Why newspaper readership is sinking

26 0f 28 dailies in Canada  promoted Stephen Harper as our PM.

No one has done more to destroy Canadian democracy than Harper.Who owns the papers?

Have you ever heard of the Sun chain doing anything other than opinion.

At least the Star digs like newspapers should.

The Sun and many US rags channel the positions of the wealthy owners. Hence the support of Harper.

Of course the Internet is worse, giving free rein to the angry white men crowd—-yet, yet there are many sites which bring excellent information—but generally don’t look to corporate controlled papers.

Queen Victoria would not agree.

Mothers’ Day: An anti-war reminder

 

The horrendous slaughter of men and boys in the American Civil War (1860-65) produced significant repulsion especially among women, already disenfranchised and victims of patriarchy.

The 20th century of course saw a quantum leap in bloodthirsty carnage and the haunting spectre of underdevelloped men cavalierly sending other people’s children to their deaths.

The brilliant German philosopher Immanuel Kant  nailed it:”Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, “War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.”

Here is the original Mothers’ Day Proclamation of  Julia Ward Howe penned in Boston in 1870. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose. We still see the cowardly activity of the Dick Cheney’s of this world, a man who had 5 deferments in the Vietnam years yet blythly sent 100s of minority  and working class kids to their deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So Mothers’ Day today has become the latest victim of capitalist amnesia: turn a radical remembrance into flowers and chocolates!

Remember Julia Ward Howe!

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, 

Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly: 

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, 

Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. 

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn 

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. 

We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country 

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

 

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. 

It says: “Disarm! Disarm! 

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” 

Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. 

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, 

Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. 

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means 

Whereby the great human family can live in peace, 

Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, 

But of God.

 

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask 

That a general congress of women without limit of nationality 

May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient 

And at the earliest period consistent with its objects, 

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, 

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.    

 

A narrow compassion

Another “terrorist” bombing (probably home grown) with the typical media response.

First the justifiable horror, the loss of innocent lives, the capture of the public commons and always, always the American exceptionalism, the flying of the stars and stripes, the public tributes and never, never a deeper understanding that it is just not Boston or New York which is resilient. It is the human family. Americans  are not exceptional. Most often too many are continually and self-referentially provincial, refusing to understand suffering beyond their own borders.

The excellent journalist. As Glenn Greenwald wrote “But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade.”

And this from  a great American think tank the New America Foundation, a research group that tries to track targeted killing which the United States has carried out. So far “the US has launched  422 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, 373 of them since Mr. Obama took office in 2009, in addition to a handful in Somalia.” The foundation estimates the number of deaths resulting from the strikes to be between 2,426 and 3,969, of which about 10 percent were of civilians and nearly as many of which were identified as ‘unknown.’ An overwhelming majority of the strikes have been carried out by unmanned drone aircraft, though cruise missiles, fighter jets and helicopter gunships have also been used.”

Writer Robert Koehler asked the impertinent question avoided by the chauvinist American press:

Will we ever reach a point where most Americans choose to absorb such data in the context of our own terrible violence? Will we ever reach a point where we feel the same urgency of grief for the victims of the violence that is a fact of life in the Middle East?

Not much universal lessons to be learned here in canada either.The  Globe offered its usual editorial boiler plate about the people of Boston and democracy ‘enduring” but nothing about the shocking continuance of American violence perpetrated abroad as stated above.

The announcer at the Raptor basketball game summed up our own narrowness. ”Tonight  We are all Boston fans”—but we are never never Iraqi fans  or Afghani fans.

Elvis Costello on Thatcher

The song’s not a party political broadcast, there’s no manifesto. It just says, ‘I’ll only be happy when this woman’s dead.’

“And some people no doubt might find that extreme. But it’s meant to be. I make no apology for that song. It’s an honest emotional response to events, and writing it was like casting out demons or something. And the song itself is the result of a form of madness, because when you get to that point of thinking these thoughts, actually wishing somebody dead, it really does become a form of madness. It’s a psychopathic thought. And it’s fucking disturbing to find it in your own head. But it would be cowardly not to express it. Because once it’s there, if you don’t get it out, it’s only going to come back and haunt you some more.

“I also think you have to remember that it’s not only her that the song is aimed at. It’s what she represents. The way she’s changed the way people value things. It’s like some kind of mass hypnosis she’s achieved. People are afraid to speak out. You know, one thing I thought I’d be asked when people heard it was whether I was saying it might’ve been a good thing if she’d died in the Brighton bombings. I don’t think so. It would have made things 10 times worse, because then she would have been a martyr. We would have had a dead queen. So really, in a profound sense, the song is hopeless. It’s a hopeless argument. Because I think it’s a hopeless situation. So, no, it’s not in a large, historical sense, going to change anything.”

Sport as tool of corporate ideology

There is one simple reason we have Mayor  Rob Ford and former mayor Mel Lastman and the US had GW Bush and Ronald Reagan  twice. It is advanced capitalism. Never underesimate the power of wealth and advertising to suborn good intentions and decent orientations. On any Saturday in the USA watch the real liturgy—hordes of fans  heading to the stadium to watch their favourite college teams play. Sport obsession is a powerful seducer of dreams, a terrible substitute for authentic living. In the words of the great cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “one of the least effective weapons against the machine.”

Dave Zirin writes below about  March Madness, the annual basketball  tournament to name a number one team. The time and energy which goes into sporting events like this and US pro football is shocking. People phone in to talk radio and with amazing analyses tell you what is wrong with their local teams. It seems to be , given the time expended, of ultimate concern.The sport fanatics are not stupid but as Thomas Frank brilliantly wrote in What’s  the Matter with Kansas: How is it that poor people vote against their own interests? How  do blue collars line up with the corporate bandits of Wall Street and the Republican Party? The manipulation is mindboggling and so very injurious to the common good.

Fantasy sport leagues are treated with utmost seriousness and leach critical time from the needed analyis of our common life.  Time wasted here is time not used to analyze societal ills or cut through the awful propaganda which paints ambitious politicos as friends of the commons when in fact they are tools of corporate ideology.Ronald Reagan was the biggest robber of the common purse in US history, an affable spokesperson for the corporatocracy.

Zirin writes :

You most have to tip your cap: no non-profit does buccaneer profiteering quite like the NCAA. What other institution would see a tibia snap through a 20-year-old’s skin on national television and see dollar signs—Kevin Ware tee shirts  at 24,99 with the meaningless quoation, “Rise to the Occasion”? In accordance with their rules aimed at preserving the sanctity of amateurism, not one dime from these shirts will go to Kevin Ware or his family. Not one dime will go toward Kevin Ware’s medical bills if his rehab ends up beneath the $90,000 deductible necessary to access the NCAA’s catastrophic injury medical coverage.

How sick is the American college system where athletics wag the educational dog?  The coach at Louisville University Rick Pitino makes  $4 million a year. I wonder what the profs make at this elite university.

The point is the sick rule of money, in this case, sport promotion. All of this in the best entertained and least informed nation on earth.

Now in Toronto we are supposed to be hyped about having a winning team with the Blue Jays this year.

But we’ll still have a mayor like Rob Ford.

Both Jesus and Buddha had great advice: Stay awake!”

Phil Donohue’s truthful movie about Amerika

 

The thing I wonder about the Dads and Moms

Who send their sons to the Vietnams

Will they really think their way of life

Has been protected as the next war comes?

I have prayed for America

I was made for America

Her shining dream plays in my mind

By the rockets red glare

A generation’s blank stare

We better wake her up this time

Jackson Browne “For America

“They stand mute “says Phil Donohue to Chris Hedges. They the drugged out consumers of TV and escapist films. The walking dead. Life’s passive spectators seduced by corporate entertainment, mindless sitcoms and the sports juggernaut, a large part of the best entertained and least informed people on the planet.

Donahue a Catholic with a conscience was sacked for his principled rejection of the war in Iraq, The father of serious afternoon journalism wax sacked in 2003 from the putatively liberal MSNBC network for his stance. Remember the abuse Michael Moore took the same year after his prophetic outburst at the Academy Awards.

To me it is ironic how social justice permeated the Catholic bones of these two men while the official mitres remained mute.

Abraham Heschel wrote:

In biblical days, prophets were astir while the world was asleep;today the world is astir while the Church and the synagogue are busy with trivialities.

Well war and sentimental patriotism are never trivial.

It takes a mensch to stand against them.

Donohue never worked on TV again. For four years he worked on a powerful documentary Body of War based on the massive suffering of paralyzed Iraq War veteran Tomas Young.

You can guess what happened in the United States of Amnesia,

Please we want escape, car chases, cheap sex, any kind of mind candy but hardly ever  filmic truth.

Too depressing the commercial verdict. No promotion. Brief openings in a few major cities then nada, It will be university campuses, art houses etc.

As TS Eliot said, “Humankind can not bear much reality.”

And the BS artists who promoted the war—Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Feith and the the talking heads at Fox they still roll on with their toxic lies and venom. Those were the ones who sanitized the war, their brazen faces still outside the bars of a jail

As Donohue lamented, “Nobody sees the pain.” Not in the fantasy dream world of television.Not in the movies.Not in the daily papers.

Jonathan Kozol pt.2

Few teachers deserve the word “educator”. Most are competent technicians who never mine the internal landscape of their students, who never really sit down and  ask penetrating questions or take deadly serious the toxic environment which occludes the  personal and social life of the student. Jonathan Kozol  is a true educator. He connects, befriends ,keeps in touch with the young people he writes about in his several books. See for yourself. His latest book is classic Kozol, Fire in the Ashes. The author  enrages you with his description  of the structural violence and socio-economic justice in the poorest parts of America. In Canada, simply visit a reserve to taste the analogue. But he never stops there.He  writes of the “fire in the ashes”. the phenomenal resilience in the lives of the poor. Kozol breaks your heart—then puts it back together again. Here he is again on Tavis Smiley’s wonderful PBS show. You can quickly smell his disdain for charter schools,the testing mania which enriches  corporations and leaches imagination from the inner lives of kids.

Newt Gingrich is dead wrong, I don’t want to waste too much time tonight on rehashing the voucher argument, the right-wing John Birch Society voucher argument. We killed that 20 years ago, so now the conservatives don’t call it vouchers anymore, they have other sweeter terms for it.charter schools are not the  the answers for children There are a few good charter schools that get the lion’s share of attention because they’re cleverly selective in who they admit, and they’re also self-selective in who hears about them and gets into them in the first place. Charter schools, especially the ones that are getting private corporate money from right-wing foundations, what they represent is a narrowing of civic virtue to the smallest possible parameters. I’ll fight for my kid in this little boutique school of 200 children, and I won’t raise my voice on behalf of all the millions that I’ve left behind. (Applause) But more important to me, if I can is to follow up on Cornel West’s  point, where he spoke of all of those billions or trillions of dollars sitting there on Wall Street. I want to make a concrete, specific, useful suggestion to President Obama.

Get hold of that kind of money, here’s the best preventive medicine that I know of to rescue children from hereditary poverty, and that is to give them absolutely rich, full, exciting, enticing, not drill-and-grill but developmental preschool starting when they’re two years old. I’m sick of people, and I won’t say who, but one member of Congress who is with us here tonight mentioned to me, “There’s no proof that Head Start worked.”Well, ask any kindergarten teacher in America which kids in her class had Head Start and you’ll find out whether or not it worked. Every kindergarten teacher, every first grade teacher knows right away.

The crime today is that even with some modest increase in Head Start that the congresswoman referred to by President Obama, very modest increase, more than half the poor eligible children in this country don’t even get a single year of anything at all resembling real preschool education. Now I happen to know what the rich get for their children because I grew up in privilege. They can’t fool me. (Laughter) They tell me. They don’t think I’ll tell you, but I will. (Laughter)

Here’s what I’m saying. If I were the president I would take all those billions of dollars that are being wasted right now on the testing corporations and I would pour that money into three full years of the best preschool education in the entire world. If this nation can’t afford to do that – it costs about $40 billion – if we can’t afford to do that, I don’t see what hope we have of upholding any sense of dignity 

Damn that jazz music!

 

According to the biographers (Smith and Guttridge) of the great jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden there was a spontaneous revulsion against dancing to the new hot jazz in the 20s. Similar reactions of course appeared with the advent of rock and roll.The latter is easily documented, but the jazz age references  caught me flat footed.

One of the leaders apparently was a man  named J. Louis Guyon, the owner of the biggest dance hall in Chicago. He was shocked as he surveyed  the dance floor and watched young people in close embrace with “limbs intertwined and torsos in close contact.”

Mr. Guyon went on. “Add to this position the wriggling movements and  and the sensual stimulation of the abominable jazz orchestra with its voodoo-born minors and its direct appeal to the sensory centres, and if you believe that youth is the same after the  experience as before, the God help your child.”

Dance teachers were similarly incensed.

Fenton T. Bolt, director of dance reform of the National Association of Dancing Masters opined that “The jazz is too often  followed by the joy ride. The lower nature is stirred up as a prelude to  unchaperoned adventure.”

Mr Bott went so far as to release a book with approved  dancing positions..some cities even hired police to supervise dances—surely a precursor to the Catholic nuns who patrolled balconies  with warning bells when swains got too close to their female partners.There was  a concerted effort to dampen ardor and squelch the influence of “vulgar music.” My friend Carmen Bush told me of an incident here in Toronto in 1927 when the great Duke Ellington came to the old Pantages Theatre on Yonge street near Dundas. Carmen had skipped school at Del Bond and sat through several sets of the Duke .During one performance two ladies bolted with a loud exclamation condemning this “jungle music.”

In Philadelphia the city hired one Marguerite Walz to instruct 75 policemen to prevent “abdominal contact”, in particular the “Washington Johnny, “in which the legs are spread apart.”

Maybe British novelist had it right when he described rock and roll dancing as “a navel engagement without semen.”

Or maybe the Baptists did when they warned that sex might lead to rock and roll dancing.

Or maybe the gnostics and Augustine spooked us with warnings about the body.

The incarnation sure is messy.

Violence–American as apple pie

In China the same day as the Sandy Hook massacre a deranged man attacked 22 school kids with a knife. Guess what?  Nobody has died.The sad man had no assault rifle

 

Why can’t Americans add 2 and 2?

 

Instead we have medical experts on the Piers Morgan show prattling on about “mental illness.” What a waste of time.In a country of over 300 million, you will find lots of mental illness.Especially in a culture which glorifies violence. “As  american as apple pie,” as Rap Brown said. There is “permission giving” everywhere in a deeply sick culture.This is a culture which OKs drones dropping out of the air regularly—in some Asian land; which invades other nations on no pretext and murders hundreds of thousands; that produces violent films on a regular basis, that glorifies football as a legitimate sport and leads the world in most social pathologies.

 

So mental illness is here to stay. Accept it.

 

But lock up the guns! In China you can’t get them.In Connecticut a kindergarten teacher had three automatics in her house.And she died by one of them.

 

Barbara Demick in the LA Times wrote that bloggers in China were praising their country’s strict gun laws in the wake of both incidents. Demick wrote:

 

Zhang Xin, a prominent real estate developer and one of the wealthiest women in China, deplored the lack of political will in the United States.

 

“Really, why can’t these politicians put aside their difference and prohibit the sale of firearms?” wrote Zhang Xin, in her widely followed microblog on Sina Weibo.

 

And there’s poor Obama wringing his hands muttering about “hugging his children”, the same line he used last time a mass murderer got loose.. What a weak response.

 

Who has the guts to refuse NRA money and enact serious gun control?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dying game: football

Jonathan Kay forsaking his bizarre anti-Palestinian rants he indulges in for the National Post,  wrote a thoughtful column on the coming extinction of football. He began his article with the  growing revelations of the damage done to NFL football players. He then morphed into Rush Limbaugh’s wacky “left wing plot” theory. You know the  rant.The left wants to kill everything that made America great—like football!

Look where football is still huge —in all those Republican states where education funding is the lowest. Canadians would shudder at the brainless football culture in Texas and the Midwest. It even permeates elementary schools-12 year old kids bulking up to get into football factories and the like.  It is a sad residue of another time—like boxing and cock fighting. It is however deep in the culture, though many parents are finally asking questions about its pervasiveness..I am convinced it has much to do with a faux idea of manhood, legalized violence and a big part of the war culture.

Kay continues:

The removal of football as a mass-market sport would be especially traumatic to the country, for it is difficult to overstate how existentially important the game is to Americans, especially in the South and Midwest. A United States without high-school football on Friday night, college gridiron on Saturday and NFL on Sunday will be like Canada without any level of hockey — virtually unimaginable.

 And yet it will happen. That’s because, however invincible football may be as a cultural force in America, it is smashing up against the immovable object of childhood safety. The result will be a whole generation of children growing up with the knowledge that football is not an ordinary sport like basketball or soccer. Simply put, it exceeds the engineering design limits of the human body. And the carnage comes, not just in the form of broken bones, but also broken brains. There are ways to make hockey and soccer safer. But there is no helmet technology in the world that can get us around the fact that a human skull decelerating from full sprint to dead stop in a tiny fraction of a second — an event that comprises the very essence of “good,” “hard-hitting” football; and not just a penalized aberration, as in other sports — cannot protect the mushy contents therein.

 This is the reason I stopped coaching football 40 years ago. I could  no longer bear the violence and the potential for serious injury.

In 1979 I wrote an article stating that Catholic schools should immediately ban the game. Part of my reasoning, maybe the major part, was on philosophical  and theological grounds—anti-violence,anti a Jesus ethic, power over love, the image of God in humans smashed. Then there was the cost, the rising tide of feminism demanding equal  funding in school sports.

Since I wrote the article, football has greatly diminished in  popularity and sponsorship. Phys ed programs have expanded the teaching of  lifelong sports as healthy recreations. For teenagers soccer as a fall game, indeed a more universal one is a healthy substitute. Maybe even rugby where the murderous helmet is absent could be justified. Still the dinosaurs hang on largely jocks of another era.

But the game is surely dying. Not soon enough for me and the thousands of kids who will be spared serious injuries

As a sidebar this week the great bishop of Richmond, Va Walter Sullivan died. Three years after my article appeared in 1979,  Sullivan banned the game in Catholic schools. That surely was  a brave thing to do in the US culture.