Pampered little rich girl "triggers" law instructor's firing

“I’ve been triggered!”… the phrase used by a push, ultra-liberal private school* co-ed, that spawned the firing of her law instructor in Vancouver should sound as a warning shot across the bow of all political and thought leaders in Canada and around the world.

According to the report written by Christie Blatchford in the National Post, the teacher made the unforgiveable mistake of mentioning, by way of making the point that personal opinions often differ from what the law says, that he opposed abortion different from the Canadian law. That comment along with others like some people drive through stop signs, knowing the law says they must stop, sent the young student to some administrators, who, after some consideration set up and apology session inside the class where the “offence” occurred, monitored the required “apology” and then dismissed the teacher for being too personal in his apology. He indicated that the student was an excellent one and that he also liked her as a person.

Tutored in the rigorous expectations, even demands, of the LGBT community, instructors at the school were under intense pressure to refrain from expressing personal opinions apparently, and this teacher with an unblemished record of excellence, was eventually ushered off the premises, and stripped of his income, on which his family depends.

How it is possible that a student, even in such cloistered and cushy opulence, be feeling “unsafe” at such a remark, as part of an illustration of a wider and valid point of illustration and explication is simply astounding. And how such a remark, linked to the “too personal” apology could result in the dismissal of this teacher is not only astounding, it is deplorable, verging on crossing the line of his personal and professional “rights”. Clearly, if there is a defence fund established to initiate a law suit in his  behalf, this will be the source of one of the cheques it receives.

There is a professor at the University of Toronto in a similar politically correct tempest in a tea-pot about being expected to use specific pronouns for transgender individuals, chosen by the individual and then having to be “imprinted” on his memory, so that he does not address the individual inappropriately. Of course, the administration at U of T is supporting the LGBT community in this absurd expectation, in another politically correct and anal tempest in a tea pot.

Just as “freedom of speech” has limits, in that hate must not be permitted, at least in Canada, different from the United States, so too do “individual rights” have limits. We must not be expected to compress, repress and subvert what passes for normal, even professional expressions designed and delivered demonstrably free of animus, insult, patronizing or even a hint of bruising the ego’s of any demographic. And school administrators might  very well be our first line of defence against such sheer anality.

However, for decades, school administrators have demonstrated their willingness to cushion even the slightest criticism to protect the system from having to engage in public controversy with their students and the parents of those students. More than that, school administrators have too often been selected from a pool of “politically correct,” sanitized, compliant and obviously politically astute individuals who have demonstrated their obsequiousness in numerous encounters with their supervisors, both local and provincial. Such servility to the political powers above makes them ideal targets for such reductio ad absurdum incidents as the one documented today in the National Post.

I have some experience in these matters. In another place in this space, I recounted a story of receiving a registered letter from a lawyer, the president of the local conservative party, threatening legal action if I failed to apologize after making an off-hand comment, outside of class within earshot of his grade eleven son, disparaging the local member of the provincial government just elected (of course, a conservative) for having accepted a position on the board of the then Northland Railway. At twenty-six, I did not consider such an appointment analogous or equivalent to a cabinet post, and thought he was abusing his office as an elected politician. Naturally, I apologized, although I have really never accepted my need to do so, and certainly have never forgotten the incident. I also have never, and never will ever vote for the conservative party in Canada, or in Ontario.

Another incident that sticks in my craw concerns a grade eleven co-ed, who received what she considered an unreasonably low grade on a term examination. I had allotted 5% for spelling and grammar, with a ½ point deduction for each error in basic spelling and grammar, up to the maximum of 5%. She was so enraged that she enlisted the support of her parents, a school psychologist and a social worker, to protest the grade in a formal meeting at the school. As there was no change in the grade, the student withdrew from the school at the end of the term and enrolled in a different high school for the balance of her education.

Like others, I have heard of other situations in which complaints have been triggered by individuals who, themselves, bore a share of the responsibility for the narrative which generated the complaint. And of course, those in charge would prefer to eliminate the target of the complaint rather than conduct a thorough investigation to determine the relative degree of culpability, if any, of the participants.

Leadership, especially in public institutions, requires a spine of titanium, linked to an inexhaustible reservoir of vigorous investigative skill and the patience to exercise it. It is far too easy for an individual, such as the co-ed in the original case in Vancouver, to wreak havoc on the basis of an unintended slight, a slight whose existence was neither contemplated nor imagined in its design or execution. And those who did not witness the “incident” are expected, as are all “enforcement” agents, to exercise both the capacity to investigate, and also, (and this is so glaringly missing in so many instances!) a responsible and detached judgement. As a former alderman/criminal lawyer of my acquaintance, put it to the city council on which I was then reporting, “Not all drivers who exceed the speed limit are or should be charged and prosecuted.”

When we permit person skills to dominate our educational agenda, and when we remain silent and thereby compliant in a culture in which skills and trivial data (even if and when collated) to dominate the students’ dexterity and experience in making critical judgements that look at the big picture, we are actively and passively participating in a culture in which more of these absurdities, and injustices will continue to occur.

It another piece we argue strongly against fake news outlets, and in another we argue against the permissive culture that watches and even champions the election of Trump (he outperformed in counties in which opioid addiction, alcohol addiction and suicide attempts are highest in the United States, according to a Penn State study of the election results published in the Washington Post online edition 202) based on lies that perpetrated a completely different universe from the one in which most of us live.

If facts no longer matter, and some extremely fragile and molly-coddled adolescent whose adult circle panders to her every slight (or in her words, ‘trigger’) is able to professionally eunuch her law instructor, with the compliant agency of the wimps at the head of the school, where in God’s name is this ship headed, if not over  very long and steep cataract, from which many of us will wish to jump at the earliest and safest moment?

This incident comes at a time when most North Americans are skittish about the Trump administration, about the spinelessness of the mainstream media, about the spineless political operatives who inflict character assassination in the morning and then climb into bed with their earlier targets in the afternoon, without even a tip of their hat to their hypocrisy.

Where are the people, call them “hard-assed” if you like, who are willing to risk some short-term discomfort for the sake of some important long-term values, values on which a civilized society depends, and without which we are all vulnerable to state spying, to policies pandering to the extremely rich explained by public relations that mask their real import, and in this case, to losing our job and our professional reputation for something every teacher worth his or her salt would do, indeed does, every day in the proper and professional conduct of their pedagogy.

I am not only “triggered”….I am royally pissed, vehemently angry and willing to take to the barricades to shout “STOP!” Are any ready and willing to join this fight?

*Fraser Academy
Read follow up on National Post,  Christie Blatchford: Posh Vancouver school places staff under gag order after teacher fired, December 9, 2016 

Is democracy itself under threat?

Faux news sites are not only insidious; they are also weapons of mass destruction (metaphorically).

Before you turn off your computer, let me explain.

The idiot whose fake news website told the world by blatantly lying that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex scheme says he received 6 MILLION page reads on that story, and was shocked it took the “national” media so long to catch onto his perversity (my word not his). And when asked whom he voted for, he replied nonchalantly, “Hillary”. In Macedonia, just to make money, teenagers are reported to be putting up more lies, and of course they too are getting a considerable number of page reads, among people who may or may not be discerning of their deception.

Google, the primary source of online advertisements, ought to be censored, perhaps even taken to court to force them to end this opportunity. The profit motive cannot be permitted to extend to persons and activities deliberately designed to lie, mislead, deceive and to propagate hate speech. Of course, there really is no international legal system to monitor or to censor or to hold both individuals who choose to lie and mislead, and Google and any other companies who might be engaged in a similar business practice. Individual nations would have to take steps to stop such abuse of a resource for which we are all grateful and indebted to companies like Google.

Of course, monitoring the internet in deliberate search of child porn, terrorist recruitment, and individuals and gangs seeking to take advantage of innocent boys and girls ranks as a higher priority for those responsible for the legitimate use of this new technology.

However, companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others still ought to be cognizant of the propensity for abuse of their platforms, and if and when such abuse is noticed, these companies have a public obligation to suspend such sites, and report their agents to the proper authorities.

Call me an social, moral and political aardvark. Nevertheless, in the illicit garden of deception that has so contaminated the recent presidential election, one of the most abusive agents of the contamination is the president-elect himself. One is now prompted to ask whether democracy has been so threatened by both the mis-information campaign of Trump and his gang of ‘deplorables’ and the triumph of lies spread for profit, not to mention a potential, if hard to prove before a court, abrogation of the election.

From our perspective, in retrospect, the American presidential election was, indeed “rigged” not only by Russian incursions through hackings but also through the deliberate, planned and organized lies perpetrated on an unsuspecting public, many of whom are so far removed from the truth of any public situation, and so deeply immersed in their own contempt for Hillary, that they are and have been easily seduced. This is not to say that the abuse of the internet by perpetrators of lies pawned off as real news stories, (not unlike the tabloid press that greets shoppers in many supermarkets) was determinative of the election results. That would be uber-reductionistic, untrue and unsubstantiated. There is simply no empirical evidence of such a travesty.

However, the perversion, distortion and mis-representation of any core of credible information was so blatant, so deliberate and so consummate by so many, and so rapid in the delivery of lies (especially by the Trump forces) as to render the “fact-checkers” impotent to keep up, and to obtain the requisite air time, or newspaper space to refute the dissemblings. What really happened, from this perspective, is that the election campaign, and the electoral results so exposed and eroded the basic underpinnings of the valid, sustainable, credible and provable body of information that has sustained the American political process for at least my lifetime (seven decades plus), transforming the political process into just another entertainment drama, devoid of any attempt or responsibility for providing the electorate with information of which to base a voting decision.

In domestic disputes, too often it comes down to “he said-she said”….and who is to be believed. Corroboration of all witnesses is absolutely essential to derive any modicum of veracity. In the case of the presidential election, not only was the public reduced to a ‘he-said-she-said’ kind of narrative drama. Neither side could be believed because the credibility of the very process itself was so bastardized and contaminated as to render it a massive insult to the American people, and what’s more to the two hundreds years of American political history. It is not that there were no lies uttered by any previous politicians; nor is it true to say that history has been conducted on an agreed basis of information in which both political parties concurred.

In Syria, for the past several months, for example, America accuses Russia of attacking Syrian rebels, while Russia denies the accusation and accuses American of supporting ISIS. Lies, lies and more lies, are not the stuff of confidence building among a public so drowning in information outlets and their purported or secret agendas.

However, it seems that in the past, the lies were outnumbered by the agreed body of information on which lively and legitimate debate from differing political perspectives. 

In this campaign, the reverse seems to hold: the truth is vastly overpowered, outnumbered and debased by the tsunami of lies.

And underlying all this “angst” about the dependence of democracy on a body of agreed information is the profit motive, the power motive and the marriage of the two in what amounts to a two-headed monster, made legitimate by the Supreme Court.  Also underpinning the angst is the tide of racism, homophobia, climate denying and the future uber-triumph of the one percent all of this unleashed by the trump cataract of permission and role-modeling.

Trump manipulated the national and the international professional of journalists so blatantly and so deliberately and so successfully that, rather than offering or being required to offer specific policy positions, he merely rides the wave of media control.

And regardless of which diplomatic, economic, military, educational, housing or health care proposals he prefers and nominates, his command of the national, and some fear the international media is so pervasive as to verge on information tyranny. If he is and remains in complete domination of the national and international news (authentic professional news outlets) who or what can or will stop him.

And that is one of the most basic and legitimate fears about the next four years.

Control of the media, both the previously legitimate, and previously empowered fourth estate, and the new digital media could enable the president elect to pull off almost whatever he wishes, knowing full well that, if he has got this far with his shenanigans, lies, deceptions, mis-information and bullying, not to mention free-wheeling character assassination (“crooked Hillary”) and enciting chants of “lock her up,” only yesterday chanted at a Canadian provincial premier who is attempting to bring both a sound economy (through fossil fuels) and environmental protection in a province akin to Texas (Alberta), he can almost literally claim that his previous statement, “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters!” could well be feasible.

And so, where is the anti-trump? Where is the alternative voice of the 52% of the American people who did not vote for this man?

Is their silence and the apparent silence of the news media in the face of this information coup, blatant and before our very eyes, now the new norm?

And is the Trump path to whatever the Trump wishes also the new norm?

That, my friends, is dangerous to the millions of people who could potentially lose their health care, the thousands of jobs that will continue to flow offshore because he cannot stop them all with side deals, and the millions of people who rely  on government hand-up’s all of which will stop flowing. These could all be in danger, just like all those negotiated trade deals, and the defence treaties, and the non-proliferation treaties….and the list is really interminable….depending on the whim of one man…

Is that not just as dangerous as those mythical, hypothetical “weapons of mass destruction” (recall Condolesa Rice’s prophetic mushroom cloud that was invoked as part of the build-up and mass manipulation under George W. Bush) that was the false justification of the Iraq war in 2003.

Is the Republican party now owner of the new and unstoppable truth debunking machine, and have they enlisted an army of eager and willing “fake news editors” in their cause to undermine truth and reality?

This lying pathology did not start with Trump, although he may have refined it and deployed it on different social media. For eight years, they lied about their own blatant racism in deliberately blocking the first black president on every proposal, even including one of their member telling him directly, “We do not think you should be here!” (Translation: a black man is not supposed to be president). Characterizing Obama as “arrogant” is another not so subtle ruse to absolve the Republican caucus of any hint of racism, and it also pandered to their constituency in the south, especially, where Obama’s election was considered an insult to many whites and a triumph to the black population. And then there was the lying about the contents of a bill to restrict assault weapons accessibility after the deplorable tragedy at Sandy Hook where first grade children were slaughtered, and joining the NRA in their deceptive “the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” as if there were no other steps prior to the moment of the archetypal shoot-out that is at the heart of the frontier/military/combative/take-out mentality.

Grace in the face of such oppressive sabotage, as Obama has consistently demonstrated, is merit enough for his Nobel Peace Prize, although there are so many other legitimate reasons for the award.

However, giving a public face to, public acceptability of, public endorsement and eventually public embedding into the culture of the habit of lying, of creating a totally new reality, in order to obstruct legitimate responsibilities for governing, or for any other personal, narcissistic ambition Trump provides personal responsibility of this tragic dynamic.

Papering, or “mascara-ing” over their deep and seemingly intransigent compulsion to lie, to deceive, to mis-represent and to dissemble is so tragically epic as to stain the reputation not only of their party but also their whole nation.

And how can the rest of the world, especially the leaders in the major capitals with whom the United States still has to collaborate, and with whom Obama has re-established a national reputation of integrity, authenticity and reliability following the macho-deceptive regime of Bush 43, trust the word of the United States government now under the complete control of Republicans at all levels, including momentarily the Supreme Court?

In a word, they can’t! And they should not.

And the rest of the world will be watching as the erosion not only of the ecosystems on which all life depends, the model of democracy that prided itself as a beacon on a hill and the political culture of the United States erodes, cracks, bursts into flame like those spontaneous forest fires that accompany global warming and climate change.

But that is only a “Chinese hoax” to this gang of lying and deceiving  con artists whose leader is the most devious of their number.

Bigotry against Muslims, the homophobia, and the “whitelash” is now showing up on Canadian university campuses, (McMaster and McGill so far) and the warning from Secretary of State John Kerry today that, in putting at risk individual freedoms, and unleashing the bigotry we are witnessing, we could be on the verge of a kind of tyranny in the west. And that would spell a serious blow to moderate, open-minded, tolerant and inclusive societies. Just earlier today Trump announced the appointment of the Attorney General of Oklahoma, a man named Pruitt, a climate change denier who is currently in several court cases against the Environmental Protection Agency, to become, you guessed it, HEAD of the very same EPA.

We are all in treacherous waters. (A moment of pathetic fallacy: the ferry I am on at this very moment, is bouncing and shooting a deluge of Lake Ontario water over the cars synchronous with my angst.)

Recruiting courageous activist citizens...urgently

The citizen’s job is to be rude- to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt. (John Ralston Saul)

If this space has a purpose, Saul has expressed it. Boorish expressions of doubt to piece the comfort of professional discourse is about as high a purpose as one can imagine for fully engaged citizenship.

After all, professional discourse is, by definition, polite, slanted in favour of the speaker and the organization/government/corporation/public service agency represented by the speaker, incomplete by design, and allegedly “expert” so that even in its writing, the assumption is that only the “inside” circle of those in the know “will get it”. Professional speak, known in classical times as rhetoric, has been the primary skill of the legal profession, the political operatives, the public relations gurus, and even sadly, too often, the televangelist, or the one behind a real podium/pulpit.

Reporters in daily newspapers are exposed to some classroom time to help them unravel the circumlocutions of professional speak, as a filter for their readers. Insurance brokers are expected to untangle the legalese of policies, including all of the myriad of exceptions when coverage does not apply, and most often this requisite exchange never takes place. Why would the agent want to expose the loopholes in the policy in front of the client who has about to sign the cheque for the annual premiums, for the next three or four decades. Similarly,  financial “planners” (another fancy word for stock, bond and mutual fund salesmen and women) eagerly and sometimes patiently await their client’s agreement to a “specially designed program of investments, depending on the relative degree of risk with which the client is comfortable. Neither the insurance nor the investment sales person, however, would even consider a “boorish” expression of doubt about the value of their products or service.

Doctors engage in professional speak every day with every patient and colleague, in the former instances, attempting to diagnose a specific complaint, in the latter making arrangements for collaborative work in clinical teams. Will they, or do they, dare to express their own personal “boorish” doubts about the professional speak of their hospital administration? Hardly! Did they dare to complain about their university deans whose compliance with hours on duty would exhaust an Olympian, and would be deemed “unprofessional” by the long-haul truckers, even though lives are at risk in both “professional” expectations.

Politicians, and their civil-(serf)-servants however, run the risk of so “enhancing” their professional “speak” as to  render much of it either  incomprehensible or unbelievable. Balancing the protection of the environment with the growth of the economy, for example, is a phrase that collected hours of air time and gallons of black ink in the last federal election, as the kind of “soothing” professional speak that demonstrated the “balanced” approach of the speaker(s). Details, however, were either omitted deliberately or unavailable from a lack of planning. The public, in our innocence/ignorance/slumber/insouciance/disinterest however, would never demand such details (so goes the thinking of the backroom election planners).

Throwing money at a political “headache” is a favourite “cure” of most politicians, almost as effective as throwing a bottle of Aleve pills at an incurable rheumatoid arthritic joint. It brings a moment of “relief” in the latter instance, and in the former buys the politician a little time (relief) from the protesters who demand much more and never really achieve their goals. A recent decision by the Army Corp of Engineers at Standing Rock in North Dakota to refuse permits for the construction of the final stage of the pipeline under a valuable source of water is, while extremely welcome, really only a momentary pause in the battle to block the final construction. Trump’s eyes are already focused threateningly on the decision to refuse permits; undoubtedly, he will find a way to make the project happen.

“Boorish expressions of doubt” comprise the lot of the citizen who, by nature and definition, does not have a research staff, a secretarial/data entry/writing staff, a public relations consultant, and a bull-pen full of lawyers, when compared with the “professional speak and speakers”. While this appears to be a distinct disadvantage, there is a silver lining in the David/Goliath story as explained by Malcolm Gladwell. Whereas Goliath had prepared for a hand-to-hand combat, and wore heavy impenetrable armour, David, on the other hand, with his sling, focused on a more distant conflict, out of reach of the giant of power. We all know the outcome of that archetypal conflict. Well, citizens will forever be the David when uttering “boorish expressions of doubt” in the face of  professional speak, an appropriate metaphor for Goliath.

The real question is how to recruit an army of citizens so committed and so energetic to engage in throwing “boorish expressions of doubt” when they hear, read, see or encounter professional speak. We teach our children that joining the “professionals” is a career goal to be emulated. We do not teach our children that being a concerned and active “citizen” is just as worthy a personal and professional goal, although there is no “income” or social status in being an engaged citizen. In fact, there is a reasonable likelihood that taking a public position on issues facing the neighbourhood, town city, province or nation will bring a predictable and likely internecine push-back that could get ugly.

Nevertheless, leaving the gathering and assimilation and promulgation of public information and debate about policy to the “professionals” will serve the perceived needs and desires of those very professionals and the public debate will be so empty of the kind of “boorish expression of doubt” that can and often does provide needed leaven to the professional, sterile, sanitized and “establishment” generated and driven arguments.

There is also the factor that the “professional media” ignores “boorish expressions of doubt” as being “less professional” and therefore less credible and less worthy of being included in sound bytes or video clips. If you think “status” (read professional) does not really matter in our culture, you are smoking something that is rendering you deaf and blind to reality. Nowhere is ‘status’ more important, more valued and more sought after (including paid handsome sums) than on the public and private media. Imagine a headline in a major daily, with a circulation in the millions, that reads, “Local contractor says costs estimates for new fire hall twice as high as necessary”. First, there is a flurry of instant and sceptical questions that jump to the forefront of the reader’s mind:

·      Is he vying for the contract?

·      Has he even looked at, let alone examined, the details of the tender?

·      Does he have a history in this community that proves his reliability, credibility and ethical trustworthiness?

·      Who does he know who might be feeding him confidential information?

·      Who does he think he is to challenge the tendering process that has been followed by our councillors?

·      Who are his friends and political allies that we could ask to find out what makes this guy worth listening to?

·      Why did he not put a bid in when the tenders were issued, and prove the worth of his contention?

·      What is this headline doing to the reputation of our town? (This is especially true in smaller centres where local dailies consider their role the “business and cultural promotion of their town or city.)

Being willing to risk one’s personal reputation, especially if one has a professional practice in the community, is not a risk worth taking for many of the same people who could offer the best and most effective “doubt” about the decisions made by elected or appointed officials, some of whom clearly have a private agenda in the conduct of public business.

In Canada, especially, the word “rude” carries a heap of negative connotative freight. “Rude” evokes those without an education, without a degree or two on their resume, without a house in the right part of town, without a family whose reputational “skirts” are so clean that their words could never be considered “boorish” or whose attitudes could never be considered sceptical.

Decades ago, English poet, W. H. Auden wrote a piece about what we today would consider the antithesis of the engaged and active citizen willing and able to venture into offering “boorish expressions of doubt” about the public issues of the day.

The poem, while dated, nevertheless, expresses attitudes and perceptions that many consider “worthy” of the most honourable citizen. It offers what amounts to an obituary to the nameless, and reduced to a number, unknown citizen. Fitting into the predictable trends, for war when there was war, for peace when there was peace, these are a couple of the hallmarks of the archetype.

Unknown citizens will not be among those offering boorish expressions of doubt about public decisions made by professional politicians.

In search of the yin/yang of reality?

 There was a time, not so long ago, when a phrase like democratic oligarchy would have been considered oxymoronic. Now, it is being used as a conversation item by a political science professor from Columbia, on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, in her articulation of the political winds currently blowing in Europe and North America.

In the same conversation, New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, in ‘selling’ his latest book, Thanks for being late, articulates three dominant trends that are  sweeping the globe: globalization, immigration and the environment, all of which he says are converging in a combined force with which leaders and the people will have to deal in the near and medium future.

And then there is the spike in the availability and deployment of digital media, a prime generator of highly spiked information that is blatantly and hubristically untrue.

One media analyst puts it this way: Twitter is the headline generator of the new media, a domain so far fully resourced and even captured by Trump with social media the megaphone of these tweets.

This weekend, both Italy and Austria will be holding votes, the former to reduce the number of legislators, allegedly making it more feasible for the Italian leader to pass legislation, the latter potentially electing the first ‘far right’ leader in Europe, with others waiting impatiently in the wings for their own opportunity within the next year. Great Britain has already voted to exit the European Union, Brexit being the expression of mostly rural voters, those feeling most anxious, if not downright frightened by mass immigration, the loss of jobs and the deaf rule by “professionals” in London, where the vote was strongly in favour of “remaining” in the European Union. Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the Brexit movement has said that the European Union is about to break apart, partly because countries can no longer determine the value of their own currency, being so tightly tied to the Euro, as a currency for the many countries in Europe.

Clearly, Trump’s campaign was fueled by much of the same octane, a contempt for the professionals by the left-behind. A union worker, a lifetime Democrat, just told the world, on CNN’s Reliable Sources, that it was union workers who created the power of the Democratic Party, and ‘she ignored us by not hearing or listening to us’. ("She" is a direct reference to Hillary Clinton!

The yin and yang concept in Chinese philosophy seems so foreign to both the news coverage of politics and especially the manipulation of the dark and light forces by Trump in his every utterance. Even George W. Bush publicly declared, “I do not do nuance!” almost as a signature of hubris. However, the American conventional perspective on reality, that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” is not only antithetical to a full and robust debate about public policy but counter to truth and reality.

The yin and yang in Chinese philosophy describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Many tangible dualities (such as light and dark, fire and water, expanding and contracting) are thought of as physical manifestations of the duality symbolized by yin and yang. This duality lies at the origins of many branches of classical Chinese science and philosophy, as well as being a primary guideline of traditional Chinese medicine,^[1] and a central principle of different forms of Chinese martial arts and exercise, such as baguazhang, taijiquan (t'ai chi), and qigong (Chi Kung), as well as appearing in the pages of the I Ching.

Duality is found in many belief systems, but Yin and Yang are parts of a Oneness that is also equated with the Tao. A term has been coined dualistic-monism or dialectical monism. Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary (rather than opposing) forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts.^[2]Everything has both yin and yang aspects, (for instance shadow cannot exist without light). Either of the two major aspects may manifest more strongly in a particular object, depending on the criterion of the observation. The yin yang (i.e. taijitu symbol) shows a balance between two opposites with a portion of the opposite element in each section.

In Taoist metaphysics, distinctions between good and bad, along with other dichotomous moral judgments, are perceptual, not real; so, the duality of yin and yang is an indivisible whole. In the ethics of Confucianism on the other hand, most notably in the philosophy of Dong Zhongshu (c. 2nd century BC), a moral dimension is attached to the idea of yin and yang.^{[3] Wikipedia)}

Carl Jung’s insight includes an important example of the yin/yang concept through such a concept as androgyny, in which a portion of masculinity and femininity are in each gender. However, we are bombarded by voices claiming their truth is the ONLY truth, and their opponents are espousing evil concepts…and the same is true in reverse.

So, whether political ideology is a subject (both theory and practice) on which yin/yang is appropriately applied, as are physical properties of light/dark, fire/water, expanding/contracting might for some be an open question. For our purposes, let’s make at least one attempt to see if there is a fit.

Propaganda is a style of language which seems to reflect a propensity to twist truth and reality to something fitting the ego, the ideology (if there is one) and the motive and will to power of those whose existence depends on the receptivity of its nuggets conveyed in ads, political campaign speeches, and reportage. And, overlaying the current political situation, whether focused on North America or the wider world, is a growing, dark and threatening cloud of propaganda and an enhanced mattress of digital information on the demographics and their various “marketing niches”, thereby enabling propagandists to target misinformation to specific audiences to manipulate their votes, as well as their purchasing preferences.

What we would today consider “kindergarten” propaganda fills Orwell’s 1984, in which “War is Peace” is only one glaring example. Yet, Orwell was writing at a very different time, when the totalitarian spectre of political control was already rising on the political horizon in Great Britain and the world. There was no internet, and no marketing sophistication, and no globalization, and no corporate financial dominance in political campaigns, no 24-7-365 news coverage and reporting and no social media when Orwell put pen to paper. (How seemingly archaic!)

Nevertheless, rather than human attitudes, perceptions and requirements of discernment between fact and fiction, between propaganda and information, between political argument and emotional massaging, developing to a much more clear, honest and magnified level given the tools now at our universal disposal, the reverse is happening, based on the kind and degree of fear, contempt, hatred bigotry and exclusion of “the other” whomever that group might be to the various publics.

Rather than Oceania being first an ally and then a war enemy (from 1884), everyone, including every group that is not “like” me, is the instant enemy, for anyone seeking public office. This nugget (whether it is considered a piece of ‘inside’ information for marketing or for political campaigns) can be and has been and will continue to be “played” on by everyone seeking public office, and every marketing and political consultant in the future. So, for the purposes of “messaging,” instant enemies need daily underlining, repetition, headlines, twitter feeds, and especially those generated by presidential candidates. 

Social media, an information “organ” that depends for its very existence on hatred, on gossip, on conflict, and on character assassination loves a voice/talking head/persona who takes on his/her enemies with a vengeance, acting like the latest iteration of John Wayne in the latest ‘western’ cowboy movie. Power “heroes” or “super-heroes” are so in demand by a populace feeling so deeply and profoundly disempowered, given their projections of strength (rather than owning their own opportunities to take responsibility for their own lives, in the face of reality) onto those promising to deliver “answers” to their perceived problems as to have virtually paved the freeway for reality television practitioners/propagandists/authoritarians/presidential candidates.

However, as the object of projections from people who believe they have been eunuched by forces beyond their control, such “digital heroes” consider themselves compelled to feed those deep neuroses that underlie those projections, generating a tickertape parade of one-dimensional, exaggerated, simplistic, reductionistic and clearly unachieveable “tweets” and speeches, and policy statements designed for the specific purpose of propagandizing/manipulating their audience, especially those already committed to the cause of the candidate speaking. Such was/is/will always be the modus operandi of Trump.

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Build the wall, block Muslims, de-fang all trade treaties, character assassinate Mexicans, Muslims, insult blacks with “what the hell have you got to lose?” defame and insult women with vulgar womanizing while pretending to be the ‘strongest supporter of women”…..this is just some of the bologna in the sandwiches served by the Trump-fast-food machine…and they were gobbled by a starved and voracious appetite among the hinterland.

Even millions of women, expected to vote for the first female candidate for the White House, voted for Trump, because they did not “like” or ‘trust’ Ms Clinton. And so the potential for cultural androgyny, that was implicit in the election of Ms Clinton, given the history of over two hundreds years of male occupants of the Oval Office, was lost. Her “basket of deplorables” comment was an unforgiveable mis-step that significantly contributed to her defeat.

However, when will it be feasible, and possible and demonstrated in fact by both political leaders and the media fraternity that there is a deep and profound danger to a perception of the universe that is:…

·      black/white, winner/loser, truth/lies,

·      in which yin denies the existence of yang,

·      in which hyper-masculinity defies androgyny,

·      in which propaganda drowns the slightest sliver of the light of truth,

·      in which foreign powers (Russia, for instance) conduct cyber-invasions to inflict itself on “democratic” elections,

·      in which global warming and climate change deniers win the presidential election, and

·      in which immediate narcissistic needs are able to eradicated epic threats to human existence?

The Chinese yin/yang conception of reality, even as it applies to the campaign promises of political candidates, and as it applies to the national education goals and the programs that undergird them, and as it applies to the growing disenchantment of co-operation and collaboration of various enlightened leaders around the world. Binary conceptions of the universe, just like bi-lateral trade treaties, “making ME/US great again” (at the expense of the other) is a rabbit hole in our understanding of ourselves, our neighbours, our towns and cities, our states and provinces, and our nations.

Now it is time for those who have the many and varied bully pulpits to enhance their concept of their role and purpose to include, at both the highest decision-making levels, as well as in the kindergarten and pre-school class rooms, the important, even essential concept that yin/yang is not a communistic, nationalistic, historic or demographic concept.

And its time in the history of human kind has long ago come. When will we wake up to its gifts?

A culture of cameo artists?

Maybe it is the media’s obsessive compulsive magnetic enmeshment with every Trumptweet…

Maybe it is the scientific and medical fields’ attraction to the microbiology of pathogens….

Maybe it is the ticker to which the eyes of Wall Street and Fleet Street and King Street and all other financial markets area glued….

Maybe it is the insatiable compulsion humans have for each and every sound on their smart phones, or emails….

Maybe it is the attention paid to headlines, without  regard to the details of the story that comprises much of the public discourse…

Maybe it is the stream-of-consciousness parade of merely headlines, without sentence structure, without narrative, without context and without the need for any of these in Trump’s vacuous mind….

Whatever IT is, we seem to be far more fixated, if not addicted to the micro-world, and ready and willing to accept a detached version of each impulse, almost as if our outer world, the world of sensations, conversations, relationships and even our understanding of the universe is no longer premised on our perceived need for a deeper, more complex and more challenging perspective on all issues in our lives.

We seem quite ready, willing and able to accept a “dogmatic” and reductionistic sound byte as sufficient for our capacity to manage our lives. Do we have cancer or not? Do we like spinach or not? Is Putin another czar or not? Is Trump another Napoleon or not? Is the future clouded in apocalyptic fires or not? Will OPEC limit production or not? Will we be buried or cremated? Will this pill fix my pain? Does she love me or not? Is he capable of being loyal or not? Is the marriage subject to sexual abuse or not? Is there a God, or not? Is the Islamic threat existential or not? Is the female boss more enlightened than all those men or not? Is this probiotic more effective than that probiotic? Will this MRI tell me what is wrong? Are we really victims of weak leadership in the out-sourcing of industrial jobs? Is China waging a cyber war against the west, right under our noses or not?

Maybe it is not Trump’s bombast, and his “weaponized testosterone” campaigning style that is the agent of our deep and profound dis-ease. Could it be that we have slipped into a mode of both communicating and thinking, of perceiving and forming attitudes that renders us both vulnerable to and cynically disposed to whatever the latest “drug” of the moment happens to be? Could it be that the spiking of deaths from drug overdoses in many countries and cities around the globe is another of the symptoms of a culture that no longer “hangs together” the way a novel or a concerto, or a symphony, or an epic poem once did. Could it be that our interactivity with the immediate, at such an intense level, giving the ‘instant’ a kind of gravitas it once did not deserve, in our compulsive grasping for adrenalin, that we have sabotaged those very human qualities that once commanded a more reflective perspective? Was the perspective of our ancestors a perspective that sought out and celebrated the nuanced relationships of men and events, that pondered the more subjective and unconscious and more long-term truths and realities without being so driven by the moment?

Literate cultures, given an in-depth understanding of both history and literature, might have rejected Trump’s sloganeering, his vacuity, his transactional greed, his manipulation of the masses, the media and the political establishment. Is that the pipe dream of a romantic idealist of the liberal studies department? Is the demise of context and the removable of critical investigative reportage, simply because no one will read it, and therefore no advertiser will support its publication, underlying the recent Alt-right political movements that,  based on bigotry, fear and a vacuity of history?

Are we participating in a cultural tsunami that, without a single shot or bomb or missile being fired, has the potential to wipe out our collective memory, our collective consciousness, and our conception of a collective future. Has this tsunami foreclosed on an intellectually framed world vision that includes a significant look back into our history, and the history of major civilizations, and a look forward not only to how are we going to survive but also what kind of future are we prepared to stand up and become proactive to leave to our grandchildren?

We have collectively watched over the demise of hundreds of Liberal Arts faculties in North American universities, as we permitted our higher education institutions to morph into little more than “trade schools”. We are witnessing a wipe-out of the shared skill of spelling, grammar, and an interest in  complexities, and in their place, without ever adequately replacing those given foundational stones for a culture that can understand itself, others much smarter than we are, and that can critically evaluate the propositions being put forward by hucksters like Trump.

And he is not the only huckster: there must be a school for hucksters, charlatans, shill ‘artists’ and those willing and able to deceive using whatever tricks are at their disposal. (Just today, Princess Cruise Lines was fined $40 MILLION for secretly pumping waste from its ships through a hidden pipe for decades! The hidden pipe made it possible for their ships to escape failure on legitimate environmental tests! Anyone ese wondering if the executives at Princess are clones of the executives at Volkswagen?)

There is some evidence that books are not going to their grave anytime soon. (Just a hunch, many of those readers are above fifty, raised on some intensive reading courses in their now “antediluvian” education.)

W seem to have fragmented our attention span, our need for instant gratification (from working to achieve a goal as a reward for the hard work) to a collective and shared OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

Of course, intimately buried in this culture is the predictable frustration that all of our petty, micro and silly “desires” are not and will not be met.

There used to be a kind of attitude among athletic coaches that a game of basketball or hockey was a lot like life, and could teach the participants important life lessons. Well, there may still be some truth in the aphorism.  However, in a professional hockey game, for example, players take only 40-45 second shifts and their speed, the number of their shots on goal, the number of ‘hits’ and the number of goals and assists they accomplish in that very tiny window is recorded for posterity, as well as for future negotiations come contract renewal time.

Sadly, that picture is not applicable to one’s seven or eight or perhaps even nine decades on the planet. We simply cannot sustain the kind of pressure, scrutiny and obsessive need for detailed accomplishments from every ‘shift’ in our professional life or in our relationships. Demanding such accomplishments from others, too, will drive both parties in the absurd equation to madness.

And yet, there is a reasonable and credible argument to be made that that is precisely what we are doing, to ourselves, and to each other.

There is a theory about “cameo” art (painting) that allows the painter to have complete control of the work, given the miniature size of the project. Is this analogy representative of the kind of thinking, reporting, discussing, and more recently campaigning to which we have agreed to be subjected.  A culture of cameo artists, propagating more of their own kind, will generate a generation or two of young people who believe that in order to be “successful” and to fit into the world around them, they must become “cameo artists” like everyone else.

What would become of the visionaries in a world in which cameo artists and their clones in most if not all academic disciplines, professions, including the political class are running things?

Or course the obvious answer is that  metaphoric trains will run off many tracks, previously considered because as the Auditor General says, the military tragically missed judging the cost of maintaining our F-18’s, as well as the cost of keeping the fleet of submarines sipping through the oceans….There is a real price to the kind of culture that is becoming normalized and a fix, if there is to be one, is going to be increasingly problematic. Finding those who think that a balance between micro and macro thinking, planning, envisioning, imagining will be difficult if not impossible.

And while now repressive culture, even one worshipping at the altar of cameo’s, cannot and will not repress the poets, the eccentrics and the visionaries. However, their ilk will be more and more needed in the public arena, and the supply of their kind will be so depleted that we will continue to have to pay a huge price for what some call political correctness, and others call “covering your ass.”

Appreciating Buscaglia's ironic insight

Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong. (Leo Buscaglia)

While there some obvious irony in the statement, let’s examine it more closely.

Whenever we feel the instinct to hurt another, to seek revenge, to malign someone who has hurt us, at that moment, rather than being our strongest and best self, we have descended to our weakest, most neurotic and also most dangerous potential.

The daily news is saturated with acts of revenge, pay-back, critical back-stabbing, all of them stemming from the weakest and the worst aspect of those perpetrating them. Trump has just tweeted that protesters who burn the flag should lose their citizenship. We can expect an endless of similar tweets, sprinkled with the “look how wonderful I am” mandatory tweets from the president elect.

And, our case for the weakness of the man, as the perpetrator of much cruelty, is made.

For the past eight years, Republicans have denigrated and maligned and even obstructed Obama for being weak, spineless, and feckless, riding the wave of false pride, hobbling hubris, self-deception and truth defiance. And a significant segment of the population has bought their candy floss. All the while Republicans were bugling their bravado, Obama was, in pointed counterpoint, withdrawing from the Iraq war of George W. Bush, persisting in withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan, negotiating with Iran to hold off their nuclear weapons development intentions, and helping to provide health care for those with “previous health conditions” that had blocked their coverage.

A strong president, as exemplified by Obama, is not only doing his job, with the best interests of the nation clearly on top of his mind, he is also offering a silent yet highly influential role model for the type of “strong” masculinity offered by his opponents.  When strength is defined and immortalized as “cruelty” as it has consistently been by Republicans on the right, our children are misguided, maliciously and with full intent by people who are in full command of their faculties, and therefore must accept responsibility for the long-term damage they have done and will continue to do, following their malignant stereotype.

It was Samantha Bee, on her show, Full Frontal, who called Trump a “vial of weaponized testosterone” as her pointed and pungent way of stick her thumb through the balloon of his pretension. From such a person, and from the cadre of sycophants he will surround himself with at the cabinet table and in the White house (if he even deigns to reside there), we can expect only more cruelty…targeting those he perceives as his “opponents”, while exempting his loyalists.

Refusing to divest himself, fully completely and legally, from all of his business interests, whether or not the law requires such divestment, is just another example of his “cruelty” to the American people, through insult, presumption and an arrogance that shouts, “If you don’t like it, sue me!” from the top of his also pretentious and presumptuous, arrogant and “weak” tower of greed.

Obama’s strength is on full display around the world, in capitals of both friends and enemies, following the “weak” cruelty and violence of his predecessor, another Republican of the born-again persuasion of Christian fundamentalists. As one writer in the latest edition of The Atlantic puts it, Obama is leaving, for the most part, a “clean desk,” for his successor. And that clean desk offers considerable scope, unfortunately for Trump to make an even bigger mess than Dubya. Even Obama’s refusal to wage open warfare on Assad, following the emergence of clear and incontrovertible of Assad’s deployment of chemical weapons on his own people, while considered inexcusable and indefensible by Republican critics, prevented the United States from becoming fully enmeshed in another war in the Middle East. And while Putin rushed into the crack of a vacuum in Damascus, Obama nevertheless demonstrated restraint, as well as hope and diligence in continuing to negotiate a highly complicated peace process in that balkanized country, headed by an unmitigated dictator.

My role model for strength married to kindness, compassion and the hope that invariably accompanies all of those acts, is my father, of whom I have written elsewhere in this space. Refusing to utter a malicious word against another human being, no matter the provocation, and withdrawing rather than engaging in a turbulent and energy-depleting conflict with those whose actions and attitudes were unacceptable to him eventually cost him his half-century-plus career. When he was expected to collect full payment for an invoice to a quarter-century customer who never failed to pay his accounts, on receipt of the goods purchased was the final straw. My father, silently and inconspicuously without telling another soul, walked to the company corporate office, placed his keys to the building and all of its compartments on the counter where customers did their business, put on his coat and walked away after  nearly sixty years of loyal, committed and honourable service. Of course, there was an immediate invitation to join other hardware operations in the town, after such a professional career.

The cruelty of the weak has been on display too often while witnessing the political processes on both Canada and the United States, where transactional relationships based on ‘what have you done for me lately’ incarcerate the participants in leg-irons of voting expectations, funding assistance, network enhancement, and public endorsements which too often slip into the oblivion of lost memory by those no longer interested in the relationship.

When the Governor of North Dakota tells the protesters to leave their encampment blocking the development of another fossil fuel pipeline, we are witnessing another act by another weak person who is either unwilling or unable or both to engage the protesters with a view to honouring their land, their water and their dignity.

And this scenario is only one of hundreds we are going to witness and perhaps even experience over the next decade as the battle to protect our shared environment literally and metaphorically “heats up.” Strength, as embodied in dollars in investment accounts by oil giants, and their investors (of whom Trump is one in North Dakota), can only see a depletion of their investment dollars through the failure to construct more and more pipelines for more and more fossil fuels for more and more contamination of our shared oxygen. This is not strength, and it exerts the only kind of cruel pressure on the short-term protesters and the long-term health and well being of each of us, not to mention the inordinate pressure fossil fuels put on the health care budget.

Even in the announcement of a former orthopedic surgeon as the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man determined to tear up the Affordable Care Act with health savings accounts and vouchers both of which we pad the insurance company profits. Eliminating people with pre-existing conditions will only line the pockets of both insurance companies and hospital corporations while eliminating the prospect of universal health care, on a single payer basis. Here again, weakness generates cruelty, when compared with the strength of people like Bernie Sanders whose compassion and kindness is clear in his advocacy for a single payer health care system, along with free college tuition for all deserving and committed students.

No differently in human interactions than in the way government conducts its business, gentleness comes only from the strong. Just today, the Canadian Auditor General issued a scathing report on the modus operandi of several government departments, notably the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. One of the pithy observations in the report recommends that bureaucrats focus on providing effective programs for their clients, rather than waiting for another litigation to force program enhancement. At the root of his critique is an attitude prevalent among governments of all political stripes to  greater or lesser degree: that recipients of government largesse will always and inevitably abuse that largesse and make the bureaucrats embarrassed when the abuse is disclosed by some news report(er). Tight-assed political correctness as a governing principle demonstrates weakness on the part of the government itself and especially on the part of those ministers and bureaucrats executing the program.  This bogus argument that people must be self-reliant and absolutely independent, while currying favour with the right wing conservative ideologues, flies in the face of human lives and their various trajectories, many of which turn “south” through no fault of the victims.

Governments, for example, in their oversight of health care, have to know and take into account the statistical reality that well over 75% of all costs on the system are attributable to those in the last decade of their life. That truth is unlikely to alter with a change in geography or climate, throughout the various regions of Canada. Budgeting for such a “strain” on the system, as a given rather than some exorbitant and inexcusable demographic drain, can only result from a perspective of strength and kindness. It will never flow from a bureaucracy that is so fixated on each of the personal careers in middle and upper management and the reduction in spending on which those career advancements are premised, a premise that from the perspective of the public good and the public interest is short-sighted and weak, and also cruel.

Similarly, middle ranking bureaucrats in the health care system who impose their “accountability” instruments like the old scientific management icons formerly known as “time clocks” in order to have more control, without regard to the various exigencies that confront health care workers at all levels every day, as another way to “save money” (and thereby enhance their professional reputations and likelihood of career advancement) are out of touch with contemporary theories of enlightened management as well as the strength to admit and envision a workplace culture that begins with trust that employees will do more than they are asked, (they always have when they respected and trusted the employer knew them as people and behaved in a respectful and trusting manner toward them!) and will do it with a sincere smile. This show of “strength” is counter-intuitive to human relations, to enlightened management theories and practice and will only increase pressure on the “bottom line” supposedly the holy grail for middle and upper managers.

Gentleness, as a guiding perspective, is neither weak nor ineffectual. Ironically, for those “black-and-white” minds who impose such systems, compassion and gentleness not only demonstrate strength, but also produce more of the kind of healing in patients, and helping in health care workers.

A similar perspective applies to the law enforcement apparatus. Weakness generates cruelty in the law enforcement business, especially when and where prisons are operated as private for-profit businesses. Hard-edged, hard-assed wardens and guards are, acting under orders from above, much more interested in dominating control of their inmates than in rehabilitation, restoration and re-entry back into society. The premise of this culture is overt strength, masking the fear and weakness of the system that the public will enlarge and expand their objection to prisoners’ living in luxury and costing the public purse more than their lives are worth.

Cruelty, in this instance, comprises legitimized revenge and an indication of strength, when the gentle approach of rehabilitation would prove to be both less costly (generating less profit for the corporations that operate the institutions) and stronger in terms of providing the talents, skills and income to families and through income taxes to the state and nation.

Policing itself, is taking notice of the advantages of something they call “community policing” whereby instead of first looking for offenders, including opportunities to lay charges, police are getting to know their communities, building trust among their people and thereby reducing the need for hard power, growing statistics of crime. Once again, gentleness is a sign of strength, whereas cruelty and disempowerment demonstrate weakness, in the form of fear of loss of control.

Even in the ways in which professionals of all types treat their clients: gentleness demonstrates the strength of the practitioner, not weakness, where cruelty exhibits weakness.

If only at the geopolitical level these clear ironies that strength is demonstrated in gentleness and weakness in cruelty could be lessons learned by those practicing diplomacy….if that trajectory could ever become enshrined in at least a few graduate schools of international relations and diplomacy, then perhaps, such a shift in what is considered normal might offer the prospect of arms reduction, the curtailing if not the closing of arms factories, and the sale of such products as symbols of national pride.

Only if and when ordinary people begin to concur with the Buscaglia insight will those agents of political, military, legal, medical, instructional and spiritual influence shift their focus, and turn this deeply ensconced ship of conventional mis-wisdom.

Turning the world on its ear, while readily considered quixotic, is nevertheless a proposition worthy of serious reflection.