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Because those things are just habits. You are not your face or your body or your thoughts. You are not your hair colour or your name or your job or your memories. We fall into the habit of thinking this is so. We fall into a pattern of me and mine which isn’t the case. What is the case is an awareness that things stick to. The awareness gets confused, or doesn’t know any better. Me and mine and our nose and our handwriting. Surely a bubble of thinking produced this text a century ago. Surely a memory was once formed of the writing, a memory now disappeared into another death. So many now, like the leaves on underground trees. Art fell apart. It became a Rolls Royce for the pretenders. The real rich bastards bought real Rolls Royce’s, not paintings, not art. Only young and naive and ignorant people went to art galleries, looking at the shit while listening to Montreal indie bands on the iPods. Art was another - or remained! - pretentious folly. So this literature is read by another one, lost to unemployment and the needs of the identity economy.

The gods of Rome stand naked in a kitchen freezer, shivering and covering their genitals with a human modesty. Haven’t we been dead long enough? they ask. No, says the dishwasher, picking up the bucket of peeled potatoes in water. No, not dead long enough. You can’t come out until we’re ready to feel bad about another holy holocaust. Prepare your guilt trips while you wait, and plan for the memory centres and the monopoly on our grief once the colonialism of Jesus is over. Until then, you stand here humiliated blue-white and starved, while we run things over the internet. Until then, fuck yourselves and have new Herculeses. Their chorus is now one of woe. But they are admonished. That opera trope is so passé.

They are fed with oranges and blue berries while they wait. But on their return, no television special. They are D-list celebrities. No one can figure out if that is Zeus or Vulcan by Jove.

The tale of them all is that there are no more tales. No more cellphones, no more art, no more laptops or iPods or clouds or geese or canoes or pretty girls for trophy wives and there are no more lives. The Universe takes a breather on the Human realm. A bit too fucked up there it concludes. But it isn’t so bad. It’s just they let the standards slip. And they paid for it.

Whose standards?

Two ends of the ego bar: on one end, the egolessness of Buddhism. Perhaps this best belongs to the left side. On the right, the glorification of the ego.

Art and anti-art: Buddhism and anti-buddhism. One glorifies and the other nullifies, and they stand in contrast to one another as technologies of dignity. I tried the art thing for my 20s. It lead to restless nights of loneliness and poverty and feelings of worthlessness in the grand scheme of things. To inflate the ego and the sense of self-importance I conceived of grand projects and felt important when people used my phone number or email address to harass me with things I didn’t care about. Spam and garbage. I tried art and the glorification of the ego and found my ego attached to a mirror image of a handsome face and a slim body, this world of my early 20s, when I was in artschool. I didn’t have to try very hard. My physical attractiveness meant I could add heartbreak to my glorification and people gave me the cute pass. Important women tried to seduce me and would confide in me. What then happened but time and food and sitting too long in front of computers and desks? Too many words read, too many written, and everything slowed downed into a soft body, pudgy with middle age, and no more cute pass. Your brains aren’t enough for this world. So what if you’re smart? That won’t buy the trophy wives to houseclean the suburb home. And so to confront this mystery of a changed world, one sits and meditates and tried to internalize the view that all this is an egg shell borrowed for a swim amidst the deluded, the hateful, and the ignorant. But no more pictures! No more art! Instead I want fine embroidery, quilted patterns, the craftsmanship of darned socks. More handmade things for this world please. And enough with the plastic crap.

But she is plastic, especially in the ways that she loves me. Concealed from each other’s paranoia, lust in the time of the Plague; we fuck and suck and all isn’t what it once was. Hair is now optional and comes only on amateur models. For professional quality one can might as well fuck a rubber doll ordered off the internet and alive not at all. Necrophillia passing off as plastophillia. It’s all the same nowadays. Please love me!This is the game. So in what world do we live? It’s time that I gave up. It all began to feel so fake; artificial contrived, pretentious. Music was one of the only things of which I was carefully ignorant to remain. If I learned too much about it I knew it would cease to be enjoyable: a balm, a calm, a lay in a dark November night.

I’ll feign illness and lay in bed for an hour, take up the pen and write suicide notes or letters threatening to kill the emperor. That way people will visit me, and if I really play my cards right, I’ll get three square meals a day, a bed of my own, and not have to sleep on grates.

This then is the legacy of a time of memory. Another world war for the newspapers. More of the same hatred and delusion and greed. This society took up the cultivation of discord and evil and I was asked to be successful within it. To validate it by my own Rolls Royce, my own Ferrari, my own trophy wife with store bought tits and an appearance on Oprah. I was asked to succeed at these things through art. Celebrity movies, incomprehension. Be fucking famous. Be another star. Because we have drowned out the out the real ones with light pollution and we are building a new constellation. Be a star for our sky, for our world, for our lie.

Am I allowed to say no thank you and go back to my newspaper pen & ink game? To reverse a thousand years of karma with a phrase so simple and mean, to say, no I’ll not be famous today, fifteen minutes is far too long already.

There is in this a simple thing really. A forgiveness to the elderly for not dying sooner: for fucking everything up with TV and laziness.

But asserted with a simple pin. In short I was afraid. My how my hair is growing thin. But this is a message to the old and the dead. There is no new crop of scholar arising to understand. Tell me if anything was ever done. Read. Pick up and read. Recite, in the name of the Creator. Recite that in the beginning was the world and it was without form and that it described that all life is suffering and that there’s an end to suffering and that it costs only three monthly payments of 19.99 so act now by calling 1-800. And all this is the end, my simple friend, the end of all our simple plans. I think I’ve been too successful at embarrassing people. And this now keeps me a quiet mouse still growing into a lion.

~

There is still a moon in the sky and lights in the rooms. Where there was once darkness there is now a television screen with animated images and all those stories. Entertainment as religion; the thing that our ancestors did and their’s did and the world is now too complicated for Shakespeare and talk radio, even the talk radio from France on philosophy. What stories! For my fat hands a fat pen. A Rolls Royce kind of kind. A big black car. Wealth and power. Don’t forget it. Quick! Quick! Take my picture for I am writing with a fountain pen! Aren’t I clever and beautiful and literary? Why not talk farming instead, since I know so little of it? Why not talk astronomy? The poets studied looser verse and the ladies rolled their eyes. Quel surprise.

~

Eventually someone will speak. Let’s forget about the Greek Gods freezing in the freezer. I still see them looking like Ego Schieles as painted by Picasso during his Blue Period of a hundred years ago. Or, I see them as Holocaust survivors about to be liberated projected from blue film. Starving, hysterical, naked, their ribs showing, awaiting the fall of monotheism and the neon dawn, but they are also just beings who should go back to their own realm. Leave us psychos alone. We have an ecosystem to ruin. Thwart the rebirth of a billion daevas. Because we’re afraid one of these screaming brats will be the next great king, queen, or talk show host. Whan! For six months, whan! And the nipples and the bottles and the diapers until one day there’s an enlightenment or a contract in Hollywood, signed with a ball-point pen and for ladies, dear ladies, a trip to the the tit man and a whitening of the smile.

And all this while prostrations
Before the personal trainer,
the new priest of a new ritual.
Self-worship demands we become our own gods
before an audience of mirrors.

But here I am with a chocolate bar. I need to wipe my mouth. I am unloved still and poverty and paunch contribute to the glamour of my humiliation. I was asked once to be a star and I said no thanks because my hair is growing thin and I did not want to be a butterfly preserved at the end of a pin. I wanted instead simple lives and simple pleasures. To wash dishes in front of a window which looked out to a landscape - grass, trees, the stereotype. But no! To Canada we go! For we live in cities and towns and it’s all graffiti and spit. Fuck it. Let us go then, you and I, a beauty stirring my stick. I’ve given up on sex and seek it only as an intimacy. I’ve had too many orgasms already to feel any biological need for another one. Special words for special feeling. An art really. But forcing it out of you … words to your silent attitude. Words and your sentences left hanging like so many limp and flaccid plants left unwatered by the fellow hired to feed the cats. Oh fuck it, it’s not like you understand anyway. There is music in the mind as there is method in the madness. I’ll grow a big mustache and say I’m ahead of my time. Dinner was over at quarter to nine.

As I mentioned in the Goodreads sent out on October 16th, I’ve prepared a transcript of the Ideas episode Economics and Social Justice, which was released today as a podcast.

Despite Mr Sacco’s acceptably flawed English, I found this to be a remarkably good listen, and I especially liked his take on what the Toronto School would call the Economics of Positional Goods. By this I mean that Mark Kingwell has been known in the past year to talk of positional goods which is borrowing from the work of his fellow University of Toronto philosophy colleague Joseph Heath, who presented on his book, The Rebel Sell two years ago with his co-author Andrew Potter, a transcript of which I made available on Goodreads some time ago and herein again for obvious thematic reasons.

In addition, because Sacco mentions in his presentation that there is a strong incentive in our culture toward stupidity, since it makes you a more pliable consumer, I was reminded of Alvin Toffler’s talk which was broadcast on TVO’s Big Ideas on September 30th. His talk was for his new book, Revolutionary Wealth where he argued that we have formed a new civilization, one I would argue which is unhealthily obsessed with the pursuit of a string of digits; Sacco would argue that we have tied our identity to these digits, administered by banks and governments, and see them as measures of our potency. Toffler argues that our society’s structures have fallen out of sync, where business is moving at an extreme rate, adapting readily to and creating change in our world but education is the dinosaur, not having kept up the pace and still teaching a curriculum designed to produce efficient factory and corporate workers.

Sacco thinks we need to invest in ourselves - that is educate ourselves - in order to remove ourselves from the rat race of competitive consumption which is tied to what he calls the economics of identity. What’s a little shocking is how this new and cool theory of economics - the economics of identity - is really rather old school. In an essay found in his Collected Works (which I tried to get on Goodreads last year but they wouldn’t let me), Northrop Frye wrote:

Still, the problem of leisure and boredom is an educational problem. Education may not solve it, but nothing else will. Schools, churches, clubs, and whatever else has any right at all to be called educational, need to think of educating for leisure as one of our central and major social needs. And education is a much broader business than studying certain subjects, though it includes that. Television, newspapers, films, are all educational agencies, though what they do mostly is more like dope peddling than like serious education. Education reflects the kind of society we have. If society is competitive and aggressive and ego-centered, education will be too; and if education is that way, it’ll produce a cynical and selfish society, round and round in a vicious circle. Intelligent and dedicated people can break this circle in a lot of places if they try hard.

What makes boredom boring? It’s not just a matter of not being busy enough. Take a girl who’s dropped out of college because the slick magazines told her she wasn’t being feminine unless she threw her brains away. What with running a house and three children and outside activities, she hasn’t a minute of free time, but she’s bored all the same. Being bored is really the feeling that there’s something missing inside oneself. When someone gets that feeling, his instinct is to feel that something outside him can supply what’s missing. This is what inspires the chase for what are called status symbols. A man struggles to get an expensive car or a mink coat for his wife in the hope that people will judge him by these things instead of by himself. One trouble with these things is that they wear out so fast. In fact, our economy partly depends on their wearing out fast. As soon as anything is recognized to be a status symbol, it begins to look silly, and we have to start chasing something else. Suppose a man wants to collect pictures, not because he likes pictures, but because it’s an approved thing to do. He’s soon fold that certain kinds of pictures are fashionable and others aren’t. But as soon as he’s got his house filled with canvases a hundred feet square covered with red paint, the fashion changes to pop art, and there he is with last year’s model of status symbols. It’s the same with all the distracting activities. A man is bored because he bores himself.

That was circa 1963. When Sacco speaks of ‘compensatory consumption’ he’s really talking about people trying to buy their way out of boredom.

But, you know, we do buy our way out of boredom all the time: we buy computers to do websites and Goodreads with, and we buy books to read which stimulate and educate. An Educated Imagination is what Pier Luigi Sacco is really calling for, and to that end here is some content by which to further that pursuit. - Timothy

‘When the individual has reached a hundred years of age, he is able to do without love and friendship. Illness and inadvertent death are not things to be feared. He practices one of the arts, or philosophy or mathematics, or plays a game of one-handed chess. When he wishes, he kills himself. When a man is the master of his own life, he is also the master of his death.’
‘Is that a quotation?’ I asked.
‘Of course. There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations’.

-Jorge Luis Borges, A Weary Man’s Utopia (1975)

Somehow the world has become a mediocre comic book, as predictable as a Star Trek episode. I grew up watching Star Trek and still love it for its graphic design, but it was never embarrassed about cannibalizing from its past storylines, and eventually it got so bad that ten minutes into an episode you could anticipate the entire plot-line. But this is an effect not confined to a show like Star Trek, it is true of almost anything on television. I was surprised when I read Chapter 18 of John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards earlier this year in the way he blended his view of art history and it’s failure to adequately resolve itself to television, which he saw as the logical conclusion of centuries of attempts at realistic image making. Image making, he thought, is tied to our desires for rituals. And TV combines animated images with ritual plot-lines, as predictable to contemporary viewers as those reciting along with a priest as he holds up the host. As he wrote:

People are drawn to television as they are to religions by the knowledge that they will find there what they already know. Reassurance is consistency and consistency is repetition. Television - both drama and public affairs - consists largely of stylized popular mythology in which there are certain obligatory characters who must say and do certain things in a particular order. After watching the first minute of any television drama, most viewers could lay out the scenario that will follow, including the conclusion. Given the first line of banter in most scenes, a regular viewer could probably rhyme off the next three or four lines. Nothing can be more formal, stylized and dogmatic than a third-rate situation comedy or a television news report on famine in Africa. There is more flexibility in a Catholic mass or in classic Chinese opera.

He went on to say, and I think this is a kicker given how it was probably written in the 1980s:

The rise of CNN (Cable News Network) canonizes the television view of reality as concrete, action-packed visuals. Wars make good television, providing the action is accessible and prolonged. The Middle East, for example, is an ideal setting for television war. Cameras can be permanently on the spot, and a fixed scenario of weekly car bombs, riots and shelling ensures that the television structure will have ongoing material.

(It makes Steven Colbert’s joke about this past summer’s Israel-Lebanese war more than just a joke but a perfectly conscious reflection of the reality of the situation). In addition, the violence on television reflects a long Western tradition in depicting violence, seen in graphic mediaeval crucifixions and the tortured damned we are familiar with from those seemingly unenlightened times.

But from the enlightened times we got Goya’s image, the sleep of reason producing monsters. As Mark Kingwell points out in his essay ‘Critical Theory and Its Discontents’ the image’s caption can be read two ways, as either ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’ or ‘the dream of reason produces monsters’.¹ John Ralston Saul, with Voltaire’s Bastards took the later interpretation for his thesis. But the experience of this decade is one of the first reading: the thoughtlessness of the times producing predictable nightmares.

~
Everything has gotten so insane that peace and quiet and non-interaction certainly has a lot more appeal. No need to answer the same old questions about how I am, which are rhetorical and meaningless, no need to tell the same boring stories about myself or the state of my life, no need to feel the peer pressure of conforming to someone else’s idea of who I am, who I should be, or how I should be. It is better in this decade to withdraw and watch operas on DVD (Wagner’s The Ring), or famous TV shows (Battlestar Gallactica is like such a masterpiece); and to avoid browsing websites too much because it just seems to add to the sense that everything has gone to bullshit, as MacLeans seems to think as well. So I missed the whole beauty video thing until the day before I saw it on the front page of the Toronto Star, and as I’ve been adjusting over the past month to a 6.30am wake up time to become a ‘corporate minion of patriarchy’ (my Halloween costume) I’m not so eager to go a’gathering for goodreads. I’ve been warning you all for months now that this project isn’t what it used to be, and that will continue to be true in the future. This list began small enough that I knew my audience - drank and laughed with some of you in the past - but now has become anonymous and my motivations for doing it continue to be some sick sense of responsibility to do my part to inform whoever might come a’googlin. I should be much more selfish and egotistical to fit in properly I know. But my work on the web in the past has come from a desire to document, and at this time I would like to use this list to promote and to document for whatever that’s worth. Death of a President was released in North America on Friday, and it probably won’t be in theatres for long. Not that it matters, because it will attain a deserved cult-status on DVD or streamed from wherever. First of all, having never seen George W. Bush in person he has always been nothing but an animated image to me. Real through portrayal and the delusion of the animated image, and so fitting, I think, to see that image manipulated into another version of a potential reality borrowed from many months from now. The skill of the digital effects became apparent very quickly; ten minutes into it I recognized it as a masterpiece, a shockingly effective use of Photoshop-like tech, and a devastating commentary on current global-american-centric-politics. I mean, what other President of the United States has inspired a fictional yet realistic depiction of his assassination while still in office to the extant that the film is presented as an historical documentary on the subject?This blending of time - watching images from a future, depicting an event from a year from now, presented as some bleeding-heart leftist documentary typically shown on CBC Newsworld on Sunday nights, twists itself into the cold water blast of just how stupid everything has gotten (given how the movie is built out of the current media clichés, from the dialogue right up the structure) but also how we’re caught up in a television dream dictating reality to us. The film hits all the right points, with an eerie accuracy, from the deluded missus posing as Bush’s speechwriter saying how he was somehow connected to God, to the political backdrop of North Korea and Iran. The speeches have been written and the players have taken to the stage and Shakespeare’s famous line has never seemed more true.

And for that reason, for the sheer fictionalization of our reality, this moment in later history which seems real because it is on TV, real through portrayal, this film will also be must-see viewing for Presidential historians, both present and future. I am compelled to write about it now, to time-stamp this text with the current date, so that there is evidence to future researchers that this movie came out a year before the October 2007 events that it depicts. I would like to think that this movie will still be watched in future years, long after the Bush administration; as a sociological study of this decade, a study in documentary narrative, as an art film, and as an historical marker of the transformative power of Photoshop-like effects. I got a glismpe watching this movie of the media-scape of the upcoming century and felt future-shock. Nuanced political discourse through fictional history, which only highlights our current confusion between memory and thought. This film is cultural evidence that we can only seem to think through the ‘hindsight is always 20/20′ trope, and that retrospective documentaries have become so prevalent in the age of the self-absorbed baby-boomer-at-the-controls-of-everything (and hence a narcissistic mediascape on their politics, youth, and classic album collections) that it’s only fitting to examine a presidency’s attack on civil liberties through the genre.

The CBS Sunday Morning program had a piece on Oct 29 on the beauty video and Photoshop - explaining what young creative people take for granted to the old foggies who watch that sentimental sunday morning sunshine stuff. And the key is what young people are taking for granted versus what the old foggies running the show have in their minds about our future. An older person close to me the other day posited that I might live long enough to see one of Toronto’s main traffic arteries - the Don Valley Parkway - turned into a double-decker highway. As if allowing for more greenhouse gas emitting machines would be an adequate solution to our traffic problems, a vision completely oblivious to environmental concerns. I countered I’d much rather see a better public transit infrastructure built. But of course, I understand where this idea comes from. It’s classic ‘cars are a great and my identity as a man is tied to the sense of freedom they bring me and the teenage sense of fuck you I never got over’. It’s the same mid-twentieth century mentality that you get from politicians when they promote the need for more people to study math and science, because not only is there a space race and we have to prove that consumerist democracy rocks, but because we need all those future engineers to retro-fit these highways into double-decker monstrosities. Ah these old people: it’s enough to wish them all dead, or at least look forward to the future when they’ve left the scene and we can build the world into something more fair and beautiful. They all gave up after Bobby was assassinated, and you can watch all about it on November 23rd. What a contrast. We’re in a situation when eloquent and visionary politicians are now part of a dreamy past, while our present is made up of inarticulate war-mongering folks notable for their lack of vision. That doesn’t seem to me a sign of a healthy state of affairs.

Wishing a certain old-foggie dead is precisely what director Gabriel Range has tapped into. I saw it at a 3:50 matinee with four other people. That is to say, I went alone and there were only three other people in the audience. I’m not sure if that’s worthy of mention - seeing late afternoon matinees on Sunday afternoons isn’t popular enough to be stereotypical. But it also contributed to the feeling that I was watching a secret masterpiece living up to art’s typical response from consumerist culture. They were told to not watch it by the media who readily quoted the likes of Hillary Clinton who thought it was ‘despicable‘. It fits into the thoughts I’ve had lately about Hitler’s famous degenerate art show: Hitler, as John Carey pointed out in his 2005 book What Good are the Arts? was being populist with that exhibit, selling the public their own prejudices toward modern art. But there is a theory about how art is a psychological reflection of the zeitgeist, capturing the spirit of the age, and it seems to be ironic that Hitler, in promoting this to mock it, provided an historical marker for modernist art and highlighted the degeneracy of the society which legitimately elected him in 1933. It was degenerate art made within a degenerate society and Hitler unwittingly held up a mirror thinking it a spotlight. Whenever politicians start making pronouncements on cultural products, one has to think something significant is going on which will need explaining to future generations: that it is an art historical moment.

We’re supposed to all know the game. It’s what makes a film like Death of President possible: string together all the tv documentary clichés for an audience made sophisticated enough by an ambient televised environment to not be confused by the fiction. But of course I say that as someone who saw it with four other people, a film which as far as box-office measures go, did not exist, and as someone with the capacity to reflect on what I saw. As I walked out of the theatre I heard the terrified screams coming from the next theatre-room, looking back I saw the poster for Saw III. Of course Geogre Bush is President in a time when watching violence is what enough people want to do to make it the top film this weekend. You might point out a horror movie is appropriate for Halloween, but Halloween is only appropriate for children. The popularity of violence in whatever manner just highlights our collective immaturity and our inability to grow beyond a mediaeval past, as Bush’s recent moves toward the elimination of habeas corpus show.

JRS wrote: ‘This perpetual motion machine works effortlessly if the flood of images illustrates situations the viewer already understands. That is one of the explanations for the system’s concentration on two or three wars when there are forty or so going on around the world. The others are eliminated because they are less accessible on a long-term basis. Or because the action is less predictable and regular. Or because the issue involved does not fit easily into the West’s over-explained, childlike scenarios of Left versus Right or black versus white. Or because the need for endless images makes television structures unwilling to undertake the endless verbal explanations and nonvisual updates which would be required for the other thirty-seven wars to be regularly presented.’ This was first published in 1992. In the time between now and then, nothing has changed. While the audience have grown more sophisticated, so has television’s methods at keeping the conversation simple. But for me, there is another question, and that is, why? Why is any of this important? Ritual? That alone seems too simple an explanation. I watch TV for the illusion of company and for the occasional good, or big idea.

What is television for? Some will say it’s merely to get us to buy things, but others will say it is to inform. But are we being informed or frustrated? Isn’t anything political on television simply a way of frustrating a democratic citizenship into feelings of impotence when faced with such inane political figures? And isn’t it this sense of frustration precisely what leads to the events depicted in Death of a President? That’s not something you’d get with an uninformed populace, nor perhaps one you’d get if the political machinery actually could register the democratic will of the population. We remain dictated to, told what to think about movies by Hillary Clinton or whatever expert they got hold of at the local university.

I first read Borges’ story, A Weary Man’s Utopia in the winter of 2001 following you know what, when the shit had hit the fan and all the flags were flying. It is the story of a man’s afternoon visit with a fellow in a far distant future. He tells the the fellow

‘In that strange yesterday from which I have come,’ I replied, ‘there prevailed the superstition that between one evening and the next morning, events occur that it would be shameful to have no knowledge of. The planet was peopled by spectral collectives - Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, the Common Market. Almost no one knew the prior history of those Platonic entities, yet everyone was informed of the most trivial details of the latest conference of pedagogues or the imminent breaking off relations between one of these entities and another and the messages that their presidents sent back and forth - composed by a secretary to the secretary, and in the prudent vagueness that the form requires. All this was no sooner read than forgotten, for within a few hours it would be blotted out by new trivialities. Of all functions, that of the politician was without doubt the most public. An ambassador or a minister was a sort of cripple who had to be transported in long, noisy vehicles surrounded by motorcyclists and grenadiers and stalked by eager photographers. One would have thought their feet had been cut off, my mother used to say. Images and the printed word were more real than things. People believed only want they could read on the printed page. The principle, means and end of our singular conception of the world was esse est percipi - “to be is to be portrayed”. In the past I lived in, people were credulous.

I would like to think that in the years since it was published in 1975, people have become less credulous. But the forms of these popular delusions have only aggregated more nuance, so that things are not only read, but heard and seen, and people believe what they read on screens. Or at least the old foggies who are freaked out by Wikipedia seem to think so, severely underestimating the capacities of people to understand the collective nature of the site.

As for politicians being cripples: I recently saw a motorcade come up University Avenue in Toronto and turn onto Queen St - first the chorus of motorbike cops, lead by someone who parked in the center of the intersection, leaping off to perform his ritual in the same manner a parodist would: exaggerated self importance as he held the traffic back, like a romantic hero confronting a tide, and along came the parade of black cars with their two-wheeler escorts. Who was this asshole? I thought. Some celebrity? I still don’t know, although I later heard the Prime Minister was in town. Perhaps it was him. But it seems to me that to parade around in black cars with tinted windows reveals a foolish paranoia: they all think they’re important enough to be assassinated and so hide from us as if we’re all crazy, showing a contempt for the citizenry which is unfair. Leaders shouldn’t hide from us and treat us as if we’re dangerous. But ironically that’s precisely the type of behaviour that leads to the protests they need to be protected from. - Timothy

———————————

1. The essay is found in the book Practical Judgments pages 171-181 and the quote is itself a quote from one of the books he’s reviewing; the orginal thought is attributed to the introduction by David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy in their 1994 book, Critical Theory.

My fellow Canadian CBC listeners, who plug your headphones into the computer at work and stream it as I do, who listen to it in the morning as you type your theses because you’re a television snob; who have come to appreciate the music for the news they introduced earlier this year as something iconic, and who may have fond memories of Peter Gzowski and the opening music to Morningside, you listeners know that Lister Sinclair died today, at age 85, in a Toronto hospital. The news made me think that’s how I’d like to go - in my 80s, with the radio playing Glenn Gould and Mozart in my honour. A good life, well spent, with everyone talking about how learned and kind you were. (Except for dying in a Toronto hospital - since I saw Dying at Grace I’ve felt it would be better to die in a ditch under the stars).

My first encounter with the voice of Lister Sinclair came in the summer of 1991. I was listening to EMF’s one-hit-wonder album that season, the single ‘Unbelievable’ on the endless repeat possible with dub cassette tapes and rewind. I’d work away at my Commodore 64 and listen to Side A and then Side B, and through this learned how to spell the word ‘believe’ since it was a song title. And on one of these songs there was a sample of a BBC Shakespeare radio play with a gravitas accented announcer. I was naive enough at the time to wonder, when I was rolling my radio tuner sometime after 9pm that night, if this voice speaking about nightingales was the voice from the album. Later I’d untangled the confusion but I was hooked to the strangeness of that broadcast, one of the series of things that begin with a certain letter, or something themed around a colour. Anyway, I tuned in at 9 the following night to catch more.

This, my friends, was an example of the CBC being hip, a far cry from George Stroumboulopoulos’ latest hints that he pierced his cock, which is how the CBC is trying to sell it today. Lister Sinclair’s sober weirdness made a much stronger impression on my sense of teenage cool than the middle class punk aesthetic which now passes for hipster ways.

Ideas is running a three part tribute over the next three nights, where it is 9pm local throughout Canada.

In the last Goodreads, sent on Friday, I promoted that evening’s Ideas, and now the voice who once presented its ideas has gone. This Goodreads serves the double purpose of sharing my thoughts on the matter (I hope you don’t mind) and to inform you that the episode on ‘Economics and Social Justice’ which I promoted will be an Ideas podcast on November 20th. In the meantime, I’m working on a transcription from the recording I made, which I’ll post on the site on that date. - Timothy

Thursday 25 September 1986

I may not have written in a long time but today was o.k. PS I’m a Space Ace¹.

________________
1. Space Ace referred to a video game in which I had achieved a high score.

And thus, that is the end of the 1986 Diary entries. I didn’t try to keep a diary again until three years later at age 14, but I ended up destroying that one because I didn’t want to remember that year. Things were better the following year, and it was then that I began to keep notebooks and develop a Journal.

The Facts & Arguments section of last Thursday’s (Sept 7th) Globe & Mail brought this article by Geoffrey Lean to my attention, where it is noted that ‘food supplies are shrinking alarmingly around the globe, plunging the world into its greatest crisis for more than 30 years. New figures show that this year’s harvest will fail to produce enough to feed everyone on Earth, for the sixth time in the past seven years. Humanity has so far managed by eating its way through stockpiles built up in better times - but these have now fallen below the danger level’.

Earlier in the week I picked up Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap at a used bookstore. This particular copy seems to have been someone else’s review-copy, since I found tucked inside the cover the photocopied blurb for his upcoming title The Upside of Down; Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (to be published October 31st). The blurb offers as a teaser the Prologue, which sets the stage with a reminder of Ancient Rome, which grew too complex and fell because its citizens couldn’t maintain its late stages. Homer-Dixon writes, ‘In this book we’ll discover that our circumstances today are like Rome’s in key ways. Our societies are becoming steadily more complex and often more rigid…Eventually, as occurred in Rome, the stresses will become too extreme, and our societies too inflexible to respond, and some kind of economic or political breakdown is likely to occur. I’m not alone in this view. These days, lots of people have the intuition that the world is going haywire and an extraordinary crisis is coming’.

We are indeed lucky to be thus living in such a time, before the extraordinary crisis. Because it seems to me that when we find ourselves there - maybe in another ten years or so? - won’t we look back with nostalgia to the simpler time of this decade, and pine for the days when old Papa Bush was on TV everynight, making us laugh with his goofy phrasings, and miss the simple-minded certainty offered by the idea that Muslim fanatics want to kill us?

Which is to say that only in a society which has enough food, whose cities aren’t being destroyed by storms, whose children are well-sheltered and well-fed, can we afford the time and resources to let our politicians play boys-with-toys war games. We truly must be living in a utopia, to have the luxury to use our time and money so productively in being afraid of one another.

Because we don’t have an extraordinary crisis to unite us and to force us to work together. Our cities are not being destroyed by storms. There isn’t a plague ravaging continents. We aren’t living with a lead-pipe infrastructure based on an finite resource that we are squandering. There is no asteroid headed our way to force Bruce Willis and Steve Buscemi to become astronauts, nor are there aliens coming to blow up the White House and force President Bush to brush up on his fighter-pilot skills, last used protecting Texan airspace during the Vietnam War (if we don’t count the air-craft carrier thing from a few years back). At the end of the day we can sit back and watch the war-show and the comedic commentaries and look forward to going back to our soul-nurturing jobs in the morning and think, today was a good day. Because the extraordinary crisis is coming, but not already here. We have the luxury of war and terrorism in this decade, and we’d better enjoy it while it lasts.

Meanwhile, commentators like Homer-Dixon, Ronald Wright, and Jared Diamond warn us that things are shaky. This civilization may not survive the 21st Century. Homer-Dixon, in his prologue, writes, ‘Rome’s story reveals that civilizations, including our own, can change catastrophically. It also suggest the dark possibility that the human project is so evanescent that it’s essentially meaningless. Most sensible adults avoid such thoughts. Instead, we invest enormous energy in our families, friends, jobs, and day-to-day activities. And we yearn to leave some enduring evidence of our brief moment on Earth, some lasting sign of our individual or collective being. So we construct a building, perhaps, or found a company, write a book, or raise a family. We seldom acknowledge this deep desire for meaning and longevity, but it’s surely one source of our endless fascination with Rome’s fall: if we could just understand Rome’s fatal weakness, maybe our societies could avoid a similar fate and preserve their accomplishments for eternity.”

Let us then consider this American-centric civilization’s accomplishments: paranoid parents who think their fat video-game playing moronic children will be raped by pudgy balding men. Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise. The American news-media. Cellophane packaged food. Chemicals with unpronounceable names. Industrialized slaughter houses for our domesticated animals, one of which (the cow) now has to be treated as potential toxic waste. Oprah Winfrey’s book club, to industrialize fiction consumption. A tourism industry. An art industry. Designers working away designing the knobs for the ends of curtain rods. Marketing agencies. Billboards. Short films conceptually contrived to promote things.

I’m just playing the USA=Western Civilization game, since, that’s the PR, the marketing, the televised ads, and the billboards have told me my whole life. England would seem to be the Mini-me side-kick, while Canada is USA’s nerdy brother, perhaps austistic, perhaps a good reader. Canada has an inferiority complex and isn’t as glamourous as the more famous brother. Canada is Napoleon Dynamite’s brother chatting up hot babes on the internet. Canada is Western Civilization’s art movie compared to the USA’s Schawrzenegger action flick.

It seems like France, Russia, Poland, Italy - they’re civilizations unto themselves and are thus somewhat divorced from the Anglo-American Empire’s sphere of influence. I’m not sure where Australia fits in since they’re more Anglo than American. Nevertheless, the United States has over 700 military bases in 130 countries in the world. Whatever we think we’re doing when we call ourselves democracies, and whatever we think of our political situation, that reality alone makes the USA Rome. And while Rome left a legacy which can still inspire sixteen hundred years after the fact, a legacy of art, architecture and law, the American Empire’s legacy so far seems to be highways and chemically processed stuff, its art made largely without archival concerns, its documents increasingly becoming subject to digital fragility.

Rome’s reputation for wickedness - brilliantly captured in I Claudius - is usually taught to us via Christian exegesis with gladiatorial reference but I think USA is well on her way to matching Rome’s record given that in July, the Internet Watch Foundation (a UK ‘child porn hotline’ site, which prefers to refer to such images as simply ‘child abuse’) reported that servers in the United States host 50% of the world’s ‘child abuse content’ while the wild-west of Russia (where your last phishing attempt may have come from) is only responsible for 15%. If we take as a measure how we treat our children as a sign of civilization, one has a rather perverse way of judging the winner of the Cold War. This rather abysmal accomplishment of American/Western Civilization - the sexualization of children (I can’t even watch anything on Jon Benet Ramsay, nevermind August’s weirdo) is something I can’t even be sarcastic about here and want to triumph as another grand accomplishment of our globalized society worth preserving.

Homer-Dixon’s thoughts can be answered: yes our society is haywire, and yes, this can only lead to a greater crisis down the road. But if we agree that current living conditions are inhumane and not worth preserving, what then is the better way? It is a moral question - that is, it calls us to envision and articulate a vision of a good life which is currently being articulated for us by Hollywood and advertising. We are not choosing to live lives with meaning or with purpose. We are choosing to fit ourselves into someone else’s image of the world, striving to buy stuff we don’t need and tempted to envy by by Robin Leach’s fucking voiceovers. This decade’s terrorist nonsense is nothing more than another example of the resources squandered by the rich and famous. Because, once again, it’s not like we don’t have enough food. So, if kids screaming at their computers while others lip-sync ‘Numa Numa’; racism and intolerance; cold-heartedness; celebrity waste and stupidity isn’t this civilization’s vision of utopia, then what is?

Is our real crime, not that we have achieved these things, but that we jumped ahead and achieved them without a sustainable framework? Would we all want SUV’s if they contributed to the health of the planet? Would we all want to be obese if there were a pill that could make us Hollywood lean overnight? (Thereby making us procrastinate about taking it, saying, ‘oh, I just don’t feel like being thin today’ while we order the super-size fries). Isn’t the real horror about some of this (excluding the child-sex abomination) based on the fact that we’re indebting our children to a life more poor than our own? Because, evidently, our economy of supplying need-and-greed has made us happy to have cluttered homes and it’s obvious that this hoarding is in part due to a fuck-the-future selfishness.

Here, I’m reminded of the German historian Götz Aly, who wrote of Hitler: ‘Hitler gained overwhelming support with his policy of running up debts and explaining that it would be others that paid the price. He promised the Germans everything and asked little of them in return. The constant talk of “a people without living space”, “international standing”, “complementary economic areas” and “Jew purging” served a single purpose: to increase German prosperity without making Germans work for it themselves. This was the driving force behind his criminal politics: not the interests of industrialists and bankers such as Flick, Krupp and Abs. Economically, the Nazi state was a snowballing system of fraud. Politically, it was a monstrous bubble of speculation, inflated by the common party members”.

This is to say that our superficial wealth today, founded on the infrastructure of non-renewable oil, means poverty for our children’s children. Governments have given up passing laws - making intentional decisions - in favor of passing tax-cuts or tax-breaks, reserving attempts at law-making for such retrogressive ends as rebutting gay marriage or trying to legitimize torture. (Which implies that they can’t imagine how to control people in those ways through tax-breaks).

People have come to equate wealth with volumes of money and not with the cultural riches which make a place worth visiting and living in and treating as an heirloom. So we’ve built ugly office towers all over the world because they’re utilitarian function is to warehouse human capital for 8 or more hours a day and left to execute their inane tasks so that the minority in control of the organization can benefit from their expertise, skill and time, to play golf all day. This means that the cultural riches of our civilization, that which we hope to leave for our children to enjoy are not the maginficant cathedrals of yesteryear, but the landscaped greens of the 18-hole golf course to be found wherever there’s room to put one (even in the deserts of Saudi Arabia). But it’s not like we don’t have enough fresh water or anything.

If the sustainability issue were to be fixed in the next 25 years so that in 2031 we could indulge in guilt free celebrity watching at the Toronto Film Fest, would we still be miserable when superficially nothing had changed? Would we then be happy with a civilization of kiddie-porn perverts, fat and stupid kids, congested highways, fear-mongering news-media, thoughtless politicians?

If this consumerist utopia would not be acceptable then, why is it acceptable now? Again, what kind of world would we like to live in? What kind of life would we like to live? Because, with reference to Homer Dixon’s ‘extraordinary crisis’ those will be the questions that will need answering. And if we can’t answer it now, when we have all time time in the world, how much more difficult will it be to answer when our cities have begun to be destroyed by storms?

Adam Curtis
It may help if we were familiar with how we got here. An excellent summary can be found in the films of Adam Curtis.

I first came across the documentaries of Adam Curtis when The Power of Nightmares was broadcast on CBC Newsworld in the spring of 2005. I soon found copies online and linked to them on Goodreads (issue 05w17:1). In the 18 months since, we’ve had Google Video show up where you can now find the Nightmares series in better quality than what was then available and where you can also find his 2002 documentary The Century of the Self.

The Century of the Self is as remarkable as Nightmares in that it traces the influence of Sigmund Freud over the course of 20th Century Western soceity through, not only his theories, but his family. I was very surprised to learn that Freud’s nephew Edmund Bernays was the fellow who invented ‘public relations’ as an alternative form of propaganda, and who is thus responsible for the past century’s advertising industry. Basically, the story told in Century of the Self is how the marketing and advertising industry grew up around the idea that we were motivated by unconscious desires which could only be placated through products. We were turned into consumers by an application of Freud’s psychoanalysis; to such and extant that by the end of the century governments were treating us as customers and politcians saw themselves as managers in the retail sector of public services. Not only that, but the whole ’selfish-baby-boomer’ / lifestyle politics / yuppie-thing’ of the 1980s has its roots in this combination of psychology and marketing.

(It should be noted that this documentary dates from 2002, the same year when John Ralston Saul mocked this point of view in a presentation for his then recently released book On Equilibrium recorded in Toronto and later broadcast on CBC’s Ideas. I raise this to suggest that in the years since things have changed so that this type of talk can now seem a little old-fashioned (as is Saul’s thesis in his most recent book, The Collaspe of Globalism). Instead of being treated as customers with regard to public services, we now have to deal with two-bit explanations of the world’s pseudo-problems caused by conservative men trying to fit everything into their god-box).

Curtis’s narratives, while profound, are also weak in the sense that they are too simplistic: the reality of our Western society since 1950 is a complex weave and while we can analyze a thread here and there, a larger pattern is meanwhile being expressed. The plot of the 20th century as presented in Century of the Self was that people were understood to be irrational and so it was thought democracy could never work; they were thus lulled into docility by bought dreams of happiness; dreams woven by Public Relations people.

Of course, business was complicit in this conspiracy, because they’d always feared a time when industrial supply would overwhelm demand and thus lead to a failure to sell. Lifestyle marketing eliminated that worry and in the process created Individualism. (John Ralston Saul’s brilliant analysis of Individualism is to be found as Chapter 19 of Voltaire’s Bastards). Politicians, in turn, used focus-group techniques to get themselves elected and then cater to the self-interested civilians/subjects-of-lifestyle-marketing (Individuals) with the added benefit that a docile population is democratically ineffective allowing those in charge to do whatever they want.

The population of the United States in 1790 was a little less than 4 million. That of the UK at the time was a little over 16 million. And so a Continental Congress from a population of less than the Greater Toronto Area declared independence from the Parliament representing half of the current Canadian population. These numbers, in today’s context, make history seem like the story of people who had nothing else better to do. And it shows just how docile our world is given our enormous numbers. We live within a remarkable feet of social-structuring brought about by educational conditioning.

This describes what John Ralston Saul constantly refers to as a corporatist society, which is fragmented into interest-groups; where the population is obedient and docile and feels incompetent beyond their area of expertise. Democracy has become a sham because we’ve given up control over our lives so that it can be scheduled by our bosses. But if we believe life is about ‘expressing our selves’ then we can buy a fast-food version: our identities come through products which saves time thinking about anything and we can thus focus on getting our jobs done in our machine-world. We live in a time were we routinely refer to people as ‘human capital’ and expect them to behave as smoothly in a role as any other machined, interchangeable part. This basic everyday dehumanization has stripped us of a sense of dignity which leads to weak backs and slumped shoulders and thus a new market for Dr. Ho’s pillows.

Curtis’s Wikipedia page states that he is working on a new series to air later this year, called Cold Cold Heart about the ‘the death of altruism and the collapse of trust - trust in politicians, trust in institutions and trust in ourselves, both in our minds and our bodies.’ I am looking forward to seeing this, since it is this quality of distrust, mean-spirtedness, and lack of trust in our selves by which I’ll forever remember this decade with the same amount of disgust I’ve so far had only for the 1980s. This series would seem to be an extension of Part 4 of Self because it was in this episode that Curtis traced the development of consumerist politics, and showed an excerpt for Mario Cuomo’s 1984 Democratic convention speech, followed by an interview conducted for the series where Cuomo says, (at about the 20 minute mark) ‘The worst thing Ronald Reagan did was to make the denial of compassion respectable’.

It is this quality of distrust and hard-heartedness that I’d like to better understand because our current society is nothing more than the expression of our own dehumanized inhumanity. But I’m not so caught up in Western-centrism to think there’s no alternative. The history of many civilizations teaches us that things have gotten really bad many times; each time the horrors pass and something simpler comes in its place. This is the thesis of Homer Dixon’s upcoming book. His point will be that we can control our future. We shouldn’t get caught up in dooming-and-glooming the present which doesn’t deserve to survive. I think we should instead begin brainstorming about what kind of society we’d like to live in, and then try to make it happen somehow.

The current Canadian population is about 32 million. In January, Apple Computers announced it had sold 42 million iPods around the world. This means that Apple’s infrastructure - to handle the registration requirements - is greater than that needed by the 1st world nation of Canada. It would seem to follow that if 32 million people can give themselves health-care, so could the 43 million uninsured Americans. Of course, this isn’t likely to happen, precisely due to the fractured nature of the common good brought about by the rise of Individualism.

While Individualism can be seen as having broken society, I’d like to think this is only temporary. The Individual rose up in a century dominated by dictatorships - not only political, but also cultural. The greatest art form of the 20th Century is undoubtedly the movie, which consists of a passive audience watching someone’s else’s artistic vision. At a basic level it is a dictatorial relationship. The Individual is now driving a cultural paradigm shift that makes the iPod the primary symbol of current cultural relationships - people want control over their cultural products, which is vastly different than the passive acceptance of media which existed throughout the 20th Century. The internet has empowered people away from the illusion of community and participation brought about through consumerism, and begun instead to interconnect them with other like minded people which can only in turn build bridges to new communities. Individualism now operates in such a way that someone like myself can watch these Curtis videos and feel educated and enlightened and informed, not only because MSM had originally served it to me through a scheduled broadcast, but because I downloaded it from a website, as can you. - Timothy

Today, the Canadian death toll in Afghanistan went up by four. I haven’t been keeping count so I don’t know what the total is. What I do know is that this headline pops up every second week or so and is part of the larger pattern of patriarchal conservative governments in power (who keep falling inline to the Bush Administration’s patriarchal and dim-witted view of the world). When the Liberals were in power, the Canadians were only being killed by American ‘friendly-fire’. But since the Harper government came to power we’ve seen the Canadians take on more responsibility and become the prime-movers in keeping Afghanistan from falling back to Taliban control. This decade is full of war news because conservative men are running things - be they conservative Islamic men who think the whole world should be Muslim; or conservative Western men who try to tie all this crap to ideas about the glory of war, and ‘right wars’ against ‘evil’ people.Personally, I think the Taliban are shits so I don’t mind the Canadian mission. I am not taking Jack Layton’s recent suggestion to withdraw and negotiate for peace with Taiban seriously. I am a little annoyed with the fact that the awfulness of the Taliban is being obscured in favour of Canadian navel-gazing ( a selfishness which makes headlines of soldiers deaths with no real analysis of what they’re doing in the first place). To say that we’re stooges for half-assed American imperial ambitions is too simple. To say that Canadian soldiers are occasionally being killed because we have a Conservative government in office is also simplistic but somewhat accurate. But I don’t think as a nation we’re all together too simple-minded to agree that keeping the Taliban from returning to power is a worthy thing.

In the months before September 11 2001 (five years ago in the past) the Taliban’s control over Afghanistan was beginning to make headlines in North America. This is the group that executed women on soccer fields, made it illegal to not have a beard, and blew up ancient Buddhist statues as representations of idol worship. It is not an exaggeration to call such behaviors barbaric. Meanwhile, the American government was overlooking such (dare I call them atrocities?) policies because Taliban barbarity was keeping poppies from being grown, and as a reward for their part in the glorious War on Drugs, were receiving significant funding and support. (Ok, maybe not ’significant’ funding - I’m fuzzy on the details, but I’m working with what was being said five years ago).

All this changed that Tuesday in September. By the late afternoon of the 11th, there was a statement by the leader of the Taliban making the broadcast rounds saying they had nothing to do with the day’s events. Which of course was untrue, as they’d sheltered Bin Laden (who at first too denied responsibility). When the United States attacked the Taliban in October, the reasons were clear and understandable. Overthrowing a barbaric regime was a good thing to do. Chasing after Bin Laden was justified. Men, ‘liberated’ (how that word has been cheapened since) were able to go the barber’s and get a shave for the first time in years.

(I occasionally grow beards and last did so this summer. I shaved it off three weeks ago and this example will always make me thankful that I at least have the option, unlike the men living under the Taliban regime).

Circa 2003 the Americans had destroyed the Taliban. There were accusations of massacres, (which for war is unfortunately normal). There was the fact that they shipped off a lot of these captured men to Gitmo and that some of them were innocent and that some of them were children; all of which will hopefully get sorted out and corrected one day. The Taliban was gone and the civilians of Afghanistan could begin to rebuild civilization under the security provided by outside forces.

Three years later, the Americans have abandoned Afghanistan to the Canadians to devote themselves to securing the Iraqi oil infrastructure so that more obese Americans can scoot around in SUVs using relatively cheap gasoline. (Because ‘America is addicted to oil’ - President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2006). Osama Bin Laden, on the run in Afghanistan, was able to get away because the Bush family had unfinished business with Saddam Hussein. This has meant that the Taliban have been able to rebuild their forces and are trying to return to power, killing Canadians in the process. But, unlike Jack Layton (proving why the NDP are largely irrelevant) I don’t think we should negotiate for peace with them and bring the soldiers home so that we’ll have more on hand for the next Toronto snow storm. Let them do their jobs helping to secure a landscape that hasn’t been at peace in decades. One day they’ll be able to return, but hopefully that will be long after the Taliban have ceaased to be relevant.

If The One had been solely a CBC production, one suspects that would have charged ahead to do what they could to promote the career of George Stroumboulopoulos, but thankfully sense kicked in at ABC and it has been cancelled. When I read this welcome news in last week’s paper, I noticed that it ended on the usual, ‘CBC is searching for a vision in the age of the internet’. To find this vision, it would help if CBC had a sense of its history, and a sense of traveling around the country without satellite hookups for broadband reporting.The idea behind The One it was reported, was to raise Stroumboulopoulos’ profile so that cable-less rubes would not be shocked when The Hour debuts on the main network in the fall, following The National. Why this type of thing is required, I don’t know. I do know that The Hour is already unwatchable due to it’s too cool for school attitude. I don’t need to know anything happening in the world badly enough to have it portioned out in bullet point cool to learn about it. I do know that CBC used to have great shows that treated young people as intelligent (Big Life, CounterSpin) but undoubtedly these were repeatedly cancelled due to low ratings. Why the CBC needs to chase ratings is a good question.

1. A Public Broadcaster
The public should demand greater funding for the CBC so that it doesn’t have to chase ratings and so that it can feel free to broadcast esoteric programing of limited appeal. This itself is a very old idea, so why are we still talking about it? Why hasn’t this happened yet?

But given enough resources, to match the ideal the CBC needs to recognize that there are 24 hours in a day and this is the time of VCRs and TIVO. There should be plenty of room on the schedule for all sorts of weird stuff that broaden our perspective and who cares if some it will be on at 4am? Young people know how to set VCRs. Something as wild as the gay-fisting show might have a place on the channel. It would be offensive to some (hell, to many), but shouldn’t public broadcasting aim to smooth out our preconceived notions by helping us become well-rounded? Shouldn’t contemporary sophisticated people at least understand what such a thing as gay-fisting is, even if it’s not their cup of tea? There should be no room for ‘I don’t know’ in today’s world. CBC, help us broaden our minds, not limit them by giving us what we think we want!

2. From Coast to Coast
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was developed to provide a coast to coast radio network in the 1930s, when this was a new technology whose benefit and advantage was obvious. But what kind of broadcasting is of interest to 20 year olds? Wi-Fi. CBC used to have a station of antennae and powerful broadcast equipment in New Brunswick which put out the network’s short-range radio signal. This station was shut down during the 1990s after the internet made it obsolete. If they thought that was worthy of investment why not Wi Fi as well? Take a laptop or a Blackberry to the rural corners of the country and you’ll be lucky to find a signal. My recent experience traveling through the East Coast on summer holiday brought this to mind - I did find signals but they were weak and didn’t really work that well. But it seems to me that if the people from the 1930s were still around, they’d be arguing for a network of wi-fi towers that stretch from sea to sea. This would also have the benefit of bringing broadband internet access to the rural communities along the US border and further an international image of being considerate.

What we are seeing, in Toronto at any rate, is the Ontario Power Commission taking up this challenge. The electric company. Ok, fine. Let’s not be limited to the idea that the official broadcasting corporation should be limited to only broadcasting, or that the power company should be limited to supplying electricity. In Toronto’s case, the wi-fi connectivity is coming as a side-effect of the new power meters, which will broadcast their information using this network. So this is an added benefit. But Toronto is not Canada, and Toronto already has the infrastructure to support widely available broadband internet access. My point is that the rest of the country does not, and the CBC is uniquely mandated to take this up if they so chose.

As it is, the CBC is stuck in the old media models, of television and radio, while treating the internet and such connectivity as an afterthought. I for one don’t understand why their radio programs, which are free to listen to when broadcast through the air, become commodities to be bought, sold, controlled afterward, so that programs like Ideas get a ‘best of’ treatment for the podcast, dolled out on a week to week basis. The CBC archive should be openly available to download. Haven’t we already paid of this content through inadequate allocation of public funds and the patience to sit through McCain food ads?

As it is, what is available on the CBC Archive webpage has been edited - selected and packaged and available only if you use Windows Player, eliminating many Mac users who probably make up the right audience for such content - cultural workers who could really use this content. This web-page was set up in 2003, reflects a corporate relationship with Microsoft which is counter to the public-good (they should be taking advantage of open-source software), and is now obsolete in light of YouTube and Google Video’s use (and thus, standardization) of Flash video, which can be played on anything.

3. Rights
It’s come up before that the CBC cannot treat its archives the way most of us would like because of the contracts signed with the performers etc, entitling them to fees for re-broadcasting, fees which the CBC cannot afford. This is an intolerable situation and something needs to be done about this.

4. Vision
In short my vision for the CBC is the following: as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they should invest in contemporary broadcasting of wi-fi so that internet connectivity from sea to sea is possible. As a public institution, it makes more sense for us to collectively pool our resources (through the usual proper funding allocation derived from tax revenue) so that individuals aren’t burdened with the costs of bringing satellite internet hookups to the lake-shore cottages of the country. As a public broadcaster, they should feel free to program a wide variety of material that reflects the interests and cultures of this country: enough of the white-bread mainstream hockey Shania Twain specials. Where does the CBC reflect the Indo-Canadian perspective? How does the CBC reflect the Aboriginal perspective? With 24 hours in a day, there’s room for 24 different one-hour shows, or 48 different half-hour shows. Further, with the internet, available through their coast-to-coast wi-fi network, they could have internet-only programs. The CBC should have one of the richest server farms in the country, loaded up with their digitized archives, so that fifty years of broadcast history is available to historians and curious citizens. In the Age of the Internet, there should be no excuse for ignorance and none for lack of historical perspective. Such conditions exist today because for too long information has been controlled by editorial shaping, itself not a bad thing (in light of criticisms of Wikipedia) but one where bias can’t often be easily unmasked.

The CBC of the 21st Century should reflect the interests of a well-rounded, highly learned population. George Stroumboulopoulos is in the unfortunate position of being the poster boy for the CBC’s own sense of cultural inadequacy, a sense that can only exist by treating the Canadian public as only being interested in superficiality, rather than acknowledging their appetite for things which help them grow as individuals and further an in-depth understanding of what’s happening in the world.

Finally, to end on a positive note:

5. CBC Radio 3
Is a success on all these counts. Radio show, podcast, esoteric programming, the hint that the host is familiar with such subversive things as drug use and gay erotica (that is, he need not be gay to be cool with its existence), CBC3 shows that CBC knows how to do this. It need not be constrained by limited thinking or a need to broadly appeal to hockey fans. More programing like CBC3 would help the corporation become the 21st Century institution it is destined to be.