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My Thoughts on Recent Rape Apologetics – Part III

The best speech I ever heard Svend Robinson give was at the 1990 Stein Valley Festival. He came to the stage wearing an AIDS awareness t-shirt emblazoned with the words “SILENCE=DEATH.” And he spoke with passion and eloquence about how these words had a far-reaching meaning, beyond activism for public health, beyond activism for queer equality, beyond the social context in which they were deployed, to the larger justice-seeking project.

A few years ago, I was talking with a man in his nineties about growing up in the Jim Crow South as a black person. One of the most arresting stories he told was of driving with his father down a country road when the two suddenly spotted a body hanging from a tree, a local black man who had been tortured to death and displayed as a symbol of white supremacy. My friend spoke with a vivid eloquence about how a silence descended on the car that made it impossible for him and his father to speak and how, when they returned home, they brought that silence into the house with them and how it wordlessly enveloped his mother, sisters, grandmother and brother.

Silence and terror are always allies.

One of the features of acts that reinforce and magnify oppressive power dynamics is the field of silence they generate around themselves. In this field, it is impossible for those under attack to form alliances and create solidarity. Even more basically, it is impossible for the injured and terrorized to heal, to receive support and sympathy from family, friends and allies. Lynchings, real lynchings, not the bullshit fake lynchings I talked about in my last two posts, spread an infectious silence through black homes, black businesses and black churches around the South, a silence that choked off words in the throats of terrorized people. To organize against them, to warn potential targets, to challenge the hegemony of the powerful men who privately condoned and enabled them, it was first necessary to speak about the collective horror.

Like sexual violence today, lynchings were never legal. Like sexual violence today, their prevalence, in the context of the explicit legal prohibition, was effected by a pantomime with two key features: (1) a discourse of the weakness and incompetence of the state the handle the social problem with which they were associated and (2) a narration of the individual exceptionality of the specific case being discussed. Lynchings were never condoned, as a systemic phenomenon, by the folks who supported them. And when powerful planters sat around the dinner table and the subject of lynchings came up, the point was to distinguish one’s local lynching as justified, from the no doubt ill-thought-out and excessive lynchings that had happened in the next state, the next county or last year.

The individual lynching under discussion was always the exception and never the rule. In this way, one could concurrently believe that white trash mob violence had got out of hand and that the local black shopkeeper hanging from a nearby tree personally had it coming. And that is what we see in celebrity rape apologetics today. Sure, most testimonies of sexual violence are true, just never the ones that are before us.

That is why it is so upsetting when somebody starts talking about how the violence of a Bill Cosby or a Jian Ghomeshi resembles the violence of another man. By “committing sociology,” to quote the Right-Honourable member for Calgary Southwest, we begin to do what the anti-lynching movement began doing in the late nineteenth century: learning something about how concurrently illicit and elite-condoned social practice was functioning to cause injury and death.

Because, let me be clear: there is no metaphor, no hyperbole here. When it comes to sexual violence, silence does equal death. Sometimes victims are killed in the course of the initial assault. Sometimes it takes days, months or even years for the permanent physical and psychological damage to bring about death. But it is indisputable that sexual violence kills and that, to bring down its body count, we must be able to talk about it openly and without fear.
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If silence equals death, then free speech equals life. And we would do well to talk about how arguing, debating, educating and conversing we are affirming human life.

First of all, refusing to remain silent is prophylaxis. When a person talks to those near them about the sexual violence they have suffered, they are not just seeking out support and comfort. They are warning people and letting them know how to protect their bodies from being abducted, choked, beaten, punched, slapped and penetrated against their will. It is rare for sexually violent people to target only one individual in the course of their careers of violence. Sexually violent individuals are no different than lethal pathogens insofar as they endanger the physical health of whole communities when everyone is silent about the risk they pose. In this way, SILENCE=DEATH requires no reframing, no translation to move from the sphere of sexually transmitted disease to the sphere of social violence.

To speak about one’s assailant is to protect potential targets of the individual’s violence. That is why it is so important for predators to conscript those they assault into burnishing their reputations. And that is why the social norms that function to enable this kind of social violence exert such pressure on victims not only to remain silent but to allay the fears of those who begin to suspect that their assailant might be a dangerous individual.

Second, refusing to remain silent is to think aloud, to analyze, to comprehend. Media and popular entertainment constantly reinforce the idea that people who are compulsively driven to perpetrate violence are reclusive, remote, obviously creepy single men with few associates and little family. When we make the conversation about human predation a wider, more comprehensive one, what we often find is not that progressive, charming, erudite, attractive, intelligent men are not the exception but the rule. The fact is that a successful career in sexual violence is one that requires highly complex and sophisticated social action in which whole social circles and discourse communities are manipulated.

Our image, so often, of rapists and violent men are of those who have been caught, either because they never developed the ability to manipulate social realities around them to permit a long-running career of violence or because something has happened that has caused this ability to deteriorate. In this way, our image of the human predator is that of one who is in the process of losing his mojo or who never had it at all. And, unless we commit sociology, our image of these individuals will be those who dementia, cockiness, madness or a loss of self-control has deprived of the ability to silence those around them. And that image serves those who are at the top of their game very well indeed. They are only too happy to make sure that our eyes are trained on dishevelled men in stained clothes, driving dented and dilapidated vehicles.

Indeed, this is how we are meeting Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby, men thrown off their game by cockiness and dementia. If we really overcame the dynamics that silence us, we could ask more frightening and important questions. In particular, we could ask what does a sexually violent person look like when they are at the top of their game, and how is that different from how they look when sloppiness and ill health finally bring them low? What does a successful predator look like and what does such a person hide behind? What tools might they use to maintain a field of silence around them? A public image whose destruction might set back a minority community? An important charitable or political project that might not survive their public humiliation? Unremunerated labour used to provide for the old, the sick, the dying? Financial generosity extended to desperate and damaged people?

Third, refusing to remain silent is to organize and take responsibility and to exhort others to do the same. We cannot organize against social evil unless we can name, understand and debate it.

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite | October 30, 2014

My Thoughts on Recent Rape Apologetics in Social Media – Part II

Yesterday, I dealt with the discourse of “reasonable doubt” and “presumed innocence” and its insidious effects on our ability to talk sexual violence. Today, I want to begin by dealing with some other old chestnuts that are being brought out by rape apologists.

“This is celebrity news about someone’s private habits. It’s a distraction; real, important things are happening like the Syrian War and the scary new security legislation coming out of Ottawa.”

Again, I would like to suggest that this argument only shows up under one condition: celebrity rapist defense. Canadians leftists and progressives are routinely talking about and engaged in literally dozens of issues. We express our opinions in the public square about a wide diversity of issues all the time. On days when the Harper government introduces new legislation to suppress voter participation or subject more Canadians to warrantless detention, arrest, search and seizure, nobody starts telling off people who are writing blog posts and Facebook updates about how a rental housing block is being torn down and replaced with condos, or how their local bird count statistics show a 30% decline in the eagle population of the Lower Similkameen.

That’s because, when we organize and talk about our organizing, we ordinarily find information about other people’s causes, concerns and activities a source of inspiration and knowledge. There is no other circumstance under which people argue there is a zero sum of analysis, attention or action. This argument is only deployed when people are trying to shut down discussion, to prevent themselves and others from knowing and thinking, to prevent the emergence of a social consensus around an issue that is important. Here, I will suggest that, like the “reasonable doubt” epistemology, it is self-serving, a defense of a cherished belief. But there are other dimensions too that I will get to later in this piece.

But let’s unpack the other part of this problematic position. For much of this year, my activist friends—and I include among that number people who are making the very point I am debunking here—expressed outrage about Stephen Harper’s statement that the epidemic of missing and murdered aboriginal women in this country should not be investigated lest we “commit sociology.” For the extreme right, to “commit sociology” is to refuse to explain systemic violence, inequality and injustice in terms of any discernible pattern but instead to explain all social problems as isolated, individual, unconnected failures of human virtue.

To label this as “celebrity news” or “what one man does in his bedroom” is to make the identical logical and rhetorical move to Harper. It is to explain widespread sexual and social violence against women and children as individual failures of human virtue that have no social dimension, no social solution and, hence, mandate no organizing, no policy changes—no collective response.

The ways in which predators hide behind wealth, privilege, power and charisma to continue patterns of predation unchecked by either the law or social disapproval are, indisputably, problems of a social character meriting social and collective responses, even if we decide the state need not be part of that response. The ways in which predators attack their victims and intimidate them into terror and silence are social issues. There are a lot of things we can do together about endemic social problems that don’t require state participation; terms like “solidarity” and “organizing” were once deployed to describe those responses.

When people mistakenly deploy Pierre Trudeau’s “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation” to explain why it’s not our business that Jian Ghomeshi knocked a woman to the floor of his living room and punched her in the head until her ears rang, first of all need to remember that Trudeau’s regime stood behind increased punishments for physical and sexual violence and second, need to understand that when acts of criminality and violence cluster, they are no longer private and we must “commit sociology” to address them.

“Bill Cosby is being tried in social media right now! This is a trial and you have set yourself up as judge, jury and executioner… This is really just a high-tech lynching by an angry mob.”

Now, I’m as big a fan of metaphor as the next guy, perhaps an even bigger fan than that. But what you are reading above isn’t metaphor; it’s the collapse of the metaphoric into the literal, the conflation of the abstract with physical reality.

So, first off, let’s get clear on what real rape trials do, if the jury convicts: they attach chains to a person’s body, stick him in the back of a vehicle, drive him to a far-off location, lock him in a tiny concrete box there for several years, confiscate all his possessions, spy on him constantly and subject him to increased risks of sexual violence by other men.

And let’s get clear on what real lynchings do: they abduct a non-white man, take him to a far-off location away from public scrutiny, tie him to a tree, torture him with hot and sharp objects, commonly tearing off his genitals and using them to suffocate him, and then murder him inefficiently and painfully.

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Worse yet, the damage done to rich, powerful, popular men’s reputations is alleged to either be of comparable value or greater value than the physical bodies of women and children who are raped, drugged, suffocated and beaten. I don’t hold with the broad application of the term “rape culture” because it deprives us of the ability to describe, with specificity, the cultures that exist today that publicly exalt (as opposed to merely tolerating) the rape of women as a social good. But what I will say is that a definitional feature of patriarchy is the core social belief that a man’s honour and reputation are so valuable that they exceed the value not just of one woman’s physical body but that of many. And it is that which underlies the false equivalency that is being drawn between incarceration and lynching and a reduction in a powerful man’s social capital.

We should also take a moment to remember the provenance of the term “high tech lynching.” It referred to a sexual predator, who today is the number one Tea Party ally on the US Supreme Court, being installed in office by the Republican Party. This term was created for Clarence Thomas by his elite white allies, as a rhetorical move to discredit the woman he sexually harassed so that he could assist them in rolling back the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and the various other laws in the US that have protected poor black men from being lynched.

“It’s so unfair that Jian Ghomeshi cannot face his anonymous attackers. Why is it that their story is being heard when he can’t defend himself or face them?”

Let us begin by saying that the right to face one’s accuser is accorded people when there are real, substantial consequences to accusations. As the plethora of pro-Ghomeshi frothing fanboyism indicates, these scandals don’t even cause celebrities to lose all their fans, never mind their friends. People have the right to face their accusers when the consequences are jail, death or substantial punishments. In no place other than celebrity rapist apologetics is it understood to be a human right to face anyone who has hurt your feelings.

But the real reason I repeated this particular line of logic is this: rape apologetics typically involve time travel. Here’s what actually happened for people who have a conventional handle on the space-time continuum:

Jian Ghomeshi was fired from his post at CBC. Nobody made any public statements about why until two days later when he posted a lengthy, rambling piece to his Facebook fan page in which he characterized accusations of sexual assault and violence by him as a defamatory criminal conspiracy orchestrated by a jilted ex. So let us get clear here: this man was fired and neither he, nor the women he assaulted, nor his employer made any statement as to why until he made a public statement in which he literally added insult to injury.

It was Ghomeshi’s inability to resist yet another chance to attack and vent his rage at the women he had already beaten that forced other victims like Lucy Decoutere to come forward, because they could not abide his additional, unprovoked attacks as he sought to further terrorize into silence the women he had already assaulted.

Beyond fanciful inaccuracy, a deeper injustice lives in the “face your accusers” line of reasoning. What it says is that if one is assaulted by a powerful, popular man, you are now conscripted into the job of keeping his violence a secret, so as to enable him to find more people to beat and rape. When someone beats or rapes you, it creates an obligation in you to make sure that nobody finds out, not his boss, not his friends, not even your friends, lest his reputation be tainted, thereby rendering it harder for him to find new victims, fresh meat.

As anyone who has lived through sexual abuse or violence knows, one is, by virtue of being assaulted, conscripted into a lifelong program of unpaid work to make sure that your assault doesn’t inconvenience your attacker or their admirers by becoming a matter of public conversation. In fact, one is often required to do additional work along the lines of, “well, we don’t hang out anymore and aren’t friends but [so and so] is still a really great person who does lots of good work.” If one gets drunk at a party and tells the story of one’s abuse or rape too loudly, so that strangers might overhear, that’s a problem, for which you, the victim may be drawn up sharply.

Unlike every other opinion one has, the belief that one has been sexually assaulted cannot be freely socially expressed in a society that values an attacker’s reputation more than it values the body or free speech of his victim.

Well, that’s a lot of words. I guess I will write a third part tomorrow in which I talk about the very practical reasons that it is important to discuss social and sexual violence in the public square.

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite | October 30, 2014

My Thoughts on Recent Rape Apologetics in Social Media – Part I

A number of people have approached me about writing a longer piece on celebrity sexual violence based on my Facebook and Twitter posts about the Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby cases. What follows is an effort based on my controversial social media posts.

Before I begin, I want to make clear that my perspectives on these issues have evolved over time. As I have got older, I have confronted both the phenomenon of false accusations of sexual violence and knee-jerk refusals to believe victims of sexual violence when they come forward. I won’t be discussing those situations in this post but the proximity of both of those phenomena to me, and their relevance to my life, may help to explain my motivation in writing this piece and the evolution of my views.

This direct experience with both phenomena has not brought me new knowledge that wasn’t already waiting for me in the wealth of clinical literature about trauma and stigma. But it has validated a foundational element of the analysis I offer here: being a survivor of sexual violence who is disbelieved is a far more traumatic experience than being the target of a false claim of sexual violence. In our hedonic calculus, it is important not to lose sight of that basic fact. Reporting sexual violence is traumatic because, for any genuine survivor, the anticipation of disbelief and dismissal, never mind the actual experience of those things intensifies the trauma already experienced, often to unendurable levels.

To begin, let us begin by clearing out the straw men.

What I am writing about is how we socially construct the truth around disputed claims about sexual violence. That means that there two things I am not doing in this piece

I am not talking about what standard the courts should use to punish alleged perpetrators of sexual violence. I am talking about how we think and talk about whether claims of sexual violence are true in a social context, not in a legal context. I am talking about what is true and what is talked about, not what is legal and what people should be punished or compensated for. I am not taking the position that Jian Ghomeshi or Bill Cosby should be in jail, or that they should pay civil damages to their victims.
I am not talking about whether we should enjoy or value the artistic production of celebrity rapists. I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the films of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski and do not plan to change my artistic assessment of these men’s work, irrespective of their sexually violent acts.

When I make these points in public discourse, apologists for celebrity rapists push back and demand that I make my standards for deciding whether things are true, and my standard for when I can talk about things being true identical to those that the court system uses to convict people of criminal offenses in the English legal tradition.

Having worked as a law researcher in my twenties, this raises immediate red flags. First of all, the courts, themselves, do not use the “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “innocent until proven guilty” standard as their means of ascertaining what is true. Making findings of fact is something left to civil courts who use, depending on what they are trying to do, the standards of “balance of probabilities” or “simple probability” to make findings of fact. Courts that try to figure out what has happened, to comprehend and narrate events deliberately and explicitly eschew the “reasonable doubt” standard when they do so.

Furthermore, we need to understand the context in which the “reasonable doubt” standard came into being, in medieval England. This was a culture based around villages whose residents were highly unlikely to relocate for any reason, populated by families who had resided there for generations. Not until Enclosure began in the fifteenth century, did people have a word for strangers who lived near them. People lived in a world of close, overlapping connections of kinship, fictive kinship (god-parents and god-siblings), parochial and guild participation. In such close-knit places, having opinions about whether people were guilty of sexual violence, murder, etc. was universal and unavoidable. In this context, the “reasonable doubt” standard was created as a countervailing force.

“Reasonable doubt” was made a legal doctrine to restrain small, close-knit communities from beating, killing and incarcerating people the majority were pretty sure had done something wrong. The point of this key standard in criminal law was that it was non-identical to social truths and widely-held beliefs but was, instead, required to meet a higher standard. This higher standard was well-expressed in the John Mortimer novels, featuring a twentieth-century protagonist who defended people he thought were likely guilty because of this “golden thread that runs through British justice [that] it is better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to hang an innocent man.”

It is therefore absurd to suggest that it is even possible to collapse our standards for forming opinions about what has taken place and how it has taken place into the “reasonable doubt” standard, because the standard was made as a countervailing force to wall off questions of physical punishment from widely-held and likely correct social truths. It has never purported to be an alternative epistemology and is not used as such. Indeed, civil court cases that make findings of fact do not understand exculpation by the criminal courts to be a determination that a person did not commit an offense or cause an injury.

And that doesn’t even cover the constraints on cases reaching the courts at all. The reasonable doubt standard is already an unreasonable basis on which to base one’s epistemology before one even considers the fact that the majority of wrongs that take place in our society are never placed before the courts at all. There are very good reasons that people who have suffered sexual violence do not appear in court. Just to remind folks who forget these things when a beloved celebrity is accused of sexual violence, let’s review:

Many victims of sexual violence fear reprisals from their attacker and his associates if they seek to punish him or make him accountable, even if that is just through telling someone, never mind pressing charges. And it is logical to fear that because perpetrators of sexual violence and dangerous, violent creeps.
Many victims of sexual violence are so damaged by the violence that they have been deprived of the capacity—by their attacker—of successfully seeing a prosecution through to its conclusion.
Many victims of sexual violence know that their reputations will be attacked by their accuser, typically before they even get to court and “rape shield” laws take effect and cannot justify having their attacker heap additional verbal abuse and shame upon them in the public square, as we saw Mr. Ghomeshi do with his former partners on Sunday.
Many victims of sexual violence get no emotional payoff from seeing their obviously troubled, obviously self-hating attacker being additionally punished and shamed and, legitimately, fear that punishing them is as likely to magnify their violence and bad character as it is to correct it.
Many victims of sexual violence have already lost weeks, months or years of their lives to dealing with the trauma of the attacks they have suffered to be able to justify investing additional time, money and emotional energy in grappling with an unwanted experience they never asked to have.
Supposing that these five reasons are not enough to dissuade someone from pressing charges, the next hurdle must be cleared: persuading prosecutors and police officers that this case has a sufficient amount of evidence and a sufficient probability of conviction to even arrest the assailant. Given the dismal rates of conviction for sexual violence and the tendency of sexual assaults to take place in private spaces, even if prosecutors and police believe the victim of the assault, it still may be impossible to prove the case.

This list is, of course, not exhaustive. It just scratches the surface of why, in the overwhelming majority of instances of sexual violence, the courts will never have a chance to make any finding.

And the thing is that we know this. The only time we seek to conflate the judgement of the courts with our judgement of the facts is when we defend celebrity rapists. Lots of other matters come before the courts and face a “reasonable doubt” standard. War crime, crimes against humanity, theft, robbery, common assault, electoral fraud and murder are all also indictable offenses judged by this standard.

And yet, here are some phrases you never hear, from either side in a debate:

“Dick Cheney isn’t a war criminal. He’s never even been charged.”
“OJ Simpson didn’t kill his ex-wife. He was found not guilty.”
“The Conservative Party didn’t cheat in the last election. Nobody in charge of the campaign has been convicted.”
“Brian Mulroney wasn’t corrupt. He was never convicted of anything.”
“Loubos Vacca didn’t steal the security deposit from you and Geoff. The police never brought him to trial.”
“That guy didn’t spit in your face. You didn’t even file a police report.”

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That’s because “innocent until proven guilty” and “beyond a reasonable doubt” are standards we use in only two places: in criminal court and when defending celebrity rapists facing public outrage. The rest of the time, we look at situations where wrongdoing has taken place and use our God-given reason to sort out what has probably happened. If we’re unsure, we express that uncertainty even as we assert what probably happened. We don’t pre-emptively silence ourselves because one of the things about wrongdoing in a social context is that our shared opinion matters. And, in order to come up with one that makes sense, it is not just helpful but vitally necessary to discuss our opinions and suspicions in a public forum, to test our reasoning and our values in a wider social context.

These behaviours are often allied with two “slippery slope” arguments: (1) that a lynch mob is forming and (2) that our loose talk, socially, will result in an unjust criminal conviction. The problem is that these things just don’t happen. Lynch mobs aren’t for dealing with famous, white millionaires. They’re for dealing with low-income people of colour. There’s never been a Woody Allen or Roman Polanski lynch mob because that’s not the social reality in which they live. Similarly, the idea that there is some slippery slope between the judgement of the crowd and the judgement of the court is an issue institutionally managed by the “reasonable doubt” standard.

No. The reason celebrity rape apologists are shushing you has nothing to do with the shabby slippery slope argument they are offering up. It is because they are, metaphorically, covering their ears and shouting “na na na na na!” They are not interested in debating the facts of a case, the means by which you reached your opinion, what evidence you used and how your used it. Their interest is in silencing you, because, given that we check our beliefs against society, their concern is to prevent views they want to hold from being checked against information and reason.

The “innocent until proven guilty” standard is only deployed outside the courts for the purpose of silencing people and silencing ideas. If people really had faith in the innocence of the rapist hero they seek to protect, they would welcome a conversation about the facts in a rational discussion. But they’re not interested in that. Their interest is in preventing themselves from having a cherished belief challenged.

Justice, social justice—not criminal punishment—is not data-averse. We do not move towards justice when our conversational intervention is to stop people from reasoning and learning, to stop information from changing hands or to stop that information from being analyzed.

Stay tuned for Part II of this essay tomorrow.

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite | October 29, 2014

The Miller Legacy and the Lobotomization of Toronto Civic Discourse

Toronto civic politics has become a sorry sight over the past decade, culminating in the current mayoral race that is drawing to a close. The 2010 mayoral race was bad, ending in the election of a troubled, confused, angry man, far out of his depth in running Canada’s fifth largest political jurisdiction. Rob Ford came into office in four years ago with 47% of the popular vote on a platform that made little sense when subject to the most basic scrutiny; it included, for instance, the construction of $23 billion worth of new subways, paid for with $10 million in municipal program cuts.

The current race features two frontrunners with fiscal plans no more credible than the one on which Ford was elected four years ago. But another important thing unites Doug Ford and John Tory and distinguishes them from Olivia Chow: they understand the role they aspire to play on council in a non-legislative sense. Both Ford and Tory understand the role of the mayor to be one halfway between a CEO and a General Manager; where they differ is on the style of corporate management they wish to employ with their inferiors or junior managers, the city council. Ford favours an old-fashioned confrontational one; Tory would be a softer touch, more consultive and collaborative.

Since Rob Ford’s election, it has become increasingly popular to explain the failures in Toronto governance and the incoherent, lobotomized character of public policy debate as resulting from the moral failings of individual bad actors. No one is to speak of a systems failure. It’s supposed to be just a coincidence that the 2010 race was a contest between “Furious” George Smitherman, the cabinet minister with a reputation for volatile behaviour and a tyrannical management style and a man who kept—for some reason—having the police come to his house to investigate domestic violence reports. And it’s just a coincidence that the two men with the greatest thirst for this office are proud to identify as “buck stops here” bosses.

But the character of people attracted to a job and voters’ estimation of candidates’ suitability for it has a lot to do with the rules defining said job. And much of the crisis and failure surrounding the office of mayor can be traced, sadly, to the last competent person to hold it and the premier with whom that man partnered to restructure the city.

In 2005, David Miller began a major undertaking: negotiating a new governance structure for the city to accommodate the reality of its role as Canada’s fifth-largest government, representing a two and a half million people, providing transit, housing, childcare and a host of other services often associated with provinces not cities. I say “negotiating” because it would insult everyone’s intelligence to claim that Miller consulted Torontonians in order to establish his agenda. Certainly, there was a panel and a set of public meetings but these bodies reached pre-ordained conclusions, dictated from the mayor’s office. I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, besides the pointless and insulting deception that wasted my time and that of other participants.

At the time, Toronto was undergoing a series of budget crises; Miller was just short of a majority (23) of NDP- and centre-left votes to pass his major fiscal initiatives. Because of the lack of a formal party system, the de facto NDP-aligned caucus that backed Miller could not make lasting, stable agreements with centrist elements on council to create a stable, governing coalition. The prohibition on formal parties on council further hobbled efforts because the NDP minority government governing Toronto was, by law, prohibited from making its workings in any way transparent or accessible to voters. Instead, the actual practices of governing Toronto had to be actively obfuscated and driven underground, into an unaccountable, covert party system.

For Miller, there was a fork in the road. It was clear that endemic budget crises, brinksmanship and instability were not the way forward. Something had to change.

I intervened in the debate that followed. I worked with a small cross-partisan coalition of democracy activists like John Deverell, Linda Sheppard and John Thompson. Our argument was this: Toronto needed to grow up; its 45-seat legislature should function like a real legislature. Instead of operating covertly and, sometimes, illegally, Toronto’s municipal parties should become transparent and accountable to the public. The city should stop using the office of the Integrity Commissioner to actively prevent councillors from speaking out about issues outside their ward and instead, it should become important for councillors to offer not just a hyper-parochial laundry list of potholes to be filled but instead campaign by declaring clearly what their city-wide vision was on the major issues, who their allies were and how people across the city could work for that vision. While we were at it, we suggested that it might be useful to reform the voting system to represent non-ghettoized and city-wide communities. After all, for most people the whole point of living in a city with a good transportation is being able to form diffuse communities with people other than one’s neighbours. In such a system, direct election of the mayor would end and we would choose mayors the way we select prime ministers, premiers and school board chairs: through assembling a legislative majority.

Miller and his allies had another vision, one on which New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other “great” American cities had based their recent governance reforms: draining significant powers from the dysfunctional city council into the office of the mayor. In such a model, many of the crises of the Miller era could be averted. In this new model, the major city committees and commissions to which substantial powers are delegated, could be constituted by the mayor unilaterally, without resort to council vote.

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As we grew increasingly desperate in our attempts to mobilize progressives about this impending, anti-democratic centralization of power we became more teleological in our rhetoric. “What will happen when David Miller is gone and the city’s business elites buy themselves a new ‘strong mayor’ who will put these new tools to very different uses?” we asked. “Won’t people with ambitions as petty dictators be drawn to this position and purchase it with their private fortunes, as has happened in the US?” we asked. The response was as unintelligent and devoid of abstract thought as the Toronto political discourse it has generated. It was essentially, “but David Miller IS the mayor.”

The US study we often cited during this debate explains the emptiness of such a position: “The success or failure of a strong mayor depends a lot on experience and personality… No structure is going to substitute for good politics. Even though many of America’s great cities—among them New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco—have visible, charismatic strong mayors, [one] can never design on an individual…” This was ignored so we began making dire predictions. We predicted that, when Miller retired, his successor would be an aspiring petty dictator who was either installed by the city’s major real estate interests or who purchased the office himself out of a private fortune. As history shows, that plan was so ineffective nobody even remembers it.

Essentially, in exchange for enlarged powers in his second mandate, Miller and his allies lobotomized Toronto civic politics. Today, elections are about the vision of the one person seeking the mayor’s chair and little more than the list of potholes each city council candidate intends to fill and the order in which they are to be filled. The plurality of ideologies, identities and communities in Toronto are not to be represented in parties, programs and political movements; they are to be placed outside the discourse. Ideologies are to be denied and obfuscated. Communities are to be ignored or shoehorned into quaint, racialized ghettos with demarcated by twee multilingual signage. Identities are to be reduced to aesthetics and tastes to be celebrated in parades and not understood to have anything to do with political representation.

And the consequences continue to pile up. Today, the biggest, most vibrant governance reform movement in Toronto is RaBIT, the “Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto” whose main project is to make sure that the mayor is elected through instant runoff voting, the system used to elect the leaders of political parties at the national and provincial level. The quest to make extra-sure that Toronto’s chief executive enjoys is the first, second or third choice a bare majority of voters in the city. After all, as the only person allowed to run on a vision, platform or program, the mayor had better embody in his person at least a majority of the city.

The idea that a legislative assembly is a body that represents a representative diversity of ideologies and communities, in which coalitions are forged and deals made, that it should be the site where a jurisdiction thinks and talks aloud with itself to choose a vision for its future and a program for achieving it, are ideas on which Toronto has given up. Instead, each councillor, elected by a plurality of as little as 19% of the 40% showing up to vote in an arbitrarily-bounded polygon containing about 60,000 residents, colloquially known as a “ward,” is supposed to represent some mythical neighbourhood consensus, colloquially termed “the community.” No matter that most communities, be they cultural, ethnic, ideological or interest-based are geographically diffuse and reach across all or most wards in the city; the point isn’t to represent actual communities but instead to shut down meaningful debate with the empty signifier “the community.” This surrender under the leadership of David Miller, the decision to create an elected autocracy rather than a transparent democracy is what has produced the ugliness, stupidity and incoherence of the 2010 and 2014 Toronto elections.

As long as formal political parties are illegal and driven underground, as long as it is a breach of councillor integrity to express an opinion or position about an issue outside the arbitrarily-bounded, numbered polygon one is elected by a plurality of voters to “represent,” as long as major policy decisions are taken out of the hands of the city council and placed within the purview of one white man with the title “your worship,” Toronto political discourse and civic culture will remain the thin gruel voters are choking down today.

Director Sara Polley speaks usefully and intelligently of the city’s trauma and the curtailed possibilities for big or intelligent thoughts, for courage and creativity in her piece endorsing my preferred candidate, Olivia Chow. But her mistake is to trace it to the failure of virtue of one sad, drunk man. The trauma was already lying in wait, a poison pill left by her (and my, I’m afraid) 2006 mayoral candidate, an inevitable event once the office of mayor was “reformed” into one that would attract the likes the Ford brothers.

In all likelihood, the Toronto left will have another four years out of power to brood on their irrelevance and marginality. Perhaps during that time, we can consider the road not taken, the possibility of offering voters a different Toronto, one that trusts in the fundamental principles of democracy and seeks to provide the city’s communities with the institutional tools to represent themselves in its legislature and, through deliberation and negotiation, enact a political program that arises from a genuine and mature conversation about what Torontonians can do together.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | October 23, 2014

Phishing for Votes in Vancouver and the Politics of the Wealth Seminar

During the 2012 US presidential election, Bill Maher made an important intervention in identifying a new, or perhaps just resurgent, trend in political campaigning: the wealth seminar campaign. Observing the Romney campaign, Maher decoded its true message: “Mitt, a rich guy, knows how to make you rich too. And, if you elect him, he’ll tell you the secret.” It’s all about presenting a leader who isn’t so much the person voters want to govern them as the person voters aspire to be. As people lose faith in the idea that any political movement or leader could actually address the forces of global capital that are marginalizing and impoverishing them, elections are increasingly imaginative pageants that exist on their own terms. The point isn’t the election result; it’s the campaign because that’s where all the suspense lives now. The result is totally predictable: the “victor” will announce that the cupboard is bare and that we all must tighten our belts with higher user fees, privatization, austerity and handing sacks of cash to corporations and the investor class to keep them happy.

Because we know the result before we vote, our focus then becomes the campaign: what will happen to the characters seeking office, what twists and turns will the campaign take, and who will end up winning the prize of announcing the policies Standard and Poor’s has already drawn up for us? This entails the audience identifying with one of the characters in the shabby pageant they are watching.

While the prospect of being a wealthy, white, good-looking business patriarch appeals to some, the Romneyesque image doesn’t do a lot for urbanites. That’s why, despite a complete elite consensus in his favour, John Tory struggles to hit 40% in most Toronto mayoral surveys. Middle class suburban family men might want to identify with such a wealthy, respected figure as Tory but they are not the majority in the central political jurisdiction of a metropolitan area. And, as it has not endured any amalgamation with adjacent municipalities in 85 years, a much larger proportion of Vancouver’s middle-income families live outside the central political jurisdiction.

If we think, instead, of typical Vancouver residents, the people making major financial sacrifices, allocating as much as 80% of their income to rent or mortgage payments in cramped, substandard housing just to live within the municipalities city limits, wealth seminar campaigning takes on very different dimensions. First of all, people who emerge in their hipster gear from basement suites in Cedar Cottage onto the cramped and erratic number 20 bus have fantasy lives that are governed by something other than dreams of wealth, stability and the ability to provide. They are making sacrifices to be hip, connected and attractive-looking. In their mind’s eye, they identify with a different character in the pageant: that man with movie star good looks, a fit, taut body, a DJing career on the side, and friendships with a vast array of environmental activists, music scene luminaries and TED talk presenters.

Vision has figured out that in Vancouver, it’s not a wealth seminar. It’s a coolness seminar. And that’s why developers line up to hang out with the Vision gang too. They aren’t just converting a $25,000 donation into a $25,000,000 rezoning windfall; they are also getting the parting gifts: a night with great local DJs, a dip in the Hollyhock hot tub. Many wealthy businesspeople, by choosing to live in Vancouver, are already making a similar choice to those living in the coffin suites they are selling. They too eschewing even greater prosperity that would come from working in a more vibrant investment climate like Toronto or Calgary. They too are here for the coolness—and there is a mechanism for purchasing that dip in the hot tub.

That’s why Vision Vancouver is making a mockery of the very idea that candidates for election need to put forward policies on the major issues. Minor issues—sure, they deserve some policy, for the geeks and the everyday running of the city. But notice the striking inverse correlation: the more Vision states an issue is one of the major, deciding issues of the race, the less policy it generates. As witnessed in their 24-hour response to Kirk LaPointe’s school meal program announcement, Vision has the smarts and the capacity to generate excellent public policy on the fly. So we have to understand the total absence of any working public policy around the Broadway subway or the opposition to Kinder Morgan not as an oversight but as part of the plan.
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Vision Vancouver’s number one issue in its re-election bid is the construction of a $3 billion subway down Broadway. In the past six years, they have spent not one cent on the planning or construction of this subway. In their ten-year capital plan, released last month, not one cent is budgeted. Nor is there any money for the subway in the last budget city council passed. That’s because they’re running on the Broadway Subway of the Mind. Like the mayor’s independent wealth, musical acumen, hip friends and striking looks, the point of the subway isn’t the subway itself. It’s the idea of the subway—one that would only be contaminated with financing plans, earth-moving equipment and tunneling machines—that really matters.

Well, that and, of course, the cool people associated with you. That’s where the diabolical genius of Vision will come to be studied by communications and political consultants all over North America. By refusing to make any effort to emancipate itself from Translink or to construct any transit on its own dime (such as the streetcars the NPA promised in 2011), Vision can centre its subway “promise” around one of those meaningless online clicktivist “campaigns,” in which we change the world by clicking “Like” and typing “RT:.”

When one goes to the Vision Vancouver web site and clicks on its “Broadway Subway: What the City Can Do” link, one quickly arrives at the online “petition” Vision is running. Instead of finding policies or plans to build the subway, one is offered the chance to—in some indefinable way—get involved, and then asked for one’s contact information. That’s right: Vision Vancouver has turned election platforms on their head, from statements of what the state will do for you, given the chance, into phishing clickbait. The same is, of course, true of their “fight” against the Kinder Morgan pipeline. There is no plan to build the subway or fight the pipeline because that’s not the point. The point is for Vision to get the contact info for low-information young voters they can drive to the polls in their hybrids on election day and for said voters to feel that their sacrifices are not in vain, that they are on a team of excellent, young, hip, attractive, connected people and not masturbating alone in a flooded basement suite, two months behind on their smartphone payments.

In twentieth-century elections, platforms were an exchange whereby people exchanged their votes for a pledge of future action on their behalf. In the new kind of election Vision offers us, voters exchange their contact information for the opportunity to imagine themselves to be part of a scene… a really cool scene, like the Hollyhock hot tub or DJ night at the Biltmore.

“And yet,” to quote Maher, “no matter how clear Jay-Z makes it that the hot tub is only for the coolest and most beautiful people, somehow, when the song ends, that is us.” After all, what is the alternative?

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | October 21, 2014

With Meena Wong, COPE Can Save Their Brand

Until yesterday, I was profoundly pessimistic about the fate of left-leaning candidates in this fall’s Vancouver municipal election. With polls showing that only 18% of Vancouverites were willing to use even one of their twenty-seven votes to elect a COPE candidate (versus 30% willing to give Adriane Carr one of their votes) and only 9% willing to give a single vote to the COPE splinter party OneCity, it appeared that if there were to be an opposition at City Hall, it would be a centrist Green Party opposition or a conservative NPA one. Pollsters haven’t even had the chance to pronounce on the viability of the Public Education Project, a third COPE splinter party that emerged yesterday. (I’m a big fan of PEP’s candidates and will be supporting them in the election, despite their untested brand.)

But then I read that Meena Wong was seeking the COPE mayoral nomination and appears to be a consensus candidate backed by all of the endlessly multiplying factions of the party. If any person can arrest the tailspin of schism and negativity that has overtaken the civic left, Meena is that person.

Until my resignation from the party in March, I was working with her to persuade COPE to adopt proportional representation both as party policy and for internal elections. After I quit, Meena and her husband, Les—arguably the most stalwart PR advocate in the whole BC NDP—continued relentlessly to call for the party to catch up with its voter base on the electoral system. It is due to their efforts that the party did eventually adopt PR for internal elections (although this adoption is largely symbolic because of the way PR is operationally vitiated by the party’s byzantine system of representation quotas).

In the past six months, Meena has also been able to build bridges with the main factions of the party (Tim Louis supporters and Left Front members), despite having worked closely with people who have publicly fallen out with the party. While every other force on the civic left seems to be making new enemies, Meena has been bringing people together—people it is often challenging to bring together.

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I am producing this article, in part, to encourage the hundred or so members I signed up for COPE last year to support Meena’s candidacy.

That stated, just picking Meena for mayor will not be enough to get COPE into the territory where even one of its candidates can be elected. The party must go beyond nominating her and play more actively on her strengths. COPE needs a bridge-builder like Meena to repair relations with the parties run by its former elected officials and board members. After so much bitterness, COPE needs to make the first move with groups and individuals who have left, starting with OneCity and the Public Education Project. It needs to repair relations with the Vancouver and District Labour Council, win over progressive NDP MLAs and MPs, and open more stable lines of communication with the Green Party. These are all things she is well-positioned to do. If COPE authorizes Meena to do the kind of bridge-building on its behalf that she has done to earn the strong consensus around her candidacy, her nomination could be a game-changer that saves the party’s brand.

Nominating Meena Wong as COPE’s mayoral candidate will not, by itself, restore the party’s ability to elect candidates. But if that is the party’s first move in an ambitious project of consensus-building and outreach, COPE may just have—at the last possible moment—saved their party and provided hope to the thousands of Vancouverites who need it.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | September 4, 2014

Justice for Anthony Smith

Imagine if, instead of a media scrum, Rob Ford were forced to push his way into Toronto City Hall past hundreds of protesters dressed in black, holding candles with signs saying “Justice for Anthony Smith.” If he were the disgraced mayor of pretty much any other Midwestern lake city running for re-election, black community organizers would have hired buses to Nathan Philips Square from Jane and Finch and attention vampires and vultures like Jesse Jackson Jr., Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan would have flown in to stymie the mayor’s return to the campaign trail. And Toronto’s 220,000 black residents would not be split on the mayor’s re-election bid but instead resolutely opposed.

Some of the reason for that is that Toronto understands itself not as just another Midwestern lake city but as a kind of urban sui generis, aided by the strange aging hippie boosterism hawked by the likes of Richard Florida and former mayor John Sewell. Toronto has a penchant for a kind of provincial grandiosity rarely seen outside long term outposts of empire. Yet, when it comes to economics, demographics, ecology, infrastructure and the other physical fundamentals of a city, Toronto is not, as it imagines itself to be, “the Little Apple.”

Instead, it is one of about a dozen major metropolitan areas surrounding Lakes Erie, Ontario and Michigan, which range in population from Green Bay’s 300,000 to Chicago’s 10 million; Toronto and Detroit are on the upper end with between four and five million residents a piece. These cities are, generally, diverse, multiracial places with high levels of income diversity paired with serious structural economic problems of the North American “Rust Belt,” where manufacturing infrastructure is decaying due to the region’s lack of access to clean, inexpensive energy and consequent dependence on expensive fossil fuels to fire its manufacturing sector.

Toronto’s black community has mostly arrived a little more recently than the black residents of the American Midwest, who mostly arrived between 1880 and 1940. While US Jim Crow apartheid was the force that produced new demographic realities on the lakes’ south shore, it was a targeted state-run campaign to recruit Caribbean black women as domestic servants in 1959 that began the reshaping of Toronto demography. But we should not make too much of this minor historical difference. The importance of figures like former Lieutenant-Governor Lincoln Alexander and events like the annual Harry Jerome Awards remind us of the centrality of African Canadians to Toronto civic life.

While law and order conservative councillor Michael Thompson can demand, as he did two weeks ago, that Rob Ford apologize for calling the quarter of a million African Canadian residents of Toronto “niggers,” for him to raise the question of Anthony Smith’s murder would be, by Toronto standards, beyond the pale. The great racial injustice of the Ford mayoralty is not the mayor’s penchant for using derogatory slurs; it is the probability that he ordered the death of a young black man and has suffered no political consequences from that very reasonable suspicion. While black activists like Samuel Getachew and Desmond Cole are doing work to raise questions about Ford with black Torontonians, their public condemnations are focused not on the fact that the mayor, who is already facing a lawsuit for a savage prison beating against another potential informant, who has already been caught on tape bragging, in a drug-induced frenzy, about how he will have those who inform on him violently beaten and killed, likely ordered the hit on young Anthony Smith. Instead, they are focused on the hurt feelings generated by Ford’s use of the word “nigger.”

Toronto’s problem isn’t that it has a mayor who sometimes uses the n-word in ways that reveal his malice towards the city’s black population. Toronto’s problem having a violent thug for a mayor who, it is clear, would wish he had ordered the hit on Anthony Smith, on the off-chance that the young man’s other enemies got to him before his associates, like Sandro Lisi, could. Cole’s talk of “victim impact statements” for all the people whose feelings might be hurt by name-calling seems—as I am sure it is designed to do, given his political ambitions in a city that hides conservative, racialized politics under a shabby multicultural veneer—quaint, provincial and non-threatening when compared against what black community organizers in Cleveland, Buffalo or Detroit might be doing, saying and demanding about now.
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While respectability-focused, genteel Torontonians express shame and outrage at their mayor’s public drunkenness, drug use, ignorance, crassness, dishonesty and foul mouth, their response to the death of Anthony Smith is one of silence. While the Toronto Star, Canada’s last bastion of liberal investigative journalism, dogs Ford for answers to questions about his sobriety, questions about the murder of a street-involved, racialized young man are strangely absent from the shouting media scrums that besiege Ford at his public appearances. Those who have made the most of the murder, for which a young man of colour was arrested but will not be brought to trial, for reasons not disclosed by the Crown, are the city’s two conservative papers, the National Post and Toronto Sun.

Let us consider the possibility that what is wrong with Toronto and its body politic is that it is far more conservative than Green Bay, Duluth, Toledo or Rochester. Sure, it has better transit, more bikes, a bike-riding socialist former mayor, a world-famous hip, blog-writing, chest-shaving urban futurist, heritage street cars and those nice multilingual signs demarcating ethnic shopping strips. But what about the fundamentals of the city’s politics? What really hides under the polite veneer that makes a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton—let alone a Cornel West—seem absurd or impossible? Surely, Toronto’s black community can’t be more fearful, conservative and respectability focused than Rochester’s!

Could it be that Toronto is the city it has always been, a bastion of cutting edge British Empire politics, a carefully ordered and maintained hierarchy of ethnic and confessional groups, deftly managed by the best technocrats the Empire could offer? Could it be that those lovely signs in Amharic, Punjabi and Mandarin are just the latest elaboration of the old Anglo imperial motto, “a place for everyone, and everyone in his place”? If so, then perhaps Toronto’s black community leaders are wise in focusing on hurt feelings about name-calling and shutting up about the murder. While the Family Compact might be embarrassed into sacking a mayor so unsophisticated and indecorous as to not know where one can and cannot say “nigger,” Toronto’s establishment may have no problem at all with a mayor whose regime guns down a young, gang-involved black man in front of a night club with impunity.

Still, foolhardy or not, if someone starts holding Justice for Anthony Smith vigils in Nathan Philips Square, I may have to grab a bag of tea lights and hop on a plane.

Stuart Parker rarely taunts the city in which he earned his PhD. But these are extraordinary times.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George Race | fusangite | July 17, 2014

Hope in the Age of Nazg: Rediscovering Tolkien’s Themes Through a Ninth-century Text

JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth is generally understood to have been substantially inspired by the author’s long career as a medievalist at Oxford University and was explicit about the ways in which he borrowed heavily from medieval names, myths and historical figures. Aragorn, as imperial restorer, was Charlemagne; “Mardil the Steward,” founder of the lineage of Denethor, clearly referenced the emperor’s grandfather, Charles Martel. Sometimes, Tolkien seemed almost over-the-top in the relish with which he made his world an idealized, enchanted recapitulation of European history, as with his description of the siege of Gondor being all but directly lifted from Edward Gibbon’s narration of the siege of Byzantium in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, right down to the feared siege engine and its projectiles.

Especially central to Tolkien’s medieval source material is the Carolingian dynasty, the first Holy Roman Emperors and attempted restorers of ancient Rome. The choice by Martel, steward to the Merovingian Emperors, to depose their lineage and substitute his own, is one that Tolkien judges harshly and credits as a key factor in the downfall of the West. He expresses this criticism in Mardil the Steward making the opposite choice when the line of Gondor’s kings failed, instead founding the line of ruling stewards who governed in anticipation of the return of the true king. Because Tolkien’s references are made to isolated moments and individuals, his uncharacteristic direct admission that Aragorn, whose line descends from the true kings and not the stewards, is analogous to Charlemagne—both being imperial restorers—is unproblematic. His judgement of the partition of the Holy Roman Empire in the Treaty of Verdun (843) is similarly heavy-handed, with Arnor (corresponding to the HRE, as distinct from Gondor, which represents the Byzantine Empire) being fatefully partitioned into the three kingdoms of Rhudaur (corresponding to the Kingdom of Louis the German), Arthedain (the kingdom of Charles the Bald) and Cardolan (the kingdom of Lothar); this partitioning, Tolkien states, resulted in the dissolution of Arnor into “petty realms and lordships,” in the precise words Gibbon uses to narrate their ultimate fate.

It is surprising, then, that so little attention has been directed to other Carolingian sources in deciphering the rich and complex world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. In the case of the four ages of the world, with which I deal here, the lacuna may be credited, at least in part, to the existence of ready-made four- and five- age schemas in a variety of mythologies with which Tolkien was acquainted, such as in Hesiod’s Works and Days.

This was my view until I encountered an apocryphal document known as the Vision of Charlemagne. As historian Paul Dutton notes, even more than other medieval European societies, subjects of the Carolingian Empire tended to articulate social and political criticism in a fraught political environment by recounting real and alleged dreams. So it was that in approximately 870, an unknown individual, likely seeking to curry favour with the oldest and most stable of the Carolingian monarchs, Louis the German, penned an account of a lost document, allegedly written by the emperor Charlemagne himself, sometime between 806 and 813. In the Vision, the emperor is presented with a sword with an inscription organizing present and future events into four periods: 1. RAHT, 2. RADOLEIBA, 3. NASG and 4. ENTI. Situating Charlemagne in the first period when “there is abundance of material success,” these periods or ages are then described as follows:

“RAHT, that is, abundance of all things… RADOLEIBA… will be fulfilled in the times of my sons [when] there will no longer be such a great abundance… and certain peoples, now subdued, will break away… When… those sons have died and their sons have begun… to govern, NASG will exist, which was inscribed in the third place. For the sake of filthy lucre, they will… oppress travelers and pilgrims… have no sense of modesty… collect riches with great disorder and dishonour… But what was written at the point of the sword, ENTI, that is the end, can be understood in two ways. Either it signifies the end of the world or the end of our line.”

The similarity of the word “nasg” to Tolkien’s cognate for the rings of power “nazg,” (“ash nazg,” meaning the one ring, “nazgul” meaning the ring wraiths, etc.), grows only more striking to the observer the greater one’s prior efforts to locate this word or anything like it elsewhere. It appears that “nasg” was a term made by the anonymous ninth-century author that languished in obscuring for more than a thousand years before being picked up by Tolkien, the prodigious reader of medieval Germanic texts in their original language. As far as I can tell, it just doesn’t show up anywhere else.

Then, of course, is the simple fact that the first three ages bear such a striking resemblance to the Tolkien schema, especially as it relates to the elves, with the world growing less abundant and more depleted with each age, with both the land and people growing both less fecund and less virtuous with each passing epoch. The little-narrated second age of Middle Earth fits especially easily with the literal sons of First Age elvish heroes, such as Elros, founding new kingdoms in a still-bountiful but declining world, in which human kingdoms gradually break away from the elves and their exalted human allies. The third age, specifically described as the age of the rings of power by Tolkien, is one of accelerated decline as avarice, pettiness and vanity drive the free peoples of Middle Earth to ruin. The triumph of evil in Tolkien’s age of Nazg or the Carolingian age of NASG is one made possible by greed and divisiveness, traits the rings fashioned by the Dark Lord Sauron were designed to amplify in those who wore them.

In the third age, the power of evil does not wax so much as the power of good wanes until there is a final crisis that threatens to plunge the whole world into a final darkness, from which it will never emerge. The division of the realms of Elendil, the human High King of the second age and Gil-galad, the elvish High King into separate, smaller kingdoms marks the beginning the third age, a fate wrought when Elendil’s son Isildur chose not to destroy Sauron’s one ring but instead to take it for himself and make it an heirloom of his kingdom. This similarly parallels the Vision which dates nasg to the Treaty of Verdun, when the Carolingian realm was divided and “Lothar, Pepin and Louis began to extend nasg for themselves throughout the neglected kingdom.” Indeed, this theme of neglect and disuse suffuses Tolkien’s writings about the failures of the Third Age as cities like Fornost, Annúminas and Osigiliath fall into ruin.
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But it is actually the point of divergence between Vision and Lord of the Rings that makes it a key to understanding the fundamental themes in LOTR and more than just an antiquarian curiosity, allowing us greater clarity on Tolkien’s larger project as both medievalist and novelist. Ultimately, the question LOTR, as distinct from the Hobbit or Silmarillion, asks is “what if people had risen to the occasion instead?” Gondor’s ruling stewards, the line of Mardil, are his answer to this question as it relates to the Carolingian dynasty using their power as Mayors of the Palace, to usurp the Frankish throne. What, he asks, would have happened if they had awaited the return of the true Merovingian king? Similarly, he asks, what if the Germanic peoples had heeded the pleas of the last Byzantine Emperor and their ancient alliance and ridden south to break the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, as the Rohirrim did during the Siege of Gondor? Not all of these hypothetical questions make us comfortable; Tolkien also asks how much better Europe would have been ruled if the great ancient houses had remained racially pure and not allowed their lineages to be “mingled with the blood of lesser men”? Indeed, what if all the white-skinned peoples of Europe had united to defend Constantinople against the dark-skinned Saharan Africans (the thinly-disguised Haradrim) and the Turkish Seljuks of Rum (the equally obvious people of Rhûn)?

But whatever late Victorian racism Tolkien mobilized in his writing, ultimately, Lord of the Rings is a fairly direct commentary on his view of the importance of hope and selflessness at key turning points history. Writing in the first half of the twentieth century, when structuralist historiographies were on the rise, whether through Marxism, Malthusianism, Whiggism or Social Darwinism, not just in universities but in popular consciousness, Tolkien used his trilogy to say what he could not as a scholar of medieval history: that evil triumphs not because of immutable structural factors but because people lose hope. In one of his few forays the politics of his day, the foreword to the 1954 edition of LOTR pushes back against claims that his novels allegorized the Second World War, remarking that if they did, the Council of Elrond would certainly have chosen to use Sauron’s ring of power, the axiomatically evil “one ring” to defeat him.

In recent years, these seemingly conservative views, at least as they pertain to the history of the Carolingian Empire have been borne-out. It appears that the belief that their empire would fall, termed “consciousness of decline” became a powerful force, independent of material factors that produced fragmentation and collapse in early medieval France. Just as Denethor, the penultimate ruling steward loses hope and commits suicide, nearly causeing Gondor to fall, because he cannot imagine that the Rohirrim really are riding to the rescue to break the siege, it appears that the pessimism in Vision was part of the set of social forces that really did make “enti” come to pass, just as the document foretold. And so, when we read Tolkien’s appendices to Return of the King in which he narrates the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, we encounter a curious alternate early modernity, a hyper-monarchical, harmonious, pastoral, literate, anti-industrial pseudo-Europe, one too humble and virtuous to defy the will of God and permit anyone but the elect to take ship and sail across the ocean to the unknown sacred lands of the West.

As Tolkien says in his abbreviated synopsis or recapitulation of LOTR in the final chapter of the Silmarillion, it is the character of Gandalf who is explicitly revealed to be the true hero of the Third Age. As the author’s Christ-figure, a hypostatic being who is resurrected halfway through the story, he is revealed to be this hero because his power, assisted by Narya, one of the three unsullied rings of power, is to kindle hope in the hearts of mortals, causing ordinary people to undertake world-changing acts of extraordinary bravery. This bravery, he suggests, is anchored in humility because, in the words of Gandalf, “help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter,” as pointed a response as any to the historical determinists who surrounded him.

Much as I love his books and have a special place in my heart for them, I don’t find Tolkien’s particular alternate utopia compelling or his racism easy to tolerate, despite it being unexceptional bordering on unavoidable in his time. Nevertheless, I think there is real value in ignoring his obfuscations and denials that his books were as precisely referential as they clearly are and, instead, engaging thematically with Lord of the Rings by looking at times past and present and asking “what if people rose to the occasion and acted with unexpected hope and courage even in the face of long-foretold and certain doom?”

Stuart Parker isn’t just a failed politician and seasonally employed academic; he remains a committed geek too.

Geekery | fusangite | June 9, 2014

COPE and the Rush to Petty Dictatorship

Any other party that had just lost half its board, its only elected member and 40% of its support in the polls would be rushing to become broader, more open and more relevant to our city. But not COPE. The main business the party will transact at its next general meeting this March will be the current Executive’s latest efforts to prevent ordinary voters and social movement activists from setting this party’s direction going into what could be its last election campaign.

Following the Executive’s success in using procedural roadblocks, misinformation, and patently false legal and mathematical arguments to defeat proportional representation at meetings in September, October and November (despite PR winning with 66% of the vote the only time members were permitted by the chair to vote on it), the next cynical move is to appear to comply with the members clear demand for a more diverse Executive that represents more than one faction of the party. Using the language of equity and diversity, a set of Trojan Horse amendments to COPE’s constitution are now being put forward, which appear to comply with the wishes of PR-supporting members seeking diversity but which, in fact, institutionalize the current leadership through a system of appointed tokens.

This March, at the party’s two-day policy conference, COPE members will be asked to ratify a Byzantine set of bylaw amendments whose primary purpose appears to be intensifying the control of the party by the faction that currently dominates it by insulating the current Executive against defeat by the members at the July Annual General Meeting or June Nominating Convention.

2. Equity Representatives on COPE Executive
BE IT RESOLVED That PART 4 THE EXECUTIVE Point 1 be amended by adding a new point d) to read as follows
PART 4 – THE EXECUTIVE
1. The Executive shall consist of the following persons (the “Voting Executive Members”): ….
d) representatives of each Equity Caucus, who may be so designated by the respective Caucuses and ratified at a general meeting.
1) one Voting Executive Member position for each Equity Caucus

Four new seats are being created on the COPE Executive, increasing its size from twelve elected members to sixteen. These four new members are elected not be the COPE membership as a whole but by four party committees (“equity caucuses”); these seats will be occupied from the time each caucus selects is occupant until the caucus removes them unless the next general meeting of the party votes not to ratify the selection, in which case the seat is then vacant until the caucus can make a new selection.

Because these appointments do not appear to expire and, except at the moment of ratification, are outside the purview of the general membership of the party. These appointees sit on the executive from the moment of their appointment until they face a ratification vote at a later meeting and, only if that meeting votes to leave the seat vacant rather than accepting the representative, are they removed. If they are not removed, they continue to serve until they wish to vacate the position. And even if they are removed, the caucus can appoint a replacement who will serve as an executive member until their ratification vote.

This means that, together with those elected to two-year terms at the 2013 AGM and those elected to 16-month terms at the March general meeting, there will be ten (out of a possible 16) seats on the Executive that will not be subject to election at the July AGM. In other words, even if the general membership completely repudiate the current executive at the coming AGM, they will retain a 10-6 majority on the Executive through the election.

BE IT RESOLVED that PART 7 COMMITTEES be amended by adding a new Point 6
6. Equity Standing Committees
There shall be four (4) Equity Standing Committees: Aboriginal, Differently Abled, Ethnic Diversity, and LGBTTIQQPP2S. The Committees shall be selected by their respective Equity Caucuses.

This set of bylaw amendments is odd because it does not specify who will comprise the equity caucuses. It states that the committees will be appointed by the caucuses but not how the caucuses will be appointed. With no specific rules in effect for regulation of caucus composition, the party must default to the resolution passed by directors on May 10^th, 2013 concerning the composition of all internal party committees on whose composition the bylaws are silent:

Whereas the members of COPE vest final oversight powers in the Executive,

Resolved that the Executive confer on committees the power to alter their composition by a majority vote of members;

Further resolved that any decision by committees including those pertaining to their membership may be reversed by a majority vote of the Executive;

Further resolved that all committees except those named in the Constitution and Bylaws exist at the pleasure of the Executive and may be created or disbanded by a majority vote of the Executive.

Further resolved that the times and locations of each committee and caucus meeting be communicated to the Executive a reasonable amount of time in advance of each committee and caucus meeting;

Effectively, this means that the current Executive may determine the composition of the four equity caucuses which, in turn, elect four members to the Executive. This is a political feedback loop whereby the current executive can insulate itself against the democratic will of the members depriving it of its majority at the Annual General Meeting.

In other words, the Equity motions have not been forwarded for the purpose of democratizing COPE but for the purpose of empowering the current clique to appoint themselves dictators of the party, irrespective of how members vote this summer.

Some might well ask, “does it really matter who controls the Executive when the members get to pick the candidates?” Well, that’s where the Executive’s new Code of Conduct comes in, a Code that gives it sweeping powers to fire candidates at will. Below are the relevant excerpts:

1. This Code of Conduct replaces any previously enacted code of conduct and applies to

a. Members of the COPE Executive

b. COPE Candidates elected to Civic Office

c. Candidates for Civic Office

~ and ~

2. All persons to whom this Code of Conduct applies shall refrain from
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a. Speaking against or criticizing COPE Policy in any public forum or communication including but not limited to media interviews or statements, candidates debates, web comments emails blogs and/or social media.

b. Speaking against or criticizing each other or any COPE Member in any public forum or communication including but not limited to media interviews or statements, candidates debates, web comments, emails, blogs and/or social media.

c. Advising or assisting COPE members to engage in 2a. or2 b. above

d Advising COPE members to express dissatisfaction with COPE and/or decisions of its membership meetings by financial means, including but not limited to boycotting COPE fundraising events, cancelling PACs, withdrawing or not providing financial support. (This especially applies to Executive members, who as Directors of the Society have a fiduciary duty to always act in the best interest of COPE).

~ and ~

6. If Allegations are upheld, consequences may include but are not limited to:

a. In case of first incident , the respondent will be offered the opportunity to resolve the matter by providing written acknowledgement that

i. their actions violated this Code of Conduct

ii. they will offer apologies as directed by the Executive

iii. they promise not to re-offend.

b. In case of

i. a first incident, should the respondent not accept the opportunity described in a. and/or

ii. a subsequent incident where allegations are upheld,

the Executive may take the following action(s).

1. In all cases the respondent will be offered the opportunity to resign.

2. Should the respondent choose not to resign

a. The Executive may remove the respondent from any “executive-appointed” role or position.

b. The Executive may make a special resolution to a general meeting to remove an Executive member per the BC Society Act: Part 3 Directors 31 (see References below )

c. The Executive may make a resolution to a general meeting to expel the respondent per COPE Bylaws Part 2 Membership 1.d) (see References below).

d. Staff may be subject to progressive discipline up to and including termination.

To be clear, then, any person expressing dissent or suspected of encouraging others to express dissent may be summarily removed from their position in COPE unless such removal is explicitly prohibited by the Society Act. This dissent might be as minor as telling a friend over the phone that an upcoming fundraising event might not be very fun for them or mocking a member of the Executive in a humorous tweet. Given the way the current Executive assumed power in COPE, by vigorously attacking the previous majority and its policies in conventional and social media, organizing phone banks and refusing to participate in key campaign events, it is clear that this group could not survive a fair application of this Code.

This leads me to believe that, as with the rules for social assistance recipients, the goal is not to have an actually enforceable policy but instead to create an environment of arbitrary terror, in which everyone is in violation of the rules all the time but only those disliked by the Executive are punished. The addition of written confessions and show trials seems especially absurd, given that the current leadership are in no other ways Stalinist, having largely adopted a small-c conservative ratepayer politics of NIMBYism, heritage preservation and meeting-intensive processes designed to magnify the voices of the wealthy and well-educated while silencing low-income and marginalized people. Marginalized people, these proposed bylaws make clear, are not to be empowered but to act as tokens or pawns, permitted to act as proxies for a rich, white, middle-aged, property-owning, West Side lawyer, but only insofar as they comply with his will and that of his handful of long-term toadies, yes-men and financial dependents.

Obviously, whether I choose to remain active in COPE will depend on how this meeting goes in March. There is little point in participating in a party that has so completely rejected democracy in favour of the pettiest, most small-minded personality cult. If this were the Cold War, one might hear grim arguments about breaking a few eggs to make an omelette or the like but this isn’t. This is about the quest of a group of bourgeois baby-boomers trying to get one guy on city council as a kind of commemorative mascot of the days it really was a Manichean struggle between the forces of labour and capital.

Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | February 17, 2014

Political Geography of Community – Part 4: Dispossession, Dislocation and the Invention of the Neighbour

With a title like this, the only sensible thing is to begin by talking about wool.

Wool has a lot to do with the way that English-speaking who can trace their lineages to Great Britain seem to have got a pretty good deal this past half-millennium or so. Wool, strangely enough, was crucially helpful in teaching the English people how to make selves that are especially well-adapted to capitalist relations between human beings.

This remaking of the self in capitalist terms, and its sweeping political implications can be found in Thomas More’s Utopia in which the author comments on a process called “Enclosure,” whereby collectively-owned shared lands on which peasants raised crops were privatized and fenced through a series of acts by the English state. Instead of people eating sheep, More observed, with Enclosure, now, “sheep eat men.” Land used by humans to raise food to feed themselves became land that was converted to range land for sheep.

It was not enough to dispossess peasants, More went on to observe; they were then criminalized, as they are today, for their dispossession through laws against begging, brigandage, vagrancy and debt. This process, which had begun nearly a century before More wrote, only escalated over the next two centuries and more and more English commoners were dispossessed for a wider and wider range of land uses as the English state financed itself through privatization.

Once they were dispossessed, powerful forces set to work on those who had lost their lands to encourage relocation. People moved to find work; and if they couldn’t find work, the state and its agents would find it for them by converting them into convict labourers, indentured servants or pressganged members of the armed forces. For the most part, people were eager to find work and moved considerable distances – down brigand- and beggar-infested toll-roads to find somewhere to work.

These people were no different from the economic migrants of any era; their choices were conditioned by familiar factors. Is there work where I’m going? How can I persuade people to let me do the work when I get there? Are there people I know there? If I get there and something happens to me, will there be someone to bail me out? England’s market towns, which had begun their demographic rebound in the 1400s, were often the destination but many people urbanized into London and many still simply moved from one rural area to the next, often in short-term work directly associated with the wool industry. As Britain’s sheep population grew, so did the ranks of the dispossessed and dislocated.

Because these mass economic migrations were not actually associated with new technologies as much as new market conditions, the English people had the curious honour to being in the vanguard of a process that would reshape even the rest of Western Europe decades or centuries later. While processes like this had taken place at many other places and times, the sheer scale and duration of Enclosure created a critical mass of a certain kind of unstable, disconnected migrant consciousness. By the seventeenth century, common English folk thought about their relationships to their place, family and job differently than others on such a large scale that a whole new discourse emerged, a discourse that the state intervened to help shape.

We know this because of the King James Version of the Bible, a very expensive state-sponsored project to produce a text around which a new, Protestant, capitalist English identity was to be built. The KJV provided a dislocated, increasingly socially literate populace with popular, universal words to help them make new selves and new worldviews for the strangely kinetic, insecure people into which they were being transformed by the privatization of indivisible collectivities, like families and family. It did that by replacing the word “brother” with “neighbour” hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Let us be clear that English neighbours centuries ago were like our neighbours now: people you don’t really know who might or might not stick around. Now, as then, we have words for the relationships that can develop out of neighbourliness: friend, spouse, co-worker, cousin, brother-in-law, etc. Medieval English people had other words too from before the era of the neighbour like “gossip,” from the compound word “god-sib” – someone connected through a god-parent, a ubiquitous institution that linked huge portions of the population together.

But, in the world of Enclosure, new ideas of “neighbourliness” became crucial new forms of solidarity. The English people had a shared imperative, whether working as translators for one of the greatest state-directed propaganda campaigns of all time or simply trying to survive a move to a new town, where they had heard there might be some shepherding work, without first starving to death, to idealize a new form of community, neighbourliness. Neighbours were a new kind of person: a person forced into physical proximity with you by economic exigency.

As the Nobel Committee has recently recognized, one of the most effective means of surviving large-scale market-driven and state-supported dispossession, dislocation and social service downloading is through the mobilization of private micro-credit. The ideals of neighbourliness as propounded by popular early modern English writers like Thomas Tusser were, first and foremost, means of mobilizing micro-credit within a marginalized population. A cup of sugar or flour lent by one’s neighbour remains, to the present day, our idealized image of what neighbourliness ultimately means. A few pence, a little flour, an egg – in Jacobean England, the ability of the dispossessed and marginally employed to rely on new acquaintances for sustenance was crucial for the success of the first socially capitalist society.

This new social ideal and associated practices were, at once, forms of solidarity amongst the dispossessed and marginalized, crucial for the generation of the minimum material and political security needed to survive and a means of pacifying a populace in the face of oppression while concurrently reducing the material obligations of the rulers to the ruled.

These techniques may also damage penile tissues leading canadian cialis pharmacy to other dangerous situations. A viagra sale mastercard man has to take it at least 40 minutes to mix with blood and start working. What are the symptoms of Erectile miamistonecrabs.com cheapest levitra Dysfunction? If you are facing erectile dysfunction. Relaxation, medical hypnosis, meditation, acupuncture, acupuncture with customized hypnosis CDs, and massage are all ways to combat this issue is by using a prescription medication known as buy online viagra. What neighbourliness was not and is not is a natural form of social organization – it is necessarily a social response to the prolonged, systematic physical dislocation and atomization of a populace due to economic exigencies. It is no coincidence that the labour movement sought to undo the great intentional translation errors of the KJV. It was not simply that labour discourse in the past two centuries has sought – almost unconsciously –to restore the meaning “peoples” in place of the KJV’s “nations,” as the translation for εθνη; it has been even more invested in changing “neighbour” back to “brother.”

While leftist thought has grappled seriously with the ways in which discourses of “nation” have reinforced racism and imperialism, the response to the other great KJV linguistic reordering has received short shrift. While a handful of important scholars have recognized the ways in which neighbourliness serves to inhibit class consciousness in that it is locates identity formation – and hence, solidarity – in residential rather than work spaces, this only scratches the surface of the problem of neighbourliness.

People imagine, incorrectly, that neighbours, neighbourhoods and the neighbourly ethic are timeless, pre-capitalist things. And while we can trace the word to the time before Enclosure, its universalization in the sixteenth century was part and parcel with it coming to refer to a probably impermanent, quasi-stranger. To be neighbourly was to engage in reciprocity as an act of faith – to enact solidarity in the absence of the trust or knowledge one might expect in the world before Enclosure.

What are the implications of this to the Jane Jacobs urbanism that has come to be so uncritically embraced by self-identified leftists and progressives? Let us historicize neighbourliness and see its fetishization as an ideal as a reasonable proxy for instability, atomization and dislocation. And let us consider the implications of understanding the neighbourhood as a form of defensive solidarity that emerges when more genuine and complete forms of community in place are under constant attack.

Of course, today’s neighbourliness is not identical to the kind developed in the sixteenth century. In Vancouver and many other major cities, neighbours are, more often than not, families forced by the housing affordability crisis to move farther from work, to suburbanize, or, conversely, childless people who work longer, more irregular hours in order to stay close to work and reduce their commuting time.

What does it mean when friends, relatives and coworkers have been evacuated from your physical locale and you are surrounded by strangers? Or, worse yet, what if you are one of the new strangers, desperately trying to narrate your relevance to a series of closed doors and impersonal shops? Faced with these socially fraught circumstances, some of us lean on the idea of neighbourliness to fight back. We know those people – they are the elderly people on your doorstep with a petition for something, the odd cadre of corduroy and tweed-wearers who attend the annual general meeting of your community centre, the acquaintances who cold-call you to ask your feelings about the decline in parking spaces and, increasingly under Vision Vancouver, the people eating finger sandwiches and writing on white boards at some kind of city-financed meeting that always seems to be taking place in Multipurpose Room C, next to the swimming pool.

Those people are very much doing what self-defined neighbours have done for centuries: using a concept that is being actively popularized by the state as a means of social control and service downloading to attempt to organize against state-supported economic development and community reorganization projects. This minority of actively-neighbourly neighbours think they are part of a big, fictive community that contains you and everybody who lives near them, with whom they hang out at the Canada Day block party that never quite gets around to happening. As I have argued elsewhere, these people are actually quite unlike most people they live near; the people they are like are the neighbourhood activists who live in other parts of the city.

Neighbourhood activists often see the majority who never seem to be around for the public meeting about the development permit application as, in some way, deficient in civic virtue. As in most discourses of civic virtue, dating back to Ancient Athens, those most lacking in civic virtue are typically the most economically dislocated, those whose time is most occupied by working, commuting and fundamental household tasks like child-rearing. Or, as conversely put by Marianna Valverde, “The local champion role is one that can be played private citizens as well as politicians… playing the role of micro-local champion is time-consuming, which may be a reason this role is generally played by people with few work and childcare responsibilities.”

Ironically, those who represent neighbours are those least like them. Those able to engage in acts of representation and advocacy are situated at the polarities of economic security with their ample time arising either from considerable familial wealth or from self-inflicted poverty in order to remain in their chosen geographic area. This mirrors the situation at the inception of neighbourliness where those most active in the civic life of the neighbourhood. Early modern England’s most active neighbours were epitomized in the figure of the neighbourhood patron, an aspiring gentleman and town notable, or the disrespectable scold, the “crazy cat lady” of her day.

Furthermore, those who use their limited time to, in preference, associate with lovers, friends, coworkers, teammates or relatives, who congregate around activities like sports, co-parenting, drinking or gambling in preference to micro-governance are understood to, in some way, be quasi-citizens, people who have lost their full franchise. Maybe that is why neighbourhood activists are so comfortable in asserting what “the community,” or “the neighbourhood” really wants in these public processes—they have annexed their neighbours’ citizenship to themselves.
I write this not because I prefer the agenda of Vision Vancouver to that of the party that came fifth in the last election, Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver. By and large, I find their policies preferable to Vision’s on nearly every front, despite the party’s stated purpose being the governance of the city by the very people I just disparaged.

I offer this harsh critique not because what groups like COPE, NSV or the Green Party are doing is wrong but because it is inherently insufficient. The conservative fantasy of the neighbourly past that these groups evoke when they point to the Greenwich Village of Jane Jacobs becomes a more entrancing mirage each year precisely because the real bonds between people are being destroyed through dislocation and replaced with neighbourliness, a state-sponsored fiction designed, from its inception, at the height of Enclosure, to pacify the populace by substituting a counterfeit for real community.

More in the next part on alternatives based on organic experiences of community.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies | fusangite | February 13, 2014

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