do and what to think." She is scolded by the teacher with a nonsequitur straight from realword imperial doublespeak, "We're not trying to tell them what to think; we're trying to show them how." A little later the text links two of the main characters to this characterization of the Serenity universe by pointing out that they were "Browncoats...[who] fought for independence."

Still later in the movie, in a number of ways the chief villain, an Operative leading the Alliance forces in pursuit of our heroes, is characterized as "a believer." The Alliance is characterized as trying to "make people better" and create "a world without sin." At another point, the Operative is described as "devout...in his belief that killing [a particular character] is the right thing to do." All of this religious language can be understood as referring to the fundamentalism of the Bush gang. In one exchange, the main character tells this Operative, "I don't murder children." The Operative replies, "I do if I have to." That brings to mind Madeleine Albright's admission that killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children by economic sanctions was "worth the price."

Despite all of this, it is a single line in Serenity that makes me think that the anti-imperialist content of the movie, though buried, has an element of deliberateness to it. In this universe, not only is there the Alliance (the centre of power, the imperium, "civilization") and the outer planets which they conquered ("savages"), but there are also a few human beings driven to inhumanity, who cut themselves, eat human flesh, and prey upon all who come within the reach of their ships, which lurk in deepest space. These are Reavers. We find out, in fact, that it was in the quest for "a world without sin" that the Alliance semi-inadvertently killed the 30 million inhabitants of a particular planet (intersteingly enough, in the same numeric range as the population of Iraq) and drove a few of the inhabitants to become Reavers, and then covered it all up.

In one climactic scene in the movie, a fleet of Reaver ships plunges out of an ion cloud in hot pursuit of the ship carrying our heroes, and straight into an Alliance fleet led by the Operative which is also out to destroy our heroes. As the inhuman Reavers wreak havoc upon the pure and noble forces of empire and vice versa, which creates chaos that allows our heroes to proceed to their destination, Mal Reynolds observes, "Chickens come home to roost." That, of course, invokes the words of two men much loathed by the right and many liberals, prophetic visionaries of revolution from two oppressed nations within the U.S. Malcolm X first used the phrase in reference to the assassination of John Kennedy. Ward Churchill breathed new life into it in analyzing 9/11. In both cases, the phrase was intended to convey the very simple and obvious point that if you do horribly violent things to lots of people, eventually some of those people are going to decide to do horribly violent things back to you.

It is very easy, when trying to relate buried narratives to the real world, to go too far in trying to figure out "who's who" and "what's what." I think that the more common (more liberal) political reading of Serenity, not that any such reading is likely to be common, would see our heroes as "good Americans," the Alliance as "those bad Republican Americans," and the Reavers, in the fine tradition of colonial racism, as the Iraqi resistance as a whole. But I would suggest that a slightly different reading makes more sense. Our heroes, as outlined above, are veterans of the losing side of a war of conquest who have decided, after their defeat, to make their way in the world as best they can. Despite a lack of noble intent to begin with, when presented with an opportunity to resist the empire that conquered them, they jump at it. Yes, that's right -- this movie actually centres around ordinary folk who occupy the standpoint of the nationalist resistance in a formal war that is long since over, but who continue resisting anyway when they see a way to do it. The Operative tells Mal, "You're fighting a war you've already lost." He replies, "Yeah, well, I'm known for that." Sound familiar? As for the Reavers, they can best be mapped on to the tiny Wahabbist element among the Iraqi resistance -- the fragment that truly is organizationally connected to al Qaeda, and which is more enthusiastic about killing Shia civilians than it is about driving the occupiers out.

(Use of this standpoint is in interesting contrast to Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III. These are also anti-imperial, in their own way, and do contain a few lines that can be read in a fairly blatantly anti-Bush way. But these films are so badly written that even the third, which is the best of the newer trilogy, caused my partner to comment that the Wookies roaring was easily the best dialogue. They are also written from the standpoint of elite liberals/Democrats who see it all coming, moan about it, and not only do little to try and stop it but probably facilitate it by their own incompetence.)

The act of resistance that our heroes manage to accomplish -- broadcasting proof of the destruction of this particular world -- is very individualistic and media driven, not the kind of engagement with collective resistance that would really be necessary in such circumstances. However, even the movie shows that getting out the truth about atrocities committed will "weaken their regime" but is not, on its own, enough to bring it down. Along with the invokation of Malcolm and Churchill and the use of those who have actively resisted empire as the standpoint for the movie, I think the most interesting idea that the film advances is the importance of belief. Many liberal sources counter the Bush fanaticism by calls for everybody to be calm, to be rational, to avoid further polarizing the situation. I think this is hogwash; the problem is not too much polarization, but not enough, and the wrong kind. In the film, a "wise old man" type character advises Mal that only passionate belief is enough to sustain resistance to the fundamentalists in charge, to counter the power of their belief. That's good advice, I think.

The realworld political significance of all of this is, of course, marginal. It could be argued that by propagating such imagery and narratives, even in coded form, the film is contributing to a culture which will undermine the drive to empire. I'm not sure how much importance I actually assign to such supposed subversion. The institutional realities of the mass media and the film industry override any deeply coded dissent in the content and make Serenity just as much a consumerist escape as the rest of Hollywood, and push whatever politics people might bother to see in it towards a fairly harmless liberal reading. If the right isn't screaming bloody murder, that's a pretty good sign that it is politically harmless.

And yet, it's still nice to see. Stories flow around us all the time, shape our world and give it meaning. Even if it is no substitute for organizing, playing with stories that give hope for a better world can be a boost, an inspiration, a reminder. And that matters too.

[WARNING: SPOILERS FOR SERENITY ABOVE!!!]

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

New Orleans Analysis

This document is an analysis, in PDF format, of the history and context of the destruction of New Orleans, the ongoing campaign of resistance by Black-led, multi-racial progressive coalitions, as well as an outline of a possible path for the future. It is written by Eric Mann, a white man with more than four decades of participation in anti-racist social justice struggle. He is a leader in the Labor Community Strategy Center and the LA Bus Riders Union, an organization that I connected with in a brief and shallow way while living in Los Angeles. I heard him speak at a progressive conference and book fair that I attended, where his contribution was one of the few left and anti-racist highlites in the midst of unispiring liberal fare. As well, his analysis of the 2004 elections struck me as being very useful in its emphasis on leftists opposing the election of Bush while staking out independent political territory by tactically supporting Kerry while building their own organizations and presenting their own analysis.

It's a massive document -- 50 pages -- but well worth the read. The focus is a program for a "Third Reconstruction." The first Reconstruction was between 1865 and 1877, after the U.S. Civil War. The second was the product of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the '60s and '70s. We are still in the midst of the white racist backlash to the second, but New Orleans provides circumstances that might allow for a renewed movement that will once again advance progressive, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist goals in the United States and, by extension, the world.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Review: Black Canadians

(Joseph Mensah. Black Canadians: History, Experiences, Social Conditions. Halifax: Fernwood, 2002.)

This book is a multi-disciplinary look at the historical and current realities faced by people of African ancestry in northern North America. Though academic in presentation and densely packed with facts and statistics, it is decently written and quite accessible.

Because my main focus in much of my reading at the moment is history, I was disappointed that the chapter which had that focus was not longer. However, there was also useful (to me) historical and other contextual material sprinkled through the rest of the book. I thought the chapter introducing concepts related to race and racism was well done and accessible, particularly compared to some other academic treatments of racism I've encountered. Though this was not elaborated to the extent that I think it deserves, I thought it was important that the connection between the Canadian state and Black societies in the Carribbean and Africa was seen as an important piece of context to talk about, given the focus of this book -- too many books that look at Canada's history, even from a left perspective, ignore the role of ties with the rest of the world (i.e. Canada's integration into colonialism and imperialism) in the formation of Canada's state and society.

This chapter on history is, as I said, shorter than I would have liked but it still pointed me towards several other sources that may be useful to me. The chapter on geography, as well as the chapter that described the trajectories and experiences of four specific Black groups in Canada (African Nova Scotians, Ghanian Canadians, Jamaican Canadians, Somali Canadians, and Haitian Canadians), contain a lot of information on the history of Canadian immigration policy and the way these decisions by the state have impacted those whose lives are regulated by them. The chapter on the labour market is comprehensive, though I think there are published sources out there with newer data (which, admittedly, tend to focus more on people of colour in general rather than specifically on African Canadians). I was surprised to see the inclusion of a chapter on sport, but it was interesting. (Trivia: In 1914 the Ontario government made boxing matches between Black and white fighters illegal.)

The chapters analyzing Canada's official multiculturalism policy and its employment equity legislation were useful, though the former could have been expanded. The chapter on multiculturalism understandably paid more attention to more mainstream criticisms of the policy than those that are mounted from an anti-racist and leftist perspective, and I thought a fuller presentation of those critiques would have been useful. However, it was useful to me to read the mainstream and right-leaning criticisms of multiculturalism because it was a reminder of how utterly disconnected to what is actually happening such arguments can be while still having a great deal of political power. It is important to encounter such arguments in print now and again to be able to respond to them well when encountered in conversation with family or at the pub. Responding on the spot can be tricky given the extent to which these arguments are detached from the actual effects of multiculturalism; they feel like fantasies based on illusions about the nature of nation, state, and society, and on fear of "other," of loss of privilege, and of just plain ol' change.

The only significant addition I would like to see to this book is a chapter looking in greater detail at some key struggles over the years by Black Canadians to secure and defend their rights. That notwithstanding, this is a very good book and one that every progressive in Canada could benefit from reading, particularly those of us who are white.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Criminalizing Dissent

The examples in this George Mobiot article are British, but most western countries have passed similar legislation, so this is very much relevant to Canada and the United States as well. He shows how laws supposedly brought in to combat terrorism are being used to criminalize dissent and political action.