American Anarchy

Jun 16, 2016 //
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Despite Bernie Sanders clinging desperately to his chances of nomination like the country itself depended upon him to be the only rational choice in an otherwise catch-22 election, I feel comfortable saying that the next American presidential election will be a catch-22 between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton representing the downward spiral that is the American status quo, and Trump representing the harbinger of the end of days.

I don’t want to spend that much time covering why Trump is the absolute worst person imaginable. He thinks building a giant concrete wall is somehow financially feasible or that the president has that kind of bullying power over another country. He thinks censoring the press is something reasonable to do within a democracy. He disparages women with superficial insults, and thinks that Hitler had the right idea when it came to handling an ideology that differed from his own. Honestly I feel stupid for even writing this out because if you haven’t figured out that Donald Trump is a terrible human being by now, then literally nothing I write is going to convince you. That being the case, moving right along.

However, Clinton’s status quo isn’t much better. The democratic party to which she is aligned, under Obama has deported more people than any previous president. For a political party to condemn Trump’s wall “solution” to illegal immigration, their own draconian practices really shouldn’t reflect the spirit of that wall. Obama also ordered ten times more drone strikes than President Bush, among them the assassination of an American citizen whose crime essentially amounted to hate speech. Closing down the torture prison for Muslims, despite being a campaign promise of 2008, also seems to have been forgotten eight God damn years later. What kind of hypocrisy is it to lambaste the bombastic xenophobia of one admittedly insane individual while grudgingly accepting it within the so-called progressive party of the United States?

That’s the democratic party though, not Clinton, so despite her being fully indoctrinated into its corporate culture, there’s still a chance she might distance herself from its less-than-illustrious past, right? Well, except she kinda voted in favour of that whole Iraq war thing, which greatly destabilized the region beyond its already pretty-much-fucked state of affairs, giving birth to everyone’s favourite terrorist group: ISIS. Clinton, in true politico fashion, prudently regrets the decision now that the whole world knows what a shitty idea it was. Of course, she would have known it then too, if she had actually read the information that was available at the time. This is what we want from a president: gross neglect when it comes to matters of global affairs. Like how she’s facing criminal charges for her mishandling of classified information by using her private, unsecured email server, despite multiple warnings to desist. People rightfully belittle Trump for his many business failures to contrast his claimed acumen, but Clinton’s facade of competency should face similar criticism.

At least she’s not clamouring to ban all Muslims! However, not being Hitler-esque in one’s policies is a really low bar. This article from Al Jazeera makes a compelling argument about the problem with the way Clinton frames the Islamic controversy. She forces Islam into a binary of radical Muslim terrorists on the one hand, and ‘good’ Muslim moderates on the other. This binary ignores the many facets that make up human beings, and resorts to defining Muslims solely in their relationship to terrorism. Within this framework, Islam is still incontrovertibly linked to terror, and it is only the measure of dedication that one has to their religion that denotes one’s likelihood of committing terrorist acts. Again, it’s not Hitler, but it’s not really ameliorating the situation either.

Clinton would also mark the very first woman president, meaning a victory for women akin to the one Obama’s election had for black communities: Pyrrhic. What are Clinton’s plans for low-income and part-time workers, the majority of whom are women? How does Clinton plan to help with child care? Having a female president does not accomplish much for feminism if most of the problems facing women are social and economic, and that president is corporatist in her politics.

So what are Americans to do? I originally wanted to sarcastically suggest voting for Trump, but now even joking about that makes me gag. I mean he’s to the left of Clinton on some issues, so he’s got that going for him, but he’s just as imbecilic about those policies as he is about his right wing beliefs. He advocates for local industry in lieu of global manufacturing which would greatly improve the domestic economy, yet produces all his own products in China. He wants to get corporate money out of politics, and brags about financing his own campaign, ignoring the fact that he himself is quite literally an anthropomorphic corporation. He’s even maintained some fairly progressive opinions during his political flip-flopping, and has come out both for and against gay marriage, which I guess you can call a draw. An article I read that I don’t care to find again because I don’t remember the source speculated that the danger with Trump wasn’t his radical ideology, but the uncertainty of which position he actually held on any given topic.

Chris Hedges in his book The Death of the Liberal Class says that voting for the “less worse” party (ie. the democrats) can only serve to push the acceptable political ideology further in that worse direction, and concessions to the right become a constant. Anyone left of Fox News only has the one option after all, so Americans end up with candidates like Clinton whose most admirable characteristic is that she is not Donald Trump, yet who is by no means a reasonable person to lead a country.

What do you do when the extent of your political influence as a citizen only allows you the choice between a neglectful criminal and a psychopath? Our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau very diplomatically said that he would work with whomever was elected, and that the Canadian/American relationship goes beyond the personalities of two individuals. This eloquently illustrates the common mentality of individuals in a contemporary democracy: accept the state of affairs for the sake of stability and maybe grumble about it privately at the water cooler. If either candidate is elected, Americans will very likely continue on with their lives, hoping that in four years their choices will be better. Yet my repeated analogy to Hitler is pertinent to this mentality: at what point is a society morally obligated to abandon traditional means of political change and opt for the non-traditional? Ought a society to continue to accept an escalating criminality in their leadership, trusting that the only potential for change is an increasingly meaningless democratic system?

Noam Chomsky’s theory is that people have forgotten other political processes in favour of blindly focusing on the carnival we call an election. To steal his line because he is much smarter than me and delightfully sarcastic, “Citizenship means every four years you put a mark somewhere and you go home and let other guys run the world.” By retaining this focus as the only option for political participation, citizens do not even consider the activist route as a means of altering the course of their Hindenburg of a country. If the political system has failed, and it most certainly has, then it is up to the people to make the necessary changes to improve their country.

It is my understanding that citizen-based political reform outside of the incumbent structures of their system is called…

ANARCHY!

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Categories Politics

The Elimination of Injustice is a Red Herring

Jun 12, 2016 //
1

The rallying cries to end racism, to end homophobia, and to smash the patriarchy are all passionate pleas calling for sanity in a world gone crazy with unfounded hatred and hegemonic power imbalances. They all wish for the same thing: the elimination of injustice. We want to destroy capitalism. We want to abolish racism. We use colourful language like this with grand images of violent revolution because it is an anger that stirs within us that wants to lash out in retaliation against the oppression that we see inflicted upon the less fortunate. Seeing the devastation that injustice can bring would indeed drive any rational person mad, so to condemn the seething reactions begotten by this social terrorism is as absurd as condoning the appalling apathy that inevitably accompanies it. I use “we” because I am not excluded from these feelings, though my preferences tend toward simmering cynicism over boiling rage.

What are these injustices? Racism is the preference of one race over another, often structurally enforced by anachronistic institutions built prior to the bleeding heart enlightenment. Basically samesies with sexism, replacing race with gender where appropriate. And so on. Now, obviously they’re not identical and intersectionality has come a long way in explaining why, but they do share one common element: they are all ideas. Ideas fused into systemic practice, yes, but at their foundation they are intangible worldviews.

How do you destroy an idea? Tangible things are easy. Audrey Lorde’s quotation about being unable to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools would be irrelevant if she were talking about a literal house. That shit would be a breeze to knock down. We have hate speech and anti-discrimination laws in Canada that prevent overt oppression meaning that, on paper, injustice has been triumphantly eliminated from our country. Well done, Canada! Except obviously it hasn’t. The tangible injustice is all but gone, leaving only the insidiously abstract injustice to be destroyed, and it seems the abstract is far more resilient.

Yet to destroy, demolish, dismantle, and decimate (if you wish to reduce injustice by a tenth) can only succeed negatively. What I mean by this is eliminating injustice can only ever negate the status quo. It seeks to thwart an inherently destructive idea with other destructive ideas. If you believe Lorde, then it’s simply never going to work.

Within the last year, there have been several sexual assault cases that were gravely illuminating about the flaws within our justice system. Kesha was forced to continue working with a man who sexually assaulted her. Brock Turner received a slap on the wrist. The judge for the Jian Ghomeshi case highlighted the problem by stating that without hard evidence, it comes down to the testimony of the accuser against the accused. This is then subject to often harsh cross-examination which can easily raise reasonable doubt as trauma is neither the best for memory nor unambiguous in its mental affectations. Thus, too often does justice ignore the victims of one of the most heinous crimes today. The legal system is an institution, but more than an institution, it is an idea. It is an idea that did not take into account the unique tragedy of sexual assault victims during its conception.

Screaming that the legal system is broken will not fix it. An argument could be made that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but imagine a group of workers complaining about the conditions of their factory to the owner. The owner may eventually implement a solution, but it will be a solution created by the owner who is likely going to avoid shifting the system too far as he is the one currently benefiting from it. Progress requires new ideas. The elimination of injustice will be the byproduct of these new ideas, not their predecessor.

The Broadway musical Rent has a lyric that states that the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation. This line is then followed by a jubilant WOOOOO! to celebrate its veracity. Peace is only the stagnation of where the war left off. Creation is the opposite of war because creativity produces something new. We need to stop trying to destroy, and start building.

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Categories Social Criticism

White Films in a Diverse Culture

May 22, 2016 //
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#OscarsSoWhite is something that I am as usual addressing much later than most, in no small part due to my unrelenting contempt for Twitter-based social justice trends. However, as the trend does accurately point out, there are a substantial number of white people in Hollywood movies, to the point where characters who are canonically non-white are often portrayed as white people. Scarlett Johansson in the American remake of the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell is one contemporary example. This generates immense online backlash in the form of the electronic version of rolling one’s eyes. On the flip side, there is backlash when canonically white characters are portrayed as non-whites. A black James Bond and a black Spider-man were both vehemently opposed and neither made it to production. As common as the themes of these arguments are, it’s not the same people arguing both sides. One group is demanding respect for the sacredness of an entirely fictional canon (Spider-man isn’t real), and the other is arguing against the forced monochromatic nature of films (black people are real).

Let’s talk about diversity in films. To be clear, there isn’t much. Black James Bond and black Spider-man never got made, remember, yet Ghost in the Shell, Pan, Gods of Egypt, and Dr. Strange did (or are, for those that aren’t released yet). Is this a huge problem? America is predominantly white, so why not pander to the largest demographic? Bollywood films are pretty much exclusively Indian, and Korean films all star Korean actors. Somewhat ironically, the original Ghost in the Shell anime has a white character voiced by a Japanese man. The film industries of these countries make films depicting their dominant group because that is their audience. It makes sense. Nobody complains about the lack of diversity of language in Hollywood films, because America is an English speaking nation.

It seems logical then that movies should depict the demographics of their host countries. America is 63% white, 16% Hispanic, 12% black, and 5% Asian, so why not aim for that? This is where it becomes complicated. For example, a Hollywood movie would need 20 characters before one of them was Asian, or another solution might be that every 20th movie would need to be casted entirely as Asian. Neither of these are feasible options. Most movies only have one or two protagonists. Or if the film was entirely Asian, it would ignore the largest demographic and would therefore have less of a chance to be a box office success. This is something no movie mogul will abide in our wealth-driven movie industry. Now we’re left wondering: should the film industry ignore 14.5 million Americans just because it would be complicated to incorporate them?

Failing to depict Asians in film does not only a disservice to Asian-Americans who are looking for representation on the big screen, but to the entirety of the population. It is our myths that socialize us, and now that religion is dead, we’re left with the entertainment industry to teach us how to be human beings. Depressing, right? Well life is miserable, get over it. We idolize our fictional heroes and heroines, and so we relate to and emulate their personality and characteristics. Ignoring Asians in film not only denies role models to maturing Asian-American youth, but also prevents Asian faces from being a part of white socialization. If whites aren’t shown any images of another race, they won’t know how to respond to them in person. And we all know how well humans behave around people they don’t understand… It’s poorly. We behave poorly.

So diversity in racial depictions is necessary for social cohesion, demographics be damned. Great. We’re left with one more problem. How do we depict races on screen? I hope I don’t need to argue that racist stereotypes are bad. If all black people on screen are depicted as gangsters, then everyone will be socialized to think of black people as gangsters. It is fairly common to see people arguing for normalcy in racialized depictions in movies. Like a black Spider-man or James Bond who behaves identically to their already established white counterparts. These films have been indistinguishable remakes for years now, what difference would it make to simply have a different race portrayed as the protagonist? Characters with accents or who adhere to dramatic outside cultures might make racial minorities seem like exotic foreigners who do not belong, and portraying other races as identical to whites would foster racial equality within North American culture.

This has one glaring problem: defining normalcy as imitating established white culture makes other cultures abnormal. The First Nations in Canada are in the midst of fighting for cultural sovereignty and to depict one as fully assimilated into white culture, interchangeable with their white peers, would be wholly offensive (especially given the context of our Residential Schools whose barbaric practices aimed at establishing exactly this). Different is not a bad thing. Some people have accents, different styles of clothing, and different cultural practices. Should a Sikh not be shown in a turban because it makes him an exotic foreigner rather than a neighbour? Portraying the rich cultures that make up the diverse American population would allow respect to blossom for alternative ways of living that people have every right to live.

However, this portrayal forces people into their ethnic culture, however respectfully it is portrayed. Some people want to assimilate. It’s not intrinsically evil. Or even pick and choose their practices; it’s their right. How can this translate to film when one version will be offensive to one group, and the other will be offensive to the first? The answer is simpler than you might think.

Let people tell their own stories, define their own characters. Diversity starts in the writing room. It is the only way to authenticity.

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Categories Art, Social Criticism
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