But in 2010, as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel sat on the dais next to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, representing the opposing powers of the conflict that had more in common than differences, where are we?  What has happened to the dream, that moment of pure joy and hope?

As its predecessor, World War Two was not the war to end all wars.  Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the list is long and bloody.  Our ability to kill has improved with each new conflict.  Diplomacy is ridiculed as the the fires of nationalism brightly light the banners of the legions.  The eagle of Rome and Germany now demands the people of the world bow down to the eagle of  America.  That the symbol of power since early history has been a scavenger should speak to us.  But somehow it doesn’t.  Fear, distrust and ignorance drive us into our imagined communities, not seeing the realities that connect us behind the myths that divide.  And so the story continues written in the blood of millions.

Political lies continued to swim in human blood.  In Hungary and Iraq honest people were encouraged to rise up against tyranny only to be abandoned when they did so in good faith believing that they would be supported.  The Hungarians listened to Radio Free Europe spew its propaganda East.  Not realizing that this was only a tactic to undermine Soviet stability they rose up and awaited the aid implicitly promised.  They stood firm as the Soviet tanks rolled over the Hungarian frontier and into the streets of Budapest.  Still gazing West in desperation as they were slaughtered, the survivors later lost in the void of the Gulag.  The Shi’as of southern Iraq encouraged by Bush senior to rebel were again abandoned as were the Kurds of northern Iraq.  How much different is this to the guarantees given to the Czechs and others prior to the war.  Horribly the Tutsi and Hutu at different times learned that ‘Never Again!’ was hollow rhetoric as did the people of Srebrenica in their turn.

Domestic persecution so abhorred in the Third Reich still visits us as well.  From the Cold War where America and the Soviet Union tried to outdo each other with show trials and mock patriotism to the Patriot Act and Canada’s anti-terrorism laws and Arizona’s yellow sombrero law (see previous post The Yellow Sombrero) we have repeated the ideas and concepts of Hitler and Himmler.  People persecuted, hounded for what they believed or what they were not what they had done.  Over one million Canadians were blacklisted as communists/socialists.  Rarely were any Soviet spies.  That was not the point.  It was the idea that was feared, not the people.  The idea needed to be destroyed lest it upset life of the power elite.  Today it is Muslims.  The ‘experts’ talk about Islamic culture and say it is violent, that it praises terror, that it is regressive.  What they don’t say is, like Nazi depictions of Jewish culture, it doesn’t exist.  It is a fabrication.  There is no ‘Islamic Culture.’  There are several Arab, Persian, Turkic and Malay cultures.  Most North Americans see ‘Islamic Culture’ and think Arab Culture but it in itself is not a monolith and Malay is the largest Muslim ethnic group.  If the threat is real why would it be represented by a mythical creation?  It seems only that some threat must exist.  But why?  What is it that the powers that be don’t want us to see.  Today we can look back at the Third Reich and see what Hitler and Goebbels didn’t want the world to know.  Will historians 65 years from now be revealing abominable secrets buried behind American imperialism?  Research the provisions and justifications of the Enabling Laws introduced by German Chancellor Hitler in 1934 to see a reflection of the Patriot Act and its ilk.  Racial profiling of Mexicans and Muslims is no different than that used by Nazi administrations.  Look at the propaganda below showing the same basic caricature used in two contexts but really about the same people, Semites.

Mussolini said that fascism could more accurately be called corporatism.  Is that not the culture we have today in Canada and the United States?  Is not the corporation and the financial sector the new Rome?   Is it not the sum total of existence, that which gives meaning to our lives?  We are told constantly that there is not enough money, enough wealth to maintain the welfare state that was to raise all boats; to create a floor not a ceiling to use William Beveridge’s phrase.  Apparently the neo-conservative Right has taken him at his word and want to cut the floor out from under the powerless in order to extend their ceiling to the heavens.  Corporations steal our money to fund their failures.  And still George Will this morning on This Week (ABC) claims that the crisis in Greece is the masses thinking they are entitled when their is no money left to fund such entitlements.  What better example of self-entitlement than the bail out of General Motors or Lehman Sachs and the rest.  They told us they were too big to fail.  They told us we needed to give them more of our money for our own sakes.  Those who would now eject us from our own homes, destroy our retirements and deny our children of the same education and career opportunities as their children feel so entitled as to believe that such behaviour is an act of gratitude.  Don’t tell me there is not money to fund entitlements.  You mean there is no money to fund those who don’t belong to your class Mr. Will.

But corporations have always held the people in disdain.  They always believed in a natural leader class.  That is why so many of them supported Hitler and nazi ideology, before and during the war.  Ford enriched itself on slave labour in Nazi occupied Europe.  IBM vaulted to the lead in tabulation later computation by designing the system that sent six million Jews to the gas chamber.  President Roosevelt had to relieve Joseph Kennedy, father of the future president, from his post as ambassador to the Great Britain because of his praise of Hitler and Nazism and his repeated effort to undermine British resolve in the face of what he considered a superior German system. Do we believe that suddenly they changed their philosophy when the war was over?  Are we that naive?  Or just so afraid that if we say such things somehow we will be next on the train to the camps.

German education under the Nazis convinced young Germans that they were superior by blood to the other races of the world.  They twisted ancient northern European myths to create an image of the Teutonic race as the defenders of civilization against the barbarian hordes.  Anything that might bring that image into question was dropped from the curriculum.  Self appointed ‘experts’ shored up the image with quasi-science and bad academics.  Education seen as the conduit to maintain the social order whether or not that order is right.  Sound familiar?  Does to me.  I see it every day in the classroom and I am both sad and afraid.  I know where it will lead, not might lead.  Young Americans today are brainwashed into believing that the American way is not jut the best way but the only legitimate way.  Other cultures, other peoples, other values are ridiculed or vilified.  The lie of democracy used to shade the evil intent:  Power.

So what have we learned in sixty-five years?  What has happened to the possibilities of 1945?  Today they are just the puppets of power.  Power corrupts.  But mostly it perpetuates.  Those who have it seek to keep it.  Those who don’t lament their suffering as the Athenian generals counseled the Melians in Thucydides account of the Peloponnesian War,“for you know as well as we do that right … is in question only between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” or they live Zapata’s words:  “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

Today I mourn not because nazism and fascism were destroyed but because they survived.  I mourn because the ideals of Adolph Hitler are the ideals of the Obama administration and American Imperialism.  They are cloaked in the facade of democracy and humanist rhetoric but they are the same.  I mourn because my country, like so many others, complacently accepts this outrage lacking the courage to die on our feet if needs must.  We play the Jester to America’s Lear.  Around the world today the celebrations are not of the end of something but of its perpetuation in secrecy.  Hitler’s mistake was to open a window and let the world see.  That could not be countenanced if the power elites elsewhere were to continue without public outrage.  Secrecy reigns once more and all is well in Washington as on Wall Street.  So celebrate, but excuse me if I weep.

“and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” — The Last Will and Testament of Alfred Nobel.

And the winner is Barack Obama.  He has done the most and best work for fraternity between nations by …… uh  ….. what exactly has he done?  Well he must be downsizing the American military.  No U. S. forces are on a recruitment drive.  He is promoting peace by maintaining troops in Iraq, increasing troops in Afghanistan, signing off on extraordinary rendition, talking about closing Guantanamo Bay.  That doesn’t sound like it fits the spirit of the Will either.

The consensus seems to be that he has won the prize because he is a symbol of hope.  At least that is the line being taken by those who support Obama.  Of course Fox News thinks the Nobel committee are a bunch of hippie / commies chosen by a parliament of hippie / commies in Norway who give this prize to other hippie / commies to celebrate hippie / commies.  If the Daily Show isn’t on you can allows tune into Fox News to get your daily laugh.  The upshot though is that no one is defending the prize as actually legitimate.  And that says a lot.

Whatever reason possessed the committee to award the prize to Obama was misguided to be charitable.  There have always been those on the Right who have diminished the importance of the Peace Prize and pointed to winners such as Yasser Arafat as evidence of it mistaken sentiments.  But Arafat had accomplished something.  Now the Right can actually say that someone won it for doing nothing except being liked by the members of the committee.  Worse there will always be the rumour, suspicion that politics played a role.  Obama’s people responded in open-mouthed astonishment that their man had received the prize.  But White House staffers are trained and proficient liars.  Even when they tell the truth it always sounds like a lie.  We will never know for sure and conspiracy theories are likely to abound across the Internet.

What I suppose gnaws at me most is the rush of progressive left wing organizations to jump on the bandwagon and celebrate the prize.  I just read a missive from Avaaz.org, a group that does a lot of good work promoting human rights and keeping governments honest, argue the prize is an opportunity to help Obama justify his winning in the future.  We all condemn the Right when they justify the unjustifiable.  But given the opportunity the Left sounds suspiciously similar.  Blind slavery to any doctrine or person is not only misguided it is down right dangerous.  Have we so quickly forgot the excesses of the Soviet Union.  We can argue that Soviet socialism was not true socialism but then we just sound as dogmatic as the current Right or the old Soviets.

Instead we should be as critical of our own as we are of our opponents.  Mr. Obama you should have refused that prize as you know you do not deserve it.  The prize committee needs to be censured for so callously violating the spirit of Alfred Nobel’s final request.  Shame on you and shame on Obama for sullying the noble gesture of Alfred Nobel.

What do you do if you have a relative, a brother or a cousin, maybe an aunt, who is having difficulty holding on to reality.  This person sometimes appears rational and aware of their surroundings but in the next moment can fly off to a world of their own creation.  Delusional, sometimes they think everyone is out to get them and flail madly at all around them in a paranoid frenzy, hurting themselves and anyone unfortunate enough to be near them.  At other times they pout and moan because they can’t have their own way in a melancholic narcissism.  The phantoms tormenting them do as much or more damage to themselves as they do to others.  As the symptoms worsen the family is called together and tries to come up with a strategy to help the pathetic soul caught as it is in its own delirium, tortured by demons from the depths of its own psyche.

It is never an easy decision for the family.  Parents remember the promise at the birth of their beloved child.  The bright smile, the first tentative steps and missteps.  Why did this happen?  Where did they fail?  Perhaps they were too permissive and indulgent.  Perhaps if they had given their child more discipline he would be able to deal better now with his demons.  But as it is he is out of control and drastic measures are called for.  Institutionalization or at least constant tight supervision.  And only the family as a whole can accomplish this.  If we all don’t work together then the only other solution is to euthanize the suffering creature and even that will take the strongest of us together.  It is always sad but if you truly love someone then you must do what is best for them no matter how difficult or painful.

It is time now for the world community to sit down together and decide how best to deal with our paranoid schizophrenic little sibling, the United States.

]]> http://zoonpolitikon.ca/blog/2009/09/when-nations-go-mad/feed/ 0 http://zoonpolitikon.ca/blog/2009/09/road-to-assassination/ http://zoonpolitikon.ca/blog/2009/09/road-to-assassination/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:45:25 +0000 admin http://zoonpolitikon.ca/blog/?p=893 This has been America’s summer of discontent and there is no sign of the rancour easing up soon.  From the surreal scenes at the health care town hall meetings to a furor over the president addressing school children America has not been this divided since the years leading up to the Civil War.  Earlier this summer a man showed up at one of the town hall meetings sporting an assault rifle slung over his shoulder and another a 9mm pistol strapped to his leg.  This was the first concrete evidence that things have gone too far.  The media is giving voice to an angry mob without providing context or reason.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is credited with the axiom that freedom of speech does not include yelling fire in a crowded theatre.  While this is somewhat out of context of the actual ruling that Holmes was making at the time, the concept serves me well here.  If I am in a crowded auditorium or arena of some sort and I falsely begin to yell fire, it is reasonable to assume that someone may panic.  One would suspect that it was my intent to create panic as no other logical motive exists.  Panic, psychologists affirm, is very contagious.  If the building is crowded and everyone rushes toward the exits at once injuries and even death are likely if not certain.  The premise here is simple.  I have misinformed those around me who have no time or ability to judge the veracity of my assertion.  In the absence of an alternative voice shouting that there is no fire and assuming no sane person would falsely call the alarm, everyone in the building would assume that there was indeed a fire.  It is therefore prudent for them to attempt to exit the building as quickly as possible given that a clear and present threat to their lives appears to exist.  The bottleneck created by a large number of individuals acting without guidance crushing the exits insures a tragic outcome.  Because my speech led to a tragedy that I should have easily foreseen, barring any mental abnormality, I am responsible for that tragedy and should shoulder the consequences.  If someone dies, I should be charged and found guilty of at least intentional manslaughter if not a higher count as my actions were not only reckless but frivolous.

People like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others of their ilk have been yelling fire at the top of their lungs.  They are not presenting alternative opinions and reasoned criticism but rather sensationalism in a hunt for ratings and top spot on the neo-con rubber chicken circuit.  The American people caught up in the fear mongering presented as journalism by these self-important gurus of Right-wing thought are reeling under a deluge of misinformation.  Hearing screams across the airwaves that Obama is going to murder their grandmothers and turn their children into socialist robots, fear takes over and few people make good decisions when they are afraid.  For the record, one more time, I have read Obama’s policies and watched his performance over the last several months and I can affirm categorically that he is not a socialist nor are any of his policies socialist.  On health care he is simply proposing what amounts to an extension of the existing medicaid program to provide for a voluntary opt in.  It will not solve the current problems in health care and will be more expensive than it should be because the major health insurance companies will still control the bulk of the market.  As for his speech to school children, asking young Americans to write an essay on how they might help their president and their country hardly seems indoctrination unless you follow the philosophies of Ayn Rand and believe that you should never do anything to help your community or your country.  How is it indoctrination if the children themselves will be giving their thoughts to the president on how to make a better America.  That sounds more like patriotism than indoctrination.  After all what is a country if it is not its people working towards common goals?  I thought that was the big complaint of the Republicans and Right Wing activists that the Democrats were not listening to the voice of the people.

Facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, mired in two foreign wars that they cannot understand and see no end to, the people of America are confused and frightened.  America no longer looks like the giant it did only a few years ago.  Americans now doubt the certainty of their childhood, that America is the most powerful and wealthy state in the world.  It’s economic dominance in tatters and its military failing abroad there is not much security left in the American psyche.  So what do these super-Americans do?  Why exploit the situation for personal gain of course.  After all that is the American way.  Lacking a coherent criticism of the Obama administration’s policies and fearing the popular surge that brought him into office in the last election, the far Right has reached into the past to resurrect the great Satan, the eternal boogie man of the Cold War, Socialism.  A word they know will fan the fear and paranoia already extant.  I see another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in our future.

Now people are showing up at presidential appearances sporting assault weapons.  I wonder how these same shock jocks would have reacted had someone shown up at a Bush appearance with an AR15?  Oh wait I seem to remember security ejecting a couple of people from an event for simply wearing anti-Bush T-shirts.  In America you have the right to bear arms at a presidential event but not insults.  Never mind, we on the Left prefer to take people out with footwear,  not guns.  How long before some confused and misinformed American attempts to assassinate President Obama in a righteous rage brought on by the words of these depraved disseminators of dissociative behaviour?  Or an already disturbed individual seizes his opportunity to be a hero or just to become immortal like Lee Harvey Oswald?  The stage is set.  It may no longer be an if but a when.  Rhetoric is already turning to action and unless the flames are dowsed soon it is only a matter of time before at least an attempt is made on the president’s life.  Like the reckless person in the theatre yelling fire, Beck, Limbaugh and the rest of the provocateurs should then be held accountable for their actions.  They should be charged as conspirators and if the attempt is successful, assassins.  The full weight of the law should be brought to bear on them just as it would be on me if I yell fire when there is none and someone dies.  Their actions make them as guilty as if they pulled the trigger themselves.

Responding to a question about his access to Obama and what he would advise him if they did speak, Wright inappropriately used the term Jews.  I am certain he was really referring to White House Chief of Staff Raum Emmanuel who as part of his job does control access to the president.  It was a poor choice of words, an ignorant remark, made in anger and frustration to lash out foolishly at someone standing between himself and a young man he had felt a kinship with, but it was not necessarily a sign of deep seated anti-semitism.  Bigotry against Jews is a plague upon our society that is so ingrained that often people don’t realize they are perpetuating it.  It is appropriate to point out that the Reverend Wright was wrong to use the word as a term of derision.  But it is not a story that warranted several days of media buzz.  I doubt it would have gotten as much attention as it did had it not been for the other, real story, that should have shocked America and made society examine its darker recesses.  The rest of Wright’s remark stressing that he believed Obama should hold to the principles that led him to seek public office and not compromise to the political hacks who care only about winning elections at any price, is a more important story than the ill thought remark.  Important not just in relation to Obama and whether or not he is really following his conscience, but for politics in general.  If everyone who sought public office followed Reverend Wright’s advice how much better the world would be.  Politicians acting on principle, doing what is right instead of acting on avarice and doing what is expedient.  That would be worthy of a round table discussion. 

Also note that no other evidence of active anti-semitism was reported against Wright.  No investigative team of crack journalists scoured the Reverend’s past to see if a charge of anti-semitism was warranted against him.  Rather the media was content to seductively lay out this one instance in virtually the same breath as the story of the Holocaust Museum shootings and let the audience draw the inference.  Having never made the accusation of anti-semitism directly they maintain a comfortable deniability.  Titillate the audience with innuendo but stop an inch short of defamation.  And people wonder why I would sooner believe a story in the National Enquirer than the National Post. 

I am sure, as my wife suggested, that had Lincoln farted during his famous speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg CNN would have been first out of the gate with the story.  Video footage of screwed up noses and quick glances amongst those directly behind Lincoln would have circulated on YouTube by now.  A panel of pundits would convene to ponder the political significance of the fart.  Was Lincoln wafting a message to the retreating Southern army?  Was the stench of this particular fart such as to raise concerns about the president’s health?  Should someone with a flatulence problem be trusted with the most powerful office of the state?  Oh yes I am sure Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper would devote an entire show each to this pressing news event.  And Rick Sanchez would be calling for a dictionary to look up the word flatulence.

Barak Obama’s health care plan, as it has thus unfolded, should be a clear and final answer to all those who believed this young man would somehow change politics and create a more inclusive, just and caring society.  The pinheads who screamed that socialism would reign and undermine the American way (greed, cynical self-interest, and lack of community) can at last rest comfortably in the certainty that President Obama is different in complexion only from his predecessors.  It is clear that his campaign document, Blueprint for Change, would have been more aptly named, Blueprint for the Appearance of Change. 

Obama still has to announce many of the details of the plan but he has rejected categorically any form of single-payer public system.  His reason:  it would be too expensive given the current state of the economy.  What a crock.  Canadian labour costs have been and remain lower than American in great part because we have a single-payer public health care system  Current closing and downsizing of Canadian automotive plants is due to political considerations not economics.  American political debate would sound like a cacophony of scorched cats if GM were to close American plants and leave all the Canadian plants open.  It would make the company far more competitive if that were the only criteria for restructuring.  So Obama’s proclamation that cost factors prevent him from creating a health care system that would truly address the current crisis in medicine is just a lie.  A stronger argument can be made that the opposite is true.  The United States cannot afford not to create a single-payer health care system given the current state of the global economy if it wishes to remain competitive. 

Surrounded by the executives of the major American health insurance corporations, Obama painted himself as a man of integrity and said he would fix health care regardless of the state of the economy.  As I have said here before, Barack Obama is a master of image.  He spoke of a consensus between the White House and the insurance companies to do what was necessary to see that all Americans would have access to affordable health coverage generously provided by that bastion of social conscience, the health insurance industry.  The question arises what if someone still cannot afford the premiums set by these socially conscious corporations?  First you will have to prove you can’t afford it and if the government decides you could by oh I don’t know living in your car instead of paying rent or whatever, then the talk is that a fine should be imposed.  Only in the United States would anyone think that insurance at gunpoint would be an appropriate solution to assure all citizens have health insurance.  Obviously this policy is not in the interests of uninsured Americans so why even think of it.  Wait a minute.  It was conceived in conjunction with the major insurance companies.  You don’t think that the president and these leaders of American finance would scratch each other’s back and come up with a solution that benefits themselves do you?  Gee, the insurance industry gets to extort millions in profits from a new source, those who can’t afford medical insurance, and the government led by Barak ‘the enforcer’ Obama sees that they cough up the dough or else.  And Barack’s pay-off, I suspect a tidy little kickback to his re-election campaign.  Might as well just call him President Barack ‘Milhous’ Obama and the corporate executives B. B. Rebozo clones.  It is interesting on this note to

Save the cost of health care premiums and rent at the same time. Suicide: the most cost effective option under the Obama Plan.

mention that a criticism of Obama’s current nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayer, is her previous assertion that all campaign contributions are in reality bribes.  She was simply stating the obvious.  A person supports a candidate because she expects him to look after her interests and in a self-serving society like the United States that means the individual’s selfish interests not her communal interest.  A bell should have gone off back in the campaign when Obama rejected public campaign financing.  Guess we know why now.  (Actually the bell did go off but the American public was so caught up in the election of the first Black president and the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream they refused to listen to those voices.  I guess that they just forgot that King’s dream was a society where a man would be judged by the content of his character rather than the colour of his skin.)

I chose to pay the rent. Now I have a permanent home.

Health care is a human right.  Money was quickly found to fight an illegal war of aggression in Iraq.  Obama while downsizing that war is ratcheting up another unwinnable war in Afghanistan and in the process propping up a government rife with war criminals.  (While Obama continually tries to compare himself to Kennedy and Roosevelt, his behaviour increasingly resembles Nixon.  Nixon while taking credit for troop reductions in Vietnam failed to inform the public that they were just secretly being deployed to Cambodia which led finally to the rise of Pol Pot and the systematic murder of millions.  Now that’s the American way in action.)  There is no question of cost for these ill-conceived adventures.   They are being fought in the name of security while they have only succeeded in making Americans less secure and making the entire world more dangerous, and more in danger.  A secure state is one that minimizes the possibility that any of its citizens will die needlessly or preventably.  Health care then is a security issue.  Not just programs to deal with potential pandemics but prompt, quality medical assistance to every citizens who needs it when they need it.  Paying the rent or saving your life should not be a choice for a citizen of any civilized country.  Today in the United States it is.  Therefore the United States in NOT a civilized country.  It is a barbaric despotism where the wealthy and powerful spend their time cheating the weak and vulnerable.  And the ‘President of Change and Hope,’ Barack Obama has revealed his true self as the ‘President of No Change and No Hope.’

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.’ 

The Good

The Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago focused among other things on the exclusion of Cuba.  President Obama appears ready to engage Cuba but on what terms.  A return to pre-Castro Cuba is not an option, at least for the people of the island.  Fidel Castro was an icon of the 20th century.  His legacy will live on in Cuba for generations to come.  Some people hate him, some people love him.  Castro has done marvelous things for Cuba.  Did he make mistakes?  Yes, of course he did.  But the benefits to the island far outweigh any negative. 

It is true that elections as we know them have not been held in Cuba since Castro marched into Havana to seize power January 1, 1959.  Oh wait, elections hadn’t happened in Cuba for a long time prior to Castro occupying the presidential palace.  So maybe U. S. hatred of Cuba wasn’t about democratic ideals.  I know, it was about land reform.  How dare Castro distribute land legally owned by faceless American corporations to those greedy campesinos.  Or maybe it was the public education or health care that offended the moral sense of America.  Whatever it was, for the sake of the Cuban people, I sure hope the Americans don’t get their way and dismantle it. 

The Bad

I have always wondered what the Castro revolution might have looked like had it not faced the enmity of the world’s most powerful state since its infancy.  All states while under siege from a foreign power centralize authority and keep a fairly tight reign on political factions.  For example Canadians should read the War Measure Act.  To think that U. S. behaviour did not affect Cuba would be naive to the extreme.  With the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its patron and source of much of its foreign capital.  The island has been facing economic hardships since the 1990s, not because Castro’s economic policies were flawed, but because the United States won the Cold War. 

People will follow anyone who offers them bread.  Castro gave them bread but much more in the bargain.  While he was forced to keep tight political control he did not sink to using death squads as most American supported Latin American regimes have done.  Cuban jails hold political prisoners as does America’s today.  Just ask Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement.  Barak Obama has a chance here to show that he is truly a different kind of American politician.  Can he reach out America’s hand in friendship without clenching the fist and forcing a wad of America political culture back down the throat of Cubans.  A minor incident gives me some inkling of what is to come.  When questioned about a book he received as a gift from Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, Obama made a joke.  The book was a chronicle of the abuses of the South American continent by American and European powers.  I know that would leave me laughing in my

The Ugly

armchair.  (The book is The Open Veins of Latin America:  Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano) 

Our intrepid leader, Stephen Harper, in his usual right off the hay wagon style said that he supported warming up relations between Washington and Havana but reassured his supporters back home that he was still an anti-communist conservative.  I must have missed that class back at university.  The one where we studied pro-communist conservatives because I have never heard of them before.  It just shows that none of us are as smart as we think we are.

For the Cuban people, Fidel Castro passing from the political scene, should be and I suspect is for most, a moment of reflection.  Fidel’s health has been failing in recent years.  He has had to hand over political control to his brother Raul although I suspect he is no farther away from the levers of power than his health forces him.  Raul reminds me of those reasonable facsimiles one could send in instead of actual boxtops to receive a baking soda submarine.  He is just not the real thing.  Regardless it is not Raul that the Americans have to deal with, it is the legacy of a giant, Fidel Castro.

Would you want a president that spent every waking hour thinking only of your foreign wars, bank and industry bailouts and unemployment figures?  Would that make any of those things better?  And hey what about sleep?  Maybe the president should get hooked on bennies and stay awake 24/7 because after all the United States never sleeps.  The economy moves on, insurgents attack in the Gulf or Central Asia, somebody is working the final hours of their job or losing their home.  How dare he sleep!  We shouldn’t wake him up with that 3am. phone call.  What is the lout doing dozing off in the first place?  (Wonder if he got it yet and how he responded?  It did seem last fall that it was the most important issue of the campaign to those of us looking on.)  Or even worse he and Michelle would take the nation’s time to say howdy to each other horizontally if you know what I mean.  Image the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs calling at such a moment.  He hears a terse ‘WHAT?’from the president and asks for permission to launch the American nuclear deterrent and only hears a chorus of yes! Yes!! YEs!!! YES!!!! on the other end.  Guess we are all cooked. 

Sorry if I am beginning to get a little absurd here, but really!  Maybe the news media should ask itself if it doesn’t have more important things to cover than this nonsense.  But since they have run out of story ideas on Paris’s panties they have to have something so it’s Barack’s brackets.  CNN and the rest of them are what puts the laughter into professional journalism.  Not in the sense of covering the funny story which is good as we all need lighter moments in our lives, but in the sense of their childish obsession with the trivial and mundane.  To paraphrase Monty Python ‘I hope there is intelligent journalism somewhere in the universe because there is bugger all down here on earth.’