The Harper Conservatives' Cultural Policy, Part II

I was feeling a bit guilty for not finding the time to post for the last two months, but with the latest culture-hating activities of the Conservatives, my last post suddenly looks timely again:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080811.wculture11/BNStory/Entertainment/home

The Harper Conservatives' Cultural Policy

Photo by Mike Morin from rickmercer.com.

I'm afraid that most of the Harper Conservatives simply don't get culture and never will. The evidence is there in Bill C-10, of course, which will be getting its third reading in the House this Friday, June 13th. The part of the bill that has become notorious amounts to a very short half-sentence in an enormously long bill. It basically says that in order for a film to be issued a "Canadian film or video production certificate" (the certification---heretofore concerned with where the film was made and who funded it---which is necessary to entitle a Canadian production to tax credits), the Minister of Canadian Heritage must be satisfied that "(b) public financial support of the production would not be contrary to public policy." (If you care to, you can read the whole bill here.)

The most obvious thing that is wrong with this proposed law is that a film or video production must be completed and in the can before the producers can know whether it will satisfy the Heritage Minister. Of course, to budget for and not receive public funding would be enough to bankrupt most small Canadian film and video companies; and naturally, other investors are going to be extremely leery of investing their money in any project that might have the rug pulled out from under it after the fact by the Heritage Minister of the day. So, not only will this create a substantial chilling of the consideration of any politically controversial topic, but, from an accounting point of view, it is contrary to all common business sense: everybody knows that you can't attract the small investors to a project until the major ones are on side. True conservatives deserve better than this daft idea from the government that bears their name.

But a second and more trenchant objection is that, from the point of view of jurisprudence, this is one of those vague laws in which a government gets greedy about taking all the power that it might ever possibly want to use in one grab. "Public policy"? What's that? Well, it is whatever they say it is. C-10, then, is, in short, a piggy law that any real democrat must despise.

Naturally, the current Heritage Minister, Josée Verner, has been robust in her defence of the law that bestows upon her a despot's powers of acting on caprice. Not long ago, she huffed impatiently:

We are far from censorship here. We are just putting forward an intention from our government and (from) the former Liberal government just to make sure that we will take fiscal measure to make sure that the Canadian taxpayers' money won't fund extreme violence, child pornography or something like that.

Apparently, she didn't actually add "Trust me," but she might as well have done so. "Or something like that" is one of those phrases that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who knows anything whatsoever about the history of what politicians have felt at times about the arts. But let's leave that aside for the moment and stick with "extreme violence" and "child pornography." Talk about inflammatory subjects!

But wait a minute. Has any film ever been made in Canada, that featured either "extreme violence" or "child pornography," and for which the producers applied for tax credit? Well, no. Never. Besides which, "child pornography" is against the law already, so given that example, the new law would basically say that it's against the law to do something which is against the law.

So, what are they worried about, really? Well, the only clue we're left with is "something like that," which, in the eyes of the Honorable Ms Verner or whoever her successors may be!, could mean almost anything that runs contrary to the views of the government of the day: gay marriage, abortion, the Kyoto protocol, Rick Mercer, or whatever.

I know that sounds as though now I am just being ridiculous, but here's the thing: the law DOES give them that power. Ergo, it is not me that is ridiculous, but the law. As I say, it is a piggy law.

But the main point that I want to make here is a new one---or, at least, as far as I can tell, it seems to have escaped all the discussion thus far:

WHY PICK ON CULTURE?

What I mean by this is: why not write a law that says that if any industry does anything which is "contrary to public policy" (or, better still, in violation of the Criminal Code---remember that old thing?), said industry will not receive any government funding or tax credits? Either the principle is a sound one or it isn't. So why not extend the law?

Why not, indeed. Because it is very clear that, while there has not yet been a film or video made in Canada that received funding while doing any of the heinous things Mr Harper and Ms Verner imagine, there have, repeatedly, been other sorts of companies that have taken public funding while violating all manner of laws, policies and public interests again, and again, and again. Who am I thinking of? Well, just consider for a second how the oil, or mining, or forestry companies would react to such a restriction. Demonstrably, if there are mad dogs that need to be muzzled in this country, those are the sectors of the economy in which you will find them, not in the arts.

So, I find myself forced to this conclusion: Stephen Harper's Conservatives have gone after the arts because they are galled by the freedom of imagination that artists embrace and represent. To a sensitive mind, this is obviously a deeply shameful situation, but I suspect that Ms Verner and many of her colleagues would be completely baffled by the suggestion that there was any shame at all in what they intend to do.

Gods and Puppets

Gordon Craig argued that puppets are "descendants of a great and noble family of images, images which were made in the likeness of God." You can see something of what he means in this video: the amplified illusion, with all the torturous labour to perform it crudely visible, is so much more powerful than any more realistic enactment possibly could be. The awe it evokes is similar to that elicited by images of gods, which, although we know them to be human creations, call our dormant imaginations into play in ways that, breaking free of banality, seem superhuman.

Barack Obama

Being Canadian, I naturally don’t get to vote in the U.S. Presidential primaries or elections, but just as naturally, I have an opinion. Because it is the most powerful office in the most powerful country in the world, everyone has some stake in who becomes the next President of the United States of America. And because the country is our closest neighbour, our largest trading partner, and our nearest relative culturally, Canadians have an even greater interest than most others in the question.

So here is my opinion. When the candidates were first named, it seemed to me that John McCain was obviously the best of a rather weak Republican field. For the Democrats, I assumed that I would favour Hillary Clinton, despite some slight misgivings about a couple of her past tactical blunders. At the time, I had little direct knowledge of Barack Obama, so the suggestions of his “inexperience” seemed credible. Over the course of the winter, however, I became convinced that Obama is by far the most promising candidate, for the following reasons.

The world is at a crucial turning point in which the ecological crises are and will be generating enormous political tensions all over the globe, and especially in the Middle East and Africa. Deforestation, lack of clean water and over-population will foment drought, famine, disease and social violence. It is naïve to think that this coming situation is any longer avoidable; the crucial question will be one of how it is managed.

In any attempt to meet this problem creatively and positively, the role played by the United States will be crucial. The world needs it to play a positive role of leadership, because we cannot afford to have so powerful a player working against the needs of the team. But if the United States continues to be riven on the domestic front by all the old dysfunctional suspicions and hatreds between the Right and the Left, between the rich and the poor, and amongst Black and White and Hispanic Americans, it will not be able to provide effective leadership. Likewise, if the profound hatreds and suspicions felt towards the United States by many in the world ⎯ particularly the Muslim majorities in the Middle East and North Africa, which are the greatest ecological and political trouble spots ⎯ continue to grow, then we can only expect the cataclysmic results of the inept invasion of Iraq to spread and worsen. Hearts and minds must be won over and united at home and abroad in order to begin to unite moral authority to the political power possessed by the United States. The nation needs to recover the high idealistic ground represented in its founding documents and overthrow all the years of self-interested conniving, petty ideological grudges and profound social disaffection that have resulted in all those many disgusting spectacles of moral failure which I hardly need to itemize here. The person who should be the next President of the United States is the person with the character and skills best suited to creating the conditions in which this nearly miraculous transformation can take place.

I don’t believe that John McCain, for all his courage, can do such a thing, because his domestic ideas are basically cut from the well-worn wishful-thinking of the Reagan era, and because he is too deeply distrusted outside of his own country to build any new bridges. I don’t believe that Hillary Clinton can do the job, because although she has had some good ideas, she is in her character a profoundly partisan politician. Her campaign style is further evidence of this fact. In the past, she may have been right sometimes in pointing to the workings of nefarious right wing conspiracies, but nothing she has said since the days of Kenneth Starr’s investigations is likely to allay the hatred of any of those who have been against her. If she gains the Presidency, it will represent, at best, a swinging of the pendulum back to something like its place under the leadership of her husband; but she will carry an even longer history of partisan grudges with her, with much less of Bill Clinton’s disarming charisma to offset the anger and distrust.

Barack Obama, by contrast, is as honest and forthright and as non-partisan a Presidential candidate as the United States has seen in more than a century. His rhetoric is inspiring not because it offers facile platitudes, but because he re-embraces the founding principles of his country from a stand-point that is fully-informed and truthful about the deep grievances and angers felt by many about the repeated betrayal of those principles by self-interested political parties. He is formidable in debate, but refuses to stoop to cheap shots, not out of weakness, but because he believes what he says: that such kinds of discourse represent much of what is wrong with the political culture of his country, and he would like to change this.

The notion of Obama’s inexperience is a canard. The eligible person with the closest experience of what it is like to be President in the post 9/11 world is Dick Cheney. Is there anybody who believes that his experience really qualifies him? George W. Bush, who is rightly considered a strong candidate for "Worst U.S. President in History," was the son of a President, and moreover had years of experience as Governor of Texas (where the experience he gained included signing more sentences of execution than any other politician in American history). The point I am trying to make is this: people gain their experience of decision-making in a certain sort of context; they come to believe through experience that certain kinds of decisions are the most effective. So, if you want a different sort of decision-making, you go to somebody with a different sort of experience: someone whose different experiences have created a different sort of character. That Obama understands American politics well enough to have come so close to the Amerian Presidency as he has already, while runnng a radically different campaign that refuses to practice the politics of fear-mongering, of resentment, of unfair insinuation, of character assassination or of venality, shows, to my mind, that he is eminently well-qualified for the office.

Finally, let’s consider the question of race. You would have to be profoundly self-deceptive to deny that race matters a great deal on both the domestic and the international stage. The feelings of disaffection from the American mainstream among young Afro-Americans is probably as severe a problem as the feeling of hatred and distrust of America amongst the Islamic nations. But imagine what the prospects might look like for a solution to this problem from the point of view of someone who actually represents the future. Try to put yourself in the place of a black twelve year-old---either an inner-city Afro-American or a Muslim living in North Africa---who has been taught that the founding principles of American democracy have become nothing more than hypocritical words used by rich, white patriarchs to secure political advantage. The effect of hearing these principles recovered, in a realistic, committed way, by a man who does not come from a rich, white background but who has attained a position of respectability and influence; who has a deep understanding of Islam that was fostered by being taught in a Muslim school; who refuses to gain advantage through low, partisan attacks; and who fearlessly speaks about difficult truths, would make an incalculably huge positive difference.

I’ll close with three videos. The first is a long one: about 40 minutes or so. It shows Obama making what I consider to be one of the finest political speeches of the modern age, a speech given in Philadelphia in March. He is talking about perhaps the most inflammatory issue in American society: race. He is honest, forthright, realistic, dignfied, statesmanlike and hopeful. In my view, only the most hardened cynic could listen and yet remain unmoved by what he says.

The next two are short music videos featuring songs by Will.I.Am, from The Black-Eyed Peas. I include them here in an attempt to capture something of the inspiration Obama instils in others. It is difficult to think of any other politician in recent years who could have inspired such heart-felt, unironic, admiring and hopeful tributes as these are.

Björk and Arvo Pärt

There is something about this clip that makes me incredibly happy. It's not just that I like both Björk and Arvo Pärt very much. It is that two such fiercely uncompromising artists can seem so comfortable and lacking in pretensions in the company of one another. The way that Björk, without any evident embarrassment, makes the analogy to Pinocchio, and the cerebral aesthete Pärt listens, charmed, and agrees, says much about the honesty of both of them: it suggests that, however deeply idiosyncratic each may be, their strangeness is not motivated by affectation, but by a striving for artistic expression that is free from the temptation of trying to meet the expectations of others.

Of course, each pays the price for this in a certain resistance to their work from some listeners. In general, the resistance is understandable, I think, because the work demands certain kinds of attention that not everyone is prepared to offer at any given moment: to each his own. However, I find myself less comfortable when I hear outright dismissals of either of these two, because there often has been a sneering present in such dismissals which I actually find morally distasteful. I have come to believe that those who don't want to even try to take Björk seriously, citing her elfin appearance and manner, may be blinded to their own patriarchal prejudices; and that those, especially among classical music aficionados, who look down their noses at Pärt because his work is "too simple," have become deafened by the fanfare of their own pomposity. I emphasize that this is not to say that everyone should like what I like. However, disliking artists' work is quite different from disparaging the authenticity of their vocations; and these two have shown enough integrity in their different ways to deserve at least our respect, if not our enthusiasm.

As much as part of the pleasure of seeing and hearing this conversation lies in watching two musicians who are so unlike one another have a meaningful encounter, I am also interested by the idea that behind their work there stands a similar attitude towards the place of music in the modern world, which I think is manifested in two quotations that I recalled while watching the video. I read each of these quotations some time ago, and I can't remember where now, so I will have to paraphrase. Arvo Pärt once said that the ultimate purpose of all music was to return our ears to silence. Björk once said that people should either listen carefully to the music they liked at a decent volume, or shut it off and "just skip it," because the idea of filling the air with bland muzak was deplorable. In both cases, then, there is a sense that it is in the relationship to the absence of music that their work defines its purpose. I'm not sure I wholly agree with either of them (to Pärt, I would say that I sometimes I play a song to whip up my enthusiasm; and to Björk, I would say that sometimes a soft musical background can be, as Bob Dylan sang, "nothing, really nothing to turn off"). But in any case, I find both ideas stimulating, and one would have to admit that this is certainly not the way music is regarded by most of the commercial entertainment industry, with its frantic efforts to pry our attention away from competitors.

Anyway, with that, I give you the video.



I think the only thing that would make me happier about that would be if Arvo Pärt also interviewed Björk about her work. Oh well, maybe next time.

Paris

I have been in France all winter, but I'll be leaving soon, and it seemed a good time to break my blog silence. Last week, a few of my graduating students asked me to contribute something to their final celebration, notwithstanding that I am still in Paris until later this month. This is what I sent them.

Polar Bears

"And now Edgar's gone...something's going on around here."

(A "re-enactment" of the Gary Larson cartoon, because I couldn't find the original online.)

Let's get one thing straight. You know that Coke commercial where the family of polar bears is on a hillside, and the cub slips down the slope to land amongst the astonished flock of penguins? Yes, those penguins well might be astonished, because polar bears live in the Arctic and penguins in the Antarctic (except, of course, when they go on vacation). But never mind, I had a sort of inadvertent vengeance in that I was quite certain, until my friend Shauna proved me wrong, that this was a Pepsi commercial. Oddly, this branding error of mine seemed to offend her more than the zoological faux pas of the advertising folks. But I suspect that the polar bears would be with me on this one.

And, of course, I'm perfectly willing to let the notion pass when Gary Larson uses it. Because he's funny, see?

At any rate, the real reason I am making this post is because I just spent most of the morning figuring out how to download a video from YouTube and put a new soundtrack to it. My reasons for wanting to do this have to do with using film clips in the classroom, but the video I chose to teach myself with was one I was altering on behalf of a friend, and it features a polar bear cub called Knut in the Berlin zoo who was raised by a zookeeper after his mother had rejected him. Honestly, the soundtrack really HAD to be changed. The original video had possibly the most annoying, cloying song I've ever heard attached to it, which seemed a shame because when I was not put into a homicidal state, the cub was undeniably... Well, I only wish it didn't rhyme with "Knut."