Spring, retirement and songbirds

Six years ago on this first day of spring – when one thinks of returning songbirds – I ‘retired’. ‘Retirement’ is one of those stupefying words that claim to help shape and explain our life. The man in the picture, about my age, is gathering cattle feed and firewood, perhaps conversing with the mountains, trees, and birds. He lives in Chitkul village at the top of the Baspa Valley, high in the Indian Himalayas. No one here thinks of ‘retirement’ as we have come to do – nor did anyone else for tens of thousands of years.

In the village, labour and leisure slosh together, attuned to the seasons and a deep ethic of mutual aid. People make lot of distinctions, around gender roles for example, but there’s little of the arbitrary-feeling, bureaucratized segmenting of life that we know.

Down the Baspa valley are vast pesticide-covered orchards;  farther down are enormous, landscape and village-wrecking hydro dams being built to fuel ‘new India’ industrialization and instant glass corporatized cities. Down there they also talk about ‘retirement’.  

I hear that in the past 50 years the world has lost half its songbirds – in large part, researchers believe, because of factors like modernity’s pesticides, glass towers lit up 24/7, atmospheric pollution and deforestation.  That dismays and disheartens me. This first day of spring, I want a world with plenty of songbirds.

What history teaches when the state goes secret

>>  Policing, broadly understood, becomes a doubled universe. On the one hand, publicly known police stations and prisons accessible to lawyers and families, publicly recognized legal rights and processes, etc. On the other hand, secret detention centres (like Homan Square in Chicago, various secret centres in Santiago,Chile, and other South American cities under military dictatorships, the ‘black sites’ set up by the US and its allies), no or little access by lawyers and families, mistreatment of detainees, the increased likelihood of forced/false confessions.

>> The elaboration/expansion of policing micro-cultures with their cult-like isolation, their increasingly internally-defined morality (constantly adjusted to deliver results given the harrowing mission they have been assigned), their resistance to public scrutiny let alone dialogue. We can’t plead ignorance of the results, including in Canada where the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Canadian officials were complicit in the torture of Omar Khadr at Guantánamo Bay; and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci confirmed that Canadian officials were complicit in the torture and other human rights violations suffered by Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin in Syria and, in Mr. Abou-Elmaati’s case, Egypt.

>>  Morality adjusted to delivering results within the context of a harrowing mission called variously a ‘war on terror’, ‘saving civilization’, ‘protecting public safety’ etc . This has routinely (‘routinely’ and not the state’s ‘bad apples’, ‘exceptions’, ‘mistakes were made’ claims) led into a world of lies, fabricated/planted evidence, threats, abductions, mistreatment including torture, etc.  Morality in such contexts has been repeatedly demonstrated to become human amorality.

>> Cultures of covert policing in the context of ‘saving civilization’ (and moralized categories like ‘civilization vrs. barbarism’) inherently provide sanctioned working space for racists and xenophobes – and likely attract both among their recruits.  States that have turned to this rhetoric demonstrate this clearly: Argentina under its military dictatorship, apartheid South Africa, Israel and France (in Algeria), to name but a few.  Thus the defence of ‘civilization’ (with its ideals of cosmopolitanism, pluralism, tolerance, dialogue) comes to rely on racist stereotypes, bigotry, etc.

>> The culture described so far - with its ‘results at all costs’ understandings of its mission, and its milieu of absolute or near absolute powers over suspects and detainees (withholding of ‘evidence’, absence of public judicial forums, absence of public scrutiny) – are a license to abuse and abusers, including (history shows) sadistic behavior and sadists. To paraphrase Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

>> As for we the people, more people – named as ‘suspects’ or ‘suspicious’ – are placed on secret ‘watch list’ databases, with increasingly restricted means to identify or challenge their accusers.

>> The lines fade between suspected, accused and, in effect, convicted (e.g. detained indefinitely without charge or open hearing), especially where the requirements of state secrecy is asserted.

>> The disastrous abuse of people’s basic freedoms and human rights as a result of such watch lists becomes more likely, e.g. the situation of Maher Arar and the other Canadians named earlier.

>> People’s right to dissent, including various forms of civil disobedience (assured under the Canadian Charter) are more vulnerable to being ‘watched’, subverted and blocked by secretive agencies with a vague and politicized mission to protect ‘public safety’ and ‘the economy’, and with a license to act against ‘unlawful’ activities (not necessarily criminal, e.g. blockades) and imprecisely but emotively named phenomenon like ‘disruptive’ social activism.

Winning politics in Camp Mirage and Hotel Redact

Some thoughts on an item in this week's news: more than four in five Canadians – 82 per cent – back the new legislation to expand the powers of 'intelligence agencies' and police.

A century of war (the thuggery of nation-states and non-state gangs) has been a godsend for weapons-makers, saviors of many kinds and the burgeoning ‘national security’ industry – the latter with its public face of ensuring ‘public safety’ and its secreted history of abuses and deceit.

Among democracies alone, just consider the operations of the French in Algeria, the British in Ireland, the US across its global network of hidden torture centres, and Canada-US collusion in the imprisonment and torture of Maher Arar in Syria. Ours is the world of Camp Mirage and Hotel Redact. State secrecy and abuses (officially: 'mistakes', 'exceptions', 'bad apples') in the name of ‘public security’ are now the norm. 

Yes, there is the incidental exposure - the ‘Pentagon Papers’, the recent Congressional report on CIA abuses, the O'Connor Commission – all of which repeatedly decry the lack of sufficient public oversight of covert state operations. But what feels new is how normalized has become the public view that ‘anything is acceptable’ to ensure our ‘security’. 

A few decades ago Hannah Arendt called this security/secrecy/abuse complex a ‘crisis’ for democracies, but she thought an independent media and election-time accountability would save the day. Now, writes Scott Horton in ‘Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare’, ‘the dynamics have shifted considerably in favor of national security elites. They have carefully calculated the points likely to alarm the public and stir it to action. More effectively than before, they use secrecy not only to cover up their past mistakes but also to wrest from the public decisions about the future that properly belong to the people’. Combine this with a media that thrives on violent crisis, and men like Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his circle who see political advantage in public alarm and its further stirring, and we see the public opinion results of this week.

After posting this, my friend Tariq Ahsan wrote:  Hopefully public opinion will change for the better after an informed debate takes place, and the level of fear from recent scares in Quebec and Ottawa subsides.

In response: I wish to be hopeful on these matters, but don’t see many reasons to be so. Few experiences are as powerful as the feeling of insecurity, and few promises more deeply – instinctively? - attractive as the promise to be made safe.

Some days the men in the PMO seem like demagogues: - stirring and manipulating, for their own gain, the fears, racism, and limited cultural space to reflect independently; promising the ‘strongest’ action; accusing anyone who questions of ‘weakness’ and ‘naïveté’. But in the case of Harper and his associates, this suggests a kind of self-awareness that I doubt exists.

Instead, I think it more likely that there is something of an alignment between his own and widespread public views about race, ethnicity, dissent, social inequality, conflicts between cultural traditions and modernity, etc. Mix this with the experience of so many Canadians (inadmissible to consciousness, admittedly) of having no effective power to make the society we might want. Then a ‘leader’ like Harper appears, saying: I promise you power against unseen and ever-present threats, power to ‘defend our most precious civilized values’, power to avenge, certainty against uncertainty . . . . 

It’s worked many times before and it seems to be working now. The irony is that it offers us the appealing-mystifying ideals of the status quo while in practice keeps us feeling vulnerable and actually disenfranchised.

Busing with Ganesha

We should have read the signs earlier on the Jaipur-Nawalgarh [India] bus run: how the driver, as he pulls the bus into the frenzy of Jaipaur’s main street, sits sideways, chatting with the folks behind him, his gesturing hand searching by the bye for the steering wheel and gear shift. Or how he enjoys his horn, a rising four-note LET ME THROUGH number set on Loud Repeat. 

It's only later - careening through a needle eye between two on-coming TATA trucks (the ones with the glowering grills), forcing motorcyclists into the sandy margin and pedestrians into the next state - that I notice a clock over the driver's seat, main hands stopped at 7:23. Is that a.m. or p.m.? The start of the day or the end? Odd where the mind takes you when terror reaches down your throat.

A swaying bus, top heavy like us, fills our windshield. We swerve sharply, people tumbling into one another, hands grabbing whatever feel closest, Sorry, Sorry, as boxes and bags skither along the aisle. A cart driver and mule flash past ... a thud and CHLUNK sound somewhere beneath us. 'You idiot! Are you trying to kill someone!?' B. yells. The driver glances into his mirror and smiles. Several passengers look towards B., nodding in agreement, but silent. The driver's buddies, youths now settled around the windshield, have a laugh, their faces full of admiration. This guy's the real thing!

It's about now that every charred skeleton of every bus and lorry I've ever seen, from Java to Guatemala to Zambia, begins to appear, bottom up, along the roadside.

My eyes return to the clock, and it’s now that I notice a smoky image of Ganesha - that chubby smiling little Hindu elephant found at entrances and exits, god of learning, good fortune, slayer of obstacles . . . and always, always hanging in some guise around bus drivers everywhere.

Sure, I have a few questions for the fat little cross-legged guy - and would like quick answers too, just in case there's still time to jump. Which is it Ganesha: are you one of us, an anxious passenger, or another of the driver's joking, adoring groupies? And just what kinds of obstacles have you set out to clear today – that cement-filled lorry in our windshield, the cart driver, the forces of weight and speed and gravity that (naturally enough) want to catapult us into the ether beyond that cliff edge?

And that god of learning role of yours. Sure, fine, I’m open-minded about learning - usually. I would even agree, usually, that the best learning is full of risks. But here and now in this deathcrate on 14 wheels, I’d be happy to forgo lessons in the joys of ‘High Speed Swerves And Overtakes’ if only I could hear a lot more about the admittedly boring subject of 'I'd Like To Live Another Day'.

And that clock. Whose time is it anyway, Mr Ganesha?