Last year

 
The year 2024 was a year of profound disappointments for many people, including myself. In addition to the challenges and painful setbacks that made the headlines, more insidious failures have crept under the radar of much of the mainstream press, such as the grim news that more people than ever before have needed to resort to food banks. 

Over the year, many of our opponents have taken the mask off. Their arrogance, their conviction that only their money and power matter, once relegated to the fringe voices they could deny, is now on full display. Their contempt for the poor is unrestrained. Their determination to maintain the order they sit atop increases in step with the daily manifestation of its failure. Hoarders of wealth so great as to have no meaning proclaim the meaninglessness of all things. Where inequality renders the wealth of the world's richest so great as to be meaningless, it makes poverty and insecurity more and more miserable. 

On all sides in politics, positions have grown more and more sclerotic, with cultural choices fusing with politics. More and more of our daily choices, from food to transportation have been labeled political and made into measures of our consistency and fidelity to various positions. As our positions have become more and more fused together, advocating for specific changes in the name of justice has become increasingly difficult. Instead of calling for one measure of decent treatment for one community, whether the homeless and outcast people on the street or Indigenous people facing pollution and despoliation of their lands, we are expected to advocate for a portmanteau of causes. The same disease has afflicted conservatives, leading to political paralysis  and changing politics from a search for solutions into a zero sum power game. This sclerosis naturally produces profound inconsistencies in all political coalitions, which must be papered over with absurdities we are expected to accept on pain of ostracism.

Our country

 I am a Canadian. This is my country.

This is my flag.

There went out a decree

Sometimes I imagine myself transported back in time, as a haunting from the future rather than the past, to the dreams of Gaius Octavius, more commonly known as Augustus Caesar. I imagine myself appearing in an otherwise placid dream of a man resting between sessions of the Roman senate, from days of commissioning yet more celebrations of his own part in the history of Rome in numberless statues and bas-reliefs. In my daydream, the sleeping dictator understands I come from the future to haunt his dreams, and asks me how he and his achievements will be remembered. I answer him: after your death, a religious movement will arise in Judea. About eighty years later, members of this religious movement will record its beginnings, and one of these accounts will mention your role in ordering a great census of the empire. It will record that your decree sent millions in motion, to the cities of their birth, and that among them were two very ordinary Galileans, a man named Joseph with Mary, his very young and very pregnant fiancee. It will record that she gave birth in Bethlehem of Judea, and lay her child in a manger for want of a proper bed. And that, Caesar Augustus, is how you will be remembered by millions in the hundred generations to come. You will be the man whose decree sent an expectant mother to give birth to a homeless child in a stable. 

Fanfare for the Common Man

 It's now the sixth of November: Guy Fawkes Day is over, and so is the civic ritual (not far) to the south of where I live. Though we do not know the full outcome yet, this election may well bring to office an administration that will bring with it policies that challenge the whole world, and not least Canada. 

At this moment, suspended between bad news (the New York Times has just called the United States Senate majority for the party of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and J. D. Vance) and the remaining hope that the Democrats will take the White House of at least the House of Representatives, it seems a good time to reflect on what it will take to respond to the challenge of a man and an administration in the White House who wants to exercise dictatorial powers "on the first day"; who plans to replace professional civil servants with ideologically vetted functionaries; who has referred to dissenters in his country as "vermin"; who has promised his supporters "I am your retribution".

For my friends in the United States, this is a bleak outlook. The Trump Administration elected in 2016 came into office by surprise, with relatively few set plans, relying on professional civil servants and members of the military, most of whom had a basis in their professional and personal ethics that enabled them to resist Donald Trump's worst impulses. If he is elected this time, he will have a retinue of individuals who share his most undemocratic impulses and a plan to transform the American government, all ready.

Thirty-nine years ago, in 1985, Jonathan Kozol published "Illiterate America". It contained a chilling prophesy describing the end result of Ronald Reagan's educational policies. It ends with these words: 

Masking skills in time will yield to a determined passion to remove those masks and to compel us to look hard into the face of every Caliban we have created and ignored. Violent disorders will become endemic. They will be met with measures that no longer seek to pacify but only to contain. American will cease to be a flawed democracy. What we will become instead cannot be named.

If the American people have given Donald Trump another term, and particularly if they have given him a compliant legislature, he will have no shortage of supporters and enablers eager to make the worst of Kozol's prophesy come true. 

River Run, 2024

The history isn't a secret.

Grassy Narrows First Nation, an Anishinaabe community, lives along the English-Wabigoon river system, northwest of Lake Superior and directly north of Lake of the Woods. Until about the middle of the previous century, they lived by fur trapping, harvesting blueberries and wild rice harvest, and the river fishery. Fish formed a significant part of the people's diet, and they also found work as guides at the fishing resorts on the river. They did not have a bucolic lifestyle, enduring unwelcome interactions with the majority society, particularly in the form of the cruelties of the residential school system.

Then the government built a series of hydroelectric dams, which disrupted the wild rice harvest. Intensive logging destroyed the blueberry harvest. And the greatest blow, the one which makes the name Grassy Narrows a source of shame to every decent Canadian, fell in 1970: high levels of mercury were detected in the English-Wabigoon river system, and medical tests showed the people of Grassy Narrows were suffering from mercury poisoning.

None of this is mysterious. Scientists and medical personnel have known for centuries that mercury is highly toxic; our common phrase "mad as a hatter" refers to the effects of the mercury used to make felt for hats. There was no question about where the mercury had come from, either; a chlorine plant upstream had dumped ten tons of untreated mercury waste into the river system at Dryden, upstream of the Grassy Narrows reserve, in 1962. The pulp and paper industry had polluted a river used by people as a source of food from time immemorial in an act of gross negligence. Governments, with equal or greater negligence, had allowed them to do it. Both now had a clear obligation: stop the pollution, clean up the river, and provide a decent level of care and compensation for the people who were poisoned.

For fifty-four years the people of Grassy Narrows have demanded the government do exactly that. Youthful activists have become grandparents, calling in vain for successive governments of this province to show a shred of compassion, or failing that decency, or failing that, responsibility for a plain obligation.  For at least the past fourteen years, members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation (Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek) have marched in Toronto to call for the Ontario government to address the harms done to them.An increasing number of supporters have marched with them.

Darcy Allan Sheppard, 1975-2009

 Fifteen years ago, on August 31 2009, Darcy Allan Sheppard encountered Michael Bryant on the most fashionable stretch of Bloor Street, between University Avenue to the west and Yonge Street to the east. What happened then depends on who you ask; according to at least one witness, Michael Bryant struck Darcy Sheppard with the front bumper of his car either deliberately or negligently, and then without trying to see if the person he had hit was all right as the law requires, had attempted to make off. At this point, Darcy Sheppard had latched onto the car, possibly to demand Mr Bryant live up to his responsibilities. Michael Bryant apparently responded by driving rapidly along the wrong side of Bloor Street attempting to shake him off. In the course of this action, Bryant drove so close to the street furniture he struck Darcy Sheppard against the street furniture, fatally injuring him.

Three Kinds of Politicians

 

All politicians have their individual quirks, personalities, viewpoints, and priorities. Within that, we can sort politicians into roughly three categories. 

The first category, the pragmatists, approach politics as an art of problem solving and consensus building, aiming to accomplish effective governance. Pragmatists tend to focus their efforts on issues and in directions where an opportunity to build a working coalition exists. Pragmatic politics involves listening and adjusting positions; pragmatists change based not only on practical politics, but also in response to information and to logical arguments. Abraham Lincoln was, famously, a pragmatist in his approach to ending American slavery.

The second type of politician, the romantics, start with a specific goal or outlook, one they resist compromising. Romantic political orientation has its value where compromise is either ineffective or morally intolerable.  Winston Churchill was largely romantic in his implacable opposition to Nazi Germany. However, in most cases a romantic approach to politics ends with fireworks such as those produced by romantic conservatives in the American Congress, have who achieved periodic shutdowns of the American government but little in the way of legislation. 

The final type, the incendiary, is more common in social movements than in politics, but incendiary politicians do appear from time to time. Incendiary politicians are distinguished from romantics by their willingness to go outside the formal and informal limits of political discourse to achieve their goals. Andrew Jackson was an incendiary politician, most notably when he defied the US Supreme Court ruling on Indigenous rights to commit one of the worst acts of ethnic cleansing in American history. Donald Trump is, of course, cut from similar cloth.

All of which makes Rich Lowry's recent commentary in the New York Times downright interesting.