Conservatives are the new liberals
Originally printed in The Peak November 28, 2011 (Volume 139, Issue 13,) and online at the-peak.ca.
Conservatives are the new liberals
By Graham Templeton
The recent staff lockout made one thing very clear: Canadians of a certain age are born conservatives. That word carries a lot of baggage, conjuring images of corporate personhood and pro-life activism, but at its heart it simply refers to a tendency toward caution; it’s less about the ideas a person holds than about the rubric they use to evaluate new ideas. Modern young people may blame Wall Street for much of the current financial situation, but they don’t tend to have much sympathy for homeowners who took insupportable mortgages and then called for a government bailout. They are pragmatists, and they don’t much mind if this makes them seem like a generation of jealous curmudgeons.
By the same token, SFU students certainly support workers’ rights, but tend not to be moved by the prospect of a pay cut for highly paid professionals. Many of them have spent five years or more toiling under the expectation that they’d have to scrimp and save just to pay for rent, food, and student loans — seen these days as equally fundamental expenses. How surprising can it be, then, that they failed to react en masse when people making in excess of $30 per hour started throwing around references to the minimum living wage?
The locked-out workers were mostly older people, used to the idea that university students are hopeful, infinitely optimistic youngsters eager to extend generous benefits to others, and sure that such benefits would later be extended to them. Widespread apathy in reaction to the lockout must have been quite a wake-up call, as they found that students’ real expectation was that they’d have to fight to pay for even the essentials. Suddenly, students were talking about wage matching and something called ‘market value’ — just what the hell happened to our radical campus?
Well, this is it. The expectation of campus leftiness was born of the hippie revolution, which saw a swell of liberal ideas in opposition to the established college order of white, heterosexual, good-old-boy conservatives. It was a phenomenally important victory for civil liberties, among other things, and one that SFU missed almost entirely. It was founded as a part of that revolution, and its institutions reflect a wish to cast off outdated, oppressive bureaucratic architecture. In this way, it’s always been somewhat absurd to talk about liberalism as ‘radical’ at SFU — at SFU, there’s never been anything safer than extreme left-wing activism.
What was telling about CUPE’s handling of the lockout was not their tactics, but their genuine amazement that those tactics failed to gain significant traction. After all, isn’t it a simple truism that university students are de-facto left-wing warriors? If they can’t be counted upon in a pinch, just exactly who can? It is in this way that the new SFU radical is, if not conservative, then unsentimental. Appeals to the generalized necessity of solidarity between barely-connected political groups are likely fall on deaf, jaded ears, and it is at their own risk that modern campus activists rely on the universality of leftist outrage.
I think it’s ultimately born of the times; we may be the only generation to look back at our parents’ with contempt. Others have viewed the past with anger, or amusement, or outrage, protesting this or that war, or social policy. To my knowledge, however, we are the first generation to view our parents as overly-entitled nancies. To hear many young people tell it, our parents danced through adolescence on the backs of their parents’ sacrifices, and kept on going right through to adulthood. They ran dozens of countries into the ground with the expectation that unlimited social programs could be sustained indefinitely with low taxes and high debt ceilings. They bumbled through international affairs with none of their fathers’ superior self-righteousness, nor their teens’ sense of worldwide ethical obligation. We are one of the only generations to view our forefathers as frivolous and irresponsible, and to define ourselves as the ones who must pay the debts incurred by their indulgences.
During our most formative ideological years, we realized that we were entering an employment crunch in which our chief rivals were the architects of that crisis. It’s a distressing choice, between maintaining job scarcity by keeping ought-to-be-retired 60-somethings in our best jobs, and somehow finding a way to pay for the mass-retirement of the very people who created that scarcity in the first place.
As opinions editor, I get a better-than-average view of the typical SFU student, and it seems to be fairly homogenous. We are pro-choice, support queer rights, and have a very keen awareness of sustainability. We have a general understanding that race and gender are sources of social inequality, but we’re becoming increasingly doubtful that the old styles of dealing with these problems have any further capacity to improve the situation. We can draw a distinction between the politics of language and race, and have a slightly guilty belief that immigrants should just learn some damned English. We blame the one per cent for many of our problems, but still roll our eyes at extreme anti-capitalist rhetoric. This is the modern campus radical: a compassionate, largely liberal class warrior who is nonetheless pragmatic, unsentimental, and unmoved by broad appeals to emotion.
Personally, I find it bracing, just to articulate that fact. When I think about all we have left to face, I have to say that I think we may actually be well-equipped to succeed. At the very least, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go but up.
Canadians are becoming what they hate
Originally printed in The Peak October 31, 2011 (Volume 139, Issue 9,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.
Canadians are becoming what they hate
By Graham Templeton
It’s become a bit of a latter-day tradition for my friends and I to head down to Washington each year to attend the Sasquatch music festival. It’s got a beautiful venue, fantastic music, and is usually a delightful four-day jaunt into Americana and sad-happy hipster music. Last year, however, this wonderful ritual was tainted, as have been so very many things, by douchebag Canadians. This nascent demographic has been embarrassing reasonable Canadians since, well, probably somewhere around the year 1812, but has become significantly more obnoxious in recent years.
If you’re wondering, it was our national anthem that so offended me. Somewhere on the second day (I think it may have crystallized at the Dan Mangan concert) the crowd figured out just how many Canadians were in attendance. The venue is just a few hours south of the border, after all, and we northerners won’t be denied our quirky post-rock. As soon as this was discovered — and I mean right away — the Canadian mob became united behind a single purpose: sing the national anthem. Sing it at every possible opportunity, at all times of the day and night, sing it over and over and over. They went to every open stage, gathered in little pockets and gabbed loudly about how awesome it is to be able to drink caesars and know what a beaver tail is — “God, America’s so crazy, am I right?”
Our country is pretty alright. We allow gay marriage, have universal healthcare, and our pot is good. On that, you’ll get no argument from me, and I’m certainly not about to ship out to the U.S. Still, let’s keep some perspective. How would we react if, at a Canadian concert, a gaggle of half-drunk Texans gathered loudly to gawk at our weird “Future Shops” and sing “America the Brave”? We’d be diving for our idiotic anti-American security blanket faster than you can say “inferiority complex.”
The internal narrative of superiority (and often even victimhood) fostered by self-serving political parties is annoying enough simply for its unbridled success, but to actually export it is totally beyond the pale. We cannot simultaneously proselytize for our admittedly great nation and smugly congratulate ourselves for humility and politeness.
The fact is that Canada is a deeply flawed nation, just like any other. We have huge areas of conservatism so extreme they’d make most American hicks curl their lips in disgust. We have a constitution that only hints at freedom, and a population that assumes it is protected by American amendments. We have an electoral system that is nearly as broken as the American one, an arguably worse record at the UN, and language-politics that rival the Tea Party in their ability to block real progress at the national level.
We are a great country, one of the best, but we have no right to look down our noses at any Western nation. That the anti-American gibberish comes largely from the same demographic set that refuses to criticize Islamic nations for outright oppression of any number of groups is ultimately a non-sequitor, but still a maddening one.
This overt Canadian nationalism ultimately comes off as pathetic and compensatory. Our government doesn’t help — they reinforce false myths about Canadian history. From the creator of Superman (who left Canada when he was 10 years old), to the inventor of basketball (who did so in America), the new nationalism requires us to engage in precisely the sort of empty-headed, revisionist nonsense we so love to criticize in the U.S.
In conversation, I refer to this trend as ‘douchebag nationalism’. It’s the set that can somehow feel progressive for slapping a maple leaf on their beer bong and trashing the Patriot Act. It’s the group that loves to brag about this War of 1812 nonsense, then turn around and criticize the U.S. for excessive military spending. Which is it, douchebags? Are you in favour of basing your national identity on having the biggest swinging dick, or aren’t you?
In a recent piece listing the eight most annoying travellers, Canadians were featured prominently, deliberately distinguished from Australians and Brits and anyone else — when it comes to smug and largely ignorant self-satisfaction, nobody can beat a Canadian. We talk about our ability to sew a Canadian flag on our backpacks and step into a world of unbridled adoration, but that very confidence has gone on to undermine our international reputation. By believing in our own humility, we have become arrogant. By believing in our own sense of charity, we have become apathetic.
Canada didn’t become a popular nation by sending armies of hippy backpackers to go tell the world how much it loves us; it gained its reputation by being a loveable nation. The narrative of the moral superiority of Canadians is born of that, and ultimately undermines it. It’s a heartbreaking thing, to realize that your country is becoming the object of scorn, and even more so to realize that the scorn is totally justified. We are acting like a nation of douchebags.
At Sasquatch, the American reaction to Canadians was a compressed retelling of this story. In just three days their reactions slid from delighted smiles and genuine curiosity, to polite neutrality, to total social shutdown. By the end, I hid my Canadian roots unless asked directly; why would I want to be associated with that gaggle of obnoxious cretins?
In the end, a music festial is the perfect simulacrum of my feelings of the subject: it used to be about the music, man. It used to be about the music.
Review: Arkham City
By Graham Templeton
I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad first: if you loved Arkham Asylum (and you did), you’re about to have your memories of that game tainted; never again will you be able to go back and enjoy it to quite the same extent. The good news, however, is that the reason for Asylum’s obsolescence is the almost universal superiority of its sequel. Arkham City is tantalizingly close to being a perfect video game.
Like its predecessor, Arkham City does everything it can to put you firmly in Batman’s gadget-stuffed Kevlar boots. It wonderfully eschews the Metroid-inspired tradition of sapping its protagonist’s power at the outset, instead leaving Batman virtually all the versatility and power he had at the end of his last adventure. Progression from here is constant and satisfying, primarily focused on letting Batman get around in his new, open-air world. By the end, Batman can all but fly, with mechanics so engaging you’ll likely end up veering off task just to spend more time soaring above the thug-infested streets. Beware, however: gleeful cries of “Wheeeeee!” can severely undercut Batman’s tortured, brooding image.
Beyond the phenomenal open world aspect, and the abnormally high level of general quality, Arkham City is a fairly standard action-adventure. In this respect, it actually falls just slightly short of Asylum, in that its marquis moments are less consistently surprising and delightful. This means that it simply has one of the best campaigns of its generation, which is hardly faint praise. Couple this with a basic gameplay formula that is simply more fun than Asylum’s, and you’ve got a genuine classic on your hands.
This is not Christopher Nolan’s Batman; character designs and personalities are taken directly from the comic book, not the recent movies. As a result, this represents probably the most pure Batman experience to be found outside of the comics themselves. Mark Hamill reprises his role as the Joker, serving as the capstone to an already excellent cast.
Put simply, Arkham City is some of the most fun you can have that’s not sex.
Grade: A
‘Tough on Crime’ is an attack on civil liberties
Corrupt judge Ciavarella confronted by a grieving mother after having been pronounced guilty.
Originally printed in The Peak September 6, 2011 (Volume 139, Issue 1,) and online at the-peak.ca.
'Tough on Crime' is an attack on civil liberties
By Graham Templeton
The definition of insanity is not, as it is popularly claimed, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. This definition can more easily be applied to stubbornness, or stupidity, or (I will argue) tough on crime legislation. It’s a shorthand for the type of politicking that has become popular in Harper’s Conservative government, in which bullish adherence to rhetoric is seen as a good-enough proxy for integrity.
Let’s leave aside the many side-issues with the Conservative government’s plan, things like its amazing willingness to lock up the mentally ill, or its attempts to further isolate the courts from the people over whom it presides. Let’s even leave the fact that the Conservatives have thus-far been rather elusive as to how this staggering increase in spending can possibly be seen as fiscally conservative. Let’s leave aside the fact that the Canadian Bar Association has condemned it, along with top researchers and policy experts.
Instead, let’s focus on the central issue: will it work? Well, no, of course it won’t. The evidence available is absolutely overwhelming, and uniformly in one direction: the Conservative ‘tough on crime’ agenda will fail, and it will fail utterly.
Today, we have the lowest crime rate in four decades, yet the central point of Harper’s new push is to jail more people, for longer. It started with mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, including possession, and continued with the systematic lengthening of sentences for most other infractions. This is in direct contravention of the evidence, which says that the longer someone spends in jail, the more likely they are to reoffend upon release. More troubling is the fact that this trend is most pronounced for so-called “low-risk” offenders, who would otherwise have probably gone on to be relatively productive members of society.
These measures are all allegedly made in the pursuit of justice, but whose justice is it? The tough on crime agenda will significantly increase sentencing for marijuana-related offenses, will slap real drug addicts with truly amazing stretches of prison time, and will do its best to destroy, among other things, Vancouver’s InSite safe injection program.
By contrast, there is virtually no attention given to financial crime, or abuses of political office. After all, such measures would serve only to make our society more just and more equal; they would totally fail to send tens of thousands more low-income Canadians into the prison system and, according to the Harper government, that’s just not acceptable.
If it’s not about evidence in favor of the judicial strategy, and it’s not about the magnitude of the social impact of the crime, then it can only be the basic philosophical belief that people should be punished for doing things frowned upon by the Conservative Party of Canada. When the pursuit of that goal endangers the freedom of Canadians, costs billions, and serves only to make the country less safe, and less just, then the exercise in political vanity becomes absolutely inexcusable.
There is a more sinister layer to the idiocy of this program, however. As stated, such an unprecedented expansion of the prison population will cost billions of dollars, and cash-strapped provinces have had to resort to a not-so-novel method of paying for it: they will partially privatize the prison industry. It’s an approach that has already led to shocking failures in the United States, and one that has every probability of failing here, as well.
The fatal flaw in the privatized prison system really ought to be clearest to conservatives themselves, since it is a result of the very market forces they so love to rely upon. They, more than anyone, should have predicted the American “Kids for Cash” scandal, in which judges were convicted of accepting pay-offs from a private prison for sentencing young offenders to inappropriate jail time. There is a reason that prison labour is a controversial topic; while it might seem logical that incarcerated persons should “give back” to society while serving their time, it introduces into the government an unacceptable incentive to jail its citizens. Incarceration has to be a financial burden, so that the jailing of citizens can have no benefit other than the basic fulfillment of justice.
“Kids for Cash” is what happens when you introduce an economic incentive to incarcerate: incarceration becomes an end unto itself. Privatization of prisons also creates yet another powerful lobbying group, this time with the goal of pushing for — wait for it — harsher sentencing guidelines. More Canadians in jail is good for the prison industry, and bad for Canadians. In this choice of loyalties, Harper has clearly chosen his side.
There is a pattern, here. Ignorance leads to mismanagement of the judicial system, which leads us to lose sight of just what that system was supposed to be doing in the first place, which leads to further ignorance. In all of this, the only ones who suffer are regular Canadians. It’s a pattern that is still visible in America, and that is becoming increasingly obvious at home. The Harper government is trying the same old things, and expecting a different result. This doesn’t make them insane, but it does makes them dangerous.
Police ‘preparedness’ is tyranny
Image courtesy of hermeneia4life.
In the fallout of the Stanley Cup riot, the police have gotten off relatively easily. Attention was mostly given to possible causes of the violence, the damage done to our international profile, and the fascinating emergence of social media as an expression of public outrage. In comparison to other riots, both in Vancouver and elsewhere, the police received very little scrutiny. It was generally agreed upon that they should have moved more quickly, but in general it is politically safer for police to do too little than too much; grumbling over response times will never illicit as much anger as accusations of persecution or brutality. However, there is a much more sinister point of criticism, one that’s been growing steadily in volume since the riot was put down, which says that the police should have been more ‘prepared’.
This is a natural reaction, and hardly unique to Vancouver. In moments of civil unrest, the police are the visual embodiment of our outrage; to see them struggle to contain rioters is to see our anger proven impotent to affect justice. Asking for increased ‘preparedness’ on the part of police allows us to recapture some sense of control, to feel as though our outrage has led to some meaningful forward movement.
It’s in the implementation that such ideas become problematic. The first proposal, and the most insulting, is that we simply cease to ‘allow’ people to gather in such numbers. Vancouver would, in this scenario, be a city that actively stopped its citizens from gathering in their own streets to celebrate and enjoy a sporting event. Having already earned ourselves the nickname “No-Fun City”, Vancouver should find a boy torching a cop car far less infuriating than a man calling for a limit to the size of public gatherings. Such reactionaries either don’t know or don’t care about the fundamental importance of the right to free assembly.
Beyond this are the people calling for a direct expansion of police powers. Some of it hinges on raising the fine for public consumption of alcohol, which is more stupid than sinister. However, many of the malcontents are demanding a heavier police presence. They want to live in a city where all large public gatherings are inevitably associated with the omnipresence of stoic, armor-clad police guards. They would destroy even the possibility of a positive, light-hearted event, in exchange for a (largely false) sense of safety. Every playoff game, every raucous parade, every Guns N’ Roses concert would be laced with the implicit threat of violence, and a frowning, puritan reminder of our basic sinfulness.
In a recent press conference, the VPD addressed this idea directly. Police Chief Jim Chu seemed intent on impressing upon the public the seriousness of the reforms they were demanding. When describing the measures he’d need to be adequately prepared for riot violence, he used the phrase “airport-style security” almost compulsively. Chu proposed — and how serious he was with this we’ll likely never know — that during an event, SkyTrain stations should refuse access to anyone unwilling to submit to a full search of their person.
Make no mistake: such measures are exactly what would be required to ensure security; in a certain sense, there’s nothing safer than a police-state. Either Police Chief Chu is a politically subversive genius using the media to criticize the mindless calls for government crackdown, or he is a very, very scary man.
Ultimately, this all has a lot in common with the debate over the Patriot Act, in that one side wants security, or at least a comforting illusion of such, and the other wants freedom, or at least the comforting illusion of such. The difference is that while the Patriot Act has the rather compelling boogeyman of the foreign terrorist, in this discussion we have only ourselves to fear.
We’ve seen that these rioters came from among us, regardless of where we come from. They were retail workers, sports phenoms, night-club douche-bags and hard-drinking college kids; they were recognizable to us, perhaps even uncomfortably so. The hard truth that few seem willing to face is that freedom is the antithesis of control; there is a reason that the etymology of the word ‘fascist’ leads to words like ‘authority’ and ‘unity’. The fate of a few store-fronts (including that poor, abused downtown Bay location,) simply cannot be seen as remotely equivalent in import.
The riot proved that we were less altruistic than we had believed, crippled much our sense of self. If, in its aftermath, we allow the riot to reveal us as cowards as well, then we are truly a city without reason, class, or character.
Modern movie trailers suck
Let me tell you about the movie In Time.
This big-budget sci-fi action flick features a setting in which immortality has been achieved; everyone stops ageing at 25, but after that life becomes a luxury. Time has become the new currency, which can be added or subtracted from your total, your literal life's savings. Work a day? Here, take some time. Want a coffee? That'll be 5 minutes, sir. If, through poor fiscal management or simple attrition, your time should ever tick down to zero, your heart stops. This means that when you show up for a day at the salt mills, you are literally working for your life.
The film stars Justin Timberlake as a poor manual labourer named Will. Will is a member of the downtrodden lower class which works and lives under the rules of a crooked game. His life is just one of millions characterized by frustration, helplessness, and a slow, inexorable slide towards a death you can't help but see coming. As you might imagine, even a universe in which time is literally money is just as capable as our own of producing a wealthy upper class — in this world, the wealthy can live forever, and the poor die young.
All of this changes when Will meets a wealthy young man with a strange, detached way about him. It doesn't take long to discover that this man is more than wealthy — he's immortally wealthy. Where Will is 28 years old, this man is 105. They talk about the philosophy of life and death, though Will, who lives with just over a day's cushion between himself and death, can hardly fathom a life that long. The man is less than thrilled with it, however, and proclaims that he's seen enough, lived enough, and wishes to die. Will doesn't agree; if he had that sort of time, he'd damned well use it properly. The two talk long into the night, and Will eventually falls off into sleep.
While Will is dozing, his new friend transfers over the vast majority of his time in a sort of futuristic electronic funds transfer. Will awakens to find that his friend has disappeared, and that his own clock has increased from just over a day to just over a century. By any measure, he is now a wealthy man. Dazed, he emerges from the building just in time to see his new friend, sitting on the ledge of a bridge, run out of time, convulse, and fall. He is likely dead before he hits the water.
But Will is now in a bit of a pickle. While his personal wealth is now enormous, what is he do with all this money? People will kill for time, even more readily than they will kill for cash, and flashing a century in the ghetto is likely to get you killed. Sure enough, it's no time at all before Will has a local mob after him, along with the police who are likely more than a little curious how he came to be in the possession of a fortune last belonging to a newly dead upper-classman.
Eventually, it becomes clear that he cannot stay in the ghetto, where the cops comb every street and the mob hides in every shadow. Will, a clever lad, decides to hide out in the last place anyone would think to look for a lower class grunt like him: Beverly Hills. Well, future-Beverly Hills. Will uses some of his new time to buy entry to the posh-est neighborhood he can find, a gated community that protects the immortal elite and their lavish mansions. Armed with a smart new suit from hover-Armani, Will tries to blend in as best he can.
The best he can do, however, just isn't very good. The blue-bloods surrounding him, the old money, the fresh-faced old-timers who've lived several normal lifetimes as hot young things, can spot him from a mile away. Will attends a dinner party, but soon enough there comes a knock on the door; it's the police, and they're looking for him on suspicion of murder. Suddenly, Will finds himself yet again running for his life.
This time, however, he tries a different strategy. Will breaks away from the cops, arming himself with one of their pistols, and holds the dinner party at gunpoint. On his way out he grabs a hostage, a pretty young girl with wide, deceptively innocent eyes. With the terrified young woman in toe, he jumps into a sports car, and makes for the hills. He's not a bad guy, though, and as they go, he and his hostage get to talking.
At first, it mostly centers around fairly predictable appeals for freedom. She asks to be let go, and he refuses because he still needs a hostage as insurance. Over time, however, their conversation begins to take a different turn, and she quite naturally wants to know more about the man who has kidnapped her. Will tells her his story, asks her to imagine a life spent scrabbling just to stay alive. She can't fathom it, however, and when asked to face the reality of the system atop which she sits, she shies away. All her life, she has shied away from the horrors of her world, preferring the comfortable fiction afforded her by her wealthy upbringing.
Will's flight from the police, however, takes them both out of her comfort zone. Soon enough she is in and amongst the people who, to her, have always been transient, ephemeral. In the face of such evidence, her carefully constructed walls of willful ignorance come tumbling down. Coupled with a mounting belief in Will's protestations of innocence, not to mention JT's rather chiseled jawline, this begins her transition to full-on Stockholm Syndrome. When next the police catch up with the duo, she is firmly on Will's side, at one point even raising a weapon in his defence.
Eventually, Will becomes dissatisfied with just living. Having seen first hand the true breadth of the spectrum of lifestyles produced by the system, he concocts a new plan: to use his time, and the access it buys him, to blow the lid off the corruption he's seen. Fuelled by outrage, hatred and fear, he begins systematically undermining the system, stealing and redistributing time to the masses — a temporal Robin Hood. These efforts are aided by his new friend, the hostage girl, whose right to the upper echelons of society is not just fiscal, but social as well. With her help, he can truly upset the order of things.
As this goes on, the cop chasing Will begins to slowly develop a belief in his innocence, and has some basic sympathies with his populist cause. It all comes to a head in a series of brilliant, over-the-top action scenes as the criminal duo try to escape with both their lives and the secret to the emancipation of the proletariat.
So. How'd I do?
Bear in mind that I have not seen this movie. I have not read anything about this movie. The one and only thing about this film that I have seen is the trailer. And that is why modern trailers suck.
A trailer is supposed to give you an idea of what the film is about. It is supposed to tease you with bits and pieces of information, let you see the scope, the mood, the themes. And then it is supposed to end. The trailer for In Time is entirely typical of modern trailers in that it fulfills these goals in the first thirty seconds, and proceeds to spend the other 120 seconds bombarding the audience with a quick-cut plot summary. Indeed, from this perspective it is actually quite impressive; it can't be easy to make a two minute summary of a two hour story. In a sense, it is a highly compressed and very nearly complete short film that just happens to be based on longer source material. It's all very post-modern.
And so, I will not see In Time in theatres. I mean, why would I? I know at least three quarters of the damned story, and likely quite a bit more than that. As far as I can tell, I have a fairly comprehensive idea of the plot points that bring us right up to the final climax. Fox, why on earth would I want to go see the long-form version of the short film you've gone out of your way to show me?
The trailer for In Time is entirely typical of movie trailers today. It was a real surprise when I was forced to watch the trailer for Midnight in Paris, which somehow manages to be enticing without giving away the whole plot. It's funny, it's charming, and it shows me exactly what it needs to: that this movie is something I'd be interested in watching. That's it! That's all it needs to do. Had they given away the central plot twists, would it have been any better? I think not. Another great example is the recent trailer for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which again gives me enough to intrigue, but not enough to spoil.
That's all I ask, Hollywood. The big-budget movie trailer has become a real art form, a slick and sexy piece of marketing that has crossed over into a cultural appeal all its own. Let the trailer be what it is supposed to be. I know you're proud of your creation, that's as it should be, but let me experience it for myself. You'll be more likely to get my business, and the guy cutting your trailers will thank you for the freedom.
Oppose the SFPIRG eviction
Originally printed in The Peak June 25, 2011 (Volume 138, Issue 12,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.
Oppose the SFPIRG eviction
By Graham Templeton
I don’t really like the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group. They do very little of value, if you ask me, and what little they do provide to students does not require that they exist; bike co-ops and book lending are well within the scope of the SFSS’s power.
More than this, SFPIRG is a bit of a shifty organization; it does everything it can to squirm away from its obligation to provide meaningful financial audits and many of its staff positions are permanently held by non-students who send our money to off-campus ideological interests. SFPIRG is something of an anachronism, a fossil of a time when anyone willing to be sufficiently extreme in the correct political direction could easily justify taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of student money every year.
With all that said, however, this eviction is nonsense.
This issue can be traced back a couple of years. In early 2010, SFPIRG was subjected to a rather abrupt grassroots movement of students unhappy about their practices and their uses of student money. They tried to mob the SFPIRG AGM and use their numbers to pass a series of hostile motions. Some of the protesters were there out of a high-minded wish for fiscal responsibility, some to make a name for themselves, some just to watch the establishment burn. Regardless, they didn’t succeed in doing much beyond raising SFPIRG’s profile and giving them yet another reason to feel sorry for themselves.
It started something, however. Every time SFPIRG resisted efforts to increase its transparency, resentment grew. Every time the SFSS meted out their funding while collecting no rent for their top-notch office space, resentment grew. Eventually, even the mention of SFPIRG would get an eye-roll from most SFSS directors.
There was talk about the various ways they were in breach of their lease, or their constitution, or their ethical obligations, or really of anything else that happened to come to mind. There were even people who dared to ask the ultimate taboo question: why should SFPIRG even exist?
Nothing much came of it, however. The SFSS is built from the ground up to resist change, and that is doubly true for negative change. It’s relatively easy to create a group like last year’s Sustainable SFU, and almost impossible to ever get rid of it. When the current board was elected, the consensus seemed to be, “Well, whatcha gonna do?”
And then this lease thing came up. Asked about it now, University Relations Officer Marc Fontaine claims to have “never heard” talk of SFPIRG’s lease, or their constitution, or their worth as an organization. To hear the board tell it, SFPIRG is being evicted purely to free up more student space — as though SFU had enough student culture to fully use even the space we already have. If I can say one thing for SFPIRG, it’s that their office is no worse for students than an empty one.
God, I’m going soft.
Regardless, that’s really my problem with this eviction move. I don’t like SFPIRG, but this is not the honest way to go about confronting them. It’s underhanded, and it doesn’t address the real problems with SFPIRG and the ways in which it chooses to organize itself.
This is a stop-gap measure designed to hurt SFPIRG in the easiest, most readily available way, and it is very likely a prelude to a more direct attack upon their right to student money — it’s harder for SFPIRG to defend itself against any such campaign if they have no office from which to operate.
This is one of the very few times, in fact one of the only times, when SFPIRG’s bleating accusations of persecution actually hold water. They are being back-doored by a board that has totally legitimate grievances but which doesn’t want to address them through the proper channels. It pains me to say it, but on this occasion, your support really should be with SFPIRG.
The SFSS does not need $750,000 in office work
Originally printed in The Peak June 20, 2011 (Volume 138, Issue 11,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.
The SFSS does not need $750,000 in office work
By Graham Templeton
When I was young, my family endured a fairly lengthy stretch of job action. My dad, a CUPE worker, was on strike — we all had to tighten our belts a bit. I was young enough that it didn’t affect me too severely since they could still afford Dunkaroos, which was all I really cared about. However, that time gave me a deep-seated distrust of The Employer, a feeling that the working schlub must look out for himself. As a result, this lockout has an odd feeling to it; in every way that matters, The Employer is now me.
And you, too. We, the students, are the employer in this case. One of the things that makes this situation unique is that there is no high-level CEO looking to add another 30 grand in bonuses to an already over sized pay cheque. This is a rare situation in that the ‘management’ of the student body and the SFSS makes far (far!) less than the workers it is supposedly oppressing. So, let’s examine this situation from the proper perspective: that of the employer.
First, we must remember that this lockout is the result of more than two years of contract negotiations. The union has been the primary source of the delays, for one very simple reason: the SFSS is transient, and they are not. These CUPE negotiators are no fools, and they are well aware that if any particular board is hostile to their cause, all they have to do is filibuster the process long enough for a more easily manipulated adversary to come into power.
This tactic, coupled with the inherently one-sided nature of pitting snot-nosed undergrads against professional CUPE negotiators, is what got this union the contract they have today. This contract, which covers just 15 full-time employees, costs students three-quarters of a million dollars per year. Bear in mind that this comes at a time when the SFSS is being forced to make cutbacks in almost every other area.
Now, I don’t begrudge the union any of this. If their contract is bad for students, and it is, then that is the fault of the past elected representatives who were too lazy, too incompetent, or too idealistic to properly advocate for our side. It may sound cold, but in the end it is a union’s responsibility to get its members the best contract it can, and it is not obligated to restrain itself out of respect for students’ money.
Thus, we arrive at the uncomfortable part of this discussion, in which we must evaluate the work these people do — are their services worth roughly a third of our annual budget? Well, no. No, they are not. The SFSS bureaucracy simply does not require $750,000 worth of office work. It just doesn’t.
Discussing wages is necessary, but ultimately only part of the issue since the real source of the over-staffing crisis is that this collective agreement also mandates a minimum number of workers. Until the agreement is changed, the SFSS could have literally no work for any of them, and still be obligated to keep them all on staff. Thus, the union’s ability to stall the process indefinitely has fundamentally broken the system.
This union feels very comfortable speaking to its own necessity, making claims about the wretched future in store for students whose fees are directed towards events, rather than receptionists. Again, this is as it should be; in a situation like this, it is the union’s responsibility to do and say whatever it can to improve its own situation. What I resent is the oh-so-outraged reaction to even the idea of a lockout.
This group has enjoyed virtually unrestrained dominance of their own employers, and has reaped enormous benefits as a result. That they now pretend to be the cringing victims of fiscal conservatism is laughable at its heart; this isn’t fiscal conservatism we’re seeing from the board, but fiscal sanity. It is the first implementation of actual, responsible advocacy on behalf of students, and if this union is unfamiliar with what that looks like then I suggest they refer to the travails of every other labour union in the country.
It is the employer’s job to be anti-union. That’s the whole point. The negotiation process is an adversarial one by definition; this is versus, not cooperative. Just as it was right and fair for the union to get all it could when it could, so too is it right and fair for the SFSS to use all of the legal, legitimate negotiating tactics available to wrest back some control of the situation. This union has been taking advantage of the SFSS for a long, long time, and now they’re getting bent out of shape because it is finally taking steps in its own defense. Understandable, I suppose, but don’t ask me to be impressed by that.
To those students expressing outrage at this lockout: If the SFSS can’t even consider a lockout as an option, should they even read a proposed contract before signing it? If it contained something totally outrageous, as it often did, what could the SFSS possibly do, in your eyes? They could always, I suppose, continue negotiations until they left office and the next bewildered young poli-sci student stepped up to the plate — but that’s what got us here in the first place.
As always, you should make up your own mind about all of this. All I ask is that you not be distracted by the left-right political obfuscation. You are in a the exceedingly rare position of being able to fundamentally change this student society, by setting a precedent of support either for these staff members or for your elected representatives. Regardless of your feelings on this lockout, this is your student society.
Take it back.
This is your rape culture?
Originally printed in The Peak June 20, 2011 (Volume 138, Issue 08,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.
This is your rape culture?
By Graham Templeton
In the days following its publication, my suggestion that we don’t live in a rape culture inspired dozens of articles, text messages, voicemails, and actual mails all to the effect of: yes we do. There is, of course, the fact that the sheer force of this backlash undercuts its very premise, but that’s not a particularly productive line of argument.
Productive argument, though, is hard to come by on this topic. There was a pervasive, single-minded effort to deliberately misunderstand my arguments. I suggested that treating young boys like future rapists is a bit like treating young girls like future sluts; this was read as my calling women sluts. I said that it takes a lot of self-pity to think that our entire culture is against you; this was read as my telling rape survivors to stop feeling sorry for themselves. There’s really not much I can say to that, is there?
One of the more common statements was that, as a man, I wasn’t “allowed” to have an opinion of this topic; men’s “insights are limited” in this so-called discussion. Yet the women asking for such a separation had no problem chiming in with their thoughts about what it was like to be a young boy or with their searing insights into the subjective experiences of men.
Beyond this, though, there really wasn’t much substance to the replies. There were a few statistics thrown around, such as the very true fact that most rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. These stats all imply that I have, or indeed that virtually anyone has made the statement that women ask to be raped, or that rape is not a problem. This is submitted as a valid defense of the rather enormous claim that the entirety of our culture systemically legitimizes rape and violence against women.
Conspicuously absent were real examples of this. Oh, there were many, many restatements of the basic premise: the media normalizes violence against women. Examples of rape culture were truly difficult to find, however.
The reason, as you’ll see if you start trying to hunt them down, is that most examples are entirely ridiculous. They are so silly, in fact, that I’m having trouble coming up with examples that don’t seem like cherry-picked straw men. If you think I’m choosing exaggerated examples, look into it for yourself. But here are a few.
You saw a picture of a woman’s breasts with her face cropped out? Rape culture. An NFL quarterback flirted with a hotel waitress? Rape culture. You saw a tongue-in-cheek breast cancer charity called “Save the Ta-Ta’s”? Rape culture. Someone implied that a woman married a man for his money? Rape culture. A teacher told girls to watch their drinks in clubs? Rape culture. It goes on and on.
I did find one example of actual rape culture. It was a female American Republican politician blaming how we “allow our children to dress” for the gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl. Despicable. Notable, however, is both how uncommon this is and, more important, the crushing reprisals this comment earned her.
Of the respondents, only Coriana Constanda goes to the apparently uncommon length of making an actual claim about rape culture; she brings up pornography as an example. This strikes me as slightly too blanket a statement, but really: fair enough.
Don’t forget, though, we’re talking about the claim that these subterranean forces are so powerful that they overwhelm the whole of our actual culture. PSAs and SlutWalks and Gender Studies and religious condemnation and the entirety of our public education system and the total loss of the assumption of innocence — all of these are nothing, when compared to the all-powerful might of objectification. In this framework, culture is defined by its subtext, rather than by the entirety of its actual content.
Well, I don’t buy it. This all comes from the most science-averse side of the social sciences; you know, the one that denies the existence of human nature? It is the one that, as a result, can only accommodate the mere existence of rape with the idea that it must be socially constructed. When you’ve already started with that assumption, well, there are only so many scapegoats you can turn to.
Again, SlutWalk was based on the idea that men aren’t exposed to enough anti-rape rhetoric; indeed, we should make it impossible for a young man to look at a woman without thinking of rape, without remembering that horrible crime for which he has been asked to answer since before he was physically capable of ejaculation.
Most offensive was the sign (carried by a man) which read: “Men take responsibility.” This is roughly analogous to marching in an anti-terrorism rally with a sign reading “Arabs take responsibility”. Unlike in the somehow much more measured discussion around suicide murder, here one cannot expect any logical or emotional fairness.
There is no culture of rape
Originally printed in The Peak June 06, 2011 (Volume 138, Issue 05,) and online at the-peak.ca, here.
There is no culture of rape
By Graham Templeton
I am offended. I so rarely get to say that, since being offended has a lot to do with self-identification as a victim and, as a middle-class white male, I really don’t have much opportunity to feel that way. However the issue of rape, and more specifically the allegation that we live in some sort of “rape culture”, offends me. It is a statement both empirically wrong, and deeply, deeply sexist.
In and around the recent SlutWalk demonstration, I heard a lot of talk about how we, as a society, have a tendency to blame the victim in cases of rape. This is utter nonsense. Ironically, SlutWalk was itself the perfect illustration of exactly how flawed this premise really is; one cop makes one stupid, misogynistic comment, and thousands take to the streets in protest. This is your rape culture? Dominique Strauss-Kahn, formerly one of the most influential men in the world, has been utterly ruined by just the allegation that he is a rapist. This is your rape culture? Our government invests enormous amounts of money into social programs for abused women, our universities carve out whole faculties for echo-chamber conversations about rape prevention, our TV stations are legally required to air public service announcements about how “No Means No”. This is your rape culture?
Now, never let it be said that sexual assault isn’t a real problem, but really, so is murder. I’ve yet to hear the allegation that we live in a culture of murder. Additionally, there are unquestionably real incidents of victim-blaming; the biggest recent example is the near-total forgiveness granted to filmmaker Roman Polanski by the mental midgets of the Hollywood set. However, to say that these cases make our culture a rape culture takes levels of self-pity I almost can’t imagine. It saddens me that there is a very strong and vocal movement asking every woman alive to think of the world as hostile to her, to think of herself as constantly in danger, constantly under attack. To walk with a sign saying “Stop the raping” implies that somewhere out there is a group of people whose secret agenda is, indeed, to prolong the raping.
We don’t tell Jews that they exist in a culture of anti-Semitism because the KKK exists. We don’t tell soldiers that the world is happy to see them die because of the Westboro Baptist Church.
These days, the argument has largely retreated behind the unassailable walls of interpretive analysis. In this framework of apologetics, it’s not that rape is overtly condoned, but that there is a bubbling subtext just below the surface of every facet of our society which supports and normalizes misogyny and forgiveness for violence against women. It is the statement that male sexuality is, by definition, violent and predatory.
It’s not an entirely illogical statement; if we’re talking evolutionary pressures here, taking our biological natures into account, then men really are predisposed to be sexually predatory. This is true, just as it is true that women are predisposed to be sexually manipulative, and that we all are predisposed to be sexually loose, sexually needy, and sexually unfaithful. However, in this era, only the first of these equally valid statements is acceptable. To reduce a woman’s psychology to such a mechanistic level would be bigotry of the highest order; in fact, that favourite imaginary opponent, the statement that women “want to be raped”, would be an example of exactly the same sort of argumentation.
Of course, the perpetrators of this ‘rape culture’ myth are far too timid to ever take their own thinking to its logical conclusion. Young boys are deluged with education designed to keep them from becoming rapists, because the rapist is assumed to be the basal psychology of the male. There is, strangely, no information sessions teaching young girls how not to become gold-digging whores. If the latter of these ideas offends you, then think very carefully about just how similar it is to the former. To call someone a rapist is infinitely more serious than to call them a slut, unless our rape-culture activists have completely devalued the term.
Additionally, think about what it does to young boys, to have their budding sexuality constantly (and I do mean constantly) juxtaposed with rape. It is really all that different from the cultural shaming of girls, for their sexual impulses?
Women should be offended by the idea that we live in a culture which uses pregnancy for financial leverage. This allegation is very easy to support, simply by disregarding how utterly immoral it is to saddle our population with its implications. SlutWalk was teeming with the implication that I, as a man, must march through the streets with a sign reading “I am not a rapist” or else be assumed to be a rapist. It’s sexism in its purest form.
You know who has a culture of rape? Saudi Arabia. Liberia. Congo. Those are cultures of rape, in that the cultures do more to facilitate rape than simply having men within them. If the simple existence of rape is all that is necessary to continue the assumption that we live in a rape culture, then congratulations: we will, forever and always, live in a rape culture.
Welcome to the ultimate in activist job security.
Click here to read my response to the many, many counter-arguments this article elicited.