The Point

Friday, December 21, 2007

B.S.F, Edition #1







Groooooss. Algae picture courtesy of the Lake Doctors Inc, apparently.

It seems like an appropriate moment to bring you the first edition of the B.S. Files on this blog. As an Albertan who was reluctantly-so for many years and has lived in a few different parts of our home on Native land (did I say that?), I try to have a generous heart when thinking about the things my fellow Canadians say and do. Sure, people from Toronto often seem incredulous to hear Edmonton's got a hip hop scene (or black people), but then again, we Edmontonians have a dim sense in general about things like, well, like the fact that in Toronto or Montreal, multiculturalism doesn't just mean having a black kid at the back of the class.

There must be something strange going on in Ontario since I've been away, though. A toxic bloom of algae on Lake Superior that went unnoticed for months, until it'd made some brains over there sufficiently addled to chuck reason or common sense completely off their mental bookshelves. How else to explain Harper's gushing, smirking, self-satisfied explanation in slow and small words to Peter Mansbridge last night that Canadians were going to be really, really upset when they started seeing that it was going to cost money in the short term to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? Was it just my imagination, or did Nicholas Stern really publish a report last year that outlined very clearly and specifically the billions of dollars more in costs we would incur in the decades to come if we chose not to act on climate change immediately? I was under the impression that this was a fairly definitive statement that yes, doing things now are going to cost a lot of money, but a hell of a lot less than waiting until 2020 to achieve insultingly inambitious almost-reductions. Pretty sure that was all cleared up. Why are we still talking about this?

Also on the algae file: the Halton Catholic School Board, and their absurd decision to ban Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy from their libraries. As if it weren't humiliating enough that it took them about a decade to notice the books were on their shelves, one might imagine an organ of a body with such a long and storied history of banning and burning things like the Catholic Church might have realised by now that taking a book off your shelf won't make the ideas in it go away. The board said in its decision that the books are not in keeping with 'the Catholic values that we are trying to teach children.'

They're right, of course. Absolutely. The books quite definitively take aim against some of the most cherished and fundamental tenets of Christianity. But come on. Yes, it's an outrage that the school board has so little respect for the critical thinking skills of the kids in their schools that they seriously believe that students are a) incapable of making up their own minds about what's in the books and b) stupid enough to not realise the books exist or go find them if they're not on the shelf at school. But more outrageous is that the board is clinging to a belief that was long ago bludgeoned, bloodied, pepper-sprayed right in the eyes, and shattered into tiny pieces of intellectual shame: that hiding ideas makes them go away at all.

When really revolutionary thinkers go about challenging dangerous or deeply-held beliefs, they don't hide the old beliefs away or burn them, they come up with new and compelling ways of seeing things. To a small number of confused and terrified people's surprise, it works. Darwin didn't need to burn copies of the Torah to get people to believe our history stretches into unfathomable depths of time, times when our hairy little ancestors bore very little resemblance to Sun Yat-Sen or Shaq or Diana Ross at all. Apple didn't need to start locking up people's CD players to convince us that a pretty little mp3 player was a very, very useful thing. To really present a fierce challenge to an idea, you don't ban it. You argue about it, you refute it, you hold it up critically and show that what you're holding in the other hand is a whole lot better.

The failure to realise this is probably much better explained by Naomi Klein, of course, in The Shock Doctrine. But I haven't read enough of it to learn much more than the 8-minute Alfonso Cuaron movie they put out about it, so I'll come back another day to her thesis about modern capitalism's inability to seriously assert itself as a global ideology without banning or burning the ideas that oppose it - through state terror, international financial blackmail, you know. The usual.

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posted by Christopher at 4:57 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Sunrise at eight


I don't know whether you've heard of this magazine called Ode? My friend Dianne directed me toward it a while ago when we went to go see Carol Off speaking at the U of A. We were trying to figure out what we knew about the cocao trade in the Ivory Coast (Ms Off's topic of the evening) and child slavery and the conversation started getting darker and darker. With marine life in the oceans now on the brink of collapse and journalists in China being regularly harassed and imprisoned, I reasoned, what hope is there for the future?

Dianne smartly upbraided me for that little bit of self-indulgence. We have a responsibility, she said, to be optimistic, to be hopeful and dream big dreams for the future. Our grandchildren's world (and the generations after them) after all, will be shaped - are being shaped - by our choices today. Milan Kundera's musings about kitsch, I think, are what have brought my thoughts so dramatically to swirling pools of cynicism and negativity. She told me to read Ode, because it was a magazine with an outlook of recognition of our world's weighty injustices and cruelties, but courage enough to look brightly at people making a positive difference and encourage them. Purely coincidentally, someone had recommended I pick up this month's issue of The Walrus for the same reason. Sure enough, they were pondering too On Optimism*.

So last week I picked up a copy of both at Front Page down on Jasper. I remembered, actually, that I'd heard of Ode before because of an article they'd published by Vandana Shiva articulating clearly what the real roots of poverty are, and what it means. Bizarrely, I flipped through the Muhammad Yunus article and the excited murmurs of algae-based power on my way to a Christmas party only to meet a woman named Tilly talking about exactly the same way of looking at life (over mulled wine, of course) not an hour later. The research doesn't seem exhaustive, and they certainly seem to have some undue optimism here and there, but I think it's kind of wonderfully subversive to turn to imagination and creativity and hope instead of sheer depression about The State of Things.

Certainly a welcome warmth in the belly of Edmonchuck winter.

*Article available to Walrus print subscibers only (and I'm not one either)

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posted by Christopher at 7:55 p.m. | link | 0 comments
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