Now the story repeats itself in Tucson.  Where is the acceptance of responsibility?  Real idea leaders have the character to stand up and admit if there words brought death.  Either to justify it in the cause of a greater good as those who fought the war against fascism or to denounce it as an error in speech, a flaw in their idea that they did not expect or intend to end like this.  Thus far silence broken only by rationalizations that ignore the elephant in the room.  It is difficult to know if people like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and the rest even believe the non sense that comes out of their mouths.  I suspect it has more to do with ratings and getting their fifteen minutes of fame, of boosting their egos and of raking in the speaking fees than it does with a sense of civic duty or trying to build a better stronger society or hell just reporting the news but that is from a bygone era when news was information not info-tainment.  The cost though is the life of a child among others.  Six people dead, others struggling to recover.  What makes you so important that we must pay like this?

But it is not just the Right Wing that has perpetrated and escalated this sewer of hate on the airwaves and the printed page.  All of the media needs to bear its share of the blame.  Instead of shouldering that responsibility and reflecting on where everything went wrong the media has gone out of its way to focus the blame away from them to the lone gunman.  He was deranged.  He had a history of social and psychological problems.  Geraldo Rivera who has made a bad joke into a career conflates everything from Puerto Rican independence to the plight of the Palestinians together as some sort of background report.  Of course he failed to mention the American Revolution and the acts of terrorism committed against innocent civilians by the Sons of Liberty, men revered as heroes by the very journalists that incite this new psychotic patriotism.  Not everyone who commits an act of political violence is deranged and while some of his examples fit others certainly did not.

In this case the young man does have a history of problems.  There are only two possible groups that will be influenced by the ravings of the lunatic pseudo conservatives:  one is those who believe they can benefit from the chaos, fear and the blind obedience to those who seem to offer control and order; the other group is the weak, the frightened, the disenfranchised, the terminally gullible lost in a world that has left them behind.  An education system has abandoned them leaving them with few skills to discern truth from deception. It has left them hostage to the swirling winds of political manipulation.  Sadly, this is by far the larger of the two.  Our gunman falls within this second group.  Told that the president of the United States and his supporters are actually attempting to destroy his country and told in the same breadth that that country is the best one that has ever been created (both incorrect), what was his simple mind supposed to to?  And what will the next simple mind do?  This is not over.  If nothing changes, if the same morons of media spew their idiocy unfettered, there will be more carnage, more funerals.

We cannot prevent it if we continue to delude ourselves and not take responsibility; responsibility ourselves for allowing this diatribe to continue, responsibility for watching and laughing when we know that others are being duped.  Making the actual announcers who use this hate speech to further their careers responsible will be much harder as they show no moral character themselves.  Appealing to their better natures is an appeal to a void.  But, a start might be to hold them legal accountable when they do step over the line.  When Glenn Beck in the Moyers piece ruminates on whether he would need to hire someone else to kill Michael Moore or if he could do it himself, the law should take him at his word.  It is a  crime under Canadian law to utter a death threat and I believe it to also be a crime in most U. S. states.  I interpret those remarks as a clear threat against Michael Moore’s life and should not be taken as a joke just because Beck is a radio and television personality.  It’s not much of a beginning but if we don’t start somewhere things will only get worse.

The G20 fiddled as London burned with passion.  People from all over descended on the city.  Once more unto the breach Shakespeare said and so they came.  CNN, that bastion of unbiased and insightful news, giggled at the foolish simpletons who clashed with police commenting that the protests would have no effect except perhaps on Gordon Brown, the host.  His public image moving forward in his career might be tarnished.  Oh how sad.  Well let the CNN info-tainers chuckle away.  The result is just to put these passionate people in some pretty fine company.  Thomas Payne, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King.  All of these icons of past days were laughed at, their ideas considered absurd.  Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win!”  So I guess those of us who believe there is something to shout to or at our leaders have reached the second stage.  We are making progress .   And from recent events stage three seems to be warming up in the bull pen. 

Inside the imps of imperialism plotted their next move.  With illusion worthy of the great Harry Houdini they declared they had pulled a diamond out of the dung.  With a trillion dollars to developing economies and a vague promise of greater regulation they announced that they would avert a depression.  Translation:  they can keep the system they so love, which benefits they and their friends greatly.  By so doing they also avert what might be the greatest political upheavals since the Great Depression and the revolutions of 1848.  At least they hope they will.  The trillion dollars is to be dispensed through the IMF and the other usual suspects.  It will come with a heavy dose of liberal laissez-faire political doctrine as is the wont of these agencies of the imperial powers.  These institutions all operate on weighted voting so that the major economic powers can control the show.  Bye-Bye any concept of justice.  States will be told to reduce spending in areas such as education, health care and social services.  These things are all under attack in our own societies so it is necessary to keep THOSE people even worse off. 

Outside people cried for real change.  Shouted to have their voices heard.  The were corraled into small areas by police, a procedure called kettling.  They were not allowed to leave the area.  Parents who had to pick up their children at school were refused.  And by extension, frightened children waited, many probably terrified when parents who were always on time were hours late.  But the British courts had approved the practice.  There were no washrooms.  People were forced to find privacy where they could.  Ostensibly this was done to prevent property damage.  After all property is far more important in our society than people.  But even this formal response to the media, when questioned, was a lie.  Each individual in each area had to submit to be photographed and give particulars before they could leave at end of day.  This violates British law but as we know in Canada the “Law” is above the law. 

So why go through this indignity.  Millions of others sat at home and did nothing, content that their leaders would look after them.  It is simple.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put it in a song called Ohio, “How can you run when you know?”  The people in the streets of London knew and they could find their way there, their voices trumpeting the collapse of the walls of the Bank of England.  Others know and they write their politicians.  Others write letters to editors or blogs or let their friends know.  None of us can change the world by ourselves.  But if we all do our part.  Whatever it is.  The world will change and it must.

Photos retrieved from Guardian UK online (see link in sidebar under News).

At the same time, we were working on ways to highlight our importance to the education of students in the various vocational programs.  Translation:  we were trying to justify our existence.  We developed a list of essential employability skills that students would develop though our courses, arguing this list as our contribution to the success of our graduates’ careers.  At the time I was less than enthusiastic but I was happy to just do my thing in the naive belief that no sane person would seriously cripple such an important element of education let alone eliminate it.  Confession:  Wrong again.  Well half wrong.  I still doubt the sanity of some decision-makers.

I should have read the writing on the wall (I have no excuse for not doing so as I come from the generation still capable of reading).  The whole process had been sparked by a reduction in our presence at the college in the previous year.  In praise of my institution our reduction was to the required level as we had exceeded minimum requirements before that.  So at the time I was disappointed that we had fallen from stellar to competent but entirely missed the point.  Now as the pressure again rises and rumours and hints of more efficiencies and reductions swirl the corridors, my brain has finally kicked into life and I realize the stupidity of my earlier behaviour. 

We have had and still do, among my colleagues, individuals who brilliantly built this department into something for other colleges to envy.  Over these past few years they have continued the long fight for survival.  They have stood their ground and tirelessly forced the enemy to bleed for every inch.  I am ashamed that during the discussion on our name and on our contribution that I did not contribute what I might have.  I apologize.  But as they say better late than never. 

The name of our school/department was more important than I realized.  The name itself should justify our existence and fully express what we are about.  If it did we would not have need of lists of essential employability skills or any other such nonsense.  But the name we chose, Liberal Studies, forces us to fight on the enemy’s ground.  Embattled from all sides we repeat Thermopylae and the Alamo, gallant but hopeless defences. 

Our society has become increasingly instrumental in its reasoning.  Everything today is a means to an end, and not just any personal end, but the end, the end that all humans strive for, career.  At least that is the reasoning.  Anything that does not directly bear on vocational improvement is superfluous and should be eliminated in the name of efficiency.  The ideal is the machine.  The human is weak, the machine is strong.  The human is slow, the machine is fast.  The human is imprecise, the machine is precise. We must become the machine. 

That is why I think we chose the wrong name for our department.  Liberalism is the philosophy of property and the machine.  Liberalism teaches that humans are first and foremost rational animals and that is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom.  A rudimentary understanding of other lifeforms on this planet quickly challenges that notion.  All life forms exhibit reason in their choices, perhaps not in the abstract as we might, but reason is evident just the same.  The machine is rational, calculating.  To become the machine so must we.  There are dangers though, the rationalism of the Enlightenment led among other places to the gates of Auschwitz and Treblinka.  The Holocaust was not irrational; it was immoral.  Liberalism is the philosophy of the times which has led us to the brink of nuclear annihilation and an environmental meltdown (pardon the pun). 

I now believe strongly that we should instead be named the School of Humanities and Social Sciences because that is who we are and that is what we teach.  Then instead of trying to convince the tunnel visioned technocrats that see identity as career that we fit into their myopic little world, we can stand on our own ground and force them to justify the elimination of humanity and society from our communities.  Can anyone argue effectively that we can survive with any less humanity in the world than exists today?  Can anyone argue that the interrelation of human beings is unimportant to our continued existence?  We bring students to an understanding of themselves and in that understanding they can come to understand the Other.  Without us the blank dead stares at admission would follow the students out into their careers and our world:  A generation without the capacity for independent creative thought because if you do not come to know your Self, who and what you are, you cannot come to know the Other and without knowing the Other you cannot effectively relate to her/him.  At that moment society is no more.  We descend into a Dantian inferno and soon destroy ourselves and all around us.  We, teachers of the humanities and social sciences are all that stand between civilization and barbarism.  We are on the wall every day, a tattered assemblage of philosophers and historians, sociologists and psychologists, masters of language, communication and politics,  defending the human still left in the world.

I often remind my students of the ancient curse, may you be born in interesting times.  Well if any times can be considered interesting these can.  We, the great unwashed (mental note need a shower today), in each historic epoch look to the heralds, the troubadours,  the minstrels, of the time, the fourth estate, in short the media to guide and inform us.  Legends in my lifetime like Neil Sheehan, Tom Wolfe, Seymour Hirsch, Woodward and Bernstein, Edward R. Murrow and more too numerous to mention have illuminated the dark underbelly of our society in an effort to help us understand ourselves and our world.  Understanding precedes correcting.  We rely on these heralds to tell us what is happening.  If they are silent then we are ignorant.  If they are biased we are misinformed.  If they are stupid we are in deep do-do.  These three are not mutually exclusive.  The greatest crisis facing our society and our planet today is that most ‘journalists’ are all three.  They are often silent because to report would challenge the underlying  ’truths’ of the ideology they are sworn to uphold.  And they are often too stupid to see their own bias.  To see it they would have to examine themselves and ask some very difficult questions and we live in a world that discourages analysis and critical thinking as dangerous. 

Bias in the media is not necessarily, although it can be in a small number of individual cases, a conscious behaviour.  Most journalists believe they report in an objective and unbiased manner, always sure to verify their information with ‘official sources’ and ‘recognized experts’.  What they don’t see is that these ‘official’ and ‘recognized’ people are just that, official and recognized, but by whom.  The ideology of liberalism has been accepted in our society today as natural.  It is the ideology that is not ideological.  In some ways this is true of every society in every epoch.  We believe that the way we live is the correct, most natural, most rational form of living.  Our thoughts and understanding become the hard truths by which everything is measured.  But how is this conditioned reached?  In other words, who made up these norms and enforces them, to different degrees punishing any who might think or act a little differently.  In Western society in the early 21st century the truth is a liberal truth, having firmly grasped European and most particularly American society in the 17th and 18th centuries, rising though the 19th to cult status and vanquishing its greatest challenger in the industrialized world with the fall of communism and the discrediting of socialism in general.  What is has displaced, vanquished and rejected is not necessarily wrong because it has lost a battle.  If losing a battle were all that were necessary to discredit an adversary then we should reinstitute trial by combat for all disputes for clearly might makes right.  I wish that those who so fondly recall John Kennedy’s remarks in his inaugural speech, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country,would actually read the rest of the speech and see the suffering and pain Kennedy expected the American people to endure just to defeat, not the Soviet Union, but just the idea of communism/socialism.  This is the objectivity that journalists are trained to see.  Liberal perspective becomes truth.  Official sources are trusted and left unchallenged.  As John Pilger remarked, speaking at a conference about his new book, ‘Freedom Next Time’,  the bits of true investagative and reflective journalism that find their way into the pages of major papers or onto mainstream networks both radio and television, are honourable exceptions rather than the rule of modern journalism.  Can we blame the journalist for seeing the world as those around them see it?  Can we blame the journalism program at university and college for putting out people that will blindly follow those who preceded them in the industry?  The question is a little unfair, I admit.  What I am really asking is can ordinary people be blamed for being ordinary?  How can we expect journalists to all be great people?  People of high conscience, principle, and great courage.  For it takes great courage to go through life uncertain of every thought you hold.  For the great person knows she/he  may be proven wrong at any moment.  Even when forcefully and vigorously asserting a position or argument, a little voice, like the slave in the chariot during a Roman triumph, constantly whispers ‘remember, you are only human’.  That is a lot to ask of anyone, to go through life in uncertainty.  But that is the human condition.  It doesn’t mean that you must always relinquish the field to your opponent or preface every remark with ‘I could be wrong but’.  You still forcefully assert your arguments because you believe them to be provably correct.  And you believe this because you have questioned them in the first place.  Accepting that we all have an inculcated perspective based on our lifetime experience means digging deeper and challenging that perspective constantly so that when we opine we do so with the confidence that that opinion will stand up to scrutiny.   That is the mark of great character and that is what I demand of journalists.  To do otherwise would be to condemn myself and you to purgatory of totalitarianism.  Such character is not encouraged by our education system or our social institutions as a whole.  The password for smoothly sailing through life is acceptance.  Accept the world as presented.  Don’t rock the boat.  But while courage won’t make you popular, it will make you honourable.   The choice is always up to the individual  So I implore those who proceed into journalism, if you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to ask the hard questions and examine your own failing then at least become a sports reporter where even basic intelligence is optional. 

In politics the first question that should always be asked is ‘In whose benefit?’   Who benefits from seeing things this way rather than that?  Who benefits when ideas are defined this way rather than that.  If the same people who are defining the events and ideas are the same people who benefit from those particular definitions, we need to be skeptical.  Maybe they are being honest and it is just coincidence that they also benefit but to accept that as the usual is to be stupid.  And that is the situation with the media today and for most of the past 100 years.  Accepting the views or their ‘official’ and ‘recognized’ sources is doing just that.  These sources benefit by the way they define the world and these are the only sources journalists must use. 

And how do journalists deal with their inability to really question the power brokers in our society?  Look at the questions they are asking.  Recently I was reminded of a question asked right after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.  I remember it being asked and at the time just shook my head in disbelief.  It has become part of the conspiracy theory industry that has grown up around that tragic day.  (The attacks have spawned several industries actually.  Only America could market tragedy like soap suds.)  The question was “Mr. President.  Where were you when you first saw pictures of the first plane hitting the towers?”  I have paraphrased as it was asked more than once directly to the president and to his media representatives.  The initial answer that he was at the school when he saw a picture of the first plane hitting which is incorrect as images of that plane hitting had not been uncovered at that point is why the conspiracy theorists are all over it.  Most likely it was the second plane hitting that he saw and the answer a result of miscommunication.  But for all the attention that the question has received because of its answer, no one has questioned the question itself.  Why would anyone, let alone someone who must by virtue of covering the White House be at an upper level of his/her profession, ask such a stupid question ?  Who the hell cares where he was when someone first showed him a picture.  What critical information is uncovered by this?  The question of when was also asked several times.  When did you know this?  When did you hear that?  When did that zit on your nose pop?  Maybe George was having a dump when his aids first showed him the pictures or told him about the collapse.  Maybe Laura wheeled a TV over to the hall and he kept the door open to watch the coverage.  If he is like me he probably got her to bring him a cup of coffee as well.  How much of this crap (pardon the pun) do we need or want to know.  Personally I have no interest in any of this.  I don’t care who told him what, when.  I would be interested in deeper questioning of his plans for dealing with the situation.  That is news! 

But news is what the heralds of these interesting times are trained to ignore.  We hear the lies repeated.  The auto industry is in trouble because it pays its workers too much.  Truth the average pay at assembly plants in the U.S. is $30 an hour.  Given the price of housing and feeding a family in America today that is not exorbitant.  But according to the heralds unless the workers stop being so greedy the Detroit 3 will collapse.  In whose interest?  The self proclaimed best political team on television asks whether President-elect Obama can move forward on health care reform in the midst of this financial crisis.  Read General Motors financial report.  You will discover that health care costs are hurting their competitiveness.  But no mention of this on CNN.  Oh! no! Wolf wouldn’t want to mention that.  In whose interest?  Victory in Iraq and in Afghanistan is necessary to secure the world (read the United States) from further terrorist attacks.  Most Americans still believe that Iraq was involved in the attacks and that the elimination of the Taliban will produce a free and democratic Afghanistan (read my earlier post Team Afghanistan for some insight into the reality).  Bringing death and destruction to those half way around the world will make them love us.  Instead every objective measure shows a more dangerous world today than before the War on Terror.  Even that phrase, war on terror is never questioned but it may tell us more than we want to know.  How can you have a war on an idea, a concept?  What would that look like?  You can’t kill an idea only the holder of the idea.  Then look at how we are proceeding in this so-called war.  In whose interest? 

In whose interest?  Over and over I ask myself that question as I watch events unfold before me.  If only journalists could find the courage to start asking those questions.  Not just of the powers that be but of themselves.  In whose interest is it that they reject information from every alternative source in favour of the ‘official’ and the ‘recognized’?  It is certainly not in mine or in the interest of society as a whole.  But it does seem to be in the interest of those who make the decision of what information the public receives.  The heralds of interesting times have much to answer for.