Book Crime

A column by The Star's Heather Mallick dredged up memories of my teaching day, memories that are not altogether pleasant.

Many years ago I was teaching a Grade 10 advanced level English course. The thorn in the side of all of us teaching it was a novel Entitled Obasan, by Joy Kogawa. An important book detailing the terrible injustices faced by Japanese Canadians during World War 11, it detailed the personal suffering resulting from the Canadian government's expropriation of their homes and businesses and forced relocation into internment camps. It is a shameful period of our history that we should never forget, and one that prompted Brian Mulroney to issue an apology to survivors and their families in 1988.

The problem was that the novel was far too advanced stylistically for Grade 10 students. Indeed, another school within my board taught it at the Grade 12 level, which was far more appropriate for such a difficult book. After many years of frustrations, we banded together and asked our department head for permission to find a substitute. She agreed, with two major stipulations: the replacement had to be written by a woman, and she had to be Canadian.

While we eventually found another novel, I objected to her selection criterion. In my view, literature cannot be judged by either gender or nationality. It either addresses universal themes or it doesn't. That being said, I am not one of those dinosaurs who insists that only the canon of dead white men is worthy of study. However, it cannot be a reason to exclude such works while at the same time seeking out works works from other cultures and sensibilities. The two are hardly mutually exclusive.

Which brings me back to Heather Mallick, who opines about the decision by the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board to remove William Golding's Lord of the Flies from the curriculum. This strikes me as an extreme overreaction to a thought-provoking piece by a 17-year-old who describes herself as a Black, Jewish, feminist, and social justice activist advocating for greater diversity in the curriculum.

The author of the piece, Kyla Gibson, writes:

The OCDSB has no right to claim that the education system is inclusive when I spend my time learning about white and male supremacy. I do not need to learn about Lord of the Flies and how these boys cannot act in a civilized manner to protect one another without desiring power, hierarchy and having a thirst for blood. I need to learn about why it is important to protect one another and to be allies to those who are less privileged.

Perhaps a little unfairly, Mallick dismisses her concerns:

I fear for students like her. The novel is at base about bullying. A plane full of children crashes on a tropical island. Their means of survival is a plot that will be re-enacted in every workplace, social justice enclave, airplane flight and Green party meeting she will ever encounter.

What she seeks, she wrote, is “to learn about why it is important to protect one another and to be allies to those who are less privileged.” But this was precisely what “Lord of the Flies” revealed.

 I can’t see how she missed the novel’s slide into group madness led by frat-boy Jack and the killing of Simon and his fat, asthmatic, bullied friend Piggy. But then I frequently finish murder mysteries and have no idea who the killer was.

As she wrote, Golding’s boys were all white so perhaps they seemed much of a muchness, fair enough, but blood is blood and by the end Simon and Piggy were simply covered in it...

Truth be told, as you may have discerned, I feel some ambivalence about this whole issue. On the one hand, as stated earlier, important themes dealing with human nature should have no cultural or racial restrictions placed upon them. On the other hand, all Ms. Gibson seems to be asking for is literature that also accommodates her cultural and racial realities. The two are not incompatible.

Is she really asking for too much, and has the Ottawa-Carleton Board been too hasty in its decision to jettison an important piece of literature?

"Here I Come To Save The Day"

Sorry to disappoint you, but it is not Might Mouse who will save the day, if only we listen. It is Barney Frankie the dinosaur, with a timely message regarding our pending extinction.

I have to confess, the following left me, not with any sense of optimism but rather deep despair. Is our last best hope to avert climate disaster an animated reptile whose warning, despite its juvenile nature, is addressed to adults?

The infantilization of our species continues apace.

"I Want To Live!"

That is the impassioned cry of a young lady as she confronts West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin leaving a corporate donor lunch.

Hunger Strike 4 Climate Justice

@HungerStr1ke

BREAKING: Abby, 20, confronts

@Sen_JoeManchin

on his fossil fuel corruption on his way out of a corporate donor luncheon on hunger strike day .

Abby can stand up to Manchin, why can’t @POTUS ?

Watch and RT if you agree

Another Reminder About A Multi-Tasking Premier

As the reinvention of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives continues as we move closer to next June's election, yet another reminder about the man behind the curtain.

H/t Graeme MacKay

Gullible White Male Trump Voters

Although I am not a big fan of his novels, Don Winslow has been releasing some really interesting videos on Twitter. This is one of them:

Just A Reminder

With an election in Ontario next June, Doug Ford has been trying to rebrand himself, somewhat unsuccessfully given his unusual capacity for stepping in it. Nonetheless, a little reminder from Patrick Corrigan serves to highlight Dougie's true nature and the values he really embraces.

But Who Serves The People?

In one of his most significant works, Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges argues that the traditional bulwarks against corporate power no longer fulfill that role. He asserts 

that the liberal class has failed to confront the rise of the corporate state and argues that the five parts of the liberal establishment--the press, liberal religious institutions, unions, universities, and the Democratic Party--are more concerned with status and privilege than justice and progress.

While I did not completely agree with everything he said in the book, the author did offer some pretty compelling illustrations to support his thesis. Today, Rick Salutin offers a similar view as he looks at the Democratic Party in the U.S., arguing that people like Joe Manchin are not the real reason that Joe Biden's progressive agenda is being impeded.

For 80 years, efforts to stifle even minimally “progressive” measures like universal public health care have been led not by individuals like Manchin but by the party establishment — including Biden himself for the last five decades. Come tiptoe through a few of the weeds on this with me.

•FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s genuinely moved the U.S. leftward with its social programs. By 1944, when he was preparing to run for a fourth term, the party bosses pressured him to replace his vice-president, the left-wing Henry Wallace, with a typical “party machine” Democrat, Harry Truman. Wallace ran against Truman as the Progressive Party candidate in 1948 and lost.

•In the 1960s, president Lyndon Johnson could’ve completed FDR’s New Deal agenda by finally confronting the racism issues that Roosevelt ducked. But Johnson was destroyed instead by another U.S. dilemma, its imperialist impulse, embodied in the Vietnam War. He flinched, backed the war and chose not to run for re-election. The party elites then beat back anti-war candidates for president and nominated a pro-war Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, who was defeated by Republican Richard Nixon.

•In the 1980s, Arkansas Democratic governor Bill Clinton lost a re-election bid and concluded he’d been seen as too “progressive”; he became pro-death penalty and anti-welfare. He was elected president in 1992 with the same approach. He put his wife Hillary in charge of health-care reform. They refused to even consider a universal public program. Their project died inelegantly.

•Barack Obama was seen as progressive when elected in 2008. But in his first crisis, the financial crash of that year, he bailed out banks and did nothing for people who lost their homes. He was absorbed into the party establishment.

•In 2016, independent “socialist” senator Bernie Sanders ran for nominee against Hillary Clinton, surprising even himself with how well he did. In 2020 he ran again and held a clear lead, when the Clinton-Obama forces joined to defeat him in the South Carolina primary. Sanders graciously supported Biden for president in the hope of moving the party’s agenda leftward. He succeeded. 

There were many progressives sufficiently motivated to run for the party, such as Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, resulting in the defeat of a number of conservative stalwarts and subsequently helping to form Biden's current agenda, an agenda that looks increasingly at risk.

They continue to take on a party elite that has struggled against serious social change, going back to the years just after the New Deal and the Cold War’s onset. 

Salutin, however, is not particularly optimistic that the old guard will cede their power willingly. He draws upon an example from Buffalo, where a self-described democratic socialist, 39-year-old Black nurse India Walton, won the mayoral nomination against the four-term Democratic mayor. The election is next week.

The establishment response was to try and get the former mayor on the ballot anyway, and then to have the position of mayor itself eliminated. Last week, the party chair for the state announced they won’t support her, just as they wouldn’t support David Duke — the longtime KKK leader — if he won a primary in nearby Rochester. These are people who’d rather lose an election than lose control of “their” party, and they often get their wish.

Sadly, it would seem that "serving the people" is just another example of empty rhetoric instead of words approximating reality.