Saturday, January 8, 2011

A sound heart vs an ill-trained conscience (Samuel Clemens)

By Scott Simon, NPR Website, January 8, 2011
This week’s announcement by NewSouth Books that it’s publishing a new edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in which a racial slur that begins with the letter N is replaced with the word "slave" stirs up conflicting reactions.
On the one hand, the effrontery—"the vapid, smiley-faced effrontery," as the great Twain biographer, Ron Powers, put it—to replace a word that a genius pointedly used more than 200 times when he wrote the book in 1885 seems a bit like covering the large, gaping wounds shown in Picasso’s Guernica with Band-Aids.
But there are already scores of editions in print in which the N-word appears. And every year, it seems that some school district somewhere refuses to read Huckleberry Finn because of it. Dr. Allen Gribben, the Auburn University Twain scholar who has edited this new version, says he just doesn't want one word to keep students from reading a great book.
Mark Twain wrote conflicts into Huck Finn’s soul. Huck was a river kid of the 1830’s who ran away from so-called "sivilized" life with his guardian, Miss Watson. He throws in with Jim, a slave who has escaped Miss Watson, and is trying to get to freedom. Huck and Jim run, rob, and scrounge together to survive. Jim refuses to run off when the going gets tough, and Huck refuses to betray Jim for a reward, even though his "conscience" reminds him that under the law, Jim is stolen goods.
"All right then," Huck screams at himself, "I’ll go to hell!"
As Mark Twain wrote in his lecture notes, "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience."
Mr. Simon gets to the heart of the matter by illustrating the heart of Huck as both loyal and beyond 'race' in his refusal to betray his black buddy, knowing the legal implications.
It is the ill-trained conscience manifest by the politically correct movement (and it has become a movement)  of those  seeking to purify not only language but also attitudes and perceptions of all of their deep and profound complexity, especially a complexity made more rich and powerful seen through the lens of time seeks to impact.
Such politically correct initiatives show their face in churches, when smiling faces whisper before a liturgy about the "new" face that just wandered in, clad in less than 'Sunday best' clothes, or the whisper in the church hall after the service about the young girl who was absent from the service 'because I heard she was in the 'family way' "but she is certainly not married, and you know, she is only sixteen!"
There is a quality of superficiality and therefore merely mask of perfection that people want to wear in front of their peers, and that superficiality knows no gender or race or social class, although the elite have mastered more of the deceptions to preserve it intact than the poor.
In fact, the poor find such pretensions unmistakeable, and know them for what they truly are: a mere cover-up for both sins of omission and for sins of commission that are sprinkled through the lifetimes of all human beings.
I recently found a poem by a Canadian poet, a Toronto poet of the mid-twentieth century. The poet's name is Raymond Souster, and the poem is titled,

                          The Bourgeois Child
                                              
                  I might have been a slum child,
                 I might have learned to swear and steal,
                 I might have learned to drink and whore.

                But I was raised a good bourgeois child
               And so it has taken me a little longer.

Huck and Jim were not bouregois kids. They learned to swear and steal to survive. They might have learned to drink and whore, in their youth, as those children not of the bourgeois do, as Souster says. Unfortunately, those of us who are bourgeois because we were raised 'respectable' took sometimes a little and sometimes a lot longer to become real, to mature, to put our feet on the dirt of the ground that is our life.
And the politically correct movement is part of the burgeoning bourgeois culture that infects much of the world, especially of the western world.
It does not like swearing and stealing; it does not like drinking and whoreing; it does not like the face and the reality of homelessness, nor the face and the reality of drunken bums living under the concrete abuttments of highway bridges, in cardboard boxes; it does not like the face and the reality of the literally hundreds of rapes on the streets of Haiti, by the roaming gangs of hungry men, and while the bourgeois class wrings its hands, it often turns its face away, because the pain is too biting.
Nevertheless, by turning away, we do nothing to stop those ravenous rapes. We do not confront those raging perpetrators! We do not protect those victim young girls and young women because we would rather not fully listen and fully grasp the depth of the ugliness.
And we think or perhaps even believe that we are participating in the training of young consciences, when, in fact, we are deadening young hearts.
Even late, I welcome an alive (and sound)  heart, and reject an ill-trained conscience, in the pursuit of truth, from Huck and from Simon, and from Picasso and from Souster.




U.S.: Addicted to the pursuit and acquisition of wealth, to its peril.

By Michael Powell, New York Times, January 7, 2011
(Quoting former Clinton Secretary of Labour, Robert Reich)
“If you widen the lens, the public is being sold a big lie — that our problems owe to unions and the size of government and not to fraud and deregulation and vast concentration of wealth. Obama’s failure is that he won’t challenge this Republican narrative, and give people a story that helps them connect the dots and understand where we’re going.” ...

Mr. Reich served as labor secretary for President Clinton, and in his latest book “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future” he applauds Mr. Obama for deft work in preventing the economy from toppling into a Depression.

But the president demanded too little of the bankers he saved, Mr. Reich says, and he conflated a rising stock market and soaring corporate profits with an improving economy.
The majority of Americans, who derive much of their wealth from their homes rather than the stock market, are falling far behind the top 1 percent, who took in 23 percent of the nation’s income in 2007. That inequality, he says, is at the heart of America’s malaise.
“Obama had a chance to reboot the bailout,” he says. “He could have said to the bankers, ‘If you want more, you’ve got to put a cap on salaries, you’ve got to agree to modify X number of mortgages.’ ”
On each issue, and in every administration, there are voices at all points on the ideological continuum. We know that the president was elected by both democrats and independents, but not by republicans. On the left flank of the democratic party is Robert Reich, whose articulate presentation of the facts, for his perspective, have commended those facts to both Clinton and Obama. However, with his most recent criticism of Obama, (comparing him to Clinton in 1994, after a different Republican electoral victory) he sounds a clarion call for the president to take a different approach.
It is true, at least in our perspective, that Obama bowed to the pressure of the insurance companies in the health care debate, and dropped the public option. It is also true that in the financial reform bill he did not go far enough. And Reich is also telling the truth that the U.S. economic woes are not due to the unions and the size of government, but rather to fraud, deregulation and concentration of wealth.
However, Secretary Reich must know that one of the immediate problems is that many states are facing something very close to, if not actual, bankruptcy. And one of the targets of this "crisis" is the long-term pension commitments that have been made to current and former employees of those states. Whether those commitments were the result, at least in part, of negotiations with unions, there is a band of political message-makers (mostly on the right) spreading the 'gospel' that it is the unions that are to blame for these excesses.
Reich must also know that, with the rich owning and controlling the companies that generate and deliver most of those "messages" (from the right) there is an open and not illegal alliance between both the companies and the perceptions of those political voices on the right, that both unions and big government are the demons of the current crisis.
Very few, if any, rockets will be sent by anyone except a few articulate economic writers and thinkers like Paul Klugman and Reich himself, to debunk the growing credibility in the mythology that unions must be destroyed and big government (including Obamacare) must be cut off at the knees. The American culture loves to attack "enemies;" in fact, the political culture depends on seeking and finding enemies, in order to keep the nation pure and uncontaminated by those enemies, whether they are within their own culture and boundaries or outside in the form of Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, etc.
There is a kind of mass movement against enemies, once they are clearly portrayed. And certainly, Obama is the prime enemy of the Republican party, and their message machine will attack the president by using the traditional myth of slaying the dragons (demons) that really drives the culture.
It is a kind of mythology that generates a belief in powerful military heroes who will take on the fight against those dragons (demons) and many U.S. voters will rush to support such activity.
The rich cannot be construed as "enemy" in a society to addicted to the pursuit and acquisition of wealth. If that were to happen, (although it would be a very healthy development for the country), the idol to which the country gives its unqualified worship would topple faster than the statue of Saddam that was pulled down a few days after the latest invasion of Iraq. It is far easier to make union contracts, including public sector pensions and  impoverished state governments (under both Democrat and Republican administrations) into the enemy.
A similar argument applies with respect to the boardroom bonuses of the large financial services sector, even when they are using public funds for those very bonuses. These acts of profligate greed at both the personal and the corporate level, cannot be construed as "demon" or "enemy" because to do so would be to render the culture of "star" and mega-star, which has become so ingrained in all other sectors of the economy as mere idol, and bring that star system down. In fact, the facts point to a significant increase in the personal wealth of most members of Congress, as one of the signs of "success" in a society (and we repeat) that is addicted to the pursuit and acquisition of wealth, for its own sake.
So while Mr. Reich is probably right in his detailing of the root causes of the economic woes, there are forces so deeply embedded, and so deeply entrenched in the culture that render his voice for the poor and the underclass almost a whisper, amid the clanging drums and cymbals of the rich and the powerful.
For Obama to accept and to act on Secretary Reich's counsel would be to begin to undo the American myth that the pursuit of wealth, for its own sake, through both legitimate and slightly less than legitimate means, is the holy grail of the society. And the argument of "spreading the wealth" at a time when most feel the scarcity of both the wealth and the means to acquire even a modest share, is less likely to find political traction, and render Obama much less likely to be re-elected, the avowed aim and purpose of the merchants of greed on the right.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Watch for soaring food prices everywhere..and unrest

By Paul Waldie, Globe and Mail, January 5, 2011
Food prices have soared to record levels around the world, raising fears that poor countries could face a crisis similar to the one that led to rioting and rationing two years ago.

“We are entering a danger territory,” Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) told reporters Wednesday.
The FAO’s food price index, a formula based on the wholesale price of 55 products including rice, meat, wheat, milk and cheese, reached a record high in December. The index has risen in each of the past six months and it hit 214.7 in December. The previous record was 213.5 set at the height of the food crisis in June of 2008, when soaring prices led to riots in several countries such as Haiti, Somalia and Cameroon while others, including India and Vietnam, restricted rice exports.
“There is still room for prices to go up much higher, if, for example, the dry conditions in Argentina tend to become a drought and if we start having problems with winterkill in the northern hemisphere for the wheat crops,” Mr. Abbassian said. “I am feeling less optimistic than I was in November – we have not had much good news.”
Prices for many agricultural commodities started rising last fall largely because of poor grain crops in Canada, Russia and Ukraine. They have spiked even higher recently because of dry weather in Argentina, a major soybean producer, and flooding in parts of Australia, which has wiped out many wheat crops. The price of wheat has jumped about 17 per cent in the last month while corn is up 11 per cent. Both are now close to two-year highs. Other food staples have been soaring as well, including canola, up 43 per cent last year, and sugar, which hit 30-year highs.
“The price spike has raised fresh concerns about food price inflation,” said Kenrick Jordan a senior economist at the Bank of Montreal. Mr. Jordan said while the impact will be manageable for developed countries: “In developing countries, where food accounts for a much more significant part of household budgets, the inflation threat is much greater.”
If anyone thought that countries were isolated from global conditions, here is one story that could be a wake-up call for those people. Furthermore, this story is one more in which ordinary people going to their supermarket, or neighbourhood food outlet feel completely powerless to do anything to change.
Food price inflation, while partially based on climate conditions, could make millions starve. That may sound a little too stark for some, but it is nevertheless a potential reality.
By Michael Brush, Globe and Mail, December 8, 2010
A phenomenal spike in agricultural commodities this year -- from cotton and corn to sugar and wheat -- is making its way to store shelves. General Mills Inc. (GIS-N36.620.932.61%), Unilever NV (UN-N31.06-0.48-1.52%), Nestlé, McDonald's Corp. (MCD-N74.660.350.47%), and Domino's Pizza (DPZ-N16.680.513.15%) all recently cautioned that price hikes are around the corner.
"Agricultural prices are going to go higher, and much higher over the next decade or two," predicts famed investor Jim Rogers, chairman of Singapore-based Rogers Holdings.


Several trends are driving food prices higher: a rising middle class in emerging economies that wants to eat better; weird weather patterns around the globe; the growing use of ethanol to fuel vehicles; and a shrinking dollar that buys less grain than it used to.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Mental Illness: poorly researched, often misdiagnosed, and a source of attack

By Carol Goar, Toronto Star, January 5, 2011
Looking beyond the official statistics, there is abundant evidence in the courts, in emergency rooms and prisons that people are misjudged, hospitalized and punished at a vastly disproportionate rate. In fact, the Ontario Human Rights Commission highlighted the issue in its 2009-10 annual report. “Mental illness is a hidden disability,” it said. “In workplaces, housing or services, where the need to accommodate people with physical disabilities is understood, there is often reluctance or even refusal to accommodate people with mental health disabilities.”

Chief commissioner Barbara Hall wants to know why. And she wants to develop policies that address the real-life experiences of people with mental health disabilities.
For the past month and a half, the commission has been collecting personal stories from individuals who have faced discrimination in finding or keeping a place to live; finding or keeping a job; getting services such as social assistance, education or health care; and having access to shops and restaurants because of a mental disorder.
It intends to use what it learns to identify systemic problems, to set standards and to explain to employers and landlords in clear, specific terms — with examples — how they are required to treat Ontarians with mental disabilities.
Some managers, for instance, appear unaware that allowing employees to make hurtful jokes at the expense of a co-worker with depression is prohibited under the Ontario Human Rights Code. Some business owners are unsure how far they have to go to accommodate people with mental disabilities. At minimum, the commission will offer them guidance.
"Guidance" and "standards" are necessary, and are an important aspect of the work of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. However, it is in changing attitudes that a more permanent solution lies.
There is something primally physical, primally empirical, primally extrinsic about our public attitudes. And, while the Canadian 'mosaic' has made progress in accommodating what appear to be physical differences, we still consider hidden differences differently.
There is a long history of 'boogey-men' or worse, evil gods, the satanic, about the state of mental 'imbalance' even though we do not know what constitutes mental 'balance' nor just how fragile it is, and how easily it can be replaced with 'imbalance'. Anything we do not understand is, by definition, too complex for our inclusion in our 'normal' capacity to define it and to cope with it. We have 'done' similar things to "God"...by both extremes, elevation and desecration, sacralizing and demonizing.
At the core of our social attitude to mental illness is the "medical model" of the practice of medicine, in which the training and the diagnosis and the treatment are all based on finding the "illness" or in the case of the physical, finding the broken bone, or the tumor, or the infected intestine, or the blocked tube in the ear, or the blocked veins and  arteries in the circulation system and then administering some intervention to reconstruct the broken bone, or to remove the tumor or to attack it through chemotherapy and/or radiation, or to prescribe some medication that will address the "problem."
So far, so go. However, it seems that there is a case that can be made that the "mind" as opposed to the physical "brain" is not so adaptive exclusively to physical interventions, although, God knows, the medical profession is determined to find a new chemical equation  every day by which to make the "brain" work more adaptively. We simply want, both for ourselves and for others, that we/they "fit" into the social patterns of the family, the school, the soccer/hockey/baseball/football/basketball teams. Anything that strikes us as "aberrant" or different from what is considered normal raises "red flags" among coaches, among educators, among parents (although they may be later to think something is amiss) and immediately we seek out some kind of intervention to "bring the child back into line" of normalcy.
If we were more courageous, and more imaginative and less risk averse, we would be far less quick to seek to remedy behaviour or attitudes that we do not "like" or that others find "unacceptable". A good example, is the epidemic of ritalin for ADHD in male children in North America over the last twenty years. Control of the classroom, while important, must never trump the child's health and wellbeing, and the teachers need to be far better educated on the norms of male biology, and male hormones and male psyches, and male learning curves.
We have a compendium of mental illnesses, compiled by the psychiatric community, in its professional wisdom, all of the participants bearing the acronym "certified" by the medical board of the state or province in which these doctors practice. It is call the DSM-IV (The Diagnostic Statistical Model). This book is considered the holy writ of mental disorders. Unfortunately, many of the presenting stories of real people do not easily fit into some of the tighter definitions of the text. And when the attending psychiatrist is asked about the relationship of the "condition" to lifestyle, to diet, to work stress, to relationship tensions, to genetic background...there is often an askance look on their face, and the acknowledgement that "we do not really know all of those answers, and we are still studying those relationships."
If the profession is uncertain, and the symptoms frequently do not fit the prescribed definitions, and the research continues into the biological evidence of chemicals, hormones, synapses, and the larger questions that might be answered by a closer look at the personal biography are left unattended in many of the "case histories" that inform the practitioners' diagnosis and treatment plan, then we will continue to separate the mind/psyche/unconscious from the physical/biological/anatomical/empirical and even the profession will miss much of the most relevant evidence that could contribute to the full understanding of the situation.
Freud studied the stories of his patients, and it was those stories that led him to his sexual etiology of neuroses. He certainly did not start out with a fixation on human sexuality. Jung broadened the Freudian theory of ego, id and super ego to include a collective unconscious, a Shadow and both an animus and anima, as (albeit theoretical) components of the human psyche. Currently, the emphasis in psychiatric research is on the biological, as one would expect, and the non-empirical research into the unconscious is left to the poets, the philosophers, the artists and the occasional non-risk-averse social and cultural historian who is not afraid to challenge his/her academic colleagues by examining the Jungian archetypes in their historical emergences. (One such beacon of hope is John Ralston Saul.)
More recenlty, James Hillman has pushed the work of Jung forward into what he calls "archetypal psychology" and in his book, Revisioning Psychology, Hillman advocates for much more attention to the biographies of individuals, as streams of light and inquiry into the psychic dynamics that are occurring in any individual. He also posits the notion that far too much emphasis has been placed on pharmaceuticals as more of a need for the profession to establish and maintain its credibility consistent with the "instant gratification" motive of the public.
These insights from Hillman are a welcome arrival on the scene of liberating the study of human behaviour, attitudes, perceptions by including the poetic, the biographic and the Platonic as integral to the exploration, and not restricting the study to the empirical, and to the biological.
However, if there is this much confusion and uncertainty among the professionals, both the practitioners and the instructors in psychiatry and psychology, imagine how the general public must be reeling from the multiple new psychological words and phrases that have made their way into the vernacular of the society.
Many of these words and phrases are not understood, or minimally understood at best, by the general public, and the media continue to pursue reports of really dangerous aberrant behaviour, most often detailing the more gruesome details while omitting the background to the actor's life.
In fact, it is too often that people will throw a word that indicates some kind of mental "defect" at another person, to satisfy a need for power and superiority or perhaps for revenge or out of jealousy. "Oh, he's just bi-polar!" is one such phrase that we hear far too often, when in fact to ascribe such a diagnosis to another person is, or ought to be considered, a criminal act. It is, in fact, a hate crime, coming as it most often does, from a completely untrained, undisciplined and uncertified observer. And yet, how many of such cases actually reach the courts? Very few, if any. For the victim, it is hardly worth the anxiety. For the perpetrator, s/he is let off the hook, and the scenario repeats, only with a different victim.
What has always amazed me is a small observation, that, for the most part, those who throw words of psychic defamation at other people are, themselves, most worthy of some form of psychic intervention. It is as if the fear of psychic disintegration prompts a projection onto another easy and available target, knowing, likely, that there will be no consequences from the victim of the attack.
It is one of the more subtle abuses of power in a somewhat sophisticated society in which many have completed at least one course in psychology, and feel thereby qualified to diagnose others, without the slightest qualm or misgiving.
It is against such abuse of power that we must all be consciously on guard, because if this is being "done" to the innocent, imagine how much more hurtful we are to the hospitalized, in the "psych" hospital, or in the hospital for the criminally insane, or in the group homes for those attempting to re-enter the society from some "maladjustment" syndrome.
And we have not even touched the radioactive subject of the use of psychological diagnosis and attack from the religious and the self-righteous. That is food for another blog, or perhaps for a full book.
Let us all consider just how close we all are to the potential of a psychic "fall" from grace and the resulting public disgrace, and hold both our tongues and our insecurites back from their "unconscious" projection onto others who rarely deserve our "bullets".

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Hungary: New repressive regime

From The New York Times Editorial, January 4, 2011
It (the new law in Hungary) creates a press supervision council, all members named by Fidesz (the political party of the new President, Orban), with authority to oversee all broadcast, print and Internet outlets and decide whether their coverage is “unbalanced,” “immoral” or “offensive to human dignity.” If the council disapproves, it can impose crippling fines of up to $1 million.

Mr. Orban’s party, which won a two-thirds parliamentary majority last year, is not stopping there in its grab for power. It has been waging all-out war on the institutional checks and balances designed to protect democracy from domination by a single party.
Fidesz has already passed legislation limiting the powers of Hungary’s constitutional court to review financial measures, including Mr. Orban’s appropriation of pension funds to balance the budget. It has cut funding for the country’s independent fiscal council and packed other important oversight posts with reliable party loyalists. Not content to stop there, Mr. Orban has named a council to rewrite Hungary’s Constitution. Mr. Orban made his name in the late 1980s with his resistance to Soviet repression and his championing of an independent political life. Two decades later, he and his party appear to have forgotten those ideals. ....
Hungarians have refused to quietly fall in line. After Parliament passed the media law last month, several newspapers protested by publishing blank front pages. They deserve strong, continued international support. Mr. Orban may have forgotten, but Hungary’s tragic history has taught its people that a free press — and a checked government — cannot be taken for granted.

To the people of Hungary, the world is watching and supporting your continued resistance to these new measures. Every voice of opposition, individually and collectively, means something, because while these measures are being taken in your country, today, similar measures could befall other countries, if the world does not collectively say, "STOP!"






Origin of Leader as "Castrato" (Saul)

From John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism, Penguin, 2005, p. 92-3.
In the midst of their (world political leaders) arguments over economic management versus political leadership, something very revealing happened. Giscard (d'Estaing) had been a long-time and apparently successful French minister of finance. He was elected in mid-1974 as a young president who could bring his economic talents to the top job. He represented a new-style politician. The specialist. The man who would take your worries away with his financial expertise. Compared with leaders like Charles de Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer--who somehow involved citizenry emotionally in their grand schemes--here was a calm, dispassionate, modern leader. Even post-modern. This was the face of the post-nationalist nation-state.
         But Giscard came to power in the midst of those seminal crises of oil, inflation, unemployment and no growth. He counterattacked as best a technocrat could and made no impact. Interest rates were so high that they were bankrupting the private sector without controlling inflation. Giscard became bewildered. Discouraged.
      Then one night he appeared on television to address the people. He told them that great global forces were at work. These were new forces. Forces of inevitability. Forces of economic interdependence. There was little a national government could do. He was powerless.
      This historic appearance was probably the original declaration of Globalization as a freestanding force escaping the controls of all men. It was also the invention of the new leader: the manager as castrato. This approach created quite a fashion among leaders at all levels. The easy answer to the most difficult problems was increasingly to lament publicly that you were powerless. Impotent. That your large budgets, your public structures, the talents and determination of your populations could make little difference. These were not problems to be solved. These were manifestations of the global reality. With your leader/manager friends in other countries you would do your best to round the sharp corners through management of the details.
       You might say that Globalization became an excuse for not dealing with important problems. Worse than that, this betrayal of the idea of public responsibility--that is, a belief in the possibility of choice--gradually undermined the citizens' confidence in their democracy. People like Giscard made the shibboleth of inevitability credible. It was the return of the fearful priests so central to the darkest moments of the Middle Ages.
And from The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer, Paladin, 1970, p.11-12, a mere four years before the Giscard d'Estaing television appearance.....
The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistatorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern. This has meant the distortion of our concepts of Love. Beginning with a celebration of an Ideal, Love proceeds to describe some of the chief perversions, Altruism, Egotism, and Obsession. These distortions masquerade under various mythic guises, of which two follow – Romance, an account of the fantasies on which the appetent and the disappointed woman is nourished, and The Object of Male Fantasy, which deals with the favourite ways in which women are presented in specifically male literature. The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage records the rise of the most commonly accepted mutual fantasy of heterosexual love in our society, as a prelude to a discussion of the normal form of life as we understand it, the Family. The nuclear family of our time is severely criticized, and some vague alternatives are suggested, but the chief function of this part, as of the whole book, is mostly to suggest the possibility and the desirability of an alternative. The chief bogy of those who fear freedom is insecurity, and so Love ends with an animadversion on the illusoriness of Security, the ruling deity of the welfare state, never more insubstantial than it is in the age of total warfare, global pollution and population explosion.
If Saul is right about the leader/manager as "castrato" (and there is little to contradict his position, except perhaps the public persona of a Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984). In fact it was in 1970 that Trudeau imposed the War Measures Act on what he perceived as an "apprehended insurrection" in Quebec perpetrated by the FLQ. One can only imagine the Trudeau response to Saul's observation, if it were to include his "watch" as Prime Minister) and women were writing about their own castration, we can, in retrospect see a collision of images of impotence, as a central image of the first few years of the decade that began in 1970.
However, on reflection, after 35 years, it would appear, at least to this observer, that women as a gender took full responsibility for improving their political power and status (if the struggle is not complete) while male political leaders in the west have fallen, for the most part, into the "castrato" category.
I have written elsewhere that both American elections of 2000 and 2004 were plebescites on masculinity, the "alpha" variety, with Gore and Kerry both losing to the Texas gunslinger, Dubya.
And we know that Dubya does not represent an authentic male leader, fully comfortable in his own skin, without having to prove himself to anyone, fully conscious of his political purpose and vision, and his capacity to carry out the best intentions and ideals of the United States. In fact, it can be argued that George W. Bush singlehandedly did more to tarnish the male archetype that any other American president, with his lies and excuses for his war in Iraq, and his tax cuts for the very rich, and his refusal to grapple with global warming and his refusal to fund No Child Left Behind.
Geroge W. Bush, represents the least evolved, the least emotionally mature and the least intellectually subtle president in the last sixty years, and gives to all males a model of how not to be a political leader.
One of the main thrusts of Saul's argument is for the citizens to take back the running of all democratically governed countries, from the experts whose powerlessness, in the face of the "inevitable," is really an abdication of their responsibiltiy. He even ridicules their mantra: There Is No Alternative or (TINA), especially as it refers to globalization.









Minutiae trumps thought and action everywhere

From John Ralston Saul's work, The Collapse of Globalism, (Penguin, 2005) p.230
...you can see the destructive effect of managerial dominance in the gradual growth of detail as the mainstay of the employee's life. The effect of new technology has been to draw even senior managers into minutiae. People paid to think and lead now spend much of their time typing and responding to or sending an endless stream of unnecessary messages, simply because communications technology invades every second and every corner of their lives. This bureaucratization of both the leadership and the creative process makes thought seem irresponsible and clear action seem unprofessional. It provides a sensation of activity while creating a broader sense of powerlessness. This is what used to be called "being nibbled to death by ducks."
It is not only that real creative thought and action are being trumped by attention to minutiae, it is also that any thought or creative proposal must be reduced to the tiniest of fragments, in order to "pass muster" as responsible and professional.
Anything smacking of the "big picture" is considered radical, childless, simplistic or 'over-the-top' by conventional approach. Consequently, it is little wonder that the dots are not being connected, as the vernacular goes, in so many situations. No one is paid to connect the dots; in fact, we have made an alter to creating new dots, isolated pieces of information collected and stored in the most highly efficient technology, overwhelming anyone who is attempting to 'keep up' with the flow of events, and now seem to turn a blind eye toward any attempt to "make meaning" of those islands of information.
We are polled on every topic for which a client is prepared to paid...and that seems like most topics.
We are watched by cameras, now so sophisticated that they will be able to sense "aberrant" behaviour prior to a terrorist attack, and thereby create even more potential customers.
We are digitized by every transaction, so much so that we have become a virtual "transaction" and no longer a human being, so great is the appetite for the digits each transaction generates.
Facebook has just received a $500 million infusion of capital and a valuation of some $50 billion as a global source of human data digits, so that marketers can mine this "wealth" (or seen from another perspective, this exposure of our privacy) and the number of users of the technology has grown to 600 million worldwide.
It is not new wealth that we are generating through the financial services sector, merely selling off bad debts to unsuspecting buyers, and creating "faux" money...while we have sacrificed real thought and real action to its digital substitute.
Little wonder then, that world leaders are powerless to take collective action to eliminate poverty, for example, or to create learning opportunities for children, or to generate necessary health care treatments in the face of national budgets directed to the purchase of arms, at a rate of 50% of the budget, as in the Sudan currently.
Little wonder that the people who are examining the work of leaders are confused about the accomplishments, and worried that good money may be going after bad, and worried that they might be losing, or have already lost, the necessary leverage to bring the ship (of state) back on course.
We are drowning in minutiae, of our own generation, and narcissistically, we continue to pour more and more private information into the public media, so that we can be known, and understood and recognized.
Seems a little sad, from this vantage point.
In their book, Fallout: The True Story of the CIA's Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking,
Catherine Collins (Author) and Douglas Frantz (Author), the authors point out that the CIA was, in their view, far more interested in 'more information than in action' with respect top their pursuit of Dr. Khan of Pakistan, the physicist who stole nuclear secrets from the Netherlands, and whom the Netherlands Security forces were embarrassed about, and asked the CIA to enter the picture. Only, instead of acting, back in 1973, when the CIA first learned of Khan's theft and later sale of the secrets and the centrifuges necessary for the production of nuclear fissile material necessary for nuclear weapons, to Libya, Iran and North Korea, the CIA wanted more and more information, and refused to bring Khan down.
If Collins and Frantz are even close to being right in their assessment of the CIA's approach to Khan, then the world owes another debt to the U.S. for the illegal and illicit transmission of nuclear secrets from the Pakistani 'doctor' to the rogue states because of the CIA's 'addiction to information over action' (the author's words not mine, in their interview with NPR's Fresh Air, aired on January 4, 2010).
Just as we all owe another debt  to the U.S. for weapons of mass destruction being conveyed to then ally of the U.S., Saddam Hussein in Iraq, under President Reagan, we see the finger prints, and the footprints of the U.S. on the wrong side of history, once again.
Another example of the failure of information when it was too gross to confront:
(quoting from John Ralston Saul's book, The Collapse of Globalism, p. 135)...
...a genocide took place in Rwanda. Half a million to a million people were killed. The developed world did not move. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer sent by the United Nations to command a minute force, has said that he consider this inaction pure racism, in particular the stalling at the Security Council. The vagueness surrounding the number murdered is in itself interesting.
We live in a world of statistics: measuring growth, productivity, height, longevity, money markets from every angle, increases in obesity, frewuency of orgasms, divorces, vegtables eaten. Yet no one seems to know or care whether half a million Rwandans were massacred.
The Rwandan genocide rolled right on into the Congo catastrophe: 4.7 million people died between 1998 and 2003. Or was it 3.4 million? Or 5.6?
Where were all the powerful forces of economic inevitability during these disasters? Where was Western leadership? They were busy speaking with confidence about Globalization while large parts of the world were in an accelerated political meltdown marked by terrifying levels of nationalist violence.