I don’t like Michael Savage, the Right-Wing radio shock jock and author.   His ideas are not just stupid, they are outrageously stupid.  He and Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan and the rest of the untalented meatheads spew their hatred onto an unsuspecting public every day.  They deserve to be reviled and challenged.  But they don’t deserve to be censored.  Censorship is a failed policy.  Never in history has censorship resulted in positive change.  If someone can provide me with an example I will be glad to apologize and change my opinion.  But of course if what we are allowed to know is censored, how would we know?  

British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, included Savage (real name Michael Weiner.  Great, we Germans spend a half century trying to outlive the stereotype only to have this idiot come along.) in a list of people persona non grata in the United Kingdom.  For this Savage is threatening to sue.  He claims he has never incited violence on his talk show or in his writings.  Technically that may be true.  I have never actually heard Savage say ‘Go forth and smite down the democratic liberal wherever you find him, in expresso bar or at Gay Pride Parade.’  Does he need to say this to be inciting violence?  No.  But will shutting him up stop these attitudes? Also no.  This is hearts and mind time and censoring Savage will not change the mind of one bigot. 

Silencing his message from the public airways will only drive it underground and add to its mystique.  More, it gives the message credibility.  Why censor something unless you are afraid of it.  Believe me that will be his spin on the matter.  ‘They know I speak the truth, that is why they fear me.  They fear that I might tell you what they don’t want you to know.’  His message doesn’t need to be silenced it needs to be challenged.  Isn’t it interesting that these champions of freedom seldom allow themselves to be caught in a public debate with anyone able to expose them as the frauds and fools that they are.  Cowards naturally shrink from a fight.  When they are caught as happened when Bill O’Reilly interviewed Phil Donahue on Fox the shallowness of their position reveals itself.  When Bill began his talk-over terrorism of his guest, a style common to these types, the articulate Donahue rose to the occasion and left O’Reilly sputtering back on the ropes desperate to survive the round.  That is what is needed to counteract the menace of these self-righteous megalomaniacs. 

Those of us old enough to remember Alan Berg, a American Left Wing radio shock jock murdered outside his home by Right Wing extremists, know that challenging these sociopaths has its risks.  Glenn Beck fantasized on his radio show about killing Michael Moore saying he thought he would be able to do it himself rather than hire a hitman.  His words dripped an underlying desire to really do this not just fantasize.  Nothing worthwhile comes without risk.  If we don’t soon begin to challenge these miscreants we will condemn ourselves and our posterity.  Their view of the world is unsustainable; left unchecked apocalyptic war and environmental catastrophe are certain.  Challenging the pied-pipers of doom sounds worthwhile to me.  Donahue, Moore and others have proved it can be done.  You and I can do it too.   Don’t sit by complacently when a colleague or acquaintance parrots the latest vitriol from one of these idols of ignorance.  Fight back!  Most of us would feel uncomfortable sitting passively while someone made a pejorative remark about Blacks or women.  There is no reason why we should condone with silence similar comments and ideas about immigrants, the poor, or homosexuals or any group whose only offense is their existence.  Nor is it wise to leave unchecked ideas that will cripple our biosphere. 

Political correctness has allowed hatred to hide.  Censorship does just the same.  It makes the stupid the mysterious.  I don’t want these ideas and hatreds hidden.  I want them in the clear light of day where I can draw a good bead on them and shoot them down.  So don’t call for censorship.  Join me on the firing squad and execute ignorance with suppositories of wisdom.

Tokens come in many forms.  They can express what words cannot and cause memories to rush back.  But tokens can also be an evil thing.  Any of us old enough to remember the civil rights movement, who are active in the feminist movement and the still struggling gay rights movements know that tokens are also a weapon of those for whom change and progress are anathema.  For a few change means direct challenges to their privileged positions as arbiters of social mores.  Change questions their divine right to be right.  Most people are followers, fearful of any turbulence that might shake their comfortable little lives.  For that mass the token is the answer.  Those who would undermine our development into a free and responsible society, who would risk the future of the planet for their own enrichment or position, once cognisant of the inability to just reject the forces of justice, use the token.  The token will appease those masses who fear disruption to their world but have a sense of guilt concerning gross injustice, by creating a semblance of justice.  Like a faux fur makes a middle class woman believe she belongs with the country club set, the token allows us to lie to ourselves. 

Business, government and social organizations rushed to find ‘suitable’ representatives of discriminated minorities (of course in the case of women it has always been a discriminated majority in North American society) to diversify their public image while avoiding any substantive reform.  Society could feel comfortable in pointing to these public images as proof that things were getting better while nothing changed.  The purpose of the token is to deflect scrutiny.  For those individuals being used it was always a moral dilemma.  For them the scam was all too apparent.  Their positions often lacked the substantial authority of their peers and were often artificial creations with little or no meaningful responsibility attached.  But their rise to even those two dimensional positions were a wedge for what dreams may come.  In the ghetto, the barrio and the kitchen their image might and did provide inspiration to countless members of their community.  To youth it signaled hope.  So even in its insipid attempt at retarding change, the token could still fulfill its higher function.  A token is good when it represents substance; it is bad when it substitutes for substance. 

Unfortunately, we see tokens substituting for substance everywhere today.  The token haute architecture and flashing electric gizmos in schools substitute for education.  Twitter and other social media substitute for real friendship for far too many people.  Corporate music, advertising, television etc. substitute for art.  Charisma and glibness substitute for political leadership.  People like Bono use activism to advance their career while enriching themselves on the suffering of the many (FYI:  U2 launders its money through a tax haven which means that the people of Ireland are poorer and Ireland has less wealth to share internationally via aid.  If you talk the talk but don’t walk the walk it is self-serving tokenism.)  President Obama rejects a single payer health care system in favour of fixing Medicare and Medicaid, the fatally flawed one-two punch of American health care.  The token allows Obama to rise to the podium and proclaim himself the messiah of health care without the political consequences of standing for what is right, the health of the American people. 

Recently my local Zehr’s store started charging 5 cents for each plastic bag used to pack a customer’s groceries.  The option was to purchase a reusable cloth bag.  My wife and I have several of these and it is a good idea.  Most tokens are good ideas.  Plastic bags don’t bio-degrade.  They are a hazard to wildlife. particularly waterfowl.  They are a landfill nightmare and should never have been introduced.  It may come as a shock to my younger readers but they did not replace paper bags until well after my marriage.  I might say here that paper would still be an environmentally friendly alternative with the use recycled paper and paper from renewable sources such as hemp.  My problem is not the charge for plastic or the idea to encourage customers to act more responsibly.  Actually I think there should be an outright ban on the use and manufacture of plastic bags.  In a way the policy the store and many others like it are pursuing is actually a token of a token.  If the store, as it should, believes that plastic bags are the scourge that they are then don’t offer the option.  Giving people the choice is just passing the ball onto the consumer instead of being assertive on saving the environment.  

But the bag replacement incentive now seizing the industry is just a marketing token.  It is a token because it does not address the serious environmental problem of our modern supermarket.  I was surprised about a year or so ago to discover that a grocery store has an exponentially larger carbon footprint than a manufacturing facility of the same size.  Looking around my Zehr’s market after my epiphany I felt incredibly stupid.  It had been staring me in the face for years and I had not seen it.  Open freezers caked on the edge with frost, ceilings 25 or 30 feet high, inefficient lighting strategies, it was all there.  My Zehr’s store is less than ten years old.  It was built after global warming had become a major political and social issue.  Environmentalism in general had become a focus of social interest and concern from species diversity to chlorofluorocarbons.  The options were there for Zehr’s and other grocery stores built at the time to act responsibly to incorporate the latest in environmental engineering.  I might not have been aware supermarkets were putrid cesspools of excessive carbon spewage but the scientists were and so corporations like Zehr’s should have.  Even so, they built another environmental catastrophe anyway.  Why?  Because they didn’t care about the environment then and they don’t now.  This current little token is a marketing ploy.  There is an industry-wide competition to out-green your competitor.  The public smiles, self-satisfied in the illusion that they are doing something for the environment while the corporations laugh and rake in the profits and the Earth weeps.

Some say ‘Well they are doing something.’  Music to the ears of the corporation who pray each day that the consumer will stand up and demand they do what is right not what is profitable.  By why would we.  We have our little token, the amorphous ‘something’ is being done.  And when our grandchildren ask why they must wear an air filtration mask to go out and why the weather patterns are so violent and erratic, we can smile self-assuredly and say ‘we did what we could we supported the tokens in the Age of Tokenism.’

Nothing like a little town hall meeting to mark one hundred days in office.  A nice win one for the Gipper speech before a receptive audience to make everybody feel better in bad times.  Barack Obama is perhaps the best president since Ronald Reagan when it comes to being able to speak to the hearts of an audience.  And America needs it now.  Things are not good and everybody needs some reassurance that we can get through this crisis. 

Of course the problems of the American auto industry were front and center in his words today.  Bad decisions had led to the position we are in now and President Obama could not justify more bad decisions with taxpayer dollars.  He would demand of auto executives that they table workable plans for a sustainable recovery if they wished to dip into the pockets of ordinary American citizens.  He is absolutely correct.  Bad decisions did bring us to this point.  But much as I dislike corporate executives and believe me, they must shoulder a significant portion of the blame, they can’t be tagged for it all.  Those bad decisions were made in a social culture that demanded just the decisions that they made.  It is a social culture that still exists and was reinforced in the president’s speech. 

Obama spoke of a time when the American auto industry built the cars that people wanted but lost their market to foreign competitors due to poor corporate decisions.  There certainly was a period of complacency that resulted in poor quality design and manufacture processes.   The American auto industry was producing vehicles that were plagued by breakdowns and recalls.  They lost the trust of the North American consumer who sought out imports that sold themselves on quality and fuel efficiency.  The president is absolutely correct lazy and stupid are bad decisions.  But were they not still designing vehicles that people wanted?  The answer is yes they were.  A cursory look at Japanese automobiles (still the chief competitor) since they broke onto the North American market will show you that Detroit didn’t change, Tokyo did.  How do the 6 and 8 cylinder four door luxury sedans full of computerized crap that just means more to break down compare to the Toyota Corolla and Corona with their simple functional design and fuel efficiency.  Not too well.  It is not that GM, Ford and Chrysler were force feeding us larger vehicles, we demanded them.  Look at the highways today and you see them full of over-sized quasi-trucks.  Many of those with brand names like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai and Mitsubishi.  That is what the people want.  There lies the problem.  We cannot afford to give the

Photo by David Williams, Knoxville Tennesee. Retrieved from FUH2.com

people what they want.  Just like you shouldn’t let your kid go on that all sugar diet she wants, you can’t let the childish North American have his Hummer.  The Earth is mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore.  (I know that GM is currently in the process of dumping its Hummer line.  Actually it is hoping to sell off the brand.  Take my advice, sell the brand to an adult toy manufacturer and not to some idiot that will try to make another ugly-ass vehicle out of it causing carbon and visual pollution.)

But there is more.  I said that Obama was correct in saying that bad decisions led us to this point but more bad decisions are not going to bail us out.  Bailing out the current automobile industry is an error of Earth shattering proportions, pun intended.  Obama’s speech mentioned moving to fuel efficient, environmentally friendly, blah, blah, whatever cars.  Hybrids, green cars, bio-fuels are all pacifiers stuck into the mouths of whining little brats who can’t get it through their heads that the private automobile must go.  If the money used to bail out these dinosaurs of our adolescence was put toward creating a comprehensive public  transit system (which would be both faster and cheaper) and into technologies such as carbon recovery, passive housing, etc.  it would create more jobs, make the economy more sustainable and guarantee our children and their children a future. 

Oh but wait that would make sense.  Can’t do that then.  And we won’t.  We will poor good money into this bygone contraption and when the inevitable comes we can only hope their is enough money and time left to save the planet.  And hope is all we have given the short-sightedness we continually confront and the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Eco-Catastrophe, breathing hard on our necks.  For now though we will all skip merrily over the cliff because no politician or community leader has the courage to just speak the truth.  But like the Earth I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.  So to paraphrase Shakespeare I say ‘First let’s kill all the people who own Hummers and see where we get from there.’ 

Green.  The word of the 21st century.  Everybody has the Green solution to the end of the world.  Recycle your waste.  Switch to coily light bulbs that take a while to get bright when switched on (Kind of like me in the morning).  Buy a hybrid car (Need to find a new name.  This one brings up images of a Camry and Corvette doing nasty things in the dark nine months ago).  Use public transit.  The litany goes on and you are all as familiar with it as I am.  It is being preached from the steps of parliament and the South Lawn.  Children are indoctrinated with it in the class room.  Talking heads on television run off at the mouth like a soup sandwich about it (all organic vegetable of course).  And since it is preached, that bastion of preaching, the church, can’t be left out.  Yes it is being preached from the pulpit as well.  God has become Green.  Actually I could deal with him better as a mischievous leprechaun with a sick and twisted sense of humour. 

I confess the whole thing has me a bit confused.  Global warming is a crisis and we need to deal with it.  The problem I have is that I hear a lot of talk but don’t see much action.  At least I don’t see a lot of improvement.  Sympathetic magic is a concept used by modern witches.  The theory is based on Like produces Like.  Well this looks like the environmental plan decided on by our social and political leaders.  If we talk about it long enough and wish for it hard enough then maybe the fairies of fate will grant our wish.  I can see the coven meetings in Ottawa now with Stephen Harper as High Priest complete with stag horns with John Baird his faithful familiar. 

The other problem is that each solution is being pitched as THE solution.  Whether it is the demon spawn of macho muscle cars with the little veggie car that could or a new coloured box weekly set out at the curb, do this and all will be well is the pitch.  Reality dictates that none of these really is THE answer and ALL of these are the answers.  We must comprehensively change the way we live and the way our societies are structured.  That is something none of our leaders want to talk about. 

Recycling helps and it is a good thing to do.  It is starting now to expand but more has to be done and fast.  One of the saddest facts of the recycling program is that most of our recyclables end up in landfill anyway, just not our local landfill.  Out of sight, out of mind.  (I believe most of my recyclables are land-filled around Hamilton, Ontario which should annoy some of my colleagues )That’s not going to get us anywhere.  There is not yet a strong enough market for the materials.  The way to change this is to not offer a choice between products from recycled materials and new materials.  If it can be made from recycled material, it MUST be made of recycled material.  If we want to be serious about this process that must be our mantra. 

The new energy efficient light bulbs being championed by David Suzuki solve one problem but create another.  No plan to dispose of the mercury contained in them is presented along with the songs of praise.  We cannot afford solutions that create problems elsewhere.  The global biosphere is an wholistic system.  The goal is to save it, not sweep the problems under a different leaf.  Suzuki and other proponents of these bulbs make two arguments in their defense.  Their long life means that the mercury is contained for perhaps a decade or more, there will be fewer light bulbs land-filled and therefore the impact will be minimal.  I forget.  How many billions in a minimal?  Their lifespan is impressive providing nothing goes wrong.  No incompetent handyman clips one with a ladder.  No child disobeys a parent and plays ball in the house.  No roof leaks.  You get the picture.  The second argument is that the amount of mercury is minimal.  (See my previous question concerning minimal)  We are told the mercury content is no more than that found in a watch battery.  That really isn’t very much but I have only owned about a dozen watches through my life.  Disregarding the ones that I had to wind that leaves three.  I am currently wearing one and the other two, sentimental mementos of times gone by, are resting sans batteries in my jewelry box to be taken out only in those private moments of tears and scotch.  I have only ever replaced the battery in one of them.  But light bulbs?  I got light bulbs coming out the ying yang.  I counted 35 in my little semi-detached.  Multiply that over the billion or so people in the industrialized first world and we are talking impact.  The other problem I have with Suzuki’s argument here is that it is dismissive.  He doesn’t argue that it is not a problem but that we shouldn’t worry about it.  That is straight from the playbook of the idiots that got us all into this mess in the first place so excuse me if I am not real receptive to it. 

As for the demon spawn mentioned above, hybrid cars, they show minimal carbon saving once all factors including manufacturing are considered.  Transportation is the toughest environmental nut to crack.  No one wants to give up their car.  Actually I do.  I can’t wait until I retire and go back to a car-less life.  Right now I would get rid of my vehicle if there were a viable public transportation option.  Currently we are spending billions, maybe trillions, of tax dollars to bail out an industry that must disappear if we want to spare this planet the horrors of an environmental holocaust.  The only answer is the disappearance of the private automobile.  Remove one or two lanes from the current multi-lane highways and dedicate them to public buses.  Move the terminals to major highway interchanges with local systems feeding them and voila public transit is faster and more convenient than private vehicles.  Eighty percent of the automobile traffic currently on the roads must be gone withing twenty years.  Let’s get over it and move on.  While there will be a transition of jobs with the change over, there need not be any net loss of jobs.  The naysayers seem to believe that if we eliminate the private automobile that the world will come to a stop as the people of this planet fall into a stunned silence, immobile for the rest of eternity. 

David Suzuki and others are supporting the creation of a carbon tax as a means to really get serious about the environment.  It does hold promise to reduce carbon emissions.  A carbon tax is a means of rationing by price.  That has been done successfully before .  However, in every case it has meant and will again this time that those at the bottom will shoulder the burden of lifting the world out of the crisis while those on top sail through their privileged lives with barely any inconvenience.  Heaven forbid that the people David socializes with, or he himself, pitch in.  Case in point, Suzuki was in the news this morning as part of a convention on Global Warming and winter sport I believe.  It really doesn’t  matter what the conference was about, it is the conference itself that was the problem.  Participants travelled many miles, most in airplanes to get to it.  Why?  Why couldn’t it have been done virtually given our current communications capabilities?  This would have made a gigantic carbon saving but Suzuki wouldn’t have the pleasure of staying at a luxury hotel and hobnobbing with his pals.  Before you start putting more pressure on the working class and those on fixed income to fight the good fight one more time, you should maybe enlist yourself and spend a little time at the front.

A better answer would be direct carbon rationing as suggested in George Monbiot’s book Heat(click on page on sidebar to see review).  Decide up front exactly how much carbon we can afford to expend each year and divide it up equally.  If I don’t use all of mine because I am careful and conserve I can sell the left over credit to some wasteful slob with money.  And trust me he will pay dear if he wants it.  (Actually let me thank George Monbiot for the alternative solutions he presented in his book which I have borrowed here.)  Publicly controlled rationing has also been done successfully in the past and it is fair and democratic.  But then I keep forgetting, most people don’t really believe in democracy, apparently including David Suzuki, the Verdant Prince.