Will we reject being reduced to someone else's "function" and ""dog"?

 

car heater options

floor,
floor and cabin,
windshield and floor,
cabin only
All of them tied to a fan and a temperature gauge.
And the driver selects some combination of force of fan, temperature and direction of heat or cool air.
"User friendly" is the operative phrase in an "operative culture". And "operative culture" is the foundational principle in a world where individuals are valued and measured by their "operative contribution" which is again measured and valued on one or both of two options:

1: what have, can, will you do for me?
2: how much have, can, will you "make/charge/invest"?

Of course, this model operates "on" individuals, families, organizations and nations. As "assumed" to be ethically and collectively normal and therefore based on a consensus from the "bottom up", the premise needs to be unpacked.

Does the model, for example, serve the fundamental needs and aspirations of individuals?
Is the competition embedded in the model a healthy one for individual humans and the planet?
Does the model imitate and/or emulate and/or enhance nature?
Is the model sustainable?
Are the thought leaders enmeshed in the rewards and benefits of the model and therefore granite in their resistance to amend or to shift priorities?
Is the global population impaled on the sword of our own design?
Is there a more life-enhancing premise and model that will open opportunity for lives of dignity, respect and honourable work/activity to all?

Some will read the above as a scathing indictment of capitalism and the inevitable endorsement of socialism or, worse, communism.
Their emotional and then intellectual reactivity is in part based on a binary either-or assumption of the limited range of options.
For the purposes of study, Aristotle divided all of nature into phyla and genus. Definitions of everything gave a level of meaning and understanding that could/would be shared, taught, researched and ultimately embedded in the cultural mind-set.
And over centuries, authorities educated in the combined Socratic/Aristotelian model ("I know nothing so I question everything"/these are the names and identifying features of") have propagated both content and method to aspiring students in all disciplines.
Artists experiencing a degree of both constriction from and rebellion against these disciplines. Mathematicians and scientists also stretched their basic learning into their soaring yet disciplined flights into the unknown, the imaginative and the creative.
And then following these expansive equations, manuscripts, canvases and  theories, a whole range of implementers took them and ran with many of them into the development of "operative" models that could affect some "result" in extending or ameliorating living conditions, or in generating profits and investments/dividends.
As the implementers created/designed/built, they merged brings like craft guilds into mass-production factories which continued to refine both their processes and their output.
Ethics, following these developments, imitated the "perfectionism" that became the operative ideal in production, health care, communication, and a new level of employment known as management.
Naturally, trying to merge the perfectionism of highly tuned machines with the ordering of human leadership, management in the new locus for both design and enhanced profit, is and will continue to be a project fraught with the inevitable "irreconcilable differences".
Nevertheless, stubborn as we humans are, we have pressed on with our fixation, a compulsive-addictive pursuit of manipulation and control of each human worker, in orders to demonstrate the absolute unshakeable worthiness of our historic achievements through the deployment of a now industrial-scientificmanagement-
medical-legal
military-informational
cyber-security
inflation of the original model...all of it carrying the weight of ethical case-studies...
based on a hierarchy of the value of human life.
Experts trained in more and more specialized, narrow and "in-depth" analysis, exemplified clearly in cancer diagnosis and treatment, are expected to make decisions that afford treatment to some while denying it to others.
And they are expected to accomplish this feat with a "board" of experts from associated disciplines all of whom have been educated on the highest value been assigned to empirical evidence.
That evidence is then weighed on such scales as projected longevity, will and support to live, attitude to continue living...etc.
There is a real risk in this collision of method of assessment and distribution of resources, not to mention the very act of "ranking" accessibility, that a gestalt of the multiple factors that "come" with each human being, including a full biography, with interests and passions, mentors and supports, spiritual aspirations and life goals will not be incorporated into the decision.
The personal biases of the decsion-makers themselves are also likely to be overlooked, as are the inherently impactful observations of those who are familiar with the subject under consideration.
Ethics and morality are not reduce able to manufacturing tweeking;
they are also not reducible to 140 characters in a tweet;
they are not reducible to the philosophic schools of thought in which the ethicists have been schooled nor the faith communities nor the ecenomic or academic or the political "status" of the individual.
A simple anecdote used in another of these spaces:
An academic ethicist, when informed of a Cambridge study attempting to find a causal link between the 2008 financial crisis and a surge in make testosterone, was totally dismissive even if the thought.
We all need to become intimately acquainted with our life ambitions and purposes, not only our career choices.
And we also must resist any and all incursions into our self-respect that are based on reductionisms to function.
We are so much more than paycheque   and an office, a title and an investment portfolio.
And we must also resist all variety of attempts to reduce us into any of the pejorative roles that so glibly slip off the tonques odour colleagues:
"ally"..."kiss-ass"..."climber"...."indolent" ..."cost"..."revenue"..."policy wonk"..."accountant"..."civil rights advocate"..."school teacher"...."drill sargeant"..."secretary"...."labrat"...
Any of these can be reductions in the eyes and mind of another...and that 'tone' we have all heard.
Dismissals are really colonial.
Differences are no excuse for isolation  or alienation...
Put-down's are emotional abuse inflicted by the neurotic...and each if us have been at different times colonizer and colonized....

It is up to those of us who are, have been and will continue to be silent in the face of attitudes, expressions and actions that demean, insult, alienate and ostracize to take the kind of action which we would prefer not ever to have to take. As Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us,

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Bullies are not going to stop bullying, unless and until the rest of us make them stop. And we are more likely to do that by refusing to tolerate their oppression in all of its many faces and forms.

The racist forms of bullying are grabbing headlines as they must. However, the obscure, unreported incidents that take place every day in each of out lives, with impunity,  dismissively comprise the fabric of a culture seeking a "dog" to kick. We must not allow ourselves to be that “dog”….there will always be someone seeking to “kick”…

And such a culture will witness not only a  pandemic of a virus but an  endless endemic of alienation and the anger and hate it spawns.

Book banners and insurrectionists....boiled in the same cauldron

 Book banning is and always has been a clear sign that fear is the motivating impulse of those energized by the need to “protect” their children.

The Roman church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum forbade books as “dangerous to the faith or morals of Roman Catholics was relegated to the status of a historic document in 1966 after existing from 1564. In 1954, the dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, offers a future U.S. society where books are outlawed and ‘firemen’ burn any that are found. In that novel, books were forbidden as a way for the government to control the thoughts of the public. Just like this week, reasons (really excuses) such as offensive language and bitterness over different levels of intellect that made people “feel bad” were used to justify the bannings.

Digging a little deeper into the issue on readingpartners.org, in a piece dated September 28, 2020, entitled ‘The little0known history of banned books in the United States, we read:

In 1624, English businessman Thomas Morton arrived in Massachusetts with a group of Puritans. But he soon found that he didn’t want to abide by the strict rules and conventional values that made up their new American society. So, he left. Morton established his own colony (now known as Quincy, Massachusetts) with the forbidden old-world customs that the Puritans abhorred. He was eventually exiled by Puritan militia, which sparked him to file a lawsuit and write a tell-all book. His New English Canaan was published in 1637. In it, he critiqued and attacked Puritan customs so harshly that even the more progressive New English settlers disapproved of it. When a book compares you to a crustacean, it’s unlikely you’ll be begging the author for a sequel. So the Puritans banned it, making it likely the first book to be banned in the United States.

From literature.stackexchange.com, we find this:

The book 1984, being about suppression of information itself, was banned in the USSR for being anti-communist, but it also was banned in the USA for being pro-communist. In the U.S. it was banned in Jackson County Florida in 1981 “because the book was ‘pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter’.” (the georgeanne.com, Rebecca Munday, September 28, 2021)

Challenged books in Canada include some very popular titles.

From penguinrandomhouse.ca, we read these words:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: challenged because of ‘profane language, anti-Christian overtones, violence, and sexual degradation.

Such is My Beloved by Morley Callahan: In 1972 two Christian ministers tried to get this novel removed from a high school in Huntsville, Ontario on the basis fo the depiction of prostitution and the use of strong language.

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence: In 1978 a school trustee in Etobicoke, ON, tried but failed to remove this novel from high school English classes. The trustee objected to the portrayal of teachers ‘who had sexual intercourse time and time against out of wedlock’. He said the novel would diminish the authority of teachers in students’ eyes.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: In the mid-90’s this book’s presence in the Alberta curriculum was challenged as part of a petition to withdraw books that ‘demean or profane the name of God and Jesus Christ’.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler: Parents demanded the removal of this novel from high school reading lists, objecting to ‘vulgarity, sexual expressions and sexual innuendoes’ in the text.

The Diviners by Margaret Laurence: Letters written in Canadian newspapers at the time opined that the ‘educators in Peterborough would be deficient in their duties if regard were not had for those whose values and sensibilities might be offended by profanity and explicit sex as found in Mrs. Laurence’s ‘work of art’. From the Archives of CBC, “Fundamentalist Christians deem The Diviners ‘blasphemous’ and ‘obscene’ and pressure school boards to ban Laurence’s novels. Several schools comply.

Today, the hue and cry about books that demand banning centres around the title Maus. Detailing Dan Spiegelman’s (the author) father’s experience of the Holocaust, ‘inappropriate language and  nudity’ motivated a Tennessee school board to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel from its eighth grade curriculum. Writing in the Washington Post*, former middle school English teacher Paul Regelbrugge writes this:

“It’s almost indescribable actually. At first blush, it’s like—okay, let’s try to put this in perspective, that it’s one small district in the state of Tennessee. But clearly there has already been an international response to this, as part of a much larger issue. My personal response is that having used this book with kids in middle school and up, I have never seen a text change the dynamic of a classroom the way this one did for several years that I used it—with different demographics, different background. I taught it to mostly African American kids in Buffalo, and to all Hispanic kids in Chicago, and kids from all over the world in Kent School District (in Washington). It becomes an unbelievable vehicle. And all the students that I’ve ever had have connected so profoundly to it. It’s become truly life-changing for many students. So, taking it away is incomprehensible.”

There is a cannonading collision occurring in many public spaces around the world. On one side of the crash is the demand for absolute control by people like trump, based on not only false information, but actually on a conceived executive decision to overthrow a duly elected democratic government. This side believes that is must take control of all levers of power away from those they consider robbing them of all of their freedom, legitimacy and agency.

Funded in part by foreign dollars, (read United States money), this past week has seen the literal hostage-taking of the city of Ottawa, by people in large rigs, hundreds of them, blocking main thoroughfares, businesses, robbing food from homeless shelters, defecating and urinating on private snow-covered lawns, and defaming public statues (e.g. Terry Fox, a national hero who attempted to ‘run’ across Canada on one leg and a prosthetic, to raise money for cancer research). The Canadian version of January 6, 2021 on the steps and in the hall of the Capitol in Washington, this vehicle insurrection is now moving into other Canadian cities, like Toronto and Quebec, to wreak havoc there as well. Opposing vaccine mandates, masks and various other government-imposed regulations, these insurrectionists, like the banned-book insurrectionists, need and demand total control. And they select the first-available, most easily targeted and least likely to push back of a number of targets while envisioning themselves as the “purifiers” and “cleansers” of an evil force, that, according to their conspiracy theories, is creeping over the world like some monster in a Hollywood movie.

On the other side of this crashing are those who actually hold the idea of an open and free public forum, (including all of the applications of that space, in school board rooms, in legislatures, in public health decisions even including mandates in the public interest of protecting the vast majority from a still-evolving and thus elusive pandemic). This side seems incredulous to not only the basis of the “freedom cry” of their opponents, but also to the methods selected to impose their will on the public square. Of course, the public institutions, like the Ottawa police, as well as the Capitol Police in Washington, or the English teachers across the globe, are neither armed nor prepared for such an insurrection, whether it takes place in front of the Parliament on Wellington Street in Ottawa, on in some board of education committee room wherever.

Assaults on the legitimacy of the public square, irrespective of the specific agents holding office, just like the banning of book considered offensive, are not only to be expected, and prepared for. They are also, ironically and paradoxically, the very monster they claim to be attacking. Projection, on a very large scale, funded and propagandized by social media, itself still neither regulated nor exercising self-regulating controls, drowning as it is in tidal waves of cash, is not only a feature of human-to-human relationships.

Projection, the act of projecting onto another (person, agency, institution, government, authority figure) those features of what is in one’s own mind whether positive or negative, is a phenomenon with which no one has been yet able to wrestle to its knees. In its negative application, of course, it has to lead to ascribing traits, behaviours, attitudes and even beliefs that are so heinous as to be unacceptable to all. In the case of the “rigged insurrection,” we are all fed up with the pandemic, frustrated by the various and evolving directions, mandates, incursions into our private lives that everyone has had to undergo for nearly thirty months. Nevertheless, we are not storming the barricades; even the vast majority of those actually responsible for the trucking industry, approximately 90% have all willingly and responsibly received vaccines, including boosters where available.

With respect to the book-banning exercise, to clean up the “smut” that seems, to those self-righteously self-proclaimed “puritans” (without a capital) who seek and demand that their religious views, and their camouflaged prurience reign, exhibit a degree of insecurity and neurosis that, if actually implemented in any elementary or secondary school classroom, would drive the pedagogue out of the profession. Furthermore, the elimination of courageous teachers, administrators and school board officials would render the education system into a tragic eunuch. Children would be “spared” things they are more then capable of relating to and even to not merely comprehending but actually integrating into their world view.

I encountered a similar “resistance” while teaching in a senior elementary school, from the “language arts consultant” who opposed even the teaching of the Diary of Anne Frank to grade eight students. I also encountered a similar book-banning insurrection in the mid-seventies, when The Diviners was under the ‘political’ and moral ‘gun’ of the holy-rollers. Fortunately, the school board wisdom prevailed, and the title remained in the list of permitted texts.

Protecting “children” from many of the more harsh features of the human race’s history, while at the same time, filtering the manner of the contextualizing of the most difficult information, remains a challenge to all sentient educators. Nevertheless, not being injecting into many professional discussions about literature, is the fact that many of our students are experiencing behaviour in their own families that would curl the hair of most of the puritans set on banning books for their own reasons.

At the end of one grade twelve class, in the late 70’s, a young co-ed asked to speak to me after class. A quiet, reserved, shy young girl, from whom I had heard little throughout the term, approached my desk sheepishly. “I really don’t know how to say this,” she began; “but last night was rough at home.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, my father, who was angry, threw me down the stairs into the basement!”

“Oh my God!” I gulped. “Are you OK?”

“Well, I’m sore and bruised, but nothing’s broken, I think,” she responded.

“Does anyone in your family know about this?” I inquired. “No,” she replied.

“Do you have any supports that can help you through this situation?” I asked.

“Well, I think I can talk to my grandparents about it; they have been supportive,” she offered.

In another class, this time, a grade ten business English class, when the subject of abortion arose, from the students, the conversation shifted between those who favoured one side to those who supported a woman’s right to choose. At the end of the discussion, another shy, polite and self-effacing young girl raised her hand, “Well,” she began, “I am certainly glad that my mother did not accept her family’s pressure when she was carrying me. Otherwise, I would not be here!”

As a teacher whose reputation is tainted by public criticism of those who considered my classroom management style too “liberal” and “too close to the students” and “too unrestricted as to the subjects discussed,” I retort, both proudly and also humbly, that I would and even could not have done it any other way. Integrating the English language into the lives of young men and women, includes not only critical examination and discussion of works of literature, naturally including the reactions and responses those works generate among the students, but also a comfort and a courage to express what one is sensing, experiencing, agreeing or disagreeing with in the classroom atmosphere. And my job was always to monitor that often turbulent, and exciting conversation to prevent personal injury or attack, to probe the reasons behind whatever they were thinking and feeling, and to guide the conversation to a modest summary.

Today, I remain appalled by the insurrection in Ottawa, as well as the book banning in Tennessee and elsewhere. Both dynamics are growing on a wave of hate, contempt, neurosis and what can feasibly be termed social psychosis for which there is only highly tentative and even more long-term address…in which we all have to participate.

 

*Caitlin Gibson, Washington Post, February 3, 2022, “When should my kids read Maus? How parents can help children learn about the Holocaust

Mehdi Hasan and Whoopie Goldberg, two voices we need to hear more from

 Mehdi Hasan, on MSNBC this week, captured one of the glaring holes in the public mind and consciousness when he blasted the U.S. media for focusing on the occasional “good news” story about, for example, neighbours to came to the aid of a teacher who had to continue to drive his daughter 100 miles each day for cancer treatment after having lost all of his sick days. His teacher colleagues pooled their days, and donated them so he could continue his compassion pilgrimage. Hasan complained that the media does not ask the question, “Why are there not more sick days for all workers in the United States?”

And the point is not relative only to the media’s having succumbed to the private sector’s, and thereby the public discourse’s, fixation on the micro, as proof of some larger evidence of good will, when, in fact, the foundation of  public need and interest has crumbled under the weight of conventional perspectives of the powerful and rich pandering to the powerful and rich.

Let’s peel this onion a little more.

What are the media selling and reaping loads of cash for the exchange? They are selling minimal, superficial, hot-button social and political gossip. Of course, occasionally, they will print and interview ‘historians’ and ‘legal experts’ to provide some background for a story, without actually pulling the scab of racism, for example, or downright unspeakable hunger, poverty, destitution and a public determined to render such stories as “those poor people” or “why can’t they pull themselves up by their boot straps like everybody else”. In some ways the media executives know that their bosses and their boards are measuring their success in revenue which is measured in numbers of consumers, and more particularly, numbers of advertising dollars.

It is not secret, and it is clearly not rocket science to mention it, that even health care has been reduced to a for-profit model which by definition and by practice excludes millions from coverage for the simple reason that they cannot afford to pay the insurance premiums. And while the medical profession may continue to provide “care” those who can pay have better access, without lifestyle impediments, to more attentive caring than those indigents who frequent ER’s and walk-in clinics.

It is also not a secret that a culture that worships, literally genuflects to, the most affluent among them, as role models for everyone else, including all American children is so dominated by a self-sabotaging perspective and mind-set that holds as a cornerstone of its creed, money is the almighty measuring stick for human value, human respect, human dignity and human honour. And while fixated on this hollow and rusted brass ring, the willingness and the capacity to have conversations at the kitchen table, the office watercooler, the corporate board rooms, and even the university seminar rooms that would connect the dots, that would as simple acts of patriotism, expose the brutality and the frozen conscience of a culture that has fallen to the idol of Wall Street and the worship of anything and everything that might make more.

 Another head on this two-headed idol of American pseudo-religion is agency…making things happen, the power to construct or tear down. Social scientists once posited various classes in western society. At least three, upper, middle and lower, were the common demographics. Now, demographics is laser-focused on postal codes, neighbourhoods, streets, and the ethnic, economic, academic, religions and political affiliations of that block. Digital technology has enabled this deconstruction all of it for the benefit of selling more- technology  first, as a means to selling more widgets as the primary motive. Measures like GDP, GNP, and ratios of income to population, have come to be deployed as “stick-drawings’ of a  far more complex, nuanced, and whether integrated or segregated ‘community’….

 And the very use of that word has lost most of its original meaning. The language of the public square has been so compromised, and processed, much like too much of our diet’s menu, into microwaveable bites of both information and “analysis”, instantly arrived at, briefly heated, and served through a narrow window commonly known as a television or a laptop or a phone screen. And we all participate in ‘consuming’ without having to chew, because not only is it served in mashed bites, but reflection on the source, the motive of the source, the funding of the source, and the absolute patronizing by almost all of the sources of public information, including political debate and advertising manipulations is considered “too painful”.

It is only if and when some ‘stark’ statement, like the Hasan insight above, that arrests our semi-conscious brain, nearly drugged from a drum beat of repetitions of “trump’s latest lies” or Manchin’s latest obstructions, or, in Canada, the RCMP’s latest fiasco, or the military’s latest embarrassment, that we awake to the potential complexity of a specific story, and then begin to wonder about how long this ‘injustice’ or conflict or extortion or hate crime has been brewing.

Pick your headline, and your messenger (media, political actor, athletic or entertainment talking head, bank or investment guru, and you find one or two themes being drum-beaten as if we were all engaged in a tribal ritual…without either music or artistic imagination.

Ironically, even though we have been reduced to ‘consumers’ of whatever anyone seeks to sell, ‘lower taxes, or banned books, or ending abortion, or fraudulent elections (not) or Putin’s bluffing, or America’s supremacy, or Kim Jun Un’s unpredictability, or Xi Jin Ping’s nefarious cunning, or Biden’s verbosity, or Obama’s citizenship (thanks to defective trump)….we have become far more scrupulous and sceptical of the labels on food products than we have of word-belches from public figures.

Any attempt to embrace the public relationship to public information, including the agents of its delivery, is termed communication theory. And as such, it seeks to deconstruct the process of seeding, searching documenting, verifying, disseminating, receiving, and then digesting the diet being served by the mass media.

Rarely, if ever, is there a concentrated, disciplined, cogent and critical examination of the couch-potatoes we have all become, and the sizzle-droppers that the public figures has also morphed into, much of that dynamic birthed in the marketing slogan, “sell the sizzle, not the steak”….

When I first heard this horrific patronizing, condescending and nefarious buzz, I was  appalled and anxious. The man uttering it was about to open a knock-off to the American Arby’s. Selling glitz, rather than steak, told me more than I ever wanted to know about how low the game of selling had fallen. Having in another life “sold” all of the products Canada Packers then offered, and having trained under their seasoned veteran representatives, most of what I learned in those training sessions could have been delivered, appropriately and professionally in an ethics class in a graduate business school. It was certainly not “sell the sizzle not the steak” but rather:

We have these quality products, delivered on a daily basis, from inspected facilities, at reasonable prices without compromise. If ever there is a problem with our product, we will work diligently to correct our oversight, and offer fair compensation and respect to our customer. Mr. Semple, our trainer, is remembered for his insightful counsel: If there is a customer compliant resulting from a bad side of beef, remember in your addressing the situation to be eminently fair to both the customer and to Canada Packers. You are arbitrating the continued operation and success of both at those moments. How things have changed in sixty years! Partnerships, between customer and supplier, were the norm. Today, partnerships have, at least in too many situations, disappeared. The customer, while warranting respect, is not always absolutely right in his/her assessment of responsibility nor in his/her demands for redress.

Hundreds of horn-honking semi-drivers, currently clogging the main streets of Ottawa, funded in part by American sympathizers (the trump cabal, for instance?) demonstrate not only the absurdity of the anti-vax movement, which inevitably morphs into the anti-government, anti-science, anti-shared responsibility (for curtailing COVID) but the political “coup” mentality that was enacted in January 6 2021 on the U.S. Capitol.

Messages, at least in the public domain, are now delivered through insurrections, traffic and mental-health obliterating behemoths, assault rifles and clubs and ram-rods.

Hasan’s professional, articulate and probing question is like a blue-jay cry in a hurricane, neither heard nor recognized as the blizzard of reductionisms, exhibiting the abuse of power by the self-righteous, self-declared victims wearing the camouflage cry of “freedom” as if their freedom was more restricted by vaccines than the pandemic itself.

And of course, the political class has not shed its French-revolution ironic and prophetic anecdote: The politician in the bar witnesses the crowd marching through the street and says to the bartender, “I’ve got to see where they are going so I can get out in front of them to lead them!” Cynical, perhaps, but highly fitting to this moment in North American history.

Hasan’ question, and the many other questions his question evokes, about access to voting, access to health care, access to disclosure and accountability, and freedom from the ravages of climate change, geopolitical military conflict, income disparity and outright bold and unrestrained lies from too many public figures.

This week’s debacle at ABC’s The View, featuring Whoopie Goldberg’s comments that the holocaust was not about racism, but about man’s inhumanity to man, including her profuse apology, her inviting ADL’s Greenblatt onto the set of The View, and her final suspension “to reflect and learn” in the words of some ABC suit, demonstrates too glaringly how low our public discourse has fallen.

Racism is, after all, one of, if not THE most heinous of human acts, entombed for eternity in the massacre of six million Jews in the Fuhrer’s holocaust. And this act, as well as the hundreds of thousands of acts of violence, verbal, physical, emotional and psychic, that continue to be perpetrated by humans against other humans, of all races, all religions, all ethnicities and all geographic regions comprises man's inhumanity to man. Goldberg herself says, as quoted in a 2011 piece from Wikipedia, “My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name—its part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black,” and “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays.” In more recent comments, Goldberg notes the difference between being black, a visible physical trait, and being Jewish not visible to the human eye.

In effect,  it is not Ms Goldberg who needs to reflect and to learn; it is the suit at ABC who needs to pause, take himself away from his desk, take a warranted leave of absence and contemplate his reductionism of what Whoopie was attempting to accomplish with her comment.

Man’s inhumanity to man, which obviously includes the most heinous acts and attitudes of racism, extends far beyond racism….into demeaning encounters based on little more than a metaphoric ‘scent’ from a person’s cologne, or another’s frown, or a power play that squeezes an individual out of office, often permanently and with impunity, without cause or with some modest cause following by a fatal and gossip-fed innuendo  and dismissal.

Ms. Goldberg’s very person, her history of support of the Anti-defamation League and her public sharing of her nuanced, disciplined and highly sophisticated scholarship notwithstanding, are defamed by a public and a network bowing to the idol of both ratings and dollars. And both of these motives arise from a reductionistic, transactional, and minimalistic comprehension of Ms Goldberg’s words. She deserves far better.

And yet, in a culture so devoid of subtlety, nuance, and the connotative aura of language and the multiple meanings and the need to embrace her subtlety and her sophistication, we can only hope that hosts like Mehdi Hasan will continue to ask his questions, as role model and motivator for tiny scribes like this one.

Bullying and hate crimes...boiled in the same cauldron?

How to constrain a bully, in the school yard, in the board room, and on the international stage?

Negotiate with firm boundaries, and build up arms (defences, weapons, security) as a deterrence….goes one argument. And on the other side, de-escalate by disarming, resisting the urge to build up arms (defences, weapons, security) only to be dubbed appeasers by those seeking a frontal confrontation.

Hitler and Chamberlain revisited in so many times and places, it is impossible to count.

Of course, we have learned that neither extreme approach is effective, and that some attempt to bring the conversation to a place where two opposing sides are not so much talking as listening. Nevertheless, the perception of all individuals, and all political regimes as to whether or not they are being “respected” and “honoured” and “understood” and “treated fairly” is, almost like the weather, turbulent, unpredictable, and ultimately it seems, uncontrollable.

A brief anecdote from another life. I was sitting in my office at noon in a senior public school (grades 7 and 8) when a young girl burst in to exclaim, “Come quick, there’s been a fight in the yard and someone’s really hurt!”

I followed her to the yard where I found the predictable circle of onlookers, with a male student lying unconscious on the ground and his assailant standing off to the side. After sending the alleged assailant to the office, and attending to the other combatant, I returned to the office to consider how this situation might be “addressed”. I do not say “managed” or even “disciplined” or even “resolved” or
“neutralized”. I had then, and to this day, no idea what the specific dispute was over. Were they fighting over a specific girl? Were they enraged with each other over some family pride and honour issue? Were they merely fighting for superiority in front of the crowd of spectators, attempting to inflate their pugilistic reputation? Who knows? As soon as I had attended to the unconscious lad, and sought medical attention, while the other cooled his heels in the office, the phone rang.

It was the father of the one who had, I now learned, been “kicked in the head” by his classmate. “If you don’t clean up that school, I am going to come down there and clean it up myself!” Immediately recognizing the unveiled threat in both the words and the intense and angry tone of the caller, I stepped up my own perception of the urgency of the moment. I called the local office of the provincial police, told them the story as I had begun to gather it, and held both combatants separately for some time. I believe I asked them each to write down their “story” of the fight, how it started and why, and what they recalled of what actually happened. After a couple of hours, the police officer returned to tell what he had learned.

“I visited the home of the alleged “kicker” in this incident, and spoke to his father and younger brother, the only two people home at the time. As we talked, the younger brother persisted in interrupting his father’s stream of words. Several times, the father told the young man to ‘shut-up’ only to have the interruptions continue. Finally, the father rose from his chair in the kitchen, and bolted to the young brother, and drove his right fist into the jaw of his son. I had to recollect that this young man had not even been in the school yard conflict; it was his older brother who had “kicked” his opponent in the head leaving him concussed and unconscious on the ground. I got the father to calm down, asked the young brother if he was OK, and returned to the car to make my notes. The only thing I can conclude is that I was investigating the wrong person, the grade 8 boy who inflicted the kick. I should have been investigating the father, a sole parent in the family with two teen-aged sons,” was his verbal report to me.

“Perhaps you and your office would consider something of a novel approach to this incident. I need to have it addressed in a manner that addresses the seriousness for the two combatants, as well as to demonstrate to the rest of the school and the small community, that this kind of behaviour is not acceptable. I can have them serve detentions in the school, perhaps write some lines, or even engage in some clean-up activities as “punishment” but I am thinking of something else. Would you office, including your supervisor consider a weekly interview in your office with both young men, each Friday until the end of the school year, some four months away, for them to report that they have not been engaged in fighting each week, and that they are completing their school work as required? I proposed.

“Well, I think that approach might be worth trying,” came the response.

And, each Friday, for the remaining months of the school year, the two boys trecked a couple of hundred yards down to the provincial police office, to report their “week” to an officer, and each student finished their year successfully. The threatening father of the “kicked” boy remained silent on the sidelines so far as I knew.

Did the intervention stop the bullying? Of course not! It merely removed that behaviour from the lives of those two young men.

In many other situations, where bullying imposes physical, emotional, psychic and career damage, the situations are so complex that it would seem there is almost no formula for addressing the situation. If a parent “bullies” and intimidates a child, the only recourse, outside of referring the matter to social and family services, is for the non-bullying parent to intervene. And if that does not occur, then the child is left on his/her own to deal with the abuse.

If a teacher bullies a child, (and make no mistake, this is not an infrequent occurrence given that personalities collide), then the student often, if not in most cases, keeps the matter silent, believing, quite rightly, that to open “that can of worms” is another act of self-sabotage that s/he cannot win. Parents are faced with increasing pressures from social media, in which bullying by teens of other teens has apparently run rampant, even leading to the victim taking his or her own life.

We wring our hands, cry foul and leave the matter to be dealt with by “experts” who almost without exception, are as uncertain of the appropriate response as everyone else. School programs, including peer training, school-yard interventions by peers, and whole system involvement have demonstrated some effectiveness, roughly around 20-30% reductions, but certainly not eliminations. Like so many other features of our lives, including most medical illnesses, we are usually in the business of “managing” and “ameliorating” the conditions, including the pain, the trauma, and the active therapy in support, to rebuild lost confidence, to restore hope and to demonstrate community opposition to the nefarious acts of bullying.

In the business world, too, a company wishing to eliminate specific competition, will take steps both overtly and privately to undercut the success of that competitor. There are some “deportment” conventions about how this might be accomplished. And yet, there are stories of both organizations and individuals who trample over the assets, and even the profits and the reputations of corporations seeking to maintain a standard of performance that would qualify as competent, ethical, transparent and accountable for most critics.

In the political theatre, at least in North America, I grew up in an atmosphere of what might be called court-room civility. Political opponents, particularly in formal debate in the legislatures, addressed each other with formal Mr. or Madame or Ms as a sign of respect for the office, as much as for the individual. Speakers are charged with the task of keeping the debate within the bounds of conventional respectability. When John Crosby disdainfully addresses Sheila Copps as “Babe” Ms Copps herself denounces his misogyny instantly, relegating the speaker to the sidelines. Such misogynistic inflammatory language, at least in Canada, has almost disappeared, while language of hate and hate crimes have, on the other hand, increased significantly.

Hate language, hate crimes, are forms of bullying that have laws in place to restrain their occurrence. And yet those laws run into the “free speech” First Amendment in the U.S. and into subtle nuances of interpretation of evidence by Canadian judges.

Reporting in the The Star, by Robert Cribb, Inori Roy, Charlie Buckley and Mashal Butt, January 28, 2022 details how weak laws fail to address the rise of hate. One specific Canadian evangelical fundamentalist Bill Whatcott, determined to speak out against abortion and homosexuality, “estimates he has distributed at least half a million flyers, the majority targeting abortion and homosexuality. A 2013 Supreme Court decision described language used in some of his flyers as “hate-inspiring. Two provincial tribunals and Canada’s highest court have found he violated hate-related human rights legislation. But despite numerous hearings and, by his estimate. More than 340 stays in custody for his speech, Whatcott has remained undeterred. ‘I’m not gonna apologize for any of my flyers…I’d rather sit in jail,’ he told Toronto Police in a 2018 video interview played for his trial last fall.”

Is there a link between the dots on bullying and hate crime? At the core of both activities lies the inordinate need for power. It might well be that hate and bullying occupy different time frames; bullying is immediate, short-term gratification, while hate has a much longer time line, often simmering before burning and exploding into some act. They both express deep contempt for another person, group or nation. And depending on the resources available to those whose appetite for power is voracious, seemingly consuming their every thought and feeling, they are able to exercise power in the theatres appropriate to their resources, fists and muscles, handguns or rifles, assault weapons or machetes, bombs or missiles or alternatively, such demonically frightening scenarios of hell and damnation, often biblically extracted, or from other sacred texts. Both hate crimes and bullying depend on a kernel of such contempt for the object of the exercise, whether or not that contempt is a projection or not, that the agent bearing that contempt is unable and unwilling to restrain, contain and moderate his/her words or actions. There is a quality of absolutism, in the sense that the agent of both bullying and hate crimes countenances no other option than the one of dominating the foe. A self- righteousness, borne of insecurity, or the perception of weakness, inferiority, whether personal or cultural or organizational, haunts the agents of both bullying and hate. The need for an enemy to oppress, or even to eliminate, depending on the depth and length and venom of the hollowness that besets the agent.

And, while detailing what is obvious about the nature of the two parallel human activities can be tapped out on a keypad, remedies, therapeutics, therapies, preventive measures to reduce the incidence of both are much more difficult even to suggest. In a time when the sociological impacts on individuals have become significant in the way we think of and even work with individual anxieties and distress, it is not a leap to reflect that the culture itself, each and every component of the culture holds a portion of the opportunity to participate as antidote for these nefarious incidents. The law, and the law enforcement agencies, cannot and will not be able, alone, to cope with these crimes. Neither will the schools and colleges, nor the after-school programs, or the entertainment and sports fraternities, by themselves, penetrate the phenomenon. The churches, it seems, have demonstrated their incompetence in the face of bullying and hate, except, in reverse, there are far too many incidents of hate directed specifically at religious groups and institutions. God, and the disciplined worship of God is as divisive a human behaviour and attitude, given that it seems to magnetize feelings and attitudes of contempt, bitterness, hate and the impulse to attack in those outside such faith communities. Similarly, race is another of the white-hot impulses generating bullying and hate crimes, often depicted as “radical change from the status quo” which, by itself, is another of the documented motivations of those engaged in hate crimes and bullying.

It may seem ironic to some to say that churches also bully anyone within earshot about how they are “going to hell” if they persist in specific behaviours. And they have been doing this for centuries, claiming they are acting on behalf of and in the name of God. An example of bullying that does not normally get filed in the newsrooms of the nation under that “file heading” is conversion therapy for those who have identified as gay, and are being ‘counselled’ into conversion therapy in order to “return to their original gender. That conversion therapy is not only bullying; it is now against the law in Canada and other countries. And yet, in my lifetime, I have worked with clergy who advocated it and endorsed candidates for active ministry in the Episcopal Church in the U.S. whom they had counselled to undergo it and who had succumbed to that counsel.

The headlines today, of course, circle around another face and form of bullying, coming out of the Kremlin. Putin is making demands, insisting that Ukraine must never become a member of NATO, and that NATO commit to withdrawal of forces and equipment and test drills in nations on Russia’s borders. And it is the divide among NATO members, particularly between European nations like Germany and France, and the U.S. that threatens to dilute any voice of solidarity in response to Putin’s bullying. Of course, none of us is surprised that Levrov and Putin’s spokesman, Peskov, both emphasize that, although there may be 130,000 troops amassed on the Ukraine-Russia border, with tanks and fighter jets, and anti-aircraft missiles in place, Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine. The unspoken specific of such narrowing descriptors as “militarily” and “through cyber-warfare” and through a “coup” are all missing from the Russian declaration.

Western analysts seem unanimous that they are unsure of what Putin is going to do. And some even argue that Putin himself may not have decided, or may not know. Germany’s contribution of 5000 helmets to Ukraine has legitimately incensed some Ukrainians, including the mayor of Kyiv. Their resistance to having military equipment, especially that made in Germany, transported across their homeland is another of the swiss-cheese holes in the NATO solidarity that obviously gives Putin delight.
Some in the U.S. Congress, as well as some in Ukraine itself, argue that a build-up of military might will only exacerbate the situation, by enraging Putin, and motivate him to take decisive military action against Ukraine. Of course, the political establishment inside NATO argues for “prepare” which in their mind means only “build up a massive defensive wall” in order to both demonstrate support for Ukraine and also to indicate to Putin that Russia will face consequences should he pull the trigger. There is little doubt, too, that the American president has to demonstrate that he has taken a very different position to his successor who attempted to “bribe” The Ukrainian president into supplying dirt on his political opponent at the time, the Bidens, in order to acquire the military support he had been promised.
We simply do not know how to “deal with” or to “talk down” or to neutralize agents who choose to bully, although we are making some progress in the education and family spheres.

Like many of the cancers, whose origins and next steps they might take, and also like the pandemic and its many mutations, we do not know all that we would like to know. And that gap is like a opportunity for anyone seeking to drive an opportunistic “truck” through our unknowing, thereby deepening the divide between political opinions that serve in part to threaten the safety and the security of all of us, on so many fronts.

Can and will NATO come to a position of solidarity in its encounter with the Russian/Putin demands? Likely at least partially.

Will Putin consider the international attention his moves have garnered adequate compensation for this scare he has injected into geopolitics? Again, perhaps partially.

Will the Chinese imitate Putin’s latest venture when they consider their options vis a vis Taiwan? Highly likely.

Will the current strategic and tactical manoeuvres by Putin embolden lesser tyrants who might be contemplating similar flexing of their political, ideological muscle? Highly likely again.

Will the U.S. actually take a deep look into the mirror of their own military invasions/incursions/take-overs in various countries, and recalibrate how they have come to this moment, as an active role model for hard power? Doubtful.

Will the United Nations Security Council, if and when it meets to debate how to interject its resources into the conflict in order to de-escalate tensions, reduce the angst inside Ukraine, and attempt to work out some kind of negotiated entente between Russia and NATO, have a positive impact? Very doubtful!

Is the world order, so called, that has been operating mostly since the second world war, under a series of tectonic shifts and rumblings, prompted by the rise of China, India, South East Asia and the seemingly constant rumblings of nationalism and populism in Europe in in both North and South America? It would seem so.

Are we safer today than we were in 1962 when the Cuban missile crisis dominated headlines? Hardly.

And, finally, will any of the participants in the current conflict stoop to deploying even a single nuclear warhead? Who knows but we all hope they resist!

Silence as a communication device...powerful and discreet and deceptive

 Let’s try to break down the experience of communicating, first from the perspective of the originator of the communication, and then from the prespective of the recipient of the message.

Most of us are blurting out words, grunts, frowns, raised eyebrows, eye rolls and/or glances, turning our bodies, bending our bodies, stamping our feet, and then there are all of the variables of “degree” in each of these messages. We want to ask for something, reply to someone for something they did, respond to another’s person, facial expressions, verbal intonations including the vocabulary chosen. And each and every experience during which we are communicating with another person is freighted with all of the other moments of communication starting at the beginning.

For example, if we have heard loud voices early in our baby years, we have already associated various interpretations of that volume. They could be ‘dark and frightening,’ or ‘enthusiastic and cheerleading,’ ‘contentious and argumentative,’ ‘impatient and critical’ whether or not we had yet even known the various nuances of meaning. And we did respond….we smiled, or cried, turned away, frowned, screamed, grabbed a soother/bottle, or whichever one of a myriad of ways we had through which to “express” ourselves. There is considerable evidence, even from the ultrasounds, that baby fetuses respond to various sounds they experience prior to their actual birth.

The now one-year-old Portugese Water Dog sleeping in her pen in the family room “speaks” using every muscle, leg, jaw, eye, ear and her ability to “absorb” however that process happens. She frolicks in the snow, she scurries through the sprinkler in summer, she rushes to the backyard fence when the neighbour Rob is cutting the lawn or tending his garden, she barks at 5:00 a.m. if she happens to hear an unexpected sound from a neighbour’s yard, or a blue jay in the pine tree overhead. Even the posture she uses while sitting in her pen carries an “expression” as does the frenetic dance she engages when she wants extra attention. Not in need of a ‘recording studio’ where performances are rehearsed, polished, and then performed as if for an audience, this little fury friend already knows that every day and every moment in every day is not merely a rehearsal, it is a moment of being fully alive. Her desires and motives are so glaringly obvious, as are her moods and feelings, that it is her ‘humans’ responsibility to learn to read and respond approrpriately to those messages. Even when she persistently stretches to the kitchen counter in search of anything, whatever might be open and ready for her pounce, and needing another of the thousands of reminders to ‘get down,’ she is sending a message….and those messages rush like white water, from second to second, even nano-second to nano-second….such is the time warp of  the intense attention, curiosity, desire and willingness to please, and especially to “attach” herself to either of her two humans. “Velcro” as applied to her is neither a joke nor an exaggeration. It is both metaphorically and literally true, from the moment she wakens to the moment she re-enters her crate for the night.

On the human scale, we too learn to “express” all of those emotional and intellectual aspirations, perceptions, attitudes, in ways many of us simply take for granted, as most of them have become unconscious. Our demeanour, too, is an expression of how we see ourselves, and our integration of how we would like others to see us. And that mix of self-appreciation and apperception and the impact of the signals we have received from others whose paths have crossed our’s blurs into a set of mannerisms, postures, body movements, and voice sounds that help to identify us to ourselves and to others.

The phrase, “you are what you eat” or “you are what you believe” both pale in comparison to “you are what you utter”…..simply because what you utter will reinforce, potentially, a picture that you are trying to build or to convey, of the unique human being with your name and birthdate, with your address and birth parents, with your academic certificates and your job position, with the church or club to which you belong and the associates in your circle. Similarly, what we do not utter, although far less noteable, and even far less likely to be recorded in our memory, and certainly not noted by another for not having been uttered, is also both a choice and a message to another.

If someone says to you, “I love you” and you greet that expression with silence, you are sending such a booming message of rejection, without ever having to account for having been offensive. You were silent. And that silence will echo in the ear, heart and mind of the ‘other’ for the rest of his/her life. Similarly, if you say those words to another, “I love you” and you receive the response of silence, you will carry that ‘wound’ forever. Rejection, in all of its many faces and forms, is, after all, so memorable, that the moment, the face of the other person, and the profound cut that is left on our psyche, while it might heal in strong scar tissue (metaphorically), nevertheless is embedded in our psyche forever.

Silence then and rejection, both expressions of rejection, are indelible. And yet our culture pays inordinate time, energy and study of the “utterances” that are recorded, recordable, in extrinsic form. It is our shared privitizing of the silence of rejection that leaves such experiences in the category of intimate, private, and not accessible for sharing simply because they expose us as so vulnerable and unlikeable that we are too ashamed to let another know. The source of either silence or rejection, too, can be a matter of permanent imprinting on our psyche…for example, if our father’s ambition for his son or daughter exceeds both the capacity and the will of the child at the time of that disconnect, both parent and child will be impacted by the disconnect, and each life will proceed in part shaped by that disconnect.

I think it was Tennyson who reminded us that we are all a part of all that we have met….and those parts that have impacted us most deeply have resulted from communication that is fixed in our memory. Whether we become fixated on those moments, or, like the Irish, never forget those moments, (mea culpa) they continue to reverberate in the drum-skin of our hearts and minds, long after the drum and the drum stick have disappeared. Neurolinguistic programming, for example, operates on the principle that if and when a thought or a new behaviour is going to be “learned and integrated into our routine” we repeat its message while touching a part of our bodies to “underscore” the message, making it a “part of our physical experience as well as our intellectual, cognitive experience. Body and mind, both simply and inexpressibly ephemerally, are a single person, never to be detached, separated one from the other, so long as no wound or illness accomplishes the separation.

There is a case to be made for the litany of messages that one has accumulated, almost like a list of stocks and bonds of experience, on which we base much of our attitude, beliefs, actions and ideologies. We do not consider those significant messages, however, as part of our identity unless and until we drag them out of the dark unconscious when a situation prompts their revisit, evoking again, although different this time, a moment in our past that we might have long ago forgotten.

The apparent linearity of our lives, from birth to age one and on to whatever age we are alive, is a distortion of the other kind of reality that can be described as ‘circular’ given that whatever we have experienced, especially if any of those  experiences have seemingly been repeated, does and will return. It is not only that we are genetic off-shoots from our parents, but we are also “archetypical” representations (not replications) of those parents. We have seemingly imperceptibly and unconsciously assimilated both their mannerisms, their words, their attitudes, and their ways of doing various things. We have not “done” this overtly, willfully, or even deliberately. And yet, it has happened. And given that those parents were different, we have adopted, assimilated and absorbed mannerisms, attitudes, vocabulary and body movements of each. This is one of the remarkable, and often inexplicable aspects of families: that young Tom will evoke a picture of uncle Joe, long after Joe has deceased, without even knowing it.

One of the many implications of our intimate and inexplicable replication of our family “inheritances” (genetic, psychological, sociological, even ethical and spiritual, and not financial or antique) is that we are more than we are aware of, and unconscious of what that might even look like. Rebelliousness, for example, in our family, in taking up or in resisting some ideology, faith community, or “dream” is, to borrow another cliché, “baked into the cake” of our identity.

And yet, for purposes of our healthy and protective security, we share these “imponderables” only with our closest friends and family. Even the concept of identity has been reduced to some glib “gender” identity, or some ethnic or racial identity, or some historic period to which we are assumed to belong. It is not that any of these “identity” criteria are irrelevant; it is just that our identity is so much more than any of these  often distinguishing, and alienating, traits, permit a level of contempt and hate because of our unwillingness to see “who” the other is through a much deeper and more complex lens.

Just recently, I was engaged in a small community project, with a few others, for whom I became merely a “position” and particular “view” of how things might proceed. And opposite that view, they positioned their “view” resulting in the reduction of all those involved to their “position” while affecting a literal and permanent dismissal of who we are as persons. My position was used to dismiss me, given that the “view” of others appeared incompatible with their’s. I was considered to have been the one whose motto was ascribed as “it’s his way or the highway”….when in reality, I was not only open to merging the two “views” with a modified significance of both for the sake of the overall project. And yet, when that option was put on the table, it was silence that came back.

Silence, from a small group, has to indicate that others share a view that they wish not to debate, for whatever reason. And of course, into such a vacuum rushed the political class, bent and determined to demonstrate their eminent worth and responsibility, given that elections are looming.

When I was greeted, subsequently with the assessment, from a participate, that “politics” is always tough and in small towns it is especially tough, I immediately responded, “Politics is a word that is used to camouflage bad human behaviour which would never be tolerated in any respectful, dignified and relationship-building experience. Building relationships, as opposed to the immediate creation of some public edifice that justifies the political ambition of elected officials, takes time, and especially takes time together to get to know others with whom one is working.

And that cannot and will not be accomplished though private, secret, and determined communication that excludes others.

We are speaking to others, sometimes even more loudly, in silence, than we would be if we were across a table, arguing the merits of our “position” in respectful if impassioned dialogue.

Men have died because others were unable to interpret their silence as ‘consent’ or as opposition….and silence is a deliberate choice of communicating needing no verbiage, no time, and with no apparent consequences such as negligence or accountability, and certainly not transparency. It will almost never be part of the construction and gardening of healthy relationships.

"Big nations can't bluff"...Biden blows it!

I have never been able either to comprehend or to countenance the level of chicanery that seems attached to weak and grovelling men who aspire to and desperately pursue power and status. Everyone knows that they have had to “kiss ass” so many times, it has become routine, normal, and even expected, from their perspective. They also have had to twist both the truth and themselves in the wind of whatever situation placed them in a negative light, as they scramble in vain to squirm out of that black light, especially if someone they consider important to their career path is watching.

Power and the pursuit of power begats secrecy, deception, manipulation, and downright scurrilous behaviour. The full truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth has no place in the lexicon of values for those in positions of power.

First off, they have literally no idea of the kind of work, the specificity or the complexity of those in their charge, and what’s more, they simply do not want to know. In that way, they escape the fine details of having to face whatever injustices might be operating at the shop floor/office floor level. They justify this ignorance as “we do not have either the time or the energy to get down into the weeds of each person’s job, or their complaints, or their life story. We have to maintain a clear perspective on the gestalt of the operation, so that we can discern if and when a ‘big fire’ is breaking out. And by ‘bug fire’ they inevitably mean, the kind of fire that will sink their personal narcissistic ambitions, plans and their conscious or unconscious genuflecting to the false god of their own brass ring.

“A secret is something you tell only to one person at a time!” is a verbatim phrase I have heard from the mouth of such a man, desperate to prove himself as a ‘top dog’ on the totem pole of his profession. And then, as if to reinforce that vacuity, he notes that his own superior has ordered that no political crisis must ever reach the office of that superior, lest the superior too will have to contend with the political mess that has been rising, like slime, to the top of the organization’s agenda.

Characterizing those in their orbit in a manner that ‘patronizes’ and detaches them from the real authenticity of their ‘charges’, calling them with descriptive monikers like “immature”, ‘self-absorbed,’ radical,’ ‘too idealistic,’ ‘going through a rough patch’….these are just some of the ways that they dismiss any who take exception to their way of operating.

Years after a long professional relationship of disdain, even contempt between a supervisor and a potential employee rejected in the interview, to approach that unsuccessful candidate with an “apology” for not having hired him/her, is another sign of a degree of false humility verging on dissembling….It is shame and guilt that prompts such an abject apology, given the successful career of that interviewee in another local setting.

Weak men, too, are those who are so enmeshed in the modus operandi of “saying whatever others want to hear” so that they curry only positive ‘reviews’ in the hope, too often successfully proven as worthy, that, if, and when the time comes for either a vote or a recommendation for promotion, because they ‘have no enemies’ they are promoted.

It is not that only sycophants are promoted; it is that too many wily, cunning, solo-flyers have and continue to rise to the top of too many organizations, both in politics and in corporations, including academia, social services, ecclesial bodies and health care organizations. The model of the “successful” role model, who wears the brass ring, drives the BMW, vacations in the Mediterranean or the South Pacific, and lives in a 5000 square foot McMansion, can only come to a crashing halt when s/he meets a concrete wall of realization that s/he has been faking it throughout the decades of his/her career.

It is not that powerful people are not intelligent; they are.

It is not that powerful people are not insightful; they are.

It is not even that powerful people are not charismatic; they are.

It is, however, what comprises charisma, and insight for how to climb, and intelligence for how to slide through the hurdles, the speed bumps, the small and medium-sized conflicts, and the unruffled performance in the interview process that assures too many decision makers that ‘this is our choice’ for CEO.

Glib, charismatic, uber-confident, unwavering, unapologetic, quick-witted, never skipping a breath when pressed for a response to a difficult question like ‘what would you do in this situation’….after all, those making the decisions have mastered the formula, and given that they have achieved through such imitation, why would they not given lasting legacy to that model in their own decisions?

“He rose to the top because he had no enemies,” is a phrase so often uttered, not by those who competed for the top job against him, but from objective observers who have traced his career path from the beginning. And, or course, once installed, those people (men and women) are extremely difficult to extract from those positions. They have honed their ’diplomatic skills’ and their rhinoceros skin, and their deaf ear, and their blind eye, and especially their shading of all ‘inconvenient truths’ especially those that might have bruised their ego and their reputation.

And, for those of us outside the “inner circles” wherever we go, and preferring that outsider status, we watch sometimes with ironic humour, sometimes with tragic sadness, and other times, with patient scepticism and doubt knowing that such people are ‘in over their head’ without realizing it.

Have you ever noticed, too, that those in positions of power have an image of the culture they seek to implant, a culture that need compliant “plants” in their greenhouse, to grow to a certain height, to blossom in a certain season and manner, and to wither in an appropriate time frame, predictably, given the history of that particular culture.

Joe Biden held a second press conference today, honouring his first full year in office. And, likeable, affable, compassionate, empathic, and ‘mature’ “Joe” uttered many statements, many of them written and delivered to attempt to recover some of the lost ground he has experienced on the last few months, now with an approval rating of somewhere in the 30% range, with a disapproval rate of 53%....

So he had to ‘sell’ some of his administration’s accomplishments over the last twelve months. Agreed.

And he was asked to address the current military build-up on the eastern border of Ukraine. And, voluble as he is, peppering his lines with “no joke, I’m serious”…he uttered these words, “Big nations cannot bluff!”

As if to remind his audience that the United States, under his presidency, was not bluffing when it repeats “serious repercussions” against Russia, should Putin attack Ukraine. And yet, after two-hundred years of American “bluffing” and pounding its national chest, and huffing and puffing about how its engagement in the Middle East, for example, has nothing to do with the oil reserves in that region, and then compliantly covering the existence of nuclear weapons in Israel from full disclosure on the world’s geopolitical stage, and then …..the list of American bluffing and huffing and puffing, (not exclusively by trump) is legion…and yet, without being confronted in that presser, Biden demonstrates how hollow, weak and ineffectual is his administration in the face of another  huffing and puffing desperate Russian leader.

Damon Linker in The Week, January 14, 2022 in a piece entitled, “Putin calls America’s bluff on Ukraine,” writes:

Russia has amassed significant forces along the border of Ukraine. Talks between Russia and NATO appear to have broken down. Members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment are beginning to suggest the need to respond to any Russian military moves against Ukraine with a strong show of force. How did we get here, seemingly on track toward either direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed state nearly 5,000 miles from American shores, or poised to back down and retreat in the face of a frontal challenge to a military alliance led by the United States?

The answer is that we go here by bluffing---and the evident decision of Russian President Vladimir Putin to call our bluff. One possible response to this unhappy situation is to continue bluffing in the hopes that Putin with eventually blink. The other far more reasonable path is to reassess the decision that got us here in the first place and move forward with less unsustainable hubris….We have been able to fight a series of small (if intractable) wars around the world because, in each case, our opponent has been vastly weaker than we are. But we have also extended implicit security guarantees to places where a strong or rising regions power has competing interests. And we’ve handled such situations by acting as if we’re willing to defend certain countries against formidable military threats when we’ve never really been prepared to do so.

This approach to conducting foreign policy worked well enough so long as no one called our bluff. Our willingness and ability to project power to the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa served as supposed evidence of our resolve everywhere.

Thank you Mr. Linker!

Biden’s words rang so hollow that one can only envision, in both Bejing and Moscow, men are excitedly quaffing their favourite liquid refreshment and laughing uproariously, most likely on a secure vitural connection between the two capitals. America has stated she is unprepared to put “boots on the ground” in Ukraine, that she will defend Taiwan against Chinese attempts to take her over, that any nuclear threats from North Korea will be met with serious repercussions.

At what point, Mr. Biden, is the American voice not to be considered the “master of the bluff”, especially when you publicly utter those unforgiveable words of denial?

This space has never advocated military action as the optimum solution to any conflict. And we urged a withdrawal from Afghanistan years before the Biden administration made the decision to withdraw. And we are not arguing here for military action on the border of Russia and Ukraine. However, we do expect that the words of the American president, hours prior to a potential invasion of Ukraine, will at least have the temerity and the authenticity to refrain from uttering the blatantly ridiculous.

Canadians are watching and listening to the tidal wave of rhetoric from both sides, amid a pandemic in which barely 2% of the southern half of the globe have been vaccinated, and where the virus still continues to rampage. A military conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not a chapter in world history that any of us can tolerate. And the sabre rattling on both sides, with the U.S. continuing to diagnose Putin’s various moves as either bluffing or not, while he keeps his poker hand very close to his vest.

If we were to enter from another planet, which leader would we discern might have the upper hand in strategy, even if not in military might?

And which leader would we judge to be more easily manipulated, though whatever trickery, chicanery or even bluffing?

The answers are obvious, and the stature of the United States is becoming more tarnished by the hour.

None of us envisioned this kind of scenario in 2022, after four  years of incompetent negligence verging on the criminal in the Oval Office. 

Reflections on victims and bullies....and the oscillation between the two

 Writing in The New Yorker, Jan. 3 & 10, 2022, Paul Sehgal, in a piece entitled, “The Key to Me,” decries the prevalence, indeed the universality of “the trauma plot” in contemporary fiction.

Here are some of his words:

The prevalence of the trauma plot cannot come as a surprise at a time when the notion of trauma has proved all-engulfing. Its customary clinical incarnation, P.T.S.D. if the fourth most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in America, and one with a vast remit. (Merriam-Webster #4: to give relief from suffering)…How to account for trauma’s creep? Take your corners. Modern life is inherently traumatic. No, we’re just better at spotting it, having become more attentive to human suffering in all its gradations. Unless we’re worse at it—more prone to perceive everything as injury. In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to statue—our red badge of courage? The question itself might offend: perhaps it’s grotesque to argue about the symbolic value attributed to suffering when so little restitution or remedy is available….During treatment for P.T.S.D. after serving in Iraq, David Morris was discouraged from asking is his experience might yield any form of wisdom. Clinicians admonished him, he says, ‘for straying from the strictures of the therapeutic regime’. He was left wondering how the medicalization of trauma prevents veterans from expressing their moral outrage at war, siphoning it, instead, into a set of symptoms to be managed.

Perhaps, as a “creative writing” instructor at New York University, Sehgal’s primary interest in literature might tend to focus his attention on the literary productions filled with trauma, and potential therapeutic “recovery”…when it might be feasible to assess that his real core complaint is with the dominance of the therapeutic model, the DSM (is it now #5?) that has emerged as the universal diagnosis and solution to severe pain whether emotional, physical, sexual or even criminal, in the literary, military, political, criminal and even the ‘spiritual’ world.

There is a deeply enmeshed transactionality to this archetype: it demands symptom, microscopically identified, and then compared with similar symptoms, clustered by those whose lives are dedicated to the relief of emotional and physical pain, as if they are so similar, if not actually identical. Agency of the interventionist, toward “healing” the psychic wound, is analogous to the surgeon who inserts screws into a severely broken arm or leg, permitting it to grow to something akin to its original strength and deployment.

Trauma, however, does not reduce so easily to an identifiable “symptom” that can, with the right intervention, be healed. Indeed, the medical model may, in fact, be counter-intuitive to an appropriate intervention. And the literary model, tracking the immense popularity of the medical model, itself tracking the “transactional” model of business, science, politics and the economy, all of which disciplines perform as if they each have the “cure” for whatever ailment is currently possession the individual or the body politic. Education too, in the form of classical conditioning, exhibits a similar “product” expectation, especially measured by behaviour that can and is measured by testing instruments that, themselves, possess an inherent bias of the designer.

It is as if  Pavlov’s dogs, so responsive to the bell/food conditioning experiment, have come to serve as models for human “interventions” on the micro and the macro scales. Professionally trained clinical whatever’s, have their theories and their scientific papers based on other theories and papers, including renowned experiments, that demonstrate the effectiveness of specific kinds of interventions.

 Whether through cognitive-behavioral, Gestalt, immersive analysis, or mere “mirroring” or any of several other models, clinicians (emblematic of the “doctor” in the white coat) probe for the “presenting symptom” and then drill down to find how the “client/patient” has been able to survive similar if less penetrating and debilitating trauma, in order to assist with the recovery of that strength. With military conflict, compounded by economic collapse, climate change and the resulting existential threat of global extinction should we not commit to the curtailment, or possible elimination of carbon and methane emissions into the atmosphere, individuals as well as cumulatively and collectively, defining the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it can hardly be a surprise that those most deeply susceptible to the rhythms and the ebbs and floes of the psychic vibrations in the culture, the artists, writers and creators generally, would both mirror and expose those vibrations.

Victimhood, as an archetype, has a compelling dramatic universality, given that we have all gone through some form. And in order to “belong” it is our shared (albeit very different, in cause, in events, in symptom and in depth of impact) experience of being wounded. And victims need bullies, in order to categorize themselves (ourselves) as victims. Given the prevalence of bullies, themselves unconsciously agonizing, inappropriately, about their own woundedness, and taking their deep and unresolved anger and frustration out on the nearest, and most “stereotypical”  weak-one….the outsider, however that archetype is defined in the immediate culture. Childhood trauma, inflicted by a parent or a family member or family friend, is often enacted ostensibly as a “healthy parenting” or even a “game” thereby protecting the ’victim’ from a full realization of the impact of that trauma. Early interactions in a young person’s life, take on a “how-am-I-doing” motivation for the child/adolescent, given that performance, grades, goals, touchdowns, bell-beating 3-pointers, scholarships, trophies and public acclaim offer and provide motivation linking both child/adolescent and parent/teacher/coach. Classical conditioning is then in full bloom.

Even somewhat mature adolescents will (have) question why we are stuck with “you are not the best teacher for us who are not the best students” in a ranked allotting of students relying on previous grades. Perceiving an injustice, and projecting that injustice onto the instructor, illustrates a simple form of bully/victim dynamic.

We have all learned what it is like to be bullied, and likely in our darkest and most secret moments, have even explored, either literally or imaginatively, what it must be like for the bully. A middle-of-the-night scribbling, in dark felt black ink, using a bright orange pen, blurted what was a vain and poorly crafted spewing down a page, so infested with anger at a colleague, that, I imaginatively entered the pattern of Brutus, when faced with the prospect of killing Caesar. At no time, afterward, did I have any emotional reaction to that person. At another time, faced with a peculiar submission of a male “coach” who had bought into the “talking” therapy as a necessary discipline for all males, I blasted a screed arguing that men and women were not the same in this regard, and that even among men, we each have our unique and respectable differences. His reply noted a “shot across his bow” and I have never heard from him since.

Oscillating between victim and bully, however, is far too familiar a pattern, especially among those who have not had/taken the opportunity to excise the boil of their psychic wounds. And, ironically, especially in the entertainment world of popular culture, those “super” heroes, who can and will accomplish the impossible, while extremely attractive to young people, are at risk of implanting feelings of desire, aspiration, dreams and even actions in emulation of those “heroes” whose actions can veer into bully-hood.

Corporate executives, sometimes called “drivers” given their tightly held responsibility to make good things happen among unwilling pawns, can and do qualify too often as bullies, leaving the archetype of victim on the shop or office floor. Professional athletic leagues, tightly controlled by top-down owners and executives, manipulate their “actors” (players, coaches, managers) as if they were merely another piece of metal for a production line. And the preferred line of interpretation of that behaviour runs something like: “If he is a man, he will accept these decisions, without complaint, without revenge, without sulking and will keep his head high and continue to perform at his highest capacity.” Are the athletes victims, or does that apply only to those like Colin Kaepernick,  who took a knee to protest racial injust, and has never thrown a pass in the NFL since, and likely will never throw another pass.

It is our capacity to discern the real victims from the faux victims that really matters, and yet in a culture in which “FAUX” trumps “real” and “authentic”, and alternative facts outwrestle, out shoot, and even erase real factual, scientific and credible information, that capacity is in jeopardy.

However, we cannot claim to be victims to that dynamic. After all, we are directly complicit in the developing background of that culture theme, whereby selling the “sizzle” and not the steak has been a montra for marketing professionals, for decades. Appealing to human emotion, especially those emotions that make one feel inadequate, frightened, small, unpopular, unwelcome, different, awkward, dumb, of the opposite gender, powerless, impotent….these are all magnets of the advertising copywriters’ vernacular. And whether or not those feelings actually exist, in any given target market, the opinion polls, the market research, the ‘opponent research” and the increasing detailed volume of that data, along with the hourly curating of that data, render each of us vulnerable to those highly seductive pitches.

Are we victims of that seduction? Many of us are, at various times.

And then there are social and political movements that arise when a group of people consider themselves “at a red line” moment, when they feel that something they regard as highly significant for them, is being eroded, evaded, dismissed, or even ignored. Victims and victimhood begat more victims and more victimhood. It is like another “mass movement” another pendulum swing of social attitudes, that vacillate from one extreme to its opposite.

The Americans renounce putting “boots on the ground” in Ukraine, in the face of Putin’s war-sabre-rattling on the Ukraine-Russian border, after twenty years of American debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, no matter how “honourable” was the service of those thousands of service personnel in both theatres. Reverting to isolation, as the former president did, is dramatic evidence of his need to “manipulate” (ride the evidence of the polls) appearing “strong” and “principled” and yet unwilling to acknowledge his inherent weakness and insecurity. The paradox of the victim/bully in incarnate in the presidency from 2017 through 2021 in Washington.

Oscillating from one pole to the opposite, however, is no way to run a railroad. We are not, individual or collectively, assigned to or resigned to a single archetype. We are all more than victim/bully. However, without acknowledging our uniqueness, our individual talent and perspective, not in a Hollywood-cheerleading manner, as “special” and capable of “anything” but rather in a much more modest and  realistic, “grounded” in our deepest intrinsic personal feelings and motivations, and seeing and respecting both the limits of our “uniqueness” and the limits of our capacities, we run the risk of over-stepping our personal boundaries.

Those boundaries, unlike the sidelines on the football field, or the ‘key’ on a basketball court, are not marked out on our individual pathways. They have a tendency to emerge only after we have over-stepped them, when someone else yells, “Stop!” And it would seem, at least to this observer, that we are not very good at touching the arm of one who might be about to over-step a boundary, for which act s/he might live to regret for a very long time.

The institutional culture, the leadership culture, in all of the powerful offices and board rooms, have a singular responsibility to own and to acknowledge when they are abusing their power. That dynamic or theme, however, is in very short supply, in too many quarters where the occupants definitely know better. Whether they are hiding behind tradition, rules that are “absolutely right” for this institution, including the institution of the church in all of its many forms, or protecting their own “ass” by defining their modus operandi as “the end justifies the means”…in a wild-west, tyrannical exercise of testosterone (by both men and women)…or as the result of expectations of their perceived investor list…or for some other reason, they are really the prime mover of most of the victim attitudes and actions….even among novelists, playwrights and creators.

Tilting too far one way, as in physics, however, has the predictable impact of trending back to the other end of the pendulum. And it is this oscillation that we have to come to recognize, and to slow its pace and compress its compulsion, if we are going to stabilize otherwise intractable forces and individuals.