The Antisocial Socialist

It was recently Remembrance Day here in so-called Canada, and schools across the country must grapple with some inherent contradictions. Remembrance Day may have started as a whole anti-war, never again sort of vibe commemoration but as the bloody fist emerged from the velvet glove, it became a celebration of war and militarism. Canadian values, as seen in the foolhardy invasion of Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with *checks notes* the Taliban, or the brutal torture and murder of a Somali teenager, the continuous violence enacted on Indigenous peoples, or the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Haiti, are reframed as a valiant, noble fight for peace, freedom, and security. Generations of schoolchildren must memorize and monotonously recite "In Flanders Fields." Military recruiters are frequently brought in to sell war as an exciting adventure for broke students searching for a way to pay for tuition.

At the same time, schools must grapple with a mandate to be as inclusive and inoffensive as possible, celebrating diversity and multiculturalism and definitely not causing any "harm." As many students in any given school are likely to have experienced the trauma of war firsthand, the beleaguered teachers and students forced to organize the Dreaded Remembrance Day Assembly must at least nominally talk about peace. It is especially awkward this year, as our government and corporations continue to arm a rogue state that is committing a genocide that gets livestreamed to the kids on their phones.

This leads to some weird aesthetic decisions. My favourite was when a gung-ho recruiter straight out of a 60s-era Vietnam movie talked about the noble and thrilling mission in Afghanistan (to an audience that included Afghan refugees–that was before we barred them from coming in the country), and encouraged the kids to sign up to get blown up by an IED. This speech was followed by an absolutely brutal rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine." With lyrics. You know, the lyrics that are essentially "No Gods, No Masters," but somehow less cool? That one.

This year, one Ottawa school tried its best. Sir Robert Borden High School, located in an area with a large Arab population, played "Haza Salam." You can read the English translation in that video—it's pretty general and inoffensive. And prettier, musically, than "Imagine." I bet you can guess what happened next!

That's right! Triggered by having to hear Arabic, because the entire language is antisemitic now, some of the worst people—the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, the soon-to-be last democratically elected Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Poilievre. and Lisa MacLeod, an MPP who cut funding to autistic children in a decision so unpopular that she had to immediately be shuffled off elsewhere—started shrieking their lungs out. Naturally, the principal of the school, who presumably doesn't want to organize the Remembrance Day assembly by himself next year, stood behind the hardworking students and educational professi—ahahaha just kidding he totally threw them under the bus and apologized to these braying fascists. I'm fairly certain this is in violation of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board's own human rights policy, but we all know this doesn't apply to Muslims or Arabs (and especially not to Palestinians). 

This kind of thing is increasingly common in schools, which have always been bastions of white supremacy but have been given tacit permission through the re-election of the Orange Man and the media coronation of our own Trumplet, Poliievre, who gets to be appointed Prime Minister without us even needing to have an election about it. The lip service to diversity and inclusion and belonging lasts only so long as it can be done away with, revealing the rot beneath. Get ready for a firehose of stories like this, as the authoritarian personalities who worm their way to the top are at last allowed to stop pretending that they think all children are equally human.

Poetic Devices X, my current favourite blogger, made a new post, which in itself is cause for celebration. (Best line: "school culture is important and that there are various types of teachers, the most dangerous of all which are “reprobates” and “resisters”, which had I discovered this phrase earlier in my career would’ve been a great title for this blog. I would get it put on my business cards, but the board told me I’m not important enough to have any.")

In it, he mentions the newfangled term "simplexity," but admits that like most edu-jargon, no one has any idea what it means.

So I looked it up, and there is indeed a Wikipedia page for it, but I'm 99% sure whoever wrote it is taking the piss. Choice quotes:

"Jeffrey Kluger wrote a book about this phenomenon that describes how house plants can be more complicated than industrial plants, how a truck driver's job can be as difficult as a CEO's and why 90% of the money donated to help cure diseases are given only to the research of 10% of them (and vice versa).

The term has been adopted in advertising, marketing and the manufacture of left-handed screwdrivers."

...

"Like most terms, it has been shaped through dialogues and discussions, in much the same way that a camel is a horse designed by committee. "

The line between educational fads and outright parody is very blurry these days. 

I just finished Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, which, as several have pointed out, is kind of the best title ever. It's about the ordinary lives of young people in the Soviet Union from the 50s to the 80s.

The prevailing images of Soviet life in the West—at least when I was growing up—were of disaffected youth who wanted nothing more than Levi jeans and Coca-Cola, quietly mouthing the hackneyed slogans forced on them by the government while privately listening to censored rock music and plotting the downfall of socialism.

And who could blame them?


Salad with mayonnaise. Check out English Russia's World of Soviet Groceries post.

Yurchak, having actually experienced the system firsthand, takes a more nuanced view, rejecting binaries (surprise! He is a post-modernist) and exploring instead the basic contradictions experienced by Soviet citizens, leading to the USSR's collapse. He begins from Claude Lefort's paradox of modernist ideology:

[T]he split between ideological enunciation (which reflects the theoretical ideals of the Enlightenment) and ideological rule (manifest in the practical concerns of he modern state's political authority) [...] In the society built on communist ideals, this paradox appeared through the announced objective of achieving the full liberation of the society and the individual (building of communism, creation of the New Man) by means of subsuming that society and individual under full party control. The Soviet citizen was called upon to submit completely to party leadership, to cultivate a collectivist ethic, and to repress individualism, while at the same time becoming an enlightened and independent-minded individual who pursues knowledge and is inquisitive and creative.

The result is an analysis that actually allows Soviet citizens some agency, particularly in Yurchak's descriptions of the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth), to which most people in the USSR belonged. Loyal Komsomol party secretaries had no problem espousing a critical but supportive view of socialism, while seeing no inherent contradiction with an appreciation of what Yurchak calls the "Imaginary West" as constructed through music, shortwave radio, and subculture. In fact, it was the ideology of their institutions, which in theory promoted inquisitiveness, that led them to pursue these interests.

The first two chapters are a slog through an analysis of authoritative discourse—the "everything was forever" referenced in the title, where content became subservient to the creation of language that removed the author and gave a sense that there was a universal, static truth that everyone new. (The result of this discourse being hilarious copypasta speeches and banners where local Komsomol members would notice grammatical errors but be forbidden by higher-ups to correct them, since the mistake was in the original.) It's dense stuff, mainly dealing with the relationship between the constative dimension of discourse—which can be true or untrue—and the performative dimension—which can only be effective or ineffective. (Thankfully, we get examples. A constative statement is "I am cold"—a description of reality; a performative statement is "I vote for this resolution," which affects the nature of social reality.) At times, I felt I lacked the requisite background in linguistics and po-mo to understand what the author is on about, but he quotes Laibach along with Derrida, so I got through it.

The rest, which focuses on institutions and subcultures, was a much faster, more engaging read. He looks at concepts of svoi ("us," as in "us/them," distinguishing "normal people" and complicated social networks from activists—in this context, unquestioning pro-Soviet ideologues, and dissidents), vnye (occupying a position simultaneously inside and outside the system, but finding the official discourse "uninteresting"), and some very strange performance art. There's some really good primary source research that's just completely engrossing, breaking up the theory with letters, jokes, and strange collections of anecdotes.

Anyway, totally worth a read. If you got through the above blather, you can have a picture of a bootleg record made on an X-Ray:

First, the serious stuff:
Chris Clarke (will my e-crush on him never cease?) has a heartbreaking and brutal post about Haïti. You should read it.

Also on Pandagon, Ilyka has a post about an out-of-control high school in Louisiana where the black students can't so much as catch a bit of shade without the white students threatening to lynch them.

krinndnz linked to the recently declassified PowerPoint slides of the Pentagon's *ahem* plan to invade Iraq. I can't make sense of them, and I bet half the people at the Pentagon couldn't either, because the whole point of PowerPoint is to confuse. Actually, the entire post is pretty right-on.

Then the fun stuff:

Also from krinndnz, two blogs for your edification and amusement: Literally, A Web Log and the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. I have not looked at the latter in enough detail to ascertain whether "Good" Burger in Toronto is in there, but I hope so.

dania_audax has a link to a comic that nearly cost me a keyboard this morning: Who Is Your Savior?

Finally, in the Funny or Sad? category, we have this story from fengi. I'll just quote from the same bit, because...wow:

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

Facing tough questions before a congressional panel last week, Broadcasting Board of Governors member Joaquin Blaya admitted none of the senior news managers at the network spoke Arabic when the terrorist messages made it onto the air courtesy of U.S. taxpayer funds. Nor did Blaya himself or any of the other officials at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the network.
...
Blaya conceded that the top officials in the network's chain of command could not understand what was being said on al Hurra broadcasts...the network's news division also had no assignment desk, he said. That left decisions over al Hurra's content in the hands of its reporters and producers, who are, according to Blaya, hastily-hired Arabic-speaking journalists with insufficient understanding of Western journalistic practices or the network's pro-Western mission.

This was in the front window display, which means:
• The person who designed the shirt didn't notice.
• The person who made the shirt didn't notice.
• The person who put it in the window didn't notice.
• No one who works at the store noticed.

Ick.

Also, there is a new Gaybortion! Wheeee! with a special guest appearance by violachic.

Here's a link to Bush's 2006 State of the Union address. You know, the one in which he comes out very strongly against furries. I know that I was very worried about the furry menace.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to identify as many examples of silliness as you can (these may include grammatical, logical, ideological, and factual silliness, as well as pronunciation gaffes, if you happen to have sound on your computer).

The winner gets to be smug.

I'll get you started: Hydrogen fuel is not a viable solution to America's energy problems.

Have at it!

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And the winner is...teapolitik, in a landslide. In what may be a record, he actually managed to win teh intarwebs twice in one day. Congratulations, and enjoy the warm feeling of smugness.

But you're all winners, really.

I just came across the term "material solidarity" in an (otherwise well-intentioned) e-mail. What they meant, I think, was "aid."

Is anyone else getting sick of the way corporatespeak, or at least the structures of corporatespeak -- euphemism, jargon, etc. -- has infiltrated activist vocabulary? All of a sudden, I'm hearing about "point-people" and "bottom-lining." (One friend remarked: "You [the Wobblies] still use 'secretary'? Why?" Because it's the most accurate description of the task. Why else?)

It actually irritates me more than "wimmin" and "persyn," fundamentally misguided though those may be. Corporatespeak is pernicious in any context because it robs the language of meaning. In the realms of business and government, this is done for very specific reasons -- to shift accountability and to obscure information. ("The functionality of the copy machine has been compromised by our Associate Coffee/Errand Assistant I." vs. "The intern broke the copier.")

So what does it mean when we do it?

I'm out of here for the night. Politicos and language geeks -- discuss.

Via jk_fabiani, if you haven't seen video footage of the Toledo riots, here's a link for you:

OMG riot!

It just looks like a lot of people running around to me. That's activist videos for you, though. If you look really close, you can spot my friend.

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Language geeks, particularly feminist language geeks: sonicage is having a fascinating discussion about male normative language that I just know some of you will love!

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Ganked from trollprincess: Chances are people you don't even know are being introduced to your journal every day, either randomly or through someone else. In addition to recent entries, people can get to know you better by what you posted in the past.

With that in mind, post a link to your entries on this day six months ago, nine months ago, a year ago, and two years ago.

Well, most of these are locked. I wonder how many lurkers I have, though.

Six months ago (April 20, 2005), I was babbling about how Heather Mac Donald was hilarious. There were also mentions of wombats and vultures.

Nine months ago (January 20, 2005), I was into peak oil before it was cool to be into peak oil.

One year ago (October 19 and 21, 2004), I discovered the reality-based community and was overjoyed that my phone wasn't working and tried to kick-start a Dr. Hunter S. Thompson for President campaign.

Two years ago (October 20, 2003), I was in the midst of a break-up with my partner of four years and dealing with The Cancer, Round One.