In a recent speech, Vaclav Havel said he had encountered two types of people during his years as a fighter for human rights, a prisoner and eventually Czech president. There were "those with the soul of a collaborationist and those who were comfortable denying authority."
I’m not sure I trust the accuracy of the quote, which comes from a column by the American historian Walter Isaacson on disgraced CIA director George Tenet’s eternal "desire to please." Isaacson is an awkward writer. Can Havel really have used the word "comfortable?" Nothing is more uncomfortable, surely, in the Soviet-spanned world then and in North America now, than challenging authority. Havel learned this to his cost.
I suspect what Havel meant is that the world is divided into those who automatically follow orders, like Tenet, and those who instantly and instinctively question them. In Laurie Colwin’s funny and wise novel A Big Storm Knocked It Over, Sven, the amoralist, describes his co-workers before the company is sold: "She’s waiting to see which is the winning team before she joins it. She’s the sort of person who is already learning the new national anthem as the invading army approaches. You poor kid. We know you wouldn’t — would you? We know you’d join the underground, or quit, or get fired. Right?"
Yes, that about sums it up, Sven.
Extreme decency
My editor made a wise change in my last column. I had used the phrase "right wing" and he changed that to "the political right." He was exhausted, he said, by the tired expression.
And so am I, and so are you, I hope.
There’s the political left, the right, the extremes of each and the middle. (In Canada, there may even be an extreme middle. They are nice people to have a coffee and a biscuit with.) But I have great faith in Canadian voters. There is a basic fairness in Canadians, a decency and rationality that has nothing to do with extremes.
And this is the essence of the person who refuses to go along to get along. There’s a stubborn voice in such Canadians that says, "This doesn’t seem right to me. I won’t vote for that."
I was greatly touched last week by a letter from a reader, Douglas Davis in Fort Saskatchewan, Alta. It was an eloquent tribute to the importance of a good, solid education for young Canadians, and it began: "I agree with much of what you have written, although I am on the other side of the political centre. What governments fail to realize is that funding education is not an expense, it is an investment. Granted, it is a long-term one."
So he and I agree on a matter that I have long been shy of discussing lest I be accused of being an "elitist." I believe education is important for its own sake. It is the basis of civilization. I especially believe in the teaching of history.
I am an elitist. I want people to be well-read, to value books. Here’s my reasoning. Educated people are more likely to deny authority. People who don’t read don’t have an intellectual storehouse to help them think independently. They do what they’re told. They have an endless desire to please those in authority; they don’t know they don’t have to.
For instance, no matter what your political beliefs, if you read Neil Belton’s book about torture, The Good Listener, you will come to profoundly oppose torture. Only a twisted mind could still praise it in the "war on terror," as the ludicrous phrase, now officially abandoned by the British government, goes.
Dodge the lingo
I am going through something of a crisis of the soul right now. I fight very hard for women’s rights, but I do wonder whether it is still useful to call myself a "feminist." I’m actually more of a humanist, since I believe men should have equal rights, too, but the word "humanist" is now used to mean something different.
I am questioning "isms" and "ists." Doris Lessing wrote a small book, almost a pamphlet, in 1987 called Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. She writes that nations should teach their citizens to become individuals to resist group pressures, while admitting that no nation will do this. In a section called Group Minds, she writes that we all live in groups — family work, social, religious, political — and most people are deeply uncomfortable if they don’t.
And that’s when groupthink takes over. This is how Nazism began, McCarthyism, the reign of the Stasi in East Germany, the increasing Stasi-like destruction of privacy in the U.S. and the demonization of "liberals." What happens is that dissidents are crushed.
It is genuinely frightening to be an American who suggests that U.S. policy in the Middle East fuelled the terrorism that destroyed the Twin Towers. It’s not so pleasant for a Canadian, either. But surely it is perfectly rational for anyone of any political belief to suggest that Canada’s efforts (at what?) in Afghanistan are pointless. No? Jack Layton is called "Taliban Jack" for his thought crime.
Never join a group without being confident of your ability to speak up in disagreement. Never follow the talking points or use the phrased mandated by the group in power: "partisan," "embedded," "in harm’s way," "support our troops," "coalition of the willing," "collateral damage" or "enemy combatant." This is Orwell’s Newspeak. They are words intended to conceal meaning, not explain it. I won’t use the word "detainee," for instance. I say "prisoner."
Born to be Word
I know other people fantasize about being Nicole Kidman (famous), or Donald Trump (rich), or Noam Chomsky (intellectual) or J.K. Rowling (best-selling). Me, I fantasize about being two words on the great satirical show The Colbert Report on The Comedy Channel. I see myself as "The Word." Stephen Colbert launches into his anti-intellectual, pro-Bush, pro-war, all-American rant, while beside him, supposedly unseen by him but perhaps emerging from another part of his brain, are printed sarcastic responses to his idiocies. "Yeah, right," says The Word. This creature sits back, smirking. It is snarky, ironic, mocking, devoid of sentiment and utterly subversive.
That’s my fantasy version of myself, eternally in disagreement with the powers that be. You may call this mad; I could not possibly comment. I just know I was born this way.
This Week
The Sopranos is nearing its end, with creator David Chase killing off something that irritated him over the series’ lifespan, the fact that viewers were fond of Tony and the Mob crew. Chase says these men are monsters. He is now making this point agonizingly clear. People aren’t murdered; they are disposed of like meat. Evil roars. The devil twitches his pointy ears. Hell beckons.
5.21.2007
Challenging Authority
5.07.2007
Heather Mallick: Resigned to Stay
HEATHER MALLICK
Resigned to stay
Whither the principle of ministerial responsibility?
May 7, 2007
"I resign. I did my job badly. I take responsibility for my shortcomings."
I only have it in quotes out of a mad hope that one day someone might actually say such a thing. But they won't.
As of this writing (I include this qualifying phrase because my middle name is Pollyanna), I await the resignation of the following:
- Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor for his professed ignorance that prisoners handed over to Afghan forces by Canadians were being tortured.
- Gen. Rick Hillier for his rush to sign the handover agreement in the first place.
- U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez for politically wringing-out federal attorneys and then forgetting about it while under oath.
- World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz for twisting bank rules to pay the one woman on the planet willing to sleep with him.
- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for defying his nation's contempt (a banner in a huge demonstration reads "You failed, go home") over the Lebanon disaster.
- Former CIA director George Tenet, who won't even give back his Medal of Freedom for puffing up a war that he knew at the time was based on false intelligence.
The list goes on.
BF lie skewers BP chief
Lord Browne, the chairman of British Petroleum, didn’t quit last week because he was found out to be gay, he quit because he was caught perjuring himself in court during a financial quarrel with a buff young Canadian boyfriend. The judge seemed willing to recommend charges (both Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer were jailed over perjury) unless Browne paid the price of losing his job. So Browne resigned.
The Financial Times of London — a newspaper that even Noam Chomsky suggests is the best paper in the world because it reports unpopular stories that others won’t touch because money, not democracy, rides on such news. Soft angles don’t much interest financial journalists — wrote that Browne should have quit long before the sex scandal came to light. The financial press said he should have bowed out after the 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas that killed 15 people, injured 180 and cost BP at least US$2 billion. He should have quit after pipeline corrosion in Alaska last year caused huge losses. These were the result of Browne’s cost-cutting on safety and maintenance.
But Browne only resigned when faced with personal harm. The harm he did to his company and other humans? Not germane to his corporate governance ethic.
Path of most resistance
Nora Ephron wrote in the Huffington Post last week that she could not remember anyone resigning over a point of principle since Attorney General Elliot Richardson quit 33 years ago rather than fire a prosecutor at Nixon's request.
I admire Ephron, but it saddens me to see how the myth of American exceptionalism infects even their cleverest citizens. In 1982, after the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, Lord Carrington quit over the failure of the Foreign Office to foresee the event. So there.
Still, I take her point. People stopped quitting. They hung in there. They stayed if they thought they could get away with it, weathered the storm, and embraced the passive tense, as in the eternal "mistakes were made."
And, amazingly, from the Bonfire of the Vanities 1980s through the late '80s era of mass layoffs (to raise stock prices and CEOs' salaries) to the current era of the hedge fund, neither politicians nor businessmen quit because they were incompetent or venal, or, dare I say it, sufficiently rich.
Nobody resigned over anything, ever.
Why should this be?
Part of the reason is narcissism. As voters grew more despairing and therefore less likely to vote, politicians felt less accountable. Why? Because they were less accountable.
It's godly at the top
An American politician (I can't remember who) said: Once you ride in your first motorcade, with regular traffic blocked, motorcycles speeding beside you, a whole city shut down for you, you're never the same.
Is it coincidence that as salaries for egomaniacal CEO became grotesque and they began flying in private jets, they lost even the opportunity for a peek at normal people — and for example how they fly, i.e., like cattle? I am Icarus, they think. I fly close to the sun. I am a god. I shall charge it to the company … which is me.
In the movie Little Miss Sunshine the little girl's father bankrupts his family to promote a self-help book/PowerPoint deal called Refuse to Lose. As in Oprah's favourite book The Secret, the path to success is wanting to win. Self-doubt, castigation and common sense are mere weakness.
All the men listed above might as well be reciting "I refuse to lose." George W. Bush, "the commander guy" as he now calls himself, literally vetoes disagreement. Bill O'Reilly uses derogatory names every 6.8 seconds during his Fox News editorials. Alberto Gonzalez presents himself as man so distracted by the rigours of National Meth Awareness Day that he didn't recall crucial meetings he personally attended.
Imagine disproving John Kenneth Galbraith's law that "anyone who says he won't resign four times, will." There's something psychotic about it.
Calcium deficient?
Winners never quit and quitters never win. It's the American homily that has done more damage to that country than Horatio Alger's ridiculous fantasies. Which would be fine if this dim notion of self-infatuation and vainglory hadn't rapidly travelled worldwide like a modern virus.
You knew I'd turn to Winston Churchill for an explanation of this phenomenon, if only to compare his 1931 performance — an assessment of the dodgy Ramsay MacDonald — to what we hear in our own Commons now.
"I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as 'The Boneless Wonder.' My parents judged that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the boneless wonder … sitting on the Treasury Bench."
And that's what they are, a collection of boneless wonders. What an awful thing to be. What a sorry thing to see.
This Week
Last week, I enthused over Rory Stewart's painful protracted walk across Central Afghanistan, recounted in his book The Places In Between. The sequel, Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing Iraq, has just been published. I don't know whether to snicker or stare in shock at the very short distance between us and the Victorians.
For in 2003, Stewart pestered the Coalition Provisional Authority in Southern Iraq to make him a deputy governor of the province of Maysan. They did. For nine months, he was in charge of 850,000 brown-skinned people. What qualified him? A Scottish male who had attended Eton and Oxford, he had joined the right regiment and worked for the Foreign Office. In other words, he was an upper-class Brit who spent nine months playing Lawrence of Arabia.
I've always thought Britain's Arabists became so because of their attraction to a world where women are veiled and kept in small rooms. But I did not think such men were still ruling a phoney British Empire. For all Stewart's merits, it astounds and sickens me.
3.10.2007
From Rabble
Here's how things work (really)
And the always great, Heather Mallick:
Magazines: where are the women writers?
I Am Powerful
