Matt Cahill's blog
Dispatch…
1. to send off or away with speed, as a messenger, telegram, body of troops, etc.
2. to dismiss (a person), as after an audience.
3. to put to death; kill
Dispatch from the 501 Queen streetcar. Thoughts dispatched, sent like troops via cellphone: instant, unilateral.
This is not a dialogue.
Dispatch. Done with; I am finished incubating this thought. I am done. It has been sent in contravention of MacLuhan, without a message.
Message sent.
[Sent via BlackBerry]
I was scoping around the various newspaper sites, as I do every morning, and found myself staring at the following headline at the top of the Toronto Star: “Frost/Nixon Up For 5 Golden Globes”.
Generally speaking, I have nothing against “entertainment news”, conceptually anyway. Most will agree: we can’t always be bombarded by the depressing day-to-day reality of just how potentially stupid we are as a species of animal. Sometimes we need our Robert Mugabe cut with a little Brad Pitt to make it go down easier.
I will accept that, as a species, we can’t eat our broccoli without the promise of something else more appetizing, like dessert.
Perhaps it was the fact that the Golden Globe awards are a second-rate contest, occasionally with fixed odds; a calliope’d portent of what the Oscars will be in a year or so (at the rate they are going). Perhaps it’s my bewilderment that a Canadian newspaper is putting it at the top of its site at a time when our Parliament has been prorogued by the government to protect its divisive reign, at a time when smart people have stopped investigating how and why the Vesuvian economic crisis in the U.S. happened, at a time when several African countries – not least of which Zimbabwe – are undergoing crises which the world will undoubtedly pay for down the road.
I admit, I am jaded by the media. I sometimes wonder what would happen if we were somehow able to harness the energy otherwise spent on detailing the brunch menus of Hollywood stars, to put it to use in better investigative reporting (or more investigative reporting, which would be nice…you know, fifth estate and all that).
There is a time for “lite” news. Some of what some people consider to be “lite” is actually – in small doses – tranquilizing in a nice way (cats that use toilets, public school spelling bee competitions, the ubiquitous athlete crossing the globe to raise money for x, etc…). I’m not, after all, nailing a manifesto to someone’s door. I’m questioning the proportionate worth of “lite” in a capricious world which, for now, is not “lite” at all (unless you’re a Buddhist, in which case everything is Nothing – please find another blog to read).
Rather than constantly anaesthetizing ourselves with the likes of the Golden Globe nominations (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” hasn’t even been released yet!), I wish our media could put the likes of “lite” into a corner rather than, as if under hypnosis, regurgitating the same soulless AP and Reuters items without care or discernment of the type of world we wish to portray.
Happy Thursday.
About eight years ago, I read my first copy of Harper’s. Up until then, I’d never been a magazine person (not counting the subscription I had, at the age of 16, to Psychology Today…and then later, Spy for a brief period, while they were struggling with bankruptcy). Okay. Let’s just say that, from my twenties onward, I wasn’t a magazine person. But one day I picked up Harper’s and I fell in love. I discovered something densely intelligent, funny, and with such a variety of content that one could spend countless hours reading (nay appreciating, savouring) every morsel it served. Lastly, for someone who was much more interested at the time in non-fiction, it was a godsend.
Then, after 9/11/01 [sidenote: it took a tragedy for people to officially confuse the order of the month and day when writing the date], I fell out of love. Not immediately, mind you – if anything, out-of-the-gate, Harper’s was one of the few mainstream voices of sanity in the aftermath. While everyone in the mass media seemed to conform to a dangerously singular mindset (i.e. being complacent), Harper’s was honestly critical and asked the necessary questions. But, over time, I found then-editor Lewis Lapham’s essays too predictably left-wing (and I think the fact that they were predictable was perhaps the greater sin). The magazine also began to suffer from the same Americentric cocooning as the rest – I believe the turning point for me was an essay on how pragmatism was a uniquely American concept. Oh, really.
I felt like I was reading something written by people who had never left their homes, or who didn’t want their presumptions challenged. In other words, for reasons arguable or not in hindsight, it became a magazine like any other.
Flash-forward to 2008: with the hell-job in its trailing throes, I found myself in a bookstore itching for something different to peruse – something less weighty (literally) than a book. And sure enough, as if face-t0-face with an ex-girlfriend, I was staring at a copy of Harper’s on a magazine rack. I picked it up, flipped through, and seeing a lack of blatant political indignation, sighed, and proceeded to the cash register.
Sure enough, I found myself addicted once again. The Readings section, with its immaculately edited selection of essays, fiction, poetry, and miscellaneous news items. The ubiquitous Harper’s Index. A fascinating piece on the possibility of transmissible cancer, by David Quammen. A report on the raw-milk controversy (with a Canadian angle, no less). Last but not least, a series of 22 short fiction pieces by Paul Theroux – each of them excellent.
While I am delighted at what seems to be the return of a full-blooded Harper’s, I’m equally despondent: it’s almost too much of a good thing. I can’t pick it up without devoting hours to reading every bit of it. As a result, I worry that everything else I’m reading (or promising to read – hello, Ulysses) will fall by the wayside.
Damn you, Harper’s. Damn you.
For those who don’t live in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), there are two papers which demonstrate the zero-sum game of “providing an alternative voice” in mass-market traditional media.
The first, which I submit as The Intolerant Right, is The Toronto Sun, a daily newspaper distributed through most of Southern Ontario. In short, pro-conservative, pro-law-and-order, pro-military, anti-liberal, anti-big-government, anti-humanist. They regularly publish op-ed pieces which make numerous references to City Council as being infested with socialists. They once published an editorial “cartoon” which allowed you to paint-by-numbers a portrait of Toronto’s mayor, David Miller, which ended up portraying him as Adolph Hitler.
The second, which I submit as The Intolerant Left, is NOW Magazine, a weekly
news/community paper with wide distribution including outside the GTA. As opposed to the Sun, NOW is pro-socialist, pro-community, pro-union, anti-police, anti-military, anti-corporate. NOW operates under the impression that the world’s problems can be solved with townhall meetings. The recent clash between the Chilean U-20 soccer team and the police was, without bothering to investigate, blamed squarely on the police who were identified as racists.
Don’t get me wrong, NOW has a good arts section. The Toronto Sun, for that matter, excels in sports coverage. However, as regards editorial thrust, both papers are heinously biased and often responsible for stoking the coals of hatred.
And thus we come to that auspicious moniker: the “outsider” or “alternative” media voice. People who devour the Sun feel that everyone else is too liberally biased and that their paper “tells it like it is”. Those who fawn over NOW feel as if every page uncovers the organic truth, conspiratorially cloaked by the interests of Big Business. Yet, despite the obvious differences between the two, faithful readers of both feel as if they are getting the inside track on enlightenment.
This is one of the pernicious problems with being the “outsider” or the “alternative” in the traditional media market – it’s bullshit. You know it. I know it. Yet – and kudos for consistency to both the Toronto Sun and NOW – one can predictably ascertain the editorial reaction of both papers without as much as a few seconds of applied imagination.
Me? Generally, I’m left-of-centre, I do think there is a clear history of corporate greed which has threatened to extinguish individual rights (let alone entrepreneurship), and I don’t want our laws to be dictated by the tenets of any organized religion. However, pure socialism is a Romantic Dream – it assumes everyone is the same, which is the summit of naivety if we must include the criminally violent or the unfortunately stupid. Yet, I believe that culture needs federal funding and should not be treated like an elitist nice-to-have. Also, I would rather have another 4 years of David Miller’s ineffectiveness than yet another malicious, vindictive clown like Mel (The Black Cauldron) Lastman or a ruinous corporate-minded manipulator like Mike Harris at the provincial helm.
The problem with any form of media claiming to the be an “alternative” is that “being alternative” (as opposed to say, trying to approach the complexity of the average person’s viewpoint) becomes a ball-and-chain by which they have to editorially tow the line, whether or not it devolves into predictability (or self-parody).
If there are two things I’ve avoided mentioning since the inception of this blog, it is Iraq and Afghanistan. For anyone who has casually surfed a blind selection of blogs in their spare time, I think you can understand why I’ve chosen not to get involved in the often mephitic atmosphere of this debate. It’s chaotic and reflects the lack of clarity in the wars themselves.
Six Canadian soldiers were killed yesterday by a roadside bomb. The media refers to these bombs as IED’s (improvised explosive devices), following the vocabulary of military spokespersons. In response to these latest deaths, here is an excerpt to more effectively demonstrate this vocabulary, from the Globe and Mail:
The Taliban’s increasing use of roadside bombs has also taken a toll on civilians, Brig.-Gen. Grant said. “They have managed to kill six great young Canadians today, which is an absolute tragedy,” he said. “The other part of this is that they’re killing lots of Afghans. They’re attacking the weak, they’re killing women, they’re killing children, they’re killing policemen. These are not the tactics of anything other than terrorists.”
[…]
Asked whether this represents an “Iraqization” of the conflict, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Trudel, who serves as chief of staff for the Canadian headquarters in Kandahar, shook his head.
“Not particularly,” he said. “It indicates a loss of control by the insurgents.”
Canadian troops faced insurgents in the farmland southwest of Kandahar city last year in the largest battles Afghanistan has witnessed since the collapse of the Taliban regime. Those fights have taught the Taliban that it’s fruitless to openly confront the Canadians, Lt.-Col. Trudel said.
“The fact that we’ve lost a lot of soldiers from IED attacks indicates a success, in the sense that our conventional operations have succeeded against the Taliban,” the chief of staff said.
Where to start…
1) These roadside bombs – sorry, IED’s – are not, historically speaking, the “tactics of terrorists”. They are the tactics of guerrillas. Crashing planes into buildings and floating boats laden with explosives into aircraft carriers are tactics of terrorists. There is more than a semantic difference between the two classifications; when you paint civilian-based militias as terrorism you are admitting a loss of control and belying a critical problem with the military operation at-hand. See: Corsica.
2) If by “Iraqization”, the journalists mean “people who were under a tyrant who barely kept a fractious mix of misplaced ethnicities (largely due to Western colonial folly) under control and who now are now occupied by Western forces (yet again) whose motives increasingly speak more about global economics than humanitarianism” then there are some similarities. However, the way in which the term is implied in the article suggests that the “tactics of terrorism” are being imported from Iraq, which itself is an interesting bit of circular logic given that Afghanistan is the only one of the two countries that had anything to do with the destruction of the World Trade towers.
3) To suggest that the killing of six of our soldiers (along with civilians and police) represents a “loss of control” by the insurgents is perhaps one of the more grotesque distortions of military logic I’ve read (recently). Sounds to me as if the insurgents are in control if by their actions they are disrupting the lives of its citizenry and the work of the soldiers who have been put there to resurrect what is becoming the Romantic dream of a post-Taliban Afghanistan.
All things considered, no matter how passionate or well-reasoned your opinion, it simply isn’t enough to oppose either of these wars, at least not anymore. Three or four years ago, perhaps. However, there is a marked difference between the two conflicts. With Afghanistan there was, at the very least, a reason for NATO troops to get involved; it was, after all, the training ground for Al-Qaeda and, considering the devastation of 9/11/01, arguing for a military response was not an irrational (ie. purely emotional) action. Iraq, however, was and is a debacle of historic proportions. It would depress me to recount just how ill-conceived (and corrupted) the decision to invade Iraq was. There are many other sites out there which can do a better job of summing up the horrible negligence of the latter invasion.
One thing I will mention, and I do so on behalf of my countrymen who are stationed in Afghanistan, is that, failing “success” – itself a contentious ideal in any war – the blame for the lack thereof can be directly attributed to two factors:
1) Iraq. If the United States and Britain had not diverted (and thus fragmented) their troops so that they were intervening [or invading, whichever way you wish to see it – I’ll leave the Semantics of Conflict essay for another day] in not only one but two countries, NATO would’ve had the maximum available response in order to accomplish whatever goals there were in the Afghanistan mission. Instead, by pulling troops out of the latter and into the former, they hobbled the efforts of the only justifiable military action of the two and endangered both.
2) Although there are 37 countries involved in the NATO/ISAF deployment in Afghanistan, there is a disproportionate amount of Canadian troops on the frontline in the most tumultuous areas (read: Kandahar), despite repeated calls for other participating countries to commit troops for support. Say what you will about the Afghanistan mission (and again, a lot of contentious arguments are to be had), it angers me to see such reluctance on behalf of other participating countries: either you’re there and fight or you should rightfully leave. You simply can’t have it both ways on the battlefield.
Canada has a tragic history of its soldiers being used as gun-fodder in armed struggle, most notably in the trenches of WWI. This perhaps explains why we did not involve ourselves in Vietnam or Iraq; though we have our share of military controversies to deal with (much of it due to financial stagnation and federal meddling), we have generally learnt not to follow into armed conflict when the goals of the coordinating military power (usually the US and/or England) are suspicious. The difference this time is that our public is looking very critically at the war in Afghanistan, asking the right questions, and putting pressure on our politicians to ensure that this latest involvement does not devolve into the sort of pandemonium currently underway in Iraq.
I would be lying if I thought the current plan in Afghanistan was particularly clear or that our politicians (and some of the bureaucratic upper ranks of our Armed Forces) had the best interests of our soldiers, Afghanis, or the reputation of Canada in mind. The former Soviet Union went bankrupt as a result of their involvement in the 80’s, with the U.S. funding, arming, and training the civilian insurgency. The shoe is on the other foot, with Russia and China supplying the insurgency via Iran. Whether we call them terrorists or not, vocabulary alone is not enough to soften the blow of rising casualties in a conflict sorely in need of clarity.
I don’t like to mention American news channels, for the very basic reason that I’m not American and that I don’t live in the U.S.. As a Canadian, however, I have an advantage in that I have easy access to American news programming. It’s easy to get swept up in what happens down there and you forget that it doesn’t even concern you (or if it does, it’s by example, not by fact).
Tony Burman, of the CBC, posted an interesting comment on a current controversy over something CNN personality (anchor? those days are gone, sorry) Lou Dobbs said. Something about attributing a studied increase in leprosy to a less-than studied association with increased immigration from Mexico. Oh my. You understand why it’s important not to get swept up in another country’s news now?
I like Tony. He’s not a bullshitter, and as a result, doesn’t have the sheen or explicit eye-grabbing “savvy” of more recent newsmen. He makes some interesting observations (which, as a Canadian, we are experts at providing to a world which doesn’t listen):
News anchors — at least in the U.S. — are increasingly revealing their own personal opinions in an effort to ‘connect’ with audiences in this very competitive media environment.
[…]
As I wrote in a column last September, the line between ‘news’ and ‘opinion’ is gradually becoming blurred, and in many newsrooms this is challenging conventional journalistic views about ‘objectivity,’ ‘bias’ and ‘opinion.’
If the patterns in the U.S. take hold, there seems to be a greater desire on the part of audiences to ‘relate’ to news and current affairs anchors whose views and perspective are known to them. The mask of journalistic ‘objectivity’ can seem forced and false to growing numbers of people who revel in the wide-open environment of the Internet.
However, what really struck me were some of the comments to Tony’s article. In particular are two:
Joe Chip from Saskatoon [responding to *yet another* accusation from a previous poster that the CBC is some sort of liberal star chamber, and should be ashamed of casting aspersions on the likes of Mr. Dobbs]
[…]As someone who actually follows media sources from around the world, I can assure you that they are an (relatively) objective news source. As living beings, we cannot avoid bias – we need to interpret the world around us in a meaningful way. The CBC reports in almost as professional a manner as the BBC, which is, despite what you and others may think, the gold standard for broadcast news. Have you noticed how their “At Issue” panel has one person on almost every week from the National Post and one from the Toronto Star? That’s not an accident, it’s about balance, and Andrew and Chantel accomplish that nicely.
Finally, I suggest that you do a comparison of how the three national leaders (Martin, Harper and Layton) were covered in the past election. You will find that Harper got the most positive coverage, while Martin was largely panned, and Layton often ignored. This was consistent throughout most major Canadian media, with more positive portrayals of the Conservatives in right wing papers and media (i.e. the National Post, etc.), and more flattering coverage of left wingers in media such as the Toronto Star. The CBC remained fairly balanced, though I thought they were a bit hard on poor Martin.
and…
Charles Barrett in Florida
Both of these comments are very insightful. I didn’t want to waste your time regurgitating what they said into some sort of personalized polemic, but rather show that there *are* thinking people out there who show just how complex our seemingly left vs. right society truly is. And I absolutely LOVE the line that “media sources are just production houses” – zing!
I’ve been reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Intimidating little book. Seems to be written in its own language: cold fucking logic. Still, there are some fascinating ideas relating to how we choose to define the world around us. It’s easy to see how revolutionary this book may have been for some people, as concepts of truth and falsity take a back-seat to the greater question of a proper logical confine for the philosophy itself – in doing so, Wittgenstein is saying that the structure of a philosophy is greater than the veracity of its content.
Gleaning from this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s 1 observation, “the medium is the message” (which was also the name of the resulting book he published 2), which seems resonant of Wittgenstein’s approach (if not somewhat parallel).
From Tractatus:
3.332 No proposition can say anything about itself, because the propositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the “whole theory of types”).
3.333 A function cannot be its own argument, because the functional sign already contains the prototype of its own argument and it cannot contain itself.
It would be rather trite to pit Wittgenstein against McLuhan based upon a couple of sentences (foundational though they may be). However, from this discourse I’m curious to take a closer look at what McLuhan was trying to say – I suppose I carry a vain hope of tripping over a Unified Theory.
You know you’re part-geek when things like this really interest you. However, I swear, I’m also part-superhero 3.
1. I always get this guy’s name mixed up with the guy who created the Sex Pistols (Malcolm McLaren)…if only they were the same person.
2. Although, technically speaking, due to a copy-edit error, the book was first published as The Medium is the Massage. I shit you not.
3. …as opposed to the Nietzschean concept of the Superman (*chortle*)
I was reading the following post on CNN (from Reuters news service):
Kenya’s first lady: Abstain, don’t use condoms
Risks anger of anti-AIDS activists in her counsel to young people
NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) — Kenyan first lady Lucy Kibaki risked the wrath of anti-AIDS campaigners by advising young people against using condoms, saying they should practice abstinence instead.
However, I have to ask: what the hell is an “anti-AIDS activist”? Furthermore, an “anti-AIDS campaigner”?
Aside from the story itself (which is troubling enough), why does Reuters insist on using this ridiculous terminology?
In a similar story on a cholera outbreak in Angola, I see no reference to groups such as Medecins Sans Frontieres or the World Health Organisation being “anti-cholera activists”. Why? Because it’s bloody obvious that the distinction isn’t necessary, unless of course I’m wrong and there is a burgeoning tide of “pro-cholera” and “pro-AIDS” campaigners in our midst*.
Particularly considering how tragically difficult it is to stabilise the AIDS epidemic in certain parts of the world (via basic medicine and education), there’s no need to further complicate the matter with ridiculous qualifiers such as “anti-AIDS” – it only serves to compound an already embattled cause.
* (conceivably, any politician who supports abstinence alone as a means of battling AIDS is probably the closest thing to a “pro-AIDS campaigner” as we’re likely to see)
As a Canadian citizen living in the US, I have perspective from both sides.
The question being dealt with here isn’t so much about Lou Dobbs [whom I do like and agree with on a lot of the points he discusses on his program].
Traditional media sources have long ago lost their way. In paying attention to a broadcast or the written story most times I’m struck by either the wrong question being asked or the answer given is either inadequate or no answer at all. The reporter/interviewer doesn’t follow-up to hold the respondant [sic] to task about their evasive answer.
It’s seems that the truth/answers are just commodities and any response to a posed question will do. Media sources, particularly television media, are just production houses.
We, the public, need start thinking of what is not asked and also hear what is not said, in a response to a question/interview.
I thought it was the media/journalists job to obtain the truth whereever [sic] it was rooted. Not just report answers.
As for Lou Dobbs and his cohorts, opinion is just that, opinion. You don’t have agree with what anybody/everybody says/believes. It’s his opinion not yours.
That is what makes it GREAT to live in the part of the world that we do, we have the FREEDOM to disagree and NOT pay with our lives.
I think my previous posters would all AGREE with this.