What Is Multiculturalism A Euphemism For Today?

Three friends of mine from undergrad ended up respectively marrying a Brit, a Slovak and a practicing Hindu. The weddings were all marked by their twin cultures and no one, as far as I can tell, lost an eye. A sister-in-law is a Swede. My folks are immigrants. So, I always wonder about these sorts of statements:

…that he considers Muslim fundamentalists an unwelcome element in liberal society is the kind of thing that gets Mr. Steyn so readily branded as a bigot, particularly in Canada where a worship of his most hated term “multiculturalism” has, he says, utterly shrivelled the limits on public discussion. That may, however, only prove his point. “It’s a sick fetish,” he says. “The idea that multiculturalism simply on its own terms is a virtue in itself is completely preposterous.”

What I don’t understand is how “multiculturalism” in this use differs from immigrants who practice Islam? Does Steyn have an issue with Filipinos or Hungarians or Peruvians? If there was no Islam and everything is the same, does he think we have the same issue? I am not sure. Because of that, I really have no idea what he is talking about. Which makes it hard to take him seriously. He may have a good point, one worth considering, if he ever got down to finer strokes. Instead we wallow in silly statements like “… diversity-obsessed Canadians have become generally sympathetic to the plight of Omar Khadr.” I’d say most Canadians have no idea who Omar Khadr is – just natterers. Just those who need it for an illustration of something else, the pre-established conclusion. How hasn’t that approach to thought “utterly shrivelled the limits on public discussion?”

None

Things I Love About Canada

Wow. I am sure glad that my folks got to this place. And not just cause Europe (and Grannie, too!) turned out to be socialists! But because Canada is really great as our celebrations on July 1st…celebrate. Here is my list about what I really like about Canada – you add yours:

  • Paddle to the Sea. I hadn’t thought about this NFB movie from the 60s for decades and, voom, there is it as the absolute paradigm of the nation’s soul.
  • Wacky idealistic politicians who turn out to stand for exactly the opposite of what they pledged to the benefit of us all. Trudeau claimed logic and was nutty enough to put us on the world stage through doing all sorts of things largely since undone. Mulroney pretended he was fiscally prudent but never finishing the job, acting like he was under Washington’s wing but helped leverage the end of apartheid. Chretien being a nutjob yet getting finally getting 30 or 40 years of deficit financing in line while making us love him for choaking a citizen.
  • Comedians who leave for the US market. They are the good ones and you can tell because the CBC rejects them. SCTV is a perfect example. And did you know Saturday Night Live was turned down as a project by the dullards?
  • Maple products. We eat the blood of trees. What is neater than that?
  • Federalism and how it divides us. Think about it. You have a mobile population, largely made up of immigrants over the last couple of generations, drop them into ten jurisdictions and – whammo – they learn to dislike each other and hold on to what they have and try to keep it from others. Overlapping redundant bureaucracies foster these jealousies.
  • The neediness. From the whole flag on the backpack in Europe and how much that makes tourism operators their love us so much to the hand wringing about how we should be doing this or that on the world stage. The best is the argument over what Canada stands for. What does Belgium stand for? No one cares. We are a nation of whining twelve year olds and we don’t see it.
  • Trees. Both Kingston and Halifax, my two favorite home cities, still sit in the woods and are full of the damn things. That is why downtown Toronto feels so weird. You can’t see the trees. We love them so much we have provincial and Federal parks that we hardly every use but are great when you do. Ontario‘s park system is particularly amazing.
  • The flags. We have the weirdest flags. The national one has a bit of a tree on it. And look at New Brunswick’s – who the hell ever picked that yellow? British Columbia looks like it was designed for a space traveller worship cult. Alberta’s politicians lobbied hard to further reduce the size of the crest and add even more blue.
  • Events like today’s England v Portugal create some small but telling discomfort between immigrant groups of different generations based on their understanding of what this country stands for even though they are compatible visions.

Me and mine? We are off for a ballgame in the US and some pie. Hey – there’s a double header today.

Man Is The Measure Of All Things

Here is my half-baked unified theory essay based largely on idle car driving and long meeting daydreaming. Entire chunks could be rewritten and reversed, deleted even. I am too lazy to edit it any more and I am note convinced myself but, thought I, what the heck. I’m posting it for comment but given that I am calling it half-baked I would expect that the comment would not be of the “yor a moeron” sort. Pick out what you like, mix and match, compare and contrast:

I don’t know why the opening of Jane Taber’s column in the Globe and Mail last Saturday has clung to the back of my mind:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper spent last Saturday night at 24 Sussex Dr. fiddling with the TV, trying desperately to find the channel that carried Ben and Rachel’s favourite show, The Forest Rangers. It was the Harper family’s first Saturday night at the Prime Minister’s official residence — the family of four and their two beloved cats moved in just two days before — and the cable wasn’t hooked up. “I told Stephen I would arrange the channels on Monday, and he said, ‘No, let’s do it right now,’ ” Laureen Harper wrote in an e-mail this week. The Prime Minister proceeded to call the cable company…

It is not a sour thought at the sight of a Dad trying without any luck to figure out the electronics or a hapless moment for the new PM that saddens me. It’s that it was The Forest Rangers. Secretly, I hope it is a remake I have not heard of but I suspect it is that same show that was never part of my growing up – because even at 42 it was before my time. I suppose what makes me really sad is that in the last four and a half decades of entertainment communications there is nothing better for a couple of kids to watch than the show that made The Beachcombers seem like Shakespeare – even if their parents hold a pretty tight rein on the TV’s remote control. But I doubt it. Who would remake the Forest Rangers? Who now could?

Is this another post about the false promise of recent changes in mass communications? I suppose it is. This weekend, taking in a movie in a 1930s cinema as well as an excellent live hockey game, I was struck like I should not have been struck how the digital advance is something of a regression. We have a population that has, say, doubled in the last so many decades but the volume and variety of entertainments has exploded. And, while the technological advances have been impressive, has the content kept up? Is it possible that there could be so many more things with which to be entertained or informed without a relative dilution of the actual quality of content?

What have we given up due to the dilution? Audio fidelity in favour of tiny ear plugs. The ability to value excellence in favour of the ability to value what we choose or, worse, what we do. Even TV as a topic for water cooler talk is dumped in favour of the replacement of water cooler talk, the SuperNetWay. We have exchanged audience for authorship and awarded each of ourselves the same prize. Except maybe for Harper as Dad. For him there is that world of kids playing in a fort (without any explanation of who maintains it and on what budget) and helping with some sort of government administrative function in relation to lands and forests (despite the child labour laws). There is something back there in that show which is not here – the suspension of disbelief, that awareness that what your are taking is has acceptable flaws.

But we are such mooks now – suckered by belief in whatever we have placed before ourselves. All it takes is for a new self-flattering toy or medium to come along to make ourselves earnestly believe we must have it. And so with politics – we are so determined to be a vital player in the administration of government that we value our whim is as good as a policy borne of the toil of hundreds and the rulings of decades. We can no longer suspend our disbelief as consumers or citizens but are locked into our own certainty in relation to all things, creating a flat world where anything is pretty much as good as any other thing. We cannot defer. We must each be authority if we are also the personalize me. So no journalist is worth their salt, no policy can be trusted, no means to assert our own personal dominion of expression can dared be passed up. We each pick at the world yet pick each our own world. Less shared, less trusted. More me-like-ness.

Sometimes I think that the few years of this millenium have seen two changes which have melded unexpectedly: the rise of networked information technology and the rise of the fear and the security demand in response to terrorism despite almost five years now passing since, hopefully, the anomaly of 9/11 that shook us out of the sleep and pattern of tens upon tens being blown up here and there on a regular basis between nation upon nation, tribe upon tribe genocides. We can forget sometimes that there was life and community and many of the same problems in 2000, 1999 and before. We trick ourselves that all has been changed. About a year ago I wondered if we were post post 9/11. I wondered it again a few months later, the day before the bombings in London. But maybe the trick is on us, that the uni-mind of internet and homogenization of shared concern has left us burned a bit, blurred a bit even as we technologically assert our individual autonomy. So concerned with our fear of flying – even while we are on the ground – that we now have met unending earnestness and each of us shaken hands with it and made it our own. I thought there was an end to irony in the weeks after September 11th but now I think we lost more than just that as tools of surveillance and information merge in the one screen wired to the network, taking and giving, providing what we can say we have made up ourselves. We must believe now, nothing left to be suspended. Where would you stand during the suspension?

What to do? Doesn’t anyone think this is just a town full of losers to be blown out of? Maybe Steve does. Is the Harper family gathering around the black and white world of the past one way to assert the contrarian way? I still think it is a little sad but I don’t know why exactly. I wish them well.

NPR Expansion

Rob, who drew me into this gig of his as a volunteer, points out a very interesting phenomena: NPR is expanding:

While many newsrooms are shedding reporters—from the New York Times to the Dallas Morning News—NPR is one of the few places an experienced journalist can hope to get a job.
“I wouldn’t call it a binge,” says Bill Marimow, himself a former denizen of the print world. Fired from the Baltimore Sun in 2004, Marimow went to NPR and this week took over as its news chief. “I would call it significant growth.”

The NPR news operation has added 50 journalists in the past three years, raising the total from 350 to 400. Ten years ago NPR had six foreign bureaus; it just opened its 16th, in Shanghai, putting it in the running with major national news organizations. The New York Times and CNN both have 26, the Los Angeles Times has 22, the Washington Post has 19.

It is no secret that I love NPR and, frankly, I wish Canada had its own version that was more closely connected to the listener and viewer than the CBC is. For all the big yap about how the main stream media is bowing to losers like me who type in their pajamas and pretend (to the embarassment of our spouses) we are Edward R. Murrow reporting from the blitz…that is simply not what is occurring. We are watching re-ordering of news media not collapse.

Nothing new. It is part of the same phenomena that same the rise of talk-radio including political talk radio in the US. When I sketched out my seminal but now dust-coated plan for the left in North America, the first thing I thought of was taking back a solid part of the media. I am doing my part but apparently the $200 million gift to NPR from the estate of a nice person called Joan Kroc is being the NPR news boom. What good folk who want objective thorough news reporting (professional unbiased news being a classic progressive or liberal goal just as much as a cheap quality and broadly available education) need to do is put their money where their mouths are.

Others have proven this works. This is just the same as the US right realized it needed to do something and fund something somewhere back in the 60s, achieved break-through in the 80s and achieving inordinate dominance in the last decade. Just as with that shift, the change that NPR is part of is not a single path. Remember how many foretold the demise of Air America during its first days? Well, it is still there and has 89 stations. What we are watching in the reshuffle is an enrichment of news sources, just in the same way that broadcast shortwave radio provided and then cable TV again provided before the internet. The strengthening of NPR is one compliment to the strenghtening of talk-radio of all sorts along with pajamastan and the next new thing that we have not even heard of yet. More voices please.

Canadian Satellite Radio

As you all know all too well, I am a radio nerd. I was a member of the Radio Prague Listeners Club, have received reception report confirmation cards from many nations, held a trans-Atlantic reception record for a while when I heard local East German radio in my old Nova Scotian home, listen through buzzing and clicking interference on poor reception nights to catch a moment of Steve Somers of WFAN and shared with you my joy at hearing California from eastern Lake Ontario a year and a half ago.

I have radio nerd cred and, though I am not hardcore, I would think that I would be the guy that satellite radio is aimed at. But when I have a look at what Sirius Canada is offering – now that the CRTC mandated puritanical technology delay is almost ready to be lifted – I just don’t know. I have a computer at home and one at work. Both play a bazillion stations and even some amateur nutcases making really bad radio to bring down the man, being in this case the corporate structure of global media, with their iPod (charmingly unaware of the irony all others see given that iPod is todays jewel in the crown of a corporate communication empire.) And yes, I have a bitchin’ Sony 2010 which has healed itself nicely which is my real window on the world. Plus I have a car with that wonder of wonders an AM/FM radio with which I can enjoy the exciting exploration of the unknown as I travel.

So what does paying $14.95 plus tax to get a subscription to Sirius Canada get me? Is it just that it will be the same wherever you are? How dull and dulling. More stardardized delocalized Omnitopian fare. Are you planning to sign on? Is anyone?

In The Days Of The Bubble

Jay has been noting events at the disasterously bad idea of Pajama Media – great evidence in itself that the A-list idea of 2003 never was – and I repeat the noting of this quotation below from the discussion board at “pajamasmedia.isfullofcrap.com” just for its sheer 1998-ish-ness:

When the only evident sign of investment is in the party you throw to announce an organization with an illegal name offering a service that no one understands and that you yourself aren’t entirely able to define, you’ve got a real problem.

Interesting to note that the URL for the thing is “osm.org”, still referencing that allegedly “illegal” name “Open Source Media” – illegal in that it was owned by some other media called “Open Source”, a fairly well known US public radio show. Nutty.

…but maybe now is the time to try to sell dog food over the internet.

Google Bubble

Micheal is putting the boogie curse on my one share of Google. I suppose that the collapse of Google in itself would trigger the end of this bubble economy. But what of the small investor who puts just enough in to get the annual report and little else? What of me that person? Shouldn’t that investor be able to trust in a system that allows irrationality to provide a 3000% annual return and a few decent share splits on an information product that can’t even assure you that the answer provided is the authoritative one on the topic?

1 + 0 = 2

I linked to this yesterday over at the sideblog (that’s what that is called by the way) but the list of people making fun of the concept of Web 2.0 is one of the best anti-tech-hype things I have read for a long time. Any you might add? My favorite is

Web 2.0 is made of … Segway spare parts

By the way, speaking of the counter culture, have you seen that iPod add where everyone is walking around in the street in their own exclusionary poddy bubbles but singing the same Christmas carol. Oddly, none of them seem to get hit by cars and, laughingly, they all carry the tune. Has no one broken the news to these people that people singing with headphones in their ears sound like scalded but urgently amorous cats?