Getting into Sight and in Mind.

Two years ago this appeared in a UK newspaper:- "Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, probably almost no-one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops are deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will bury its dead, just as the rest of the world, as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does. It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again. That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved. Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy.

Minority Language Angst

This year Quebec is introducing world-leading improvements to how doctors deal with patients in end-of-life situations. But at the same time they are having their language police bully local authorities with less than 50% English-speaking taxpayers to force them to drop all English communication. That's Quebec for you - the Good, Bad and Ugly province. Quebec is the country of Je Me Reviens and Maitre Chez Nous. Yet I'm very fond of it. Over 40 odd years of regular travel there I've hardly ever had a bad time.

Its a place where the majority francophones have the most stable society, the highest per capita income and the best quality of life of all French speaking territories globally.  A civil society wherever in it you travel. A fun-loving place, probably the best in our Dominion to have a good time in. With gorgeous scenery, great food and fabulous sporting options. The region where ice hockey was invented. A jurisdiction with its indigenous people nowadays calmer than in just about anywhere else in North America.

How to explain the dichotomy of its suppression of the English minority's right to live in their own language at a time when Quebec's treatment of other minorities is as good as anywhere?  And how does one explain the government there thinking up ever newer ways to prevent both new immigrants and locally-born French from getting an English education? Quebec's official printed English is deteriorating to worse than you will see in Western Europe or Asia. This at a time when English is firmly in place as the global lingua franca.

Fascism Today

It is conventional to think that fascism got its comeuppance as a result of being on the losing side in WWII. Yes, some regimes did survive beyond that time as a result of staying neutral. Spain and Portugal are examples. But eventually they all succumbed to the winds of democratic change. A key driver of C20th fascism was the charismatic leader who restores national greatness. Once he is gone, things tend to calm down. Thus, while dictatorships live on, truly fascist ones don't. The leadership of modern dictatorships can change, say as in the example of China, but they have other ideologies.

But do they? A defining feature of both modern Russia and China is their sense of thwarted national importance. In Russia at this moment this is manifested in the Duma's campaign to purge Russian life of foreign influences. Putin's recent banning of American adoption of Russian orphans is just the best known of a series of mooted or in-the-works measures to roll back the internationalization of the Russian people that has proceeded apace since the end of the Soviet empire. Some of the more sinister suggestions being considered are strictly curtailing marriage between Russian officials and foreigners from outside the former Soviet Union, categorizing foreign ties such as owning property or having a child abroad as a threat to the state, and amending their constitution to include a national ideology.

In China historical grievance combined with a strong sense of cultural superiority is a powerful unifier among the dominant Han majority. Some ways in which this manifests are  sabre-rattling  about Japanese territory, and on-and-off bullying of minority territories or geographical neighbours once part of a former Chinese empire. This includes Taiwan, Vietnam and Tibet, where Tibetan identity is being marginalized by Han immigration and the gerrymandering of religious leadership selection. Not long ago I got into a ding-dong about Tibet with my Hong Kong-born respirologist, with him asserting that Tibet has always been Chinese and so China is being unfairly pilloried in foreign media!

The alarming build-up of PRC peacetime military strength and Russian racist posturing cannot help remind us of early Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Much of how Argentina behaves towards the Falklands again today as it did formerly under Leopoldo Galtieri and his Junta follows the same pattern of channelling popular anger into supporting aggressive behaviour. The strong ethno-cultural focus of these regimes' propaganda is a defining feature of fascism.

The Mystical in the Songs of the World

As one who came of age in the Nineteen-Sixties, for me Brad Wheeler’s now forgotten  2009  review article in the Toronto Globe and Mail remains a seminal read. He was memorializing the 90^th birthday tribute to Pete Seeger on May 3^rd in Madison Square Garden. Titled  'The songs, they are a-changing'  Wheeler's piece was a trip down the memory lane of the big “songs-of-the-times” and a lament for the great pop anthems of our past. Perhaps the last of these was Neil Young’s Rocking in the Free World of 1989.  

Wheeler's obituary for great songs quoted Don McLean, who in 1971 had penned that superb tribute to the rural American South, American Pie, as saying: “Pop culture is illiterate now; nobody cares about words and they don’t care about melody either. In order to write an anthem, you have to be at least reasonably poetic, and I don’t think that people today have the verbal wherewithal”. McLean went on: “People love language, they crave it, but the support for it is drifting away. Society is not going in the direction of poetry. It’s going in the direction of numbers.”

In regretting “the vanished mighty sway of music” Wheeler attributed it to the ever-expanding diffusion of outlets for music so that “..the potential to reach a large audience with a serious topic is diminished”. The possibility of a single and singular artist capturing the ethos of a time in history is disappearing. The ‘do you remember where you were when...’ moments of  today and tomorrow will have myriads of uploaded YouTube snips or their future equivalents. While a few are widely spread by viral means online, nearly all will be without the broad exposure that creates an enduring image in the public mind. 

As there is now so much noise out there, nothing can any longer be definitive.  No single vision can capture a time or place’s dominant mood or emotion. How can there be shared nostalgia for an era, like there is still for the Sixties, when there is no longer a signature tune or memorable picture or quote that forms a collective point of remembrance of how it felt to be alive then? Are we already coming into the time when the truly transcendent, the stuff of myth, can no longer find an entry into our society’s collective consciousness?

Snared by Technology

US consumer reporting agencies are required by their federal laws to show consumers their credit reports to allow them to correct errors in their own records, but data brokers who collect and sell consumer information for marketing purposes are not required to give individuals access. The business of collecting information about our individual tastes and behaviours is running amok pretty well everywhere in the World, totalitarian or democratic. It's just the purpose for doing it that differs.

Google is now using its mapping and GPS capabilities to send you locally tailored ads - the shape of things to come. One just can't hide, short of dropping off the grid and becoming a hippy or hobo, or going to live with an Amazon tribe. The itinerant Roma keep trying but it's not working. And even true hippies have to consume something commercial at some point.

You can be sure a great deal of the promotional digital bumf that data collection technology developments bring your way will be unwelcome. The old broadly distributed and loosely targeted analogue advertising was easier to ignore than the rifled hit that you get on your smart phone, a message that is more intrusive and may well cost you money to read. Watch an old 1960s Star Trek episode on DVD and you'll time it at 51 minutes, then compare that to the length of the action in a modern one hour show on TV.  Just how many more unwanted messages can we receive before there's little else?

But is anyone really fighting back? What liberates also enslaves, and technology is our modern slaver.