The mask is right off

This time he said it before a microphone and TV cameras. Donald Trump claimed that from his perspective the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he has awarded to, among others, donors, professional athletes, politicians, and radio commentator Rush Limbaugh "is better" than the Medal of Honor. He claimed the medal of freedom is "better" precisely because recipients do not have to sacrifice their health or their lives.

Donald Trump has made it clear from the outset that he despises service and sacrifice. He has repeatedly, and very publicly, rejected the notion that those who sacrifice themselves for the good of others have a claim on their fellow citizens. He dismissed the five and a half years his political rival John McCain spent in brutal captivity for his country with a sneer: "I like people who weren't captured, OK?". When the family of Humayun Khan, who had given his life in Operation Iraqi Freedom, appealed to Donald Trump to abandon his Islamophobic policies in the name of the United States Constitution, and of their son who had given his life for that constitution, Donald Trump dismissed them by doubling down on his Islamophobic positions.

Reflections on Conservatism in the Wake of Charlottesville

The American people have elected a man who has no idea of shame as their president, and I surprised myself by feeling particularly incensed to see the way he confidently assumed he could disrespect a gold star family and then count, not only on the obedience and professionalism but the political support of the American service chiefs. Last week, his service chiefs served a quiet but determined notice: they would obey him but never willingly acquiesce to the corruption and dishonour of the military they served. After witnessing white supremacists parading with the symbols of slavery and genocide, and their president refusing to condemn either the ugly ideology or its uglier, murderous display, the chiefs of the American services: Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps issued a series of statements condemning white supremacy and warning potential recruits their services had no place for bias or racism.

The white battalion

by Gage Skidmore , via Wikimedia Commons

A friend and colleague of mine, an officer in the Canadian Infantry, taught me "Old King Cole" ("beer beer beer said the privates, merry men are we"), and he taught me about the White Battalion. The White Battalion is a tradition in the Canadian Forces, or at least in some regiments. It is a term for the regimental dead. As my friend explained to me, regiments disband, their colours hung on the walls of churches for time and nature to return them to the Earth, but white battalion never disbands; its members are transferred to an active regiment. Soldiers remember, honour, and grieve.


The act of remembering war dead has many expressions in many places, but it works out to the same basic contract: a society will ask its young men, and in some cases its young women, to put themselves in harm's way for the sake of the nation. In return, the nation will carry the names of everyone who gives their life in its service down through history in honour. It is a covenant painted on the walls of thousands of churches. It is carved in the stone of war memorials in villages and cities across the world. It forms the basis for a signature piece of American political rhetoric: Lincoln's Gettyburg Address. It is a part of the hearts of millions of families.

White is a privilege, not a people

Ballycastle Church, Ireland, photo by John Spragge

People from many cultures and origins, including  Picts, Celts, Franks, Angles, Saxons, and Slavs, have somewhat lower melanin levels than the average for the human species. That physiological peculiarity does not define a common culture or identity. People with low melanin levels speak different languages, derived from different language groups, follow very different religious and cultural practices. Where cultures meet, as in the "melting pot" or "mosaic" of mainstream North American culture, African cultures have as much influence as their European counterparts.

The word "white" defines a cloud of privilege, not a people. Like most clouds, it is white with unclear and contested borders, opaque but insubstantial, and often roiled by unseen but real violence, both within and without.

Nazi victory porn

It is a paradox: high intensity military combat is one of the most extreme of human experiences, which means nobody who has not experienced it can will have the emotional or physical memories to make sense of it. Relatively few people today have experienced high intensity combat. Only a minority of people ever enlist in the armed services, and the majority of members of the armed services work at the vital, and sometimes dangerous, job of supplying the front line soldiers. Today, the majority of people have not experienced high intensity combat.

Yet it appears war remains the one of the most common single subjects for historical presentations and documentaries, as well as historical fiction. Accounts of war, historical and otherwise, often tend to lay stress on the experience of intense combat, rather than the boredom that defines much of military life.

JunkersEF128 jet model
By Juergen Klueser via Wikimedia Commons

Partly, this stems from the curiosity people who have never experienced intense conflict feel about it; partly from assumptions about the importance of military conflict in shaping history. But books and documentaries do not make present the experience of battle, as Guy Sajer's book The Forgotten Soldier makes clear: "One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired..." War documentaries come closest to the experience of a civilian reading about events taking place a long way away; yet even the experience of a civilian in wartime involves uncertainty the viewer of a documentary or reader of history does not share.

The combination of unreality and the ability to evoke emotional intensity makes military history subject to various forms of manipulation. I call one particular form of this manipulation "Nazi victory porn". It consists of various descriptions, frequently highly unrealistic, of ways Hitler could supposedly have won World War II.

The sales force for war is out

...and experience suggests we can expect another round of trashing for Neville Chamberlain. That guy. Every hawk with a war to sell, or a conflict to stoke, or a peace initiative to shut down, drags out the same carpet beater and flogs the very dead horse of Neville Chamberlain's unavailing concessions at Munich. Even ones who can't say exactly what Chamberlain did at Munich.

Neville Chamberlain died in November of 1940: Winston Churchill gave the eulogy at his funeral, and even with bombs raining on London, could say of Chamberlain's policy:

But it is also a help to our country and to our whole Empire... [that] we were guiltless of the bloodshed, terror and misery which have engulfed so many lands and peoples, and yet seek new victims still. Herr Hitler protests with frantic words and gestures that he has only desired peace. What do these ravings and outpourings count before the silence of Neville Chamberlain's tomb? Long, hard, and hazardous years lie before us, but at least we entered upon them united and with clean hearts.

Many people in the present day who know far less than Churchill take a far less charitable view. Why does this matter? Do I really intend to waste time defending an old, white man whose maintenance of the imperial system undoubtedly fed the great conflicts of the 20th century?

Reasons to Worry, Reasons Not To

 By Gage Skidmore
via Wikimedia Commons

Right after the election in which a minority of American voters put Donald Trump in the White House, I began to see online articles suggesting Mr. Trump and his supporters have a brilliant agenda for working the end of American democracy. Some articles I have read suggest Mr. Trump's intellectual incoherence actually has a brilliant covert purpose, and his operatives have a plan of such speed and subtlety that Americans standing up for tolerance and freedom can only hope to watch helplessly as Mr. Trump and his minions construct a fascist state.

I wish I knew these articles grossly overestimated Mr. Trump's native abilities.

Homeland Security photo

I wish even more that the best outcome of Mr. Trump's coming administration looked less chaotic and miserable. Donald Trump and his friends on the right wing of the Republican party may not have a brilliant plan. They still can, and probably will, inflict four years of absolute misery on the poor and dispossessed in the United States. We have already seen an appalling increase in bullying and harassment throughout the United States and even in other countries. The Republican Congress looks set to dismantle even the minimal social safety net in place in the United States. The next four years look set for more catering to the wealthy few at the expense of children going to school hungry. Unless the course of the incoming administration changes, the leadership they provide will reward the worst behaviour by police and public officials at every level.

At best, a man who has paraded his ignorance and prejudices will soon have the ability to give orders to the most powerful and destructive military on the planet. He will also control the world's most sophisticated surveillance apparatus. This frightens me. It frightens a great many people. It should.

Daniel Berrigan, presente

Conventional movies have contained few genuinely moving, as opposed to sentimental moments. One of the most moving occurred at the beginning of the film The Mission with Jeremy Irons, a story of the involvement of the Jesuits with the Guarani people. Near the beginning of the film, three Jesuits walk toward the viewer coming over a rocky knoll. Two of these are actors dressed as Jesuits: the third is Dan Berrigan.

By Thomas Good GFDL

While protests against the American Imperium and its exploitation and war would inevitably have arisen, Dan Berrigan had a profound influence on the shape they took. His embrace of a non-violent, ethically based resistance to war and domination helped inspire activist movements of the past generation. He followed the example of Jesus, whose ministry, by the world's standards, ended in the utter failure and disgrace of the cross. By separating the pursuit of truth and ethics from fame, from success, from power, Dan Berrigan helped create a movement that political defeat could not stop and that darkness could not stifle.

He is at peace now. Let light perpetual shine upon him. Let us who remain continue the great work he has nobly advanced.

Politics through the window (please, just not Windows 10...)

Politics, as an art, a practice, and discipline and a commitment has one real purpose: to make good policies for the peace, welfare, and just ordering of the polity. Politics aims to find solutions that allow us, as disparate, imperfect people, to live good lives together in a functioning community.

It also makes for terrific theatre.

Grace notes and missed opportunities

Rob Ford has died. Rest in peace.

After a pause, a very brief pause, in the interests of decency, the negative assessments of Rob Ford's performance as mayor have started. And indeed, Rob Ford's tenure in the mayor's office was a disaster, most of all for Rob Ford. Edward Keenan's got it mostly right. Heck, nearly everybody has it right. Rob Ford's talents, his outlook, did not match the skills and the perspective a mayor needs.

Rob Ford believed in servant government. Politicians should believe in servant government. If more politicians really wanted to serve the people, instead of socking away money in off-shore tax havens, we wouldn't just have better government, we'd have a better world. Rob Ford wanted to solve people's problems. He wanted to serve as the kindly scullery maid handing leftovers out the back door. He wanted to answer phone calls and get potholes filled. Despite his lapses, he did a good job as a councillor.

Darwin day

Alternet reports that today, Sunday Feruary 12 marks the 203rd birthday of Charles Darwin and asks how we plan to celebrate. I gave some thought to Charles Darwin and the nature of evolution as a learning system. In a talk at Knowledge Technologies in 2002, Uche Ogbuji said humans have as much information in our brains as we have in our DNA. Keeping knowledge in our brains gives us an advantage, because for DNA to update itself with new information, the individual organism has to reproduce and die. I took this knowledge with me into First Nations justice work, and I had the opportunity to learn from First Nations people about the intimate connections between all things in the world. As they taught me, I remembered the world of abstract language-based knowledge, and I took another tentative step forward. I came to understand that the knowledge encoded into our DNA does not simply reflect us: it also reflects our environment. No one species evolves in isolation, rather and entire ecosystem evolves, moving forward and producing information about how to fit together. Our DNA and the living processes that refine it do not produce individuals or even individual species: they produce ecosystems.

What I encountered as the bleeding edge of European science, the intersection between cognitive theory and evolution, the First Nations people I worked with understood as traditions they had loved and reverenced from time immemorial. So on the 203rd anniversary of Charles Darwin, I conclude thus: like Columbus, Darwin sailed to far places and brought back information his contemporaries and successors used both for good and for ill. But can we truly call either man a discoverer for walking on ground lightly trod by others for thousands of years?

Time, space, and the suburbs

Last week I saw a movie at the Cineplex Odeon Queensway, a huge multiplex in Etobicoke. I have often enjoyed two pieces of sculpture on the property: a metal canopy by Jean McEwen entitled Between Heaven and Earth, and a soaring spiral tower (I don't know the artist's name or title) that has a weird resemblance to Tatlin's Monument to the Third International.

On this visit I noticed something I hadn't seen before: a row of beautiful old maple trees lining the parking lot to the northwest of the theatre. They were evenly spaced, with trunks I would guess about two metres around, and generous , spreading branches. From the leaf shape I think they were some less common type of maple, maybe mountain maple or striped maple.

I found it intriguing to speculate about who had planted them in such a regular way, and why. Had this row of maples lined the driveway of some vanished farmhouse? Unlikely, since there was no answering row of trees. Were the maples planted by some enlightened factory-owner to provide shade for picnicking workers at lunch? More likely, especially since this was, I believe, an important area for defence industries in World War Two. Or were the trees planted by the municipality to line a street, now swallowed up by the entertainment complex?

In any case, the trees provided a graceful link to an earlier time, a puzzling yet powerful reminder of the existence of the past amidst an instant landscape.

My second experience, somewhat related, occurred today. I visited Woodbine Racetrack (again, in Etobicoke) for the first time, accompanied by young lady, in order to watch the races and bet on the horses (we bet $40 and won $32, not a bad price for an afternoon's entertainment for two). The race track forms part of a very large complex. The building that houses the stands is a large, modern facility, impressive in many ways, with its horse-themed photomurals and super-efficient staff.

However, in some ways the building's slickness made it seem more like a mall--one felt this especially in the food court. It didn't have exactly the kind of rakish excitement that I associate with horse races in old Hollywood movies.

What fun then, to step out of the sliding glass doors, and find just the kind of simple, uncomfortable, outdoor stadium seats that one might see in a 1930s drama. The racetrack designers made a conscious design, in this part of the facility at least, to stick with tradition. We sat down, felt the cool breeze and we knew that our horse was going to win!