The American Public

I have for a long time had a theory about the role of media in the way the worst kind of capitalism works – all capitalism not being by any means bad. I'm not an economist, nor a political scientist, nor a sociologist, but I have my own little theories. jdid says I overestimate the intelligence of the American public. I've known the American public since I went to college in the US, at age seventeen, and I respectfully submit that the Democratic Party would not have a black man named Barack Obama running for president in the upcoming US election if the American public of now, this day and time in October 2008, were stupid people. I've already written about this. As I’ve said, I never thought I would live to see a black person as a viable candidate for president of the US. That it has happened in my lifetime says a lot of very positive things about our neighbours to the south and I rejoice in that. But being a victim of Bad Capitalism can leave a person open to manipulation. Here’s how it works. Bad Capitalism is rapacious. It has no conscience and its greed is limitless. Bad Capitalism wants to control not just the economy, but also the political system, the educational and health care systems, the transport system, the media, the entertainment systems, and so on, and so on. Once it controls all those systems, it ensures that they work together to achieve one purpose: making Bad Capitalists richer and more powerful. The Bad Capitalist system makes everything really hard for all but the privileged few: hard for a person to get a good education unless they have parents who can afford private schools or afford to live in areas where there are good public schools, so many middle and lower income folk have to make do with schools that aren't so good, and getting from those to college or university isn’t easy. It’s hard to find a job anyhow, and a not-so-well-qualified person must fight to get one, and must often work two or three jobs to make ends meet. The two- or three-job person gets caught up in a daily grind where work dominates and takes up all their time, and stress affects their health. Because this person is working so many hours, it’s hard to find time to spend with family, much less find time for reading books and newspapers to keep abreast with what is going on. Now, here's where some of the Bad Capitalist owned media come in on behalf of the greedy Bad Capitalists: they offer the public, not serious analysis and solid facts, but sound bits-and-bites and biased packaging of information. (jdid, you are absolutely right in this regard.) Television becomes a place where an exhausted person can sit and be diverted – by almost any foolishness. (I'm telling you. I know. I've been diverted in this way more hours than I care to count, especially if I'm depressed and frightened about how to meet the next month's mortgage payment.) And there is mostly foolishness on the Boob Tube. So the tired overworked person ends up picking up information where and when he can, and doing the best with it that he can, with two consequences. (1) He or she can end up reading and trusting only some kinds of programs, newspapers and magazines, and end up under-informed or misinformed. (For example, there’s an article on John McCain in Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson (online, posted October 19th) that’s worth reading, whatever your politics. But it’s long, and though it’s well worth reading, many people will just not stick it out.) (2) People can end up thinking that such a person is stupid, because they are pressed and stressed by a difficult life. The amazing thing is, this overworked average Joe or Jemima in America really has not been fooled in recent elections. Let’s ignore for a moment that George Bush may well not have been elected President in either of the last two elections. (Lots of evidence for this, for anyone who is interested.) But if one takes the number of voters who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 and calculates it as a percentage of voters eligible to vote (estimates say between 55 and 60% of voters actually did vote in the 2004 election) then President Bush was most certainly NOT elected by the majority of the American people. Gallup polls distinguish between eligible voters and likely voters in their polls. Give thanks, that never mind things are so hard for so many people, never mind that their lives may be squeezed into very narrow spaces, they manage to find the truth. which means, for me, that the Spirit is alive and well and blows where it wishes. I have one plea this fall. Say your prayers, if you pray, fast if you fast, and for the sake of God and good citizenship – be a likely voter! Go out and vote. Once more, your life may depend on it… Selah!

Lying politicians, and elections...

An update... I'm behind on responses to the folk who've dropped by to visit here and who've said things to me in conversations elsewhere, and I apologize. I've been snagged by that nemesis of those of us who are keyboard-bound, stalled in tunnels of the carpel kind, so both hands are now in splints. At a terrible time too: the goings on in the world are shrieking for comment. Unbridled capitalism has finally had its comeuppance, throwing the US into chaos and crashing stock markets... Don't get me wrong. I'm not crowing. Too many ordinary folks are in real trouble, not just in the USA, but here in Canada, and no doubt elsewhere as well. As usual, the people who can least afford it are hurting while the chaps on Wall Street who caused the trouble will walk away unscathed. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the rest will be bailed out (however that is arranged) by monies that come , one way or the other, from the taxpayer's pocket. Comments on two matters, for now. First! When it was reported that mortgage giant Freddie Mac had paid an advocacy group run by Rick Davis, John McCain's campaign manager, $30,000 a month until the end of 2005, the McCain campaign denied that Davis still had ties to Freddie Mac. Davis himself told reporters that "it's been over three years since ... I had any contact with those folks." Newsweek's Mike Isikoff reports, however, that Freddie Mac paid Rick Davis's consulting and lobbying firm a consulting fee of $15,000 a month starting in 2005 and ending only last month, when the U.S. government acquired the firm. This is scandalous, and makes liars of the two Republican candidates, a big part of whose platform is that they are against those nasty lobbyists. Fact checkers (found easily online) report that Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, has used lobbyists as well. We all make fun of politicians – the only people who tell bigger lies than statisticians – but this barefaced lying is an insult to the intelligence of the American people and they should not put up with it. (Bible believers should also remember who Jesus ran out of his Father's temple – the moneylenders!) Second. Anyone who is thinking of voting for Stephen Harper in Canada's coming election ought to bear the American situation in mind and recognize how dangerous it is that he's emptied our coffers with his ill-advised tax cuts leaving us with no surplus, nothing to tide us over bad times. We now know clearly that hurricanes, out of whose paths God has kindly kept us, are not the only things that shatter economies and upend countries. Disease in humans or animals, collapsed infrastructure, crop failure, drought, floods, a nuclear meltdown in one of those old reactors, underhand dealing in our fiscal sector, any of these can suddenly arrive, and if they come now we have no nest egg to dip into, thanks to Mr Harper. Quite apart from the environment, quite apart from the divisive tactics according to which he's encouraging people who do needlepoint, sew, quilt and make handcrafted canoes to think they are somehow different from people who write and paint and carve, if you are thinking of voting Conservative in the upcoming Canadian election, remember America, a nation with empty coffers. These are critical times, requiring good government, and Conservatives aren't big on government: they think, the less of it, the better. But when the skies fall, as in times of war, disaster and famine, good government can make all the difference. So put you vote where it counts this election... Your life may depend on it.

How can it be that it is good for Bristol Palin's baby to live and good for Troy Davis to die?

rethabile has asked us to write an American sentence for Troy Davis. This is my American sentence.

To kill Troy Davis is to kill a foetus that has been fulfilled.

America applauds Bristol Palin for keeping her baby then its courts turn around and kill a man, indeed a man about whom there is doubt as to his guilt for the crime for which he has been sentenced. How come it's immoral to kill a foetus, but moral to kill a foetus that has grown and become the person it was meant to be? That seems somehow perverse, having less to do with ethics and more to do with some kind of ethereal, romantic notion about the helplessness of babes in the womb. If to kill in cold blood is wrong, then it matters not whom we kill. (We won't get into the issues of war and self-defense here.) Or does "pro-life" mean pro-foetal life? How can the same morality that is served when a foetus is preserved, also be served when a full-grown human person is killed? Isn't the argument made that it is wrong to kill a foetus because it is human life? And even if we were to agree that capital punishment is an appropriate verdict for a capital crime, must the state not pause when there is uncertainty that the person convicted is guilty? Or is there more going on here? Is this an issue that concerns race? Class? Both? It's impossible to pursue at this time all the relevant issues in this case, and we will hopefully return to at least some of them, one less obvious one being that idolatry is a subtle sin, one we commit when we purport to value "the sanctity of human life" when it is prettily wrapped up in a developing baby but regard it as disposable in grown human beings. We say, where I come from, "What go round, come round." Also, "Time longer than rope." They are interesting encapsulations of the idea of the inexorability of justice, elsewhere expressed in aphorisms like "Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind." Outside, beyond, over and above all our behaviours, individual and collective, as citizens, communities and states, the same inherent order (or Order) that sees to the rising and setting of the sun governs human behaviour. We should perhaps look to it.

Everyday matters...

Never mind the gorgeous weather, I spent the day tiling a bathroom – believe me, a challenging activity for someone who has osteoarthritis! It's not really by choice. In a city short of tradespeople, it's hard to find someone who will do a small job – which this one had to be, since it's a small bathroom, or washroom, as they say here. (I hate the term, talk truth.) Even when you find someone who agrees to take the job, chances are you'll get that fatal call a day or two before the big day that tells you, "Sorry. No longer possible." An intricate job too, since the tiles (they were already there: I was replacing maybe half of them) are small white octogons interspersed with much smaller black squares. They come set out in pre-set, one foot mosaics that are attached to netting, and that helps in putting them down, but only if you are working in those large dimensions. Patching tile by tile is something else! But what to do? One does what one must, so I'm pressing on. Hopefully I'll be done tomorrow. Then we'll return to painting, and after that, cleaning. I sometimes think I might have been happier living in a cave or in a tent as a nomad – though I suppose having and raising a family in the wild or on the move would not have been any easier, or simpler. Ah well! BTW, if you need to clean carpets, ordinary soda (the white chaser that you use for drinks) works. By the same token, baking soda works too, especially for carpets with pile. There are lots of safe, environmentally friendly alternatives to chemicals. And they're easy to find online and worth trying. On a bookish note, I've just finished reading Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm. Has anyone read it? I'd love to hear what people think. And Nalo Hopkinson's New Moons Arms has won the Sunburst Award! Congrats, Nalo! Keep them coming, and keep them winning! rethabile, thanks for visiting and for the translation. "Sunflowers" now exists in French and Spanish translations. Going to go. Retiring early tonight, as I've more tiling to do tomorrow. Stay focused – and pray! They're doing crazy things with the atom in a 27 km tunnel that runs across the French-Swiss border. A (very, they say) few critics think the experiment, due in late October, might precipitate a black hole that will drag in earth and everything on the planet. Maybe more on this soon...

"Sunflowers" – "Tournesols"

Something a little different this time, folks. Here's a poem from my last collection, The True Blue of Islands (Sandberry Press, 2005 – available from amazon.com). I've tried to translate it into French; I knew some French once, but I've forgotten much of what I knew. I'm putting both the poem and the translation up, in the hope that someone whose French and kwéyol is better than mine will make a comment. I'm especially interested in whether there's a way to 'translate' the pun (English "guest" and creole "guess") in the last word. All comments welcome

Sunflowers

Vincent Van Gogh the sunflower man
cut off his ear when Paul Gauguin
wouldn’t stay to paint with him
in southern France.

I burnt my veil and wedding dress
scarred both my cheeks
tattooed rosettes
along my arms with cigarettes.

We both needed a man to stay.

You think that it was
loneliness? I don’t
think so. Madness
has always been my guess.

© Pamela Mordecai 2005


Tournesols

Vincent Van Gogh, l’homme des tournesols
s’est coupé l’oreille quand Paul Gauguin
ne voulut rester avec lui pour peindre
au sud de la France.

J’ai brulé ma voile et ma robe de mariée
je m’ai marqué des cicatrices les joues
j’ai tatué rosettes
au long de mes bras avec des cigarettes.

Nous deux avions besoin qu’un homme restât.

Tu crois que c’était
la solitude? Je ne
le crois pas. Toujours
j’avais pensé qu’il doit être la folie.

Are they ‘Christian’? Are they ‘right’?

Who are these people who have claimed the words "Christian" and "Right" as if they have some Divine entitlement to them? And why on earth have the rest of us allowed this foolishness? It’s bizarre that they’ve been able to license themselves in this way, making “Christian Right” into a label for a group of people who are no more Christian and no more right than any of the rest of us, and some of whom are very scary indeed. Yeah, yeah. I know Conservatives are right and Liberals are left, and hence the term (i.e., to refer to the Christian bloc among conservatives) but that is also a bit of folly that we've paid dearly for. The words have a powerful subtext. They’ve facilitated these folks arrogating unto themselves the moral high ground, so that the message is not merely that they are conservative but that they are discerning, wise, enlightened. (I suspect that most people hearing ‘right’ in “Christian Right” think not ‘conservative, but ‘correct’.) Perhaps the most frightening thing is that they’ve been allowed to get away with behaving in decidedly un-Christian, not-right ways. While they insist on holding the rest of us accountable, they don’t seem to have to live according to their beliefs. As a Christian, I try to nurture my relationship with the Holy Spirit, and to listen to his guidance as I deal with what I see around me. The Holy Spirit cautions me not to judge anyone but he also reminds me that Jesus gave me a yardstick in the Sermon on the Mount: "By their fruits shall ye know them." So perhaps we should look at some fruits. For example, when it comes to staying married, these folks don’t seem to do so well. I'm quoting from a 2004 article in the New York Times (See http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/weekinreview/14pamb.html): "As researchers have noted, the areas of the country where divorce rates are highest are also frequently the areas where many conservative Christians live." Mmmn. Not such a good fruit crop there… Perhaps we should look for some other telling statistics for the "Bible belt" states. Assuredly, they do not do well in the matter of peace. Peace is paramount in the preaching of Jesus. That teaching began with the angels at his birth, when they sang, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men.” (Luke 2: 14) He himself exemplified it throughout his life – with perhaps a couple exceptions, one being when he lost his cool and drove the traders out of his father’s house (Luke 19:46), another being when he condemned the Pharisees and Scribes – at some length, it’s worth noting. (Matthew 23). Jesus extols peace making in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5: 9) and, himself faced with weapons in the garden of Gethsemane, warned his disciples against the use of force, against making aggression a way of life: “He who lives by the sword shall perish by it.” (Matthew 26:52) Indisputably the modern version of the sword is the gun. Nonetheless we have ostensible Christians (many being members of the NRA) somehow managing to square their gun toting behaviour with that caution. (I’d especially like to hear Sarah Palin on this.) Worse (for us poor members of the human race, fodder for cannon), how come these claim-to-be-Christians get to support war and take pride in their store of troops, weapons, missiles, and their vast nuclear arsenal? The trouble is that for a lot of people the Holy Spirit is a dead God locked up tight in a book rather than a Live Person who sustains, counsels, guides and comforts. I believe in the Bible as a living Word, one that I contemplate with the Holy Spirit’s guidance. I know that God speaks to me, and that if I listen, I can hear him. Aha! Perhaps that's the explanation. Is it that we have not so much "pretend Christians" in the so-called "Christian Right" but deaf ones?

Is Stephen Harper's government to be trusted?

We're having an election in Canada on October 14th. In 2006 the Canadian government headed by Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, passed a law establishing a fixed date for elections. Mr Harper has now seen fit to disobey, ignore, circumvent that law – take your pick. It is beyond question that his government passed the law. It's also beyond question that he has chosen to break it. Some say it's because the polls were running in his favour, and there is indeed an Angus Reid poll in this morning's paper that has his party way ahead. I don't know about anyone else, but it makes me very nervous when a government uses the country's parliament in this whimsical kind of way. Either fixed election dates are a good idea or they aren't. If a government goes to the trouble of passing a law that says they are, I don't expect the same government to ignore the law two years later. None of the political commentary that I have read suggests that the country is in a state of crisis such that the government cannot function, which might be a circumstance in which breaking the law that fixes the election date could arguably be allowable, indeed, wise. If the election isn't being held because it's the best thing for the country at this time, then one must conclude that it must be the best thing for the governing party – in other words Mr Harper has chosen to break his own law because it suits his purposes. I don't care what the pundits say, I, plain old ordinary citizen, don't expect those entrusted with the running of my country to give me a six for a nine. Three card sharks, used car salesmen and vendors of snake oil behave in this way. Responsible governments don't. It makes me want to go find out what else he’s said that he's changed his mind about. It makes me think that when Mr Harper says he'll bring our troops home in 2011, he may well find a reason at some future time to change his mind. Makes me wonder whether I can trust anything he says. Makes me think about where I'll put my vote...