Although western Canadians (and much of my own family) are probably
looking at last night's election as some kind of personal slight on
Alberta, an apocalypse even, I think it's a lot more helpful to see what
happened last night as a referendum on the extent to which Canadians
believe in the reality and severity of global warming.
On this
front, Alberta and Saskatchewan are going to be OK. 2/3 of Canadians
voted for parties who either pay lip service to global warming while
ignoring their own government's 5 year old emission reduction targets
(the Conservatives) or who loudly proclaim that global warming is real,
while spending more money on oil and gas development and pipelines than
any federal government in history and tinker around the edges in ways
that fall far short of our Paris accord targets. Moreover, if there
were any serious worries by anyone that the Trans Mountain pipeline
would be scrapped, those worries should have been put to rest. It will
be built.
As for the other 1/3, those who might feel on a sliding
scale that global warming is the central existential issue of our age,
things are pretty bad. Although we were all fantasizing last night
about some kind of minority where the NDP or Greens held the of balance
of power, the size of the liberal minority, and the fear of another
election means that although the carbon tax will stay, it will be far
easier for the the Liberals to govern with the consent of the
Conservatives more often than not, than to constantly be attempting to
cobble together a more radically left wing political program, especially
given that on most economic and foreign policy issues, the liberals and
the conservatives are far closer to each other than they are to the
nominally left wing parties. And far from the BQ being some kind of
spoiler, I suspect it is Quebec that will be ignored when it comes to
issues that they care about (like global warming).
This isn't to
say that many Westerners (pace BC of course) won't remain completely
unhinged from reality, from settled scientific discourse, or from the
positions of their own ruling class (the oil and gas industry) but as
someone with a lot of family there, I thought it important, after an
acrimonious election, to point out that they won a lot more than they
lost, even if the colour of the winners isn't the one that they liked
best.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Friday, October 18, 2019
Are we doomed?
In this empty corner of the blogosphere, this ghost town, there's really not much going on. I don't really read blogs anymore. There are maybe three that I manage to still click on with some regularity, but like many people, once Google Reader was replaced by Facebook, my reading habits shifted and now instead of reading too many blogs, I find myself just constantly reacting negatively to all of the stupid Facebook posts I see.
So this is way of saying that, at this stage, I don't really expect anyone to read this either, but it's still my thing, a place to publicly muse about things, and so I will continue to indulge myself occasionally. This is also a passive aggressive way of suggesting that if you'd like to comment, feel free
À propos, as many of my long time readers would know, I veer between talking about politics and talking about culture, with random things in between. Given we're a few days away from possibly electing a Conservative government (again!), a government which explicitly rejects the existential issue of our age (as opposed to the Liberals, who acknowledge it while hoping they can continue to kick the can down the road) I have to say, it has been difficult to wrap up my dissertation on a 19th Century German poet and his relationship to medieval German culture.
I should say that it's not quite that I'm falling into the trap of "my dissertation is a waste of time, the humanities are a waste of time" kind of thinking that does trip one up often, rather it's more that I really feel as though I should be doing more than writing this dissertation, or blogging, or whatever it is I do on a day-to-day basis.
The earth is burning and I live in a country that will surely become a battleground in my lifetime, both in the figurative sense and the literal one, and most of my fellow citizens would prefer to either deny the reality of our situation, or kick the can down the road until the sliver of opportunity that we have now is gone.
This is incredibly demoralizing - I mean, I really would just prefer to practise the piano or the organ and sing and conduct, none of which I do exceedingly well (or often enough), but it is generally difficult to do much when all one sees around them is the end of the world, and end that comes not as a bang but as a decay, and with it the end of the idea that there's a future that might be better for our children.
This prospect is made even more difficult because a) I have a child, a teenager in fact, and b) a lot of people with teenagers and little kids are totally fine in this country with electing someone whose policies will ensure that our children's lives will be worse than ours. I mean, this has been going on for a long time (my entire adult life I'd say? Or at least since the turn of the century?) but I don't know if I've ever really seen people be so brazen about it, about the fact that they'd trade their children's access to a healthy environment, and doom them to war because the world's resources are dwindling and Canada will be one of the last habitable places on earth, for a few hundred dollars in tax cuts so they can drive an SUV around for a few more years before the revolution comes.
In other words, when did nihilism officially become a telos in this country for oh, about 2/3 of Canadians? I've always believed that Canadians are fundamentally pretty nihilistic as a people, with our soft sense of cultural and national identity, but this has always been offset by our newness as a country, and that the idea of Canada was still a largely unfinished political project, a project that could (and would) be improved on, a place where reconciliation could not only be acknowledged but actually happen, and where as as the second largest nation on earth, we'd eventually rise up to our unique role as stewards of this vast land, rather than fall back to our old ways as exploiters. At this historical moment, a moment where we are so clearly running out of time, Canadians are not only failing each other in droves, we are failing our ancestors and our descendants.
This sense of the expanse of time opening before me and behind me is both inescapable and overwhelming. Whenever I get into some dumb Facebook bunfight over some stupid post by someone whose brain has been curdled by the right-wing social media serotonin machine, the one thing I always want to say, but never do, is that I hope they remember what they wrote there, or how they voted.
In 10 years, when things are so much worse because we decided our cars were more important than our children, and that a beer fridge in the basement was more valuable than clean drinking water for Attawapiskat, I really hope that, like anyone who gets ostracized because of something they said on social media, they will be held accountable, that they'll have to answer, even if only to their children, why they chose, at this crucial moment in human history, tax cuts over the well-being of future generations, or service cuts over ensuring that the most vulnerable of us can not only maintain an adequate standard of living, but have something resembling a flourishing human existence, an existence which we Canadians, could easily afford to provide for everyone, but don't.
That I feel as though I am asking a lot of my fellow Canadians in wanting them to vote for idea of a better future over the (illusory) possibility of "cash" in your pocket, a literal bribe to ignore the devastation we are wreaking on this earth for another five years, is perhaps the most demoralizing thing of all.
All that being said, and in an attempt to be true to this blog's mandate (as well as begin to develop some real social media synergy by posting identical content on a multitude of platforms, please enjoy this visualization of the first prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, the piece we sent up into space to show the universe that intelligent life once lived here. Although I'm no longer convinced that listening to Bach might alter the course of history for the better, it certainly won't hurt .
So this is way of saying that, at this stage, I don't really expect anyone to read this either, but it's still my thing, a place to publicly muse about things, and so I will continue to indulge myself occasionally. This is also a passive aggressive way of suggesting that if you'd like to comment, feel free
À propos, as many of my long time readers would know, I veer between talking about politics and talking about culture, with random things in between. Given we're a few days away from possibly electing a Conservative government (again!), a government which explicitly rejects the existential issue of our age (as opposed to the Liberals, who acknowledge it while hoping they can continue to kick the can down the road) I have to say, it has been difficult to wrap up my dissertation on a 19th Century German poet and his relationship to medieval German culture.
I should say that it's not quite that I'm falling into the trap of "my dissertation is a waste of time, the humanities are a waste of time" kind of thinking that does trip one up often, rather it's more that I really feel as though I should be doing more than writing this dissertation, or blogging, or whatever it is I do on a day-to-day basis.
The earth is burning and I live in a country that will surely become a battleground in my lifetime, both in the figurative sense and the literal one, and most of my fellow citizens would prefer to either deny the reality of our situation, or kick the can down the road until the sliver of opportunity that we have now is gone.
This is incredibly demoralizing - I mean, I really would just prefer to practise the piano or the organ and sing and conduct, none of which I do exceedingly well (or often enough), but it is generally difficult to do much when all one sees around them is the end of the world, and end that comes not as a bang but as a decay, and with it the end of the idea that there's a future that might be better for our children.
This prospect is made even more difficult because a) I have a child, a teenager in fact, and b) a lot of people with teenagers and little kids are totally fine in this country with electing someone whose policies will ensure that our children's lives will be worse than ours. I mean, this has been going on for a long time (my entire adult life I'd say? Or at least since the turn of the century?) but I don't know if I've ever really seen people be so brazen about it, about the fact that they'd trade their children's access to a healthy environment, and doom them to war because the world's resources are dwindling and Canada will be one of the last habitable places on earth, for a few hundred dollars in tax cuts so they can drive an SUV around for a few more years before the revolution comes.
In other words, when did nihilism officially become a telos in this country for oh, about 2/3 of Canadians? I've always believed that Canadians are fundamentally pretty nihilistic as a people, with our soft sense of cultural and national identity, but this has always been offset by our newness as a country, and that the idea of Canada was still a largely unfinished political project, a project that could (and would) be improved on, a place where reconciliation could not only be acknowledged but actually happen, and where as as the second largest nation on earth, we'd eventually rise up to our unique role as stewards of this vast land, rather than fall back to our old ways as exploiters. At this historical moment, a moment where we are so clearly running out of time, Canadians are not only failing each other in droves, we are failing our ancestors and our descendants.
This sense of the expanse of time opening before me and behind me is both inescapable and overwhelming. Whenever I get into some dumb Facebook bunfight over some stupid post by someone whose brain has been curdled by the right-wing social media serotonin machine, the one thing I always want to say, but never do, is that I hope they remember what they wrote there, or how they voted.
In 10 years, when things are so much worse because we decided our cars were more important than our children, and that a beer fridge in the basement was more valuable than clean drinking water for Attawapiskat, I really hope that, like anyone who gets ostracized because of something they said on social media, they will be held accountable, that they'll have to answer, even if only to their children, why they chose, at this crucial moment in human history, tax cuts over the well-being of future generations, or service cuts over ensuring that the most vulnerable of us can not only maintain an adequate standard of living, but have something resembling a flourishing human existence, an existence which we Canadians, could easily afford to provide for everyone, but don't.
That I feel as though I am asking a lot of my fellow Canadians in wanting them to vote for idea of a better future over the (illusory) possibility of "cash" in your pocket, a literal bribe to ignore the devastation we are wreaking on this earth for another five years, is perhaps the most demoralizing thing of all.
All that being said, and in an attempt to be true to this blog's mandate (as well as begin to develop some real social media synergy by posting identical content on a multitude of platforms, please enjoy this visualization of the first prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, the piece we sent up into space to show the universe that intelligent life once lived here. Although I'm no longer convinced that listening to Bach might alter the course of history for the better, it certainly won't hurt .
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