artsforum.ca

On July 30, 2016

Artsforum Coins a Phrase: Behold the ‘Hand-Held Self-Affirmation Device’

© By John Arkelian

Our (negative) review of the new movie “Nerve” coins a phrase for

Keeping One Eye on What Really Matters – Illustration © 2016 by Linda Arkelian.

those ubiquitous telecom devices into which so many faces intently gaze – as though transfixed – these days.  Here’s an excerpt:  “Any movie that revolves around people’s pathetic addiction to their ‘hand-held self-affirmation devices,’ if we may pause to coin a phrase, better known as so-called ‘smart-phones,’ isn’t worth the celluloid it’s printed on (or, nowadays, the digital space it occupies)…. This film consists of boring electronic toys in the hands of fools, nothing more, with plenty of fruit-themed electronic product placement.  Skip it, and, for heaven’s sake, put your confounded idiot box away!”

There you have it, an apt moniker for the trivial gadgets that have inexplicably addicted young and old the world over: “Hand-Held Self-Affirmation Devices” (or ‘HH-SADs’). And here you thought they were for phoning, texting, and looking up all manner of fatuous trivia online.  No sir, their appeal transcends mere telecom service:  They mesmerize the unwary with the trite and the inane, triggering an unearned rush of endorfins, right on cue, each and every time we get an incoming text or email.  The omnipresent ‘HH-SAD’ ostensibly promotes and expedites more “communicating;” but most of it is of the most superficial sort.  A virtual, if globally dispersed, Tower of Babel.  (Or babble.)  A headlong rush to the lowest common denominator.

In a theater?  In a car?  Walking down a busy city sidewalk?   Sitting at a dinner table with friends or family?  No time or place seems to be the wrong time or place for these portable light-and-sound cued response stimulators.  Where we go, they go.  Users need to get their fix – and often.  But, mayhap this man’s garish glare is your warm comforting glow, a subconscious visual prompt to infancy, when each of us was the center of someone’s attention, the apple of someone’s eye.  Now that eye is an insensate bundle of circuits and ‘apps.’  And that electronic eye never sleeps, never averts its gaze.  It’s a jealous lover, too, for it expects us never to avert our gaze from its own unblinking eye.  But it’s a pretty poor (not to mention insidious) substitute for looking into the face of another (physically present) person, reflecting on the state of the world, holding the powerful accountable, or simply seeing, hearing, and responding to the physical world around us.

Pretending to better connect us, instead, these devices disconnect us, offering virtual connections in place of the real ones they’ve stolen, wrapping us in glowing cocoons of self-preoccupied obliviousness.  They offer false self-affirmation to the many, drawing our gaze to the Pool of Narcissus and binding it there (“And in the Darkness bind them”), reducing us to an unthinking captive audience trapped in self-absorption of the most banal kind.  Pavlov’s dogs, anyone?   It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s pervasive, and it’s well-nigh universally popular.  No coercion necessary for this little trick:  On the contrary, people line-up to be caught in this variety of amber.  Gotta get the newest model, the latest apps.  Those who need our votes (and later our quiescence) buy our affections cheap, displaying their supposed common touch with so-called ‘selfies.’  And why not, the lure of the Self is strong.  By accident (or by design?), these HH-SADs have the effect of stupefying, isolating, and, maybe, by increments enslaving the unwary.

John Arkelian is an award-winning author and journalist with a background in international and constitutional law, criminal prosecutions, and diplomacy.

Linda Arkelian is a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, actress, artist, and teacher.

Copyright © 2016 by John Arkelian

Illustration © 2016 by Linda Arkelian

Illustrator’s Note:  This picture combines an impression of the Buddha with imagery depicting meditation, ‘levitation,’ the yoga pose known as the lotus, a waterfall, legs forming the symbol for infinity, sly references to ‘tuning in’ to ‘higher waves’ (represented by the wi-fi power bars), and, of course, a smart-phone – all in the counter-intuitive context of meditation that’s intended to settle the mind and rid it of distractions.  Rumor has it that yoga students will take class with their cell phones near their yoga mat – and that’s a real a no-no.  Keeping one eye on what really matters, indeed.

On June 19, 2016

© By John Arkelian

No one wants to be harmed by a terrorist attack, but there’s a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being the victim of a terrorist.  Of course, we all sympathize with (and grieve for) the tragic victims of extremist violence; and of course we should take reasonable precautions to forestall such outrages.  But, however horrific the crimes killers commit in the name of whichever noxious ideology is in vogue these days, their atrocities are few and far between.  Even if that were otherwise, protecting ourselves from them does not, cannot, and never will justify subverting our fundamental rights and our way of life as a free and open society.  For one thing, no amount of intrusive security measures can ever be a guarantor of perfect safety.  If a would-be killer is intent enough on doing harm – whether he is fueled by inner demons or radical beliefs – he is apt to find a way to do so.  So, there’s the practical objection:  Surrendering our freedom in the name of security will leave us with neither.  But, more important still is the principled objection.  The West stands at the pinnacle of human accomplishment and human civilization:   We stand for liberty, justice, democracy, equality before the law, accountability of the state for its actions, separation of church and state, protection of minorities, and the fundamental importance of inalienable human rights.  No one, no state, no cause, and no danger should, ever, supersede those inviolable human rights.  That’s what our constitutions say, that’s what we pledge our allegiance to, that’s what binds us together despite our differences, and that’s what our forbears have fought (and died) to secure and defend.  And yet, governments in the West have shamefully betrayed the very essence of who and what we are – violating and subverting supposedly inalienable rights in the trumped-up name of protecting us from terrorists.  In reply, we say:  Better some danger from a madman or fanatic with a gun or bomb than an incrementally constructed police-state where we have lost the very things that make us who we are.

Canada, like its sibling south of the 49th Parallel and its friends elsewhere in the West, adopted practices, policies, and repressive laws in the wake of 9/11 that pose a graver threat to all of us than any nut with a gun or a bomb ever did.  Our governments’ disdainful and perfidious disregard for our core rights and first principles pose an existential threat to our entire way of life – a threat no band of murderous thugs can ever hope to match.  One year ago, in June 2015, the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015 (a.k.a. Bill C-51) became law in Canada.  It wasn’t the first such unwarranted, unconstitutional, and repugnant measure to be adopted here, only the latest.  It allows the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to obtain warrants to commit just about any crime.  Indeed, it gives judges power to authorize CSIS to violate even the paramount law of the land – the constitutionally-entrenched (and supposedly well-nigh inviolable) Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) argued that such provisions could bring “the entire Charter into jeopardy” and that the Act “undermines the rule of law and goes against the fundamental role of judges as the protectors of Canada’s constitutional rights.”

The CBA also decried Bill C-51’s “vague and overly broad language.”  It criminalizes speech, vaguely making it unlawful to “advocate or promote” terrorism, even in the absence of any intent to commit violence.  It gives CSIS an expansively vague authority to “take measures” to counter activities which it deems to threaten Canada’s security.  And it expands the definition of threats to national security in such a way as to potentially encompass almost anything and everything, potentially even legitimate non-violent protest by environmentalists, aboriginal groups, or other dissidents.  It greatly expands the power of CSIS and a myriad of other government agencies to share information about people who simply engage in protests:  Indeed, it outrageously permits them to disclose our personal information “to anyone, for any purpose,” as they see fit.  It further lowers the bar on what we would otherwise rightly call unlawful confinement, calling it by a more palatable name (“protective custody”).  It mandates an unprecedented attack on personal privacy, opening the door to what the federal Privacy Commissioner warned would be a new governmental power “to know virtually everything about everyone” – words that smack of an Orwellian Big Brother, not the Canada we know and defend.  And it abjectly fails to build-in strong (or even adequate) all-party Parliamentary oversight of CSIS and other agencies acting in the purported name of national security.

That seems a clear enough warning, a clarion call even, from the country’s legal professionals.  But the Conservative Government of Stephen Harper was contemptuous of the havoc their new Bill would wreck upon our core rights and our core values.  And, they were supported by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals (who were then the third most numerous party in Parliament):  Trudeau and Company professed to be uncomfortable with some unspecified parts of Bill C-51, but they nevertheless supported it in toto, promising to revisit the new law if and when they took office.  In contrast, despite initial prevarication, the NDP under Thomas Mulcair (which then constituted the Official Opposition) ended up in four-square opposition to Bill C-51:  Their past leader Ed Broadbent rightly observed that it “undermines our rights and liberties and does a disservice to every citizen and to the free society we all cherish.”  At the time, it was widely supposed that the Liberals disliked Bill C-51 but cravenly feared that voting against it would permit the Harperites to paint them as “weak on national security.”  So, it was supposed, they held their noses and voted for the noxious new legislation, subject to their promise that they would revisit and modify certain (unspecified) provisions, when and if they came to power.  Come to power they did on October 20, 2015, with a majority government and nice-sounding promises to replace the dour Harper style with a sunnier one of their own.  Eight months later, in June 2016, they have not lifted a finger to revisit, let alone modify, a piece of legislation that they ought never to have voted for in the first place.  By voting for Bill C-51 – a set of provisions which are utterly inimical to our core rights, our fundamental values, and our constitution – in the first place and then by failing to revisit it once they achieved control of government eight months ago, the Liberals, like the Conservative before them, have rendered themselves unfit to govern.

John Arkelian is an award-winning author and journalist with a background in international and constitutional law, criminal prosecutions, and diplomacy.

Copyright © 2016 by John Arkelian

On February 23, 2016

© By John Arkelian

Vaclav Havel said, “Systems are there to serve people, not the other way around.”  Well, the truth is that our political and economic systems no longer serve the interest of ‘the 99 percent.’  For years now, we’ve heard the mantra of the system’s new idols:  Out-sourcing, down-sizing, industry rationalization, de-regulation, free trade, corporate concentration, mergers, wanton speculation by banks and stock markets, and globalization.  Our political and economic leaders tell us that those things are inevitable.  It’s progress, they say.  And not just inevitable.  We’re also soothed by assurances that such policies are good for us.  Sure, we’re told, there may be painful transitions for some; but, in the end, we’ll all be better off for the changes.  In fact, globalization and its ilk are neither inevitable nor beneficial to the majority.  On the contrary, most of us are extremely ill-served by policies that enrich the few at the expense of the many.  We reduce or drop protective tariffs to favor freer movement of goods across national borders.  Doing so certainly favors corporations:  It frees them to export jobs en masse to the Third World, where labor is cheap, and where environmental standards and worker health and safety safeguards are lax.  Products from China are routinely adulterated by toxins; garment workers in Bangladesh are locked inside ramshackle sweatshops, where they burn to death when fires break out – for want of the most basic safety measures.

Corporations need to be ever larger, we’re told, in order to compete more effectively in the global marketplace:  In the process, we get more and more corporate concentration in fewer and fewer hands.  But true competition, which is the heart of capitalism and the market economy, requires many players, not fewer.  Fewer options mean a captive consumer, at the mercy of near-monopolies or cartels:  The piratical fees and usurious interest rates imposed by Canadian banks, cable companies, and wireless telephone firms spring to mind.  North America can’t compete with cheaper labor costs in the Third World, we’re told.  The de-industrialization of the United States and Canada is progress, we’re told.  Factories, nay, whole industries, that long thrived here, suddenly collapse or move offshore.  (Cities, like Detroit, and sometimes, entire regions, lay destitute and ruined in the process.)  And why shouldn’t industries pick up stakes and move?  There’s no honor, loyalty, or patriotism in the board room, among the ranks of those callously intent on stealing our jobs.  Corporations serve the profit motive and nothing else.  But, it wouldn’t profit them to desert North America if they hadn’t first induced our political and opinion leaders to adopt so-called “free-trade” agreements that let them take our jobs overseas and then sell their foreign goods here without hindrance or tariff.  Wander any store selling clothing, appliances, or home décor:  it seems that well-nigh every product we buy in the West is now made in China (and only in China – there are no ‘made in North America’ alternatives on offer).  It’s nice for them:  Years of massive economic growth, a rich harvest of jobs, prosperity for many, and, for some, great wealth.  But those jobs and that wealth are jobs and wealth that were scooped up from North America and transferred there.  Our own ‘one-percenters’ profit from this massive transfer of jobs and wealth; everyone else in the West is robbed of employment or real growth in income.  We get cheap (and often shoddy or toxically tainted) goods; but we lose our future.  Unemployment rises (to levels suspected to be much higher than those admitted by official counts), while those who do manage to cling to jobs are often obliged to accept a declining standard of living.  Politicians make concerned sounds about encroachments on the middle class; but they ignore the looming elephant in the room – their own unforgivable complicity in undermining the industrial might of the First World.

The West, the Western World, is the home (and guardian) of democracy, equality, inalienable human rights, the rule of law, and, something even bigger.  Shall we call it civilization?  In science, technology, philosophy, law, literature, music, cinema, and art, the West has no peers, not even close.  For all its vaunted long-vintage as a ‘civilization’ of sorts, China has never managed to organize itself as a free and democratic society.  How civilized is that?  The values of its oppressive regime are antithetical to ours, yet our leaders collude in state-controlled Chinese companies buying up sections of our resource and telecommunications sectors.  We transferred our wealth to them; now they are buying us out.  Don’t be too proud of Western civilization, say some.  There are other ways, they say.  There may be other ways – ways, which in some Muslim countries, for example, legitimize misogyny and the moral effrontery known as ‘honor killing.’  Not all societies, not all so-called civilizations, are created equal.  People are, yes, but not the systems that they live under.  The West’s hard-earned position as the home of enlightenment and liberty is to be preferred (and, yes, trumpeted) over all the alternatives.  The West is humanity’s apex.  Alas, however, it is under siege – a siege from within that threatens to undermine or social cohesion, our security, and ultimately our moral compass.

Is globalization good for us?  No, it is not – not unless you happen to be a member of the one-percent. Is globalization inevitable?  Not, it is not.  On the contrary, it is directly attributable to conscious choices made by the few and foisted on the rest of us.  The fact is that the combination of the United States and Canada, even if they stood alone, constitutes a market of such vast size and (still) wealth, that it could (and should) manufacture its own goods for its own population.  North America is an indispensable market.  What we insist upon matters, if we will but demand what is just – not for the small wealthy minority, but for the overwhelming majority of our populace.  People in North America are well-educated, hard-working, inimitably resourceful, and, most important of all, blessed with freedom.  We do not shuffle and bow before potentates or tyrants.  We are not cowed by the powerful.  We speak our minds.  We practice tolerance.  We celebrate diversity.  We welcome newcomers.  We hold ‘the powers that be’ accountable.  We hew to government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

How should we respond to globalization?  By calling a halt to it.  If needs be, we can build Fortress North America.  ‘Autarky’ (or complete self-sufficiency) is an option for North America:  With our resources, wealth, large (and highly educated) population, and endless resourcefulness, we can stand alone – and thrive, doing so – if we have to.  But, we don’t stand alone:  The West also comprises Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and close allies like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.  What do we do?  We exit the ill-advised free trade pacts that throw open our doors to foreign goods and services.  In their place, we pursue ‘fair trade.’  There’s ample precedent in the near-past.  The Auto Pact between the United States and Canada stipulated that American automobile manufacturers could sell cars in Canada without tariff obstacles, provided that they made a certain number of those cars in Canada.  North America has the great size and strength as a market to impose such conditions upon Third World trading partners.  We can also require that, as a condition precedent for reduced tariffs for goods coming into North America, Third World countries like China, India, and Bangladesh must enact and strictly enforce environmental protection laws, child labor laws, and worker health and safety laws that are as least as stringent as those that exist in North America.  (There is no reasonable rationale for tolerating differential standards in such basic public interest safeguards.)  We should also insist that goods being imported here originate in places where workers are paid a “fair living wage.”  What constitutes a fair living wage may not be the same amount here as it is somewhere else; but it lies within our power to eliminate sweat-shop wages and to thereby partially ameliorate the labor cost differential between the developed and developing world – not by reducing wages here, but by mandating their rise elsewhere as the price for free access to our market.  And, for its part, Canada should belatedly act on what has been glaringly obvious for decades:  that it should make things with its resources and not just sell raw materials to others, for them to transform into finished goods and resell back to the resource producers at a higher price.

“The market economy is as natural and matter-of-fact to me as the air.  After all, it is a system of human economic activity that has been tried and found to work over centuries (centuries? millennia!).  It is the system that best corresponds to human nature.  But precisely because it is so down-to-earth, it is not, and cannot constitute, a world view, a philosophy, or an ideology.  Even less does it contain the meaning of life.  It seems both ridiculous and dangerous when, for so many people… the market economy suddenly becomes a cult, a collection of dogmas, uncompromisingly defended and more important, even, than what that economic system is intended to serve – that is, life itself.”*

*Vaclav Havel, Summer Meditations (translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson), Knopf Canada, 1992

John Arkelian is an award-winning author and journalist with a background in international and constitutional law, criminal prosecutions, and diplomacy.

Copyright © 2016 by John Arkelian