Shades of fascism haunt Trump's candidacy

Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, outlined three principles of a fascist philosophy:

1)    “Everything in the state”.. The Government is supreme and the country is all-encompassing, and all within it must conform to the ruling body, often a dictator.

2)    “Nothing outside the state”. The country must grow and the implied goal of any fascist nation is to rule the world, and have every human submit to the government.

3)    “Nothing against the state”.. Any type of questioning the government is not to be tolerated. If you do not see thing our way, you are wrong. If you do not agree with the government, you cannot be allowed to live and taint the minds of the rest of the good citizens.

The use of militarism was implied only as a means to accomplish one of the three above principles, mainly to keep the people and ret o the world in line. Fascist countries are known for their harmony and lack of internal strife. There are no conflicting parties or elections in fascist countries.      (From the Urban Dictionary)

Although there is no evidence that Trump is a fascist, there are more and more academics, with brains larger and much better trained than this scribe’s, who are warning of the arrival of fascism through the Trump campaign for the White House. Typically taking the “high road” and maintaining a perpetual smile, President Obama, on the other hand, is merely pointing out how he cannot, and he trusts the American people will not, take Trump seriously.

In coffee shops, in public businesses, and even on the street, the question, “What do you think of the American election?” is being voiced in all kinds of company. And, even for people living outside the United States, without the “vote” in the presidential election, the drama playing itself out on the television shows, on twitter, and in the tabloids, is generating both guffaws of incredible laughter and a shared collective tightening of both the eyes and the lips for many people.

Trump has the habit of pummelling, albeit verbally, every one and any one who criticizes him, his gutter tongue, his brazen misogyny, racism and insufferable arrogance. That kind of scene is and has been repeated for months, demonstrating for those still living under a rock the unqualified truth that this man is not fit to be the leader of the free world. However, there are accompanying signs of political attitudes and words and behaviour that are aided and abetted, if not actually originated, supported and funded by the Trump forces that endanger both democracy and the American political culture.

One example of the steroid-infested rhetoric that burps out of the media came yesterday from the Senior Senator from Arizona: John McCain. He told the world that there was no chance, absolutely no chance, that the Senate (presumably controlled by Republicans) would ever approve any appointment to the Supreme Court from a (presumed) President Hillary Clinton. This follows a theme expressed by the “Donald” himself when he declared that Hillary should be in jail, and that, if elected, he would ask his Attorney General to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate her, with a view to sending her to jail.

Another irresponsible utterance from Trump concerns the “rigged election” and the command for his supporters to ‘oversee’ the polling stations to ensure that voter fraud is not rampant. Not only does this utterance completely disagree with the overwhelming evidence that there is very little voter fraud, it also undermines the confidence in the American political system at home and around the world. Furthermore, it suggests that should Trump lose the election, he will mount a serious campaign, urged on, funded and given voice and likely street protesters, to challenge the results of the election in any of the various theatres he could attempt to “purchase” and thereby to control.

Trump so positions himself in a “mode” that would position him, as president, as the embodiment of the “state” and thereby approximate the three postulates of Mussolini and thereby justify whatever actions the one-man omnipotent ruler might take.

·      Build a wall!

·      Keep all Muslims out, especially those from Syria and Iraq, (although the vetting process is considered the most rigorous and fool-proof in history…

·      Inflict a secret campaign against IRIS, since he “knows better than the Generals” how to fight the war against terror

·      Fix the problem of the lack of “law and order” in the streets, as if he has some superior, even Superman insight about how to reconcile two hundred years of racial tensions in his homeland

·      Fix the horrible problems of the Veterans Affairs Administration, once again as if by his mere command the world of entrenched and dysfunctional bureaucracy will suddenly and magically be transformed….

·      Make China stop manipulating its currency (by himself)

·      Gut NATO (by himself)

·      Bring jobs back to the United States (by his own actions)

·      Destroy ISIS (through his own control of the military, the intelligence and the Middle East)

·       

These are not statements of policy; they are rather pronouncements of one who sees the state and his person as one, who proposes to rule as a solitary and superman ruler, given his persistent slandering of all individuals and groups who express opposition to him.

Why would Trump stoop to learn:

·      the nuances of the history of any file,

·      the parameters of any legislation,

·      the limits of the constitution, the commitments of any treaty,

·      the expectations of any ally or even the various and differing perceptions and positions of the various political interests at home and around the world,

·       the requirements of a planet bending under the weight of global warming and climate change…

when, in his own mind (the place of residence of the only universe that has any reality for that mind), he has no need, and no responsibility, and no respect for any idea, person, policy or option than whatever his mind dictates.

And it is that last word, dictates, the spectre of a single person having the absolute power, in a nation that has a long and honoured history of seeking to ‘perfect’ a democratic union, that so enflames both Trump’s supporters and his many opponents.

And when the issue of this male’s relations with women, with humility, with grace and dignity, with listening, with collaboration and with the exciting and humbling experience of learning is poured into the pot of his candidacy for the most powerful political office in the world, then there is no surprise that the people around the world are made even more anxious than they might have been prior to his vacuous emulation of some mythic Hercules, or Achilles….

Trump’s Achilles’ heel cannot be defined by his “heel”… it is his whole person that betrays him, his proposals and potentially the country he is pretending to lead.

And whether he wins or loses the election on November 8, the world is not finished with his incarnation of the empty and loud megaphone of the Barnum and Bailey circus. Trump is both the hawker and the freak-show inside the American tent, in a land so currently bi-polarized between the elevation of his “promises” and the desperation of the people who drink his kool-aid that it will take consistent and creative and compassionate empathy to heels its gaping psychic troubles. 

Reflections on McLuhan's picture of "our age of anxiety"

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts. (Marshall McLuhan)

Although he has been deceased for decades (he died in 1980), there continues to be much truth in McLuhan’s insight. Positing his “the medium is the message” ironic twist to a previous truth (the content was the message) McLuhan awakened both anxiety and amazement than most Canadian intellectual giants. Radio and film, as 'hot' media, focusing on a single sense, and spoon-feeding the audience, as compared with comic books, a cool medium, in their engaging of the audience, formed a template created by the media 'guru' that has been at the centre of his work for decades. 

 Beginning with a new kind of literacy, the kind that “read” images, as compared with words, McLuhan pioneered a fresh approach to the education fraternity, in an attempt to help students adjust to a world barely known to their teachers. We grew up with “hard copy” books, poems, short stories, plays and newsprint. There were movies, but they had barely begun to be considered part of the corpus of “world literature”. They were still thought of more as “entertainment.”

 It was in 1969 that I bought my first 8 mm camera, (a Vivitar), enrolled in a “history of film” course, and attempted to produce and direct a highly amateurish movie version of George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984 in a grade twelve “tech” class of eighteen-year-old male students. Such courses were rare entries in university calendars, and the instructor came from Vancouver as a summer lecturer. There were some fifty films included in the syllabus of that course, including Citizen Cane, and The Triumph of the Will, the propaganda piece on the Fuehrer, by Leni Reifenstahl. 

Such “technical” aspects as camera angles, lighting, sound effects including the musical score, lens types (gauze, wide angle, close-up), film speed that examined the frames per second, (the larger the number the slower the pace of the film, and vice versa), and “transitional edits” were among the features we learned to look for, and take our baby steps in trying to appreciate their meaning, purpose and impact. There was a sense of adventure in exploring a medium that depended on the viewer’s capacity and openness to assimilate the montage of images that flowed past the eye, the mind, the psyche and the heart.

Having been a radio ‘nut’ in my youth, and experiencing my first exposure to television in the Spring of the year I left for university (1959), I had a much more attentive “ear” to radio sounds and popular music than I did to cameras and photo images. I cannot remember if there was even one course in film studies at the university during my undergrad years. (I doubt it!)

So, the transition, and transformation that happens when a culture’s focus moves from books and paper, radio and the telephone to television and photographic images, as the staple of both entertainment and learning experiences, while not nearly as dramatic as the current cultural transformation from television and typewriters and hot lead print to digital images, and the technological hardware and software that drive them. Nevertheless, it was the wave that the North American culture rode in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century.

Remember the first televised presidential debate took place in the campaign between Kennedy and Nixon in the 1960 race for the White House. There have been presidential historians who have speculated that F.D.R., confined to his wheel chair would have had considerable difficulty being elected once let alone three times, if he had had to use television rather than radio to campaign. So just imagine the gulf that has been crossed since that first televised debate, to the twitter universe, facebook, snapchat and all of the other myriad of platforms available throughout the world today.

McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ would have to be completely re-thought today. 

And if we were to take a first look, very superficially, we would be somewhat chagrined that the medium of twitter/facebook etc. might be the message, and not the minimal and often seriously impaired ‘verbal” content of those platforms. Of course, it will take another generation or two to fully comprehend and fully appreciate the potential of these digital media, although their ubiquitous use now is being used as one of the defining features of a nation’s notion of individual freedoms and rights. So in that sense, the access to the new media is part of the message of political freedom, and thereby citizen opportunity.

For those of us who spent decades at the front of English classes, we are deeply saddened at the near total loss of the capacity to spell, and to read beyond the literal and the denotative level of language, not to mention the almost complete abandonment of the “cursive” ability to write one’s own name for school children. It they want to learn how to ‘write’ (cursive) they enrol in something called “calligraphy” as an “art” option since it is no longer an integral part of the “regular” (compulsory) curriculum.

Although legibility is less problematic, a feature that removes considerable anxiety from the practice of drug dispensaries, doctors’ writing being almost beyond readable, the montage of both letters and imogees and photos both still and streaming is generating what could easily be considered a completely new way of communicating.

Such communication also separates the millennials from their parents and their grandparents, since the latter generations would be able to “translate” only fragments of the message. “Rap” too, another melange of sound, rhythm, emotion, body language and political rhetoric, represents another “new language” in our contemporary culture. (One has to wonder how much time people preparing to enter the law enforcement profession spend learning how to read, listen to and interpret/translate “rap”!)

Have you noticed too the use of repetition, (to our ears, ad nauseum) in many of the popular tunes played on commercial radio, on ITunes, Utube and the other music platforms? A single phrase repeated up to twenty times in the space of thirty seconds hardly qualifies as a serious and creative use of music composition.

Yet, a tweet should not be the primary tool of communication for a presidential candidate either! So much for nuance, subtlety, the mastery of complicated files and the intellectual timbre that was historically considered a minimal requirement for serious contention for high public office. They are all relegated to the museum in the current political climate.

And it is not only adjusting to the new languages of the digital technology that brings McLuhan to mind. It is also the growing gap between the current laws and conventional cultural expectations of ordinary citizens in a world in which such massive shifts of capital, labour, intelligence and the environment have almost completely rendered political and legal and professional organizations out of touch and out of step with the responsibilities they are charged with fulfilling. The more suction and storage capacity we develop and deploy to manage information, including metadata, the larger grows the gap between those in charge of both the collection, storage and interpretation, not to mention the dissemination of that information. Body cameras, security cameras on the street corners of many cities, thumb prints and iris images as marks of one’s identity as just the tip of the iceberg of the gap in both content awareness and power differentials between ordinary people and the “establishment” whose access to the secrets entombed in those many vaults, on those many hard drives is unfettered, compared with the “public” access, awareness and inclusion in the new circle of “knowing”.

This gap between those who “know” and those who will never “know” even what they do not know, inevitably generates a deficit of trust, seemingly even a hollow cave empty of trust, and thereby of confidence among ordinary people. There is a case to be made that this gap between those “inside” and those “outside” the circle of the public discourse, normally considered to be filled with a set of agreed pieces of information, as well as a conventional method of making sense of the patterns of that date, is one of the serious impediments between those in the various institutional “establishments” and the people who send them there, whether by vote or indirectly by appointment through the normal channels of the elected representatives.

Everyone knows and agrees that the pace of new technological developments has already outpaced our human capacity to absorb, to assimilate and to adjust to a purposeful and a meaningful relationship between our lives and the new technology. All of us are playing catch-up and will be for the rest of our lives. Even though our children and grandchildren have and will continue to spend far more time in front of their “screens” doing all of the various things they can do (and this list is growing daily) than we will, they will experience a kind of scepticism about the gap between their perception and comprehension of the world and our’s. The normal gap between individual perceptions and world views is not under consideration here. It is the cultural gap, the conception of the universe that comes from the capacity to “talk” and to “see” anyone anywhere in real time, through the technology of the chip, along with all of the other “transactions” that are possible in all of the other spheres of human existence, that comprises a generational separation that could rival the shift from agriculture to industrial cultures.

Another shift in both perception and conception of the world is the shift to a nano-second as the normal unit of time, compared with a former university lecture “hour” of fifty minutes, a laboratory session of two hours. Meals are often punctuated by cell phone or tablet messages, thereby rendering the family dinner table vulnerable to a new way of being in the same room. “Presence” can no longer be considered in the manner of only a few decades, a time period of being with another, that frequently knew no limits, or at least rather loose time limits.

Another implication of the idolatry contemporary culture displays in its worship of the new technology is the sound of the suction of millions of people from the pews, the choir lofts, the organs and the pulpits on thousands of churches. Accompanying this suction is the silence that fills the collection plates in those same sanctuaries, and the ca-ching of the real estate deals completing the sales of those historic pieces of architecture from the churches to the new land-developers.

While there is greatly enhanced opportunity for everyone to apprentice their “photo” skills and talent, and thereby the visual literacy of the next generations will inevitably be significantly better than was/is our’s, the kind of potential human connection, community if you like, seems to be threatened, at least in the physical sense. How can anyone be fully present to a face-to-face conversation when those encounters are constantly interrupted by the invasion of some too often vacuous message on a digital device? The short answer is, “You can’t!”

While it is truism of the capitalist world that “they require stability” and “constancy” and a sense of what are the rules, people too rely on some semblance of normalcy, stability, constancy and predictability. These qualities rely to a considerable extent on getting to know ourselves, on getting to know and experience a few others, both family and friends, and on spending time “with” others. Flitting like gnats from text to text and twitter to twitter, from utube song to utube song, and from email to email, (although the latter take at least a few minutes to “write”) is hardly the stuff of community, connection, relationship-building and feeling an integral part of something that is outside of and bigger than one’s self.

A basketball team, a swimming team, a hockey team….they are all worthy activities, and kids need them still. It is the time away from ‘scheduled’ time, away from competing for marks, competing for part-time jobs, competing for championships,,,just hanging out together than could be one of the prices of our new technology whose size and significance we will not begin to know until another few decades of digitization have stamped their feet on our psyches.

A modest proposal to shift governance from reactivity to proactive prevention

There is something wrong with this picture!

Every-time a whistle-blower cries foul, the corporation, government agency, or other employer, or offending party cries foul even more loudly. A “disgruntled employee” or a “troublemaker” or “his work record was tarnished by several negative reports” (so this latest outburst is merely revenge!)…or whatever counter-claim seems to fit the need of the loud and well financed power.

And, in the political campaign, the “fact-checkers,” literally thousands of little beavers are busily digging into archives, video tapes, digital newspapers, and transcripts of specific facts, in order to demonstrate the “soothsayer” who uttered the outrageous statements is shown to be distorting, misrepresenting or actually lying…on a one-by-one, case-by-case basis.

Similarly, when a corporation’s product is demonstrated to be faulty, just by a single consumer, even one who has been injured by, in, or as a result of using, that product, the producer of the product cries foul, begging coverage by the “legal requirements” under which the product has been produced.

Case-by-case basis….single incidents….these by themselves rarely gather the kind of attention that would accompany the “canary in the coal mine” impact of noxious gases for underground workers, although even there, the “big boys” refuse to accept responsibility, accountability and liability and many lives have been sacrificed to that institutional denials, and omissions.

Power, through dollars, through political influence, through the purchase of expensive legal teams, and through the skillful and highly paid public relations “experts” nearly always swamps the voice that cries foul. The tobacco industry pushed back for decade, perhaps even longer that their produce could not be proven to cause cancer, even when they knew there was incontrovertible evidence that it did, and does and will continue to. Occasionally, a company will have to pay reparations, apologize and try to “move forward” that “magic” phrase by which all tragedies are supposed to be shoved into the vault of history.

A single clergy suicide, too, will never provoke the kind of critical self-examination among church authorities that would seek to and determine to uncover the culture in which such an event occurred. The “responsibility” will always rest exclusively on the perpetrator/victim, when we all know that the context, culture and ambience contributed.

 There is a genuine clashing of gears in this model. If we are conditioned (as we are) to render first reports of trouble as nothing to worry about, something to be ignored, denied, and snow-plowed into the ditch of public opinion, simply because of a cultural “convention” and perception, we participate in the potential of a really serious and potentially endemic issue going unattended at our peril. The model also encourages the “big boys” to adopt that old mantra, “It is better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission” for an act or a series of actions that are known to be harmful. Knowing they area creating a potential problem, they are already engaged in the process of preparing their “damage control” public relations campaign to minimize the damage.

And this model also stems, at least theoretically, from a religious model of sin and forgiveness, a model that, if warranted, and originally applied to relations between man and God, and between one human and another, is not appropriate in the larger public sphere. In a private relationship, in which two are engaged, there is ‘full frontal” (borrowing from Samantha Bee) confrontation, push back and checks on one’s attitudes, behaviours and words. Such a direct engagement is not available in the public arena, where the “fourth estate” is the public servant attempting to serve as public advocate, in the face of unethical behaviour by the political class and the mega-corporations, including the universities, the churches, the hospitals the military and the government, including the individual actors in these theatres.

Malfeasance among the political class, the corporations and the public institutions is rarely accidental, and yet it confronts us like a new enemy, an enemy with which the political class is incestuously embedded. We cannot afford to have the institutions setting the standards of expected ethical behaviour for our children, without the energized, vocal and committed and persistent public cry for better governance of the “powerful”.  They are now so large, so rich and so powerful (as they are also the source of retirement funds for millions, who desperately need the stock values to continue to rise) that both their innocence and their “legal status” as individual human beings can no longer be tolerated.

Governments themselves, are not the benchmark of ethical standards either, given their primary purpose of retaining their own power. Their access to public funds, and to the levers of power on how to spend those dollars, discreet from those funds raised on behalf of a specific political party, is now so influential, and their impunity from both disclosure and thereby from accountability (in four years a lot of damage to public policy can and too often does occur behind closed doors, as it has in Canada under Harper), that we have to re-think how we are governed. (And proportional representation will not solve this conundrum!)

Habeus corpus, that venerated legal maxim of “innocent until proven guilty” must be preserved, for individuals and for corporations. However, it is the “oversight” issue that needs to be strengthened by both legislation and public funding. The power of the public purse has to be equal to, if not superior to the fiscal vaults of the millions of corporations whose wealth and political influence far exceeds that of many legitimate governments. We not only have to rescind “citizens united” that opened the gates of political campaigns to private and corporate dollars. We also need to accept the fact that only public money can be used for political campaigns, thereby levelling the playing field for all candidates (who would receive an equal amount of public funds, and by limited to another amount of private donations). It is time to cut the billionaires and the millionaires of out the exclusive ‘right’ to seek public office and/or to drive the political agenda of the nation with their cheques.

It is also time to overhaul the way we think about public oversight, public prosecution, public capacity to hold witnesses accountable, as if they were appearing in a court of law. We need far more oversight, not only of the intelligence community, but also of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, the military manufacturing industry, the “water” industry ( companies like Nestle must be prohibited from raping the natural resource of drinking water, and profiting from its sale). And we need the journalism schools and the law schools to design a joint curriculum in which graduates will be able to ask the tough questions, knowing the parameters of the law.

 It is not enough to protect democracy, now that is has raged out of control before our eyes, and with our silent complicity, that we have a fourth estate attempting to keep the conversation balanced in terms of air time and column inches for competing interests, and to keep the “facts” straight, although those boundaries are necessary. We need a public voice long before the political class even receives its first vote. We need to fund the public broadcasters like the CBC and PBS, and the private media outlets have to be first encouraged and then mandated to hire, retain and support investigative reporters in major fields like national security, environment, public health, natural resources, and fiscal management. (The Office of Budget Management (U.S.) and the Auditor General (in Canada) and a single Ethics Commissioner (in some municipal, provincial and national governments) are no longer adequate to protect the “public interest.” It is not a presumption of guilt that drives these observations and proposals. It is the new reality of how personal, government and corporate privacy is being hacked, and how we have access to public information that was never available in the public arena when the “oversight” function was created.

The notion of “prevention” as opposed to the notion of “criminal or ethic charges” after the fact has to drive the shift in “governance.” Although there is no “sex appeal” in the pubic policy and practice of “prevention” of issues, it is a highly valued way of thinking and governing. For example,just today two Northern Saskatchewan communities are reeling over the death by suicide of three young girls under the age of fifteen. Rushing in psychologists, after the fact, and sending others of the twenty who are deemed to be “at risk” to large cities for ‘help’ is such a pathetic example of how cleaning up messes after they occur only betrays our shared complicity in failing to take the necessary steps to “PREVENT” such despair.

It does not take a ‘philadelphia lawyer’ to discern that conditions in all First Nations communities are so desperate that it should surprise no one that young people would see no hope and consider suicide as their only option to end the pain.

There is an old adage about children falling into a rushing river, with hordes of people pulling them out, below the falls into which they slipped. Many of us have asked, repeatedly, why are more people (and resources) not dedicated to preventing them from falling in in the first place. And this shift in the archetype of governance, prevention and proactivity, including the institutional muscle that would make such proactivity authentic, is so glaringly needed, in order to bring about a geopolitical shift in modus operandi about the global issues that are going unanswered, unattended and threatening to swallow us all.

It is no longer enough for any government to focus primarily on the “budget” issues of their term in power. They must be held accountable, and seen to be holding themselves accountable through a vigorous and invasive media coverage on all the important files supported and enhanced by institutional “oversight” paid for, legislated for and sustained by the kind of political action to which no respectable party can turn a deaf ear.

Not only is “prevention” and proactivity in the governance of the governing necessary. It is also a time when the public needs more and not less information about the global patterns, forces, both good and evil, that are emerging in the various world capitals, and hinterlands. Consequently, private and public media outlets must expand, and not contract their teams of foreign correspondents. This is especially true when the issues we are facing increasingly do not respect national boundaries. When we learn that Britain is now leaving the European Union, and then learn that Italy is on the brink of bankruptcy and potentially leaving the EU, and Scotland has announced a second referendum on leaving Great Britain, we all need to know the implications of these moves, not only for the countries involved, and for the EU, but also for the world community.

Climate change, for example, and the global warming that coms with it, generated by the activities of human beings, is not reducible to a single storm, drought, fire, or hurricane or tornado. However, cumulatively, there is little doubt among those with both brains and research banks far larger than mine that we are quickly moving into the danger zone on the multiple impacts of this phenomenon.

Similarly, corporate malfeasance can no longer be considered on a case-by-case basis if the cumulative impact is going to be assessed. It costs billions in individual corporate losses, both in production and distribution costs, as well as in insurance costs and in the cost of departing investors when a company produces a faulty product, as well as in the loss of the reputation of the country in which the factory or service is generated, a loss for which the whole country will eventually pay, and pay dearly.

Fact checking too, as is so clearly obvious in the current presidential campaign, can no longer be documented on a case-by-case basis, for the simply reason that such a method permits and even fosters a collective memory lapse, as well as a kind of inferred impunity on the part of the liar, thereby exacerbating the situation.

Leadership, in a culture of political chaos and change, requires new ways of thinking, new ways of conceiving the situations we face. No longer will the band-aids of public relations after the facts have imploded, after the globe’s climate has so impaled the planet, after the governments have pushed their “envelop” (as all practitioners of power can and will do, increasingly the longer they have that power), after the teens have terminated their lives, after the children of Flint have been so permanently damaged intellectually, physically, emotionally through their consumption of lead-poisoned water.#

Having descended to the public gutter on so many fronts, with public officials demonstrating their own bravado in insulting the public with both lies and then denials, with overspending in inappropriate projects, with inflicting abusive power on innocent people, and with distorting the real dangers with impunity…it is time to reflect, individually and collectively, in all countries about how power is being abused, not only on the innocent children whose parents are charged with child abuse, but with public policies and actions that aggressively seek to prevent all abuses of power in each and every community.

It is no longer acceptable for public leaders to cover their asses,  and announce headline-grabbing stories, while, behind the curtain of public knowledge and awareness, many serious issues remain unaddressed, and those same political leaders continue to retain power simply through the cash support of their ideological benefactors.

Ideology is no longer an adequate identifier for political aspirations. Survival of both the political systems, including the democratic institutions, and the planet are now on the horizon of all thinking, sentient and increasingly rebellious people. We deserve and demand better!

#  A Michigan resident reminded me this week that hundreds of towns and cities across North America that have used and continue to use lead pipes for their water supply, without replacing them with safe pipes, so in his view millions of others are also in danger of water poisoning in the same way as those living in Flint.

The erosion of human dignity in a transactional, narcisstic culture

But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. ….Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced  back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytic couch. (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

Usefulness, achievement nihilism and commodification….turning all encounters into a buyer-seller exchange and teaching that purpose can be achieved through the acquisition of money and all that money buys….these are the traits of a culture mired in its own self-sabotage. None of this implies, infers, nor even connotes human dignity*. And there is no guarantee of one’s dignity as a concomitant of “achievement” especially if it is a dignity defined by “roles” and role playing.

(While nihilism may have been prominent on many university campuses when Frankl was writing, there is considerable evidence that, as they morphed into ‘training schools’ preparing their students for some job with varying levels of  skill demands, that nihilism has also morphed into an even more empty quality, “the pursuit of personal wealth and power.)

I first learned about dignity, although at the time I would not even have know the word, from watching my father, a hardware store manager (not owner!) who simply lived his life and his role as one, honouring all others, engaging all others on their terms, and demonstration a degree of patience, tolerance and respect beyond what most would consider normal, and thereby earning the warranted honour and respect of everyone who met and knew him.

In Canada, as in other countries, an introduction to a person is almost always accompanied by the cliché question, “What do you do?” as if the knowledge of this information is the essential key to getting to know that person. And, after that, the stereotyping, and the pigeon-holing, and the conscious and even the unconscious comparisons start between that person and every other person we know we wears that vocational hat. A person in the military or in law enforcement will too often be dubbed as authoritarian, while a clergy will be painted as dull, boring, dumb and passive, and possibly too compassionate, while a teacher will be depicted as nit-picking, micro-managing, controlling and dominant. A doctor suffers from the incurable stereotype of ambitious and rich, while not necessarily being all that interested in helping heal others.  A lawyer, sadly, is so disfigured into the ambitious, ambulance-chasing, social-climber who represents the dramatic actor of the society, given the need to perform before the judge and jury.

While none of these stereotypes are totally false, neither are they complete. They are, rather, our reduction and simplification of the “role” of the model with which we are most familiar, a familiarity gleaned from the sometimes deliberate and often off-hand remarks of our parents, neighbours, teachers, coaches and friends. To a certain extent, their world is almost imperceptibly passed along to us, much as a cold virus would be, without our being conscious of the ingestion. Occasionally, there will be an example of a “role” in the community that nearly all the people will consider to be the antithesis of the stereotype. There is no community that is  immune to the caricatures, stick people, black sheep and even tempermental individuals who wear the costumes and play the part of these “achievers.”

There is, however, a kind of security in operating inside the professional “boundaries” of the roles, expectations that are shared with most communities, with the bodies licensing the practitioners, and the traditions already established by the previous personnel who each contributed to the culture of the role. Of course, over time, there will be the inevitable shifts sometime mere nuances, that move the expectations, the conventions and the rules in each role. Security, however, is no substitute for dignity; in fact, the kind of security that effective “role playing” provides may well impede, repress or even obliterate the pursuit of one’s dignity.

However, there is a significant danger in the potential for ordinary citizens to drape their pictures of a ‘good’ practitioner in any of the respective roles, projecting his or her unique model of either excellence or its opposite. And that is certainly not the only danger.

Another danger is the real potential for individuals themselves, once having donned the “role,” to hide behind its stereotype, and to shrink from coming “out” with opinions for which the community might retaliate. If there is not a specific financial loss for taking a public stance on a specific public policy issue, there could well be significant and negative consequences for the “reputation” of the outspoken practitioner. In addition, the circle of influence in which s/he lives and operates will rarely get to know the person hidden under the mask of the role.

Sometimes the role might even be a “husband” or “wife” or “neighbour” who guards his privacy even from his or her closest family and friends. And there is an inevitable and rarely dissipated estrangement from people, mothers, fathers, sons daughters, sisters, brothers, cousins, nephews, nieces when the role is all the rest of the world is permitted to see, and when the individual substitutes the role for “showing up”…as the full, authentic, unguarded and vulnerable person he or she really is.

After spending a day of ‘orientation’ to the business school in a renowned Canadian university, I commented to one of the university’s retired professors, “There is a lot of social engineering going on on that campus.” He confirmed the observation, underlining his words with, “especially in the business school.”

In fact, so dangerous is this strippng of the dignity of the individual that many people are either unable or unwilling to distinguish their mask from their ego. And to a large extent, the world will let them be, in the suffocation of their own cocoon, whether that cocoon is conscious and deliberate or unconscious and unknown.

We all know people like this, from the simply experience of being with them and looking into their eyes, and seeing not the far-off gaze of one who is preoccupied with an important question, but the vacant and empty look of eyes that have almost literally glazed over, as a kind of contrived armour, keeping the world at bay.

Dignity, on the other hand, involves a state of genuine comfort in one’s own skin, a sense of who we are as a human being, sentient, curious, engaged, expressing the real emotions of the moment, regardless of their impact on the situation and cognizant of the full presence of each other person in the room, not merely their role, or their mask, or even the reductions bandied about among colleagues. The role is a kind of entrapment, often precluding change, when we all know that we are changing each and every day, whether anyone notices or not, and whether or not even we make note of the changes.

Fathers often become mere “cheques” in the family, just another way of being ghosted by the rest of the family, especially if the father does not protest. Mothers, too, are often reduced to the kind of care-givers they were obliged to be when their children were in diapers, long after those same children have graduated from grad school.

There are those among you, dear readers, who will vigorously defend the generation of stereotypes, “role models” for the younger generation, as a protector and guarantor of social stability, law and order and a general attitude of respect for the traditions of a shared past. And while there is merit in that observation, when the individuals who break out of the stereotypes, who re-draw the expectations of those stereotypes, who cannot be ‘contained’ within the boundaries of those boxes of the expectations of others, who are the most interesting and the most challenging and the most “alive”. And if and when those “outcasts” are trashed, demeaned and alienated from the “professions” and the main street, the culture grows a little more sterile.

And when the culture grows a little more sterile, then governments are more able and more likely to “snow” their citizens, without worry of public uprising or protest. The culture is predicated on the achievement of the bottom line, after a complicit race to the “bottom” in which everything, everyone and every encounter has a price tag. In such a culture, human beings, with dignity, rarely participate in encounters and exchanges with authenticity and respect and dignity, that dignity that is dependent on each individual having his or her own, and having that dignity honoured and respected as a cultural norm.

And there are so many ways in which this transactional foundation of the culture play out. Most obvious is the total predatory attitude to women incarnated by the Republican candidate for president. And while that may be one of the more heinous dangers, there are others:

·      the hundreds of bullets fired into the bodies and the heads of innocent young men, and

·      the hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women, and

·      the boiled water advisories on literally hundreds of First Nations reserves, and

·      the unemployment and underemployment of hundreds of thousands of mostly men, and

·      the growing lines at food banks and shelters for the homeless and

·      the failure of the “great powers” to take legitimate responsibility for their complicity and their brutality in places like Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine and

·      the sell-out of the main street media in treating Trump as a “ratings magnet” (as well as an ISIL recruitment magnet) for their own self-aggrandizement and

·      the abdication of political responsibility for addressing the growing danger of global warming and climate change….

And this list could go on and on, all of it easily and legitimately traced back to a failed notion of the human being, as a mere cog in the machine of business, government, the military and the media.

Clearly the revival of human dignity as a quality inherent to all people, as considered and practiced by all people, would not solve all of our culture's many pressing issues. However, as a starting point for healthy human develoment, parenting and education, it would significantly shift the public discourse, and thereby support real "humane" solutions.

Frankl would be dismayed at the extent to which his foreshadowing has become the new norm.

*Merriam-Webster dictionary definition:  the quality or state of being worthy of honor and respect 

Family issues must be front page news...not relegated to the "family" pages

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home. (Confucius)

One morning in another life a grade twelve student met me at the door of my classroom holding his report card in his hand. As a student whose first language was not English, he had received a grade of 58% in the average of his term work and his examination. He was adamant that such a mark was unacceptable. I listened carefully to his petition; reviewed his work and informed him that the mark would stand.

I later learned that the mark had been “deleted” (back in the non-digital age, ‘white-out’ was the rather obvious choice for deletions) so that his parents could not see the truth. Pride, parental expectations and evidence of personal shame, completely unjustified by the diligence and the persistence the student displayed to learn a new language, were at the root of the situation. Deception was the choice of method to deal with the perceived problem.

There are so many different “reasons” for both children and parents resorting to deception, cover-up, dissembling, and failing to “show up” as we really are.

Basic to the dynamic of deception in the family is the varying reliance on “pride” that accompanies too many situations. If the family is engaged in alcohol dependence, or domestic or child abuse, it is taken as a “given” that family secrets have to be protected, at all costs. Even the closest of friends, neighbours, fellow pew-sitters, co-workers, and classmates must not and do not ever learnt the truth of the tragedy. In fact, too often, even within the family, certain members will not be made aware of the full truth, thereby “protecting” both the abuser and the one kept in the dark from quite literally having a relationship. No relationship is feasible without a full disclosure among close family members. And the refusal to disclose, including the unwillingness, and the incapacity to disclose, as well as the fear of such disclosure (another piece of evidence that is often overlooked in any analysis) lies at the heart of the issue.

While T.S. Eliot reminds us that we cannot stand too much reality, nevertheless, it is the degree of withholding that too often determines the kind of foundation on which family relationships are constructed. For a young twenty-something to drive her car into a snowbank on the way home from a house party, without injuring any of the occupants or damaging the car, without having the courage, and the openness to inform her single mother, as a way of protecting both herself and her mother, is to demonstrate a degree of enmeshment that warrants critical self-examination. For an adolescent male to put long sleeve shirts on every day before leaving for school, to cover up the welts inflicted by his mother, is what many might call a merely incidental incidence, not worthy of consideration as a serious family issue. Those who hold such a view, however, are not, were not, and cannot image being in the “shoes” of the adolescent. For the adolescent, one of the questions is ‘why is this abuse occurring only when my father is not present, and is not being told?’

We do have some examples of public disclosure that, although they are often relegated to the social columns, nevertheless merit a reference. President Obama, for one, stopped smoking cigarettes six years ago, “because he so feared his wife’s response” if he failed to stop. On the other hand, for Trump to have to apologize to his family for having said what he said, and for what he has done, and not said, is loudly displayed as fodder in the current presidential election. So the issue of truth-telling is front and centre in the public discourse in North America, and perhaps around the world.

No child or adolescent can or will tell his or her parents everything about their lives: not the first time a car drives into a ditch, not the first time too much booze renders one intoxicated, not the first time some illicit drug renders him ‘high’…and yet the patterns of disclosure are begun in such situations. For some, it takes a few days, weeks or even months for them to find the confidence to disclose. And, with that time lapse, perhaps they can and do reconcile their fear, and their apprehension about the consequences of full disclosure. And the parents, themselves, are not without responsibility for the kind of family culture they have fostered over the early years. Too much pressure for control, too little relaxation and acceptance of the small “mistakes” and too much rigid discipline, all of these squarely in the purview and the job description of the parent will lead to an inevitable withholding. Parents, too, who operate at such a high performance level, (I was certainly one of these!) will inculcate a fear of not being “good enough” even though their words might be unequivocally supportive of their children.

Fear of not being “good enough,” of not being “up to the perfection” of their parents, of not being willing (or perhaps ever able) to let their parents see their “imperfections” is one of the dynamics, and a very subtle and dangerous dynamic it is) that infiltrates many professional families. How many times have we all heard the story of a young man or woman who spent most of their life trying to life up to the expectations of their parents. And, we all know that those expectations might never have been specifically articulated, but merely inferred from the actions and the attitudes of the parents to their own lives. And these attitudes are extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the child to confront. When, for example, is there time in a busy, fully scheduled, fully engaged, (over-regulated) schedule for children to participate in their various “activities” and then also to have the time and the energy and the composure to say to their parent, “You know, I am getting tired of trying to meet your unrealistic goals for my life! I would like to talk about what I want to do, and what I am willing to do and I would like to get your support for my agenda, not the one that makes you look good in front of your friends!”

Clearly, it is not only the ‘sins’ of the child that need disclosure. So do the attitudes, demands, expectations and even beliefs of the parents also need to be explored, fully and in an unqualified and unrestricted manner, in family circles. And such circles require “strong” parents, open parents, vulnerable parents and the courage to structure time and space for the family to have these conversations. And it is this family culture that I failed to facilitate in my own marriage. I was too busy “performing” on the public stage, drinking in the applause that comes from such performances. I was too dependent on public adulation to be the kind of effective and compassionate and open and vulnerable parent that my children needed and deserved. The temperature inside the home, especially the “heat” of the parental expectations, and also the parental “strength” to take the honest criticism from their children (not the phoney power games, but the real issues of too much pressure that forecloses on open communication) is critical for full disclosure.

And the time and patience required to open to our children, really open, really sit and listen, rather than burying our minds and our bodies in our own “professional agendas” as an unconscious way of medicating the pain of our own unworthiness and our determination to prove our value to “whomever” it is that we believe we have to prove ourselves to, is so ephemeral, like a butterfly, and so fleeting. And like the tennis racket that is poised at a certain angle, needing to be shifted only a fraction of an inch to get the ball over the net, parental attitudes, in too many cases, need to be shifted from achievements of power, money, status and public recognition and acknowledgements to getting to really know their children. I failed in this primary parental responsibility, and for that I have profound regrets and for that I apologize to my three daughters.

They are all professionally successful, and for that they have themselves to thank. They did it! They made their parents and their culture proud. And I can only hope that they did not do it at the cost of missing the emotional and the psychic needs of their children.

Confucius tells an important truth. Can we read the deeper implications to our culture and to our families in his observation. For far too long, family issues have been relegated to the social pages of our newspapers, where the majority of readers are women. Education, parenting and the development of a family culture, including the development of family relationships has for far too long been considered “effeminate” and the responsibility of the mother. It is long past time for editors, political leaders and fathers to learn that they obligations do not stop with the proverbial “bring home the bacon” commandment. All the bacon in the world will not feed the soul, the spirits and the hearts of their children. We need to raise the expectations on ourselves, (and to reap the rewards of our determined and disciplined shift of the “racket angle” of our goals and our agendas) and put more of our energy and our imaginations into the kind of atmosphere and the kind of warmth we bring and foster in our kitchens and our television rooms, and in our backyards, and in our camping trips.

Roots of the gift of unvarnished truth

And the eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you"; or again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, it is much truer that the members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary; and those members of the body which we deem less honorable, on these we bestow more abundant honor, and our less presentable members become much more presentable….

Taken from the book of Corinthians, this picture has impact in so many situations.

The voice of the weak, the less honourable, the less presentable….that is the voice of such basic and fundamental truth, based as it always is on a rather unvarnished examination and experience of reality, unpolished and even uneducated, untainted by the salons, the lecture halls, the sanctuaries and the board rooms. There is a story that has meandered through our family history. It concerns the Baptist clergy grandfather who, upon being confronted by his congregation with the demand that he dismiss, exclude, drive out the ‘unsavoury presence’ of the poor, the illiterate, the contemptible and the underclass from the congregation, faced them down, categorically refused their demand and faced his own dismissal, a firing on behalf of those voiceless, that continues to echo today, a full century later.

There is a refreshing candor to the world view, and the language used to relate to the world that flows from each and every utterance, unencumbered as it always is by pretense or the need to put on a face of sophistication, from the people who have struggled, scraped, gone hungry and even had to beg for much of their survival. They know when the politician and the bureaucrat, for example, resorts to obfuscation, or change the subject, or when they embellish their ‘story’ for their own personal aggrandizement and they are unimpeded by fear of rejection when they call a spade a shovel.

They have already been stripped of any vestige of status, social standing, political power and economic stature, those symbols of power and sophistication to which many have committed themselves, especially those who have entered the vaunted middle class, and seek to climb even higher. Their residence is often on the wrong side of the tracks, often without the normal conveniences of clean running water, access to a steady supply of energy for heat and light, thereby depriving their children of even the basic food and heat and light needed to engage with their homework, no matter how much or how little, in order to pursue the kind of education that might provide some hope and opportunity for a more sustainable life for any future family.

And while the political class and the policy developers consider the “poor” needing physical amenities like water, food, housing and work with dignity all of them legitimate, worthy and needed, there is a poverty of the spirit, a poverty of the range of options available to them, especially in situations of trauma, sickness, loss and even deeper depravity than most of us will ever know or experience. The poverty borne of a complete deprivation of travel, of books, movies, foods from foreign lands, of opportunities to explore various belief systems, political ideologies, and the opportunities to discuss experiences with those whose world view differs from those of the local community is infrequently mentioned when discussions develop on the needs of the poor by those with power to make changes in their lives.

There is a cultural condition that can be depicted as intellectual, emotional and even physical isolation, a hunkering down to the kind of life patterns that making a living demand. Early rising, sparse nutrition, hard labour, an even more intense fixation on the kinds of aphoristic perceptions and beliefs that characterize the history and the tradition of the neighbourhood are just some of the cultural pen strokes that tend to depict the thousands of growing ghettos in towns and cities around the world.

Historically, the ethnicity of peasant communities often comprises one or at best two cultures, leaving the rest of the world to be thought of as “foreigners.” I once met this bigotry, born of the poverty enshrined in fear, when I purchased a Japanese-manufactured car: “Oh you got one of those ‘slanty-eyes’ eh?” The speaker drove one of the muscular North American half-ton trucks, complete with tonneau-cover, the pride of his life.*

Little ‘kingdoms’ or ‘empires’ of highly restrictive and restricting clusters of mores and expectations fossilize attitudes in these towns and villages where the lives of everyone are open books to the people living there, exposing the big and the small indiscretions as worthy of condemnation, alienation and even ostracizing the miscreant. Often, underlying these judgemental attitudes is a kind of religion that can be characterized as literal, fundamental, judgemental, hard-edged, and imposed on all as a kind of template of moral and ethical rules. Sometimes, too, the religious leaders in many poor and rural communities hold inordinate power over the lives of their adherents, bleeding from the personal ‘code’ to the political party to vote for.

Naturally, those whose mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers were born in the community, are considered “insiders” and all others, even those who might take up the challenges of community leadership are, and will remain, “outsiders” who will never really belong. Their ideas, their recommendations, their honest and honourable contributions will forever be considered “suspect” and “snobbish” and “pretentious” and non-conforming to the “way we do things here.” This attitude pervades not only the towns and villages, but the churches, schools and the various organizations within the communities. There is a ‘natural’ preference of those ‘insiders’ to build (sometimes unconscious) walls of ‘tradition’ and ‘convention’ and ‘acceptability’ that greets newcomers and potentially even with conscious “exclusion” efforts, has the result of keeping newcomers and their attitudes, perspectives and suggestions ‘at bay.’

So in the spirit of John Donne who loved James and Mary and George and Jane, (individuals) while at the same time hating the “whole” community, or the group or the ‘gestalt’ of the edifice of public attitudes, perceptions, practices, and fears we each have the burden of discerning the values of individuals when they are often embedded in the public “myth” of the stereotype of the community.

And we each have the obligation of sifting through the experiential baggage of all the people we encounter, seeking to discern the unique individual character from the community “values” that have been imprinted on the individual. I was told, as an adult, that I was born in what had been known for a long time as “the most conservative town in the province.” On reflection over the ensuing decades, I have come to agree and to give witness to the rebellious attitudes within my being both to fundamental, literal and suffocating faith beliefs and practice as well as to the arrogance of politicians inside the establishment who resist and refuse to open to and to integrate new science, new ideas and new possibilities. As the inveterate “outsider” I share the mantle with those who have very little, who identify with the outcasts, who enjoy poking our fingers in the eyes of the “establishment” and who hold the “power structures” of all institutions under the most powerful microscope, scepticism and suspicion.

Doubtless, this “attitude” and perspective of scepticism, suspicion and doubt, like an “irish-spring deodorant, pervades every encounter I have with people in positions of power and responsibility. And in my own narrow perspective, I hold strongly to the position that power by definition overcomes all of those who seek and who find it. Power demands its own language, belief and the willingness to maintain its superiority, through the presentation of unbalanced pictures of reality, pictures that favour the reputation of the originator of the picture, whether those reputations are of corporations, presidents, principals, prime ministers, bishops, bank managers and presidents. Power, too, has the capacity to seduce even the most honourable, the most moral, the most disciplined and the most religious of men and women. And this attitude of scepticism, suspicion and doubt of the powerful emerges from a very small town, where I was able to witness the excesses of wealth, the excess of political control, the excesses of moral/religious superiority, and the excesses of insularity, isolation and resistance to the world itself.

Rather than share the power and the wealth of the insiders, and the entrappments, stereotypes attitudes and beliefs that inevitably attach themselves to that power and wealth, I honour the spiritual wealth of the truth, unvarnished, unsophisticated, and unfettered by the fear of being rejected by the powerful. That rejection is baked into the cake of the underclass, to which I proudly proclaim adherence…. It is a gift from the “poverty” and the culture of my home town. And it is a gift I have and will treasure so long as I breathe.

*Of course, this sounds patronizing, demeaning and insulting. Rather, I felt sad and anxious that such attitudes or dependence on the “bling” and the “bobbles” were so deeply embedded in the culture of the rural, isolated and relatively vulnerable community in which I was working.