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On October 24, 2016

© By John Arkelian

How can it come down to this – in the greatest nation on Earth, the best hope for mankind, the land of the free and the home of the brave?  Have the lights gone out in that shining city on a hill?  The presidential election campaign poses precisely those questions, with its choice of two unsatisfactory candidates for the most powerful job in the world.  Consider Donald Trump.  Every time he opens his mouth, he confirms our impression that he is an obnoxious, bloviating bully and a vulgarian.  The very antithesis of a thoughtful, well-informed figure, his stock-in-trade is broad generalizations and stereotypes.  It’s a puzzle that anyone was surprised by his ever-so-crude sexual words caught on tape some years ago:  It has been crystal clear from the get-go that he is a crude man.  Is there a word for the diametrical opposite of “classy?”  If so, he is its walking, talking definition.  Why his appeal?  For some, he appeals to their thinly veiled prejudices and fears.  Others like Trump’s unvarnished demeanor.  But far more people have found in Trump an unlikely answer to their deep craving for change.  Now that’s something with which we can find common cause.  The status quo is not serving the interests of America or most of her citizens.  Trump isn’t part of the political establishment.  He isn’t even a politician.  And that has a certain superficial appeal when partisan deadlock and abject neglect of the 99% are the order of the day.  But, there is nothing about Trump that suggests that he would be a balm to those injuries to the commonweal.  He is merely a celebrity, in a society which is entirely too fixated with celebrities.  He is not the white knight, the exemplar of just reform that America so desperately needs.  Bernie Sanders, on the Democratic side, maybe, but not Trump.  Rather, his rashness, impulsiveness, pettiness, and unbridled egotism, combined with a seeming dearth of good judgment, leave him unfit for high office.

What of Hillary Clinton?  Her supporters point to her years of public service – as First Lady, as a Senator, and as Secretary of State.  But Clinton is nearly as disliked and mistrusted as Trump.  Clinton’s ethical and practical shortcomings abound, whether it was vouching for her husband to get him elected (when it is likely she knew she was telling bald-faced lies about his fidelity); contributing to the mess that poorly-planned Western intervention wrought in Libya; selling access to power by granting donors to the Clinton Foundation preferential access to herself as Secretary of State; taking large sums of money from Wall Street and pledging her allegiance to them in leaked confidential talks; using dirty tricks (in cahoots with the leadership of the Democratic Party) against Bernie Sanders to impede his bid for the presidential nomination; being part of the so-called ‘war on terror’s’ insidious attack on inalienable human rights (through the routine assassination of real or perceived foes by drone strikes, and through the unconstitutional mass surveillance of law-abiding citizens) under the Obama Administration; or glossing over her reckless breach of secure-handling requirements for classified emails while she was at the State Department.  Clinton may have 30 some odd years of public life, but what has she got to show for them?  Where are the lasting policy successes, the reforms, and the commitments to real change or to improving the lot of ordinary citizens?  There’s a hard-to-pin-down (but awfully off-putting) sense of entitlement about Clinton:  Many suspect that she feels entitled to the post, that this is “her time.”  Clinton and her supporters have been so bold as to suggest that we should vote for her because she’s a woman, and that her election to the highest office in the land is part of some ordained victory against gender barriers.  In fact, however, Clinton’s gender ought to be irrelevant to voters:  Her gender is neither a reason to vote for her, nor against her.  What’s far more relevant is the fact that Clinton is part of the establishment, when there is a justified hunger in the land to be rid of the establishment’s yoke.  The paradox is that Trump is a dream-candidate for Clinton:  He manages (almost) to make her look ‘good’ by comparison.

One candidate likes to talk about the process being “fixed.”  And maybe it is, in ways that don’t seem to occur to him.  Third parties are shoved aside, effectively blocked from participating in presidential debates that are run by the two main parties.  Democrat and Republican.  How different are they, really?  Both seem to neglect the 99% in favor of the narrow interests of one-percenters.  Maybe they are just a good-cop, bad-cop tag team, an unholy pairing that gives us the illusion of choice, when, beneath the rhetorical ‘differences,’ each of those parties is one-half of a single Janus-faced party of the status quo.

And the status quo is unacceptable.  Critical issues face America.  Few of them are even being mentioned by Clinton or Trump.  Politics in America is corrupted by money.  The U.S. Supreme Court perversely endorsed the notion that money should talk.  Why is neither candidate calling for a constitutional amendment to attack that systemic corruption at its root?  Inequality is a crisis that demands action, as the chasm between rich and poor grows ever larger, undermining the existence of the strong middle class which has long guaranteed the nation’s stability, prosperity, and democracy.  No one mentions the gerrymandering of electoral district boundaries by individual states, a political ‘fix’ that predetermines the result in many states before the election is ever held.  Who has a plan to bring rationality to the debate over firearms and find ways (by constitutional amendment, if need be) to impose reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, including such obvious basics as thorough screening (for criminal records or mental instability) and sensible limits on the kind of guns deemed fit to be in civilian hands?

We concentrate on the dangers posed by terrorism and extreme fundamentalism while we neglect the looming geo-political rivalry with an expansionistic China.  Trump is challenging so-called ‘free trade’ pacts, but neither candidate is getting to the heart of the problem:  We have been sold a fraudulent bill of goods which asserts that “globalization” is both inevitable and good for us, when it is neither.  In the interests of the few, we have de-industrialized the West, transferring industry and jobs to the Third World (especially to China).  It is a profound betrayal of the West – and it poses a clear and present danger to our security.   What about environmental protection?  There are tough choices to be made there.  Why aren’t we hearing coherent plans about protecting the environment from the two main parties?  What about the grave risk to our freedom posed by the security state?  Why has neither candidate pledged to dismantle the unconstitutional measures, enacted in the wake of 9/11, that are intimations of Big Brother?  Why are we still unlawfully holding prisoners in Guantanamo Bay (and perhaps elsewhere) without charge or trial – in open breach of our most fundamental legal guarantees?  Why are we still propping up noxious, dictatorial regimes?  Worse still, why are we selling weapons to them?  Why aren’t we more discerning about who we call allies?  (Tyrannies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to name only two, don’t belong on that list.)  Why aren’t we insisting that a genuine friend, Israel, stop ignoring its own long-term interests (along with everyone else’s) by continuing to build settlements on land it does not have lawful claim to while endlessly postponing the compromises needed to try to heal the perpetual wound of conflict with the occupied Palestinians?  Why aren’t we insisting that China rein-in its reckless ally North Korea?  If China refuses, it is a direct part of the problem and needs to be sanctioned itself.  Why is America unwilling or unable to control the movement of people across its southern border – and what should we do about it?

Why are we not taking urgent measures at home to dismantle oligarchy in favor of real democracy?  Why are we not ensuring that wealthy individuals and corporations pay their fair share?  Why are we not reversing the reckless trend to militarizing our domestic police forces?  What are we doing about the ubiquitous presence of pornography, fraud, gambling, and misinformation on the internet?  Why on earth are we not dismantling large corporate conglomerates in favor of real competition and diverse choice for consumers?  It is intolerable that so many television networks, newspapers, and radio stations are held in so few (corporate) hands, when democracy needs a multiplicity of competing voices.  The Obama Administration elected not to hold the financial racketeers among our bankers and investment companies accountable for the criminal activities that nearly derailed our economy in 2008.  None of them were charged with an offense.  Why is neither of the candidates promising to lay charges against those whose greed, fraud, and recklessness did so much harm to so many people?  Why aren’t they promising to reform the operations of Wall Street, and bring it under strict control in the public interest?  And why is neither candidate promising to reverse the egregious misuse of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and to instead guarantee protection of those who draw back the curtain on governmental or corporate wrongdoing?

Who is addressing the troublingly massive national debt and our large annual federal budget deficits?  How are we to get back to balanced budgets?  What about making health care universally accessible to all, regardless of their financial means?  (Other industrialized countries have done so:  Why not the United States?)  What about improving education?  What about reversing the inane notion of letting banks and polluters police themselves?  What about undoing the perverse trend to privatizing prisons?  Who is talking about sensible ways to reconcile two competing needs, that is (i) to ensure that the military might of America remains second to none and (ii) to ensure that we get the most bang for our buck in a defense budget that eats up the lion’s share of national spending?  And, why is no one talking about the acute national security threat that has been created by our foolhardy headlong rush to connect everything online?  Military command and control systems, critical infrastructure, sensitive government communications, electronic voting machines, and personal information about ordinary citizens – all of that, and more, needs to be unhooked from the internet.  But neither candidate is saying so.  And, why is neither of them addressing the deplorable decline of civility in public discourse – a decline that predated this election by years?

We have been reduced to two utterly unsatisfactory choices for chief executive. The very qualities we need – integrity, humility, decency, compassion, forbearance, self-control, and the wisdom, instincts, empathy, and grace of a statesman – are conspicuous by their absence.  The best we can do in this election is to consider the more substantive policies being advanced by the candidate for a small third party (specifically, Jill Stein of the Green Party) and cast our vote there until such time, if any, as the two main parties can be reformed and renewed.

Copyright © 2016 by John Arkelian.

John Arkelian is an award-winning journalist and author.  A former diplomat, who worked in London and Prague, he also served as a Federal Prosecutor and as a Professor of Media Law.

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