Banditi

Like everyone whose name stands for havoc (Trumpism), there's a prototype. Before Hitler, there was Mussolini, and before Trump, another Italian -- Silvio Berlusconi.

Something about the passage from real estate into media. While Berlusconi made his fortune as a developer, Trump muscled his siblings out of their father's inheritance and lost more in bad developments than he would have made had he banked that inheritance and collected the interest. 

Like Berlusconi, Trump moved into media. This time he succeeded. Not as a cable television tycoon, like Berlusconi, but as talent, a performer who played his cartoon self. While Trump was still concluding episodes with "You're fired!", Berlusconi was forming a political party -- Forza Italia, or Go, Italy!

Prime Minister Berlusconi's time in office is a well-documented clown show that had him charged and convicted of fraud and corruption. Trump will suffer a similar fate. But like Berlusconi, his convictions will be overturned. The question is, will there be such a thing as Politics by then? Or a Law that upholds basic human rights and freedoms? If not, those who "Let Trump Be Trump" will have accomplished their mission. Just like U.S. President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower accomplished their mission when they Let the Mafia Be the Mafia during World War II, and the British during the Great War before them, when they Let Lawrence Be Lawrence.

He Did Not Attend

E. B. White (1899-1985) was in his fiftieth year when he returned to New York City from Brooklin, Maine, to write a 7500 word piece on the town that did as much for him as he did for it. The commissioning magazine was Holiday (1946-1977), which catered to Americans whose postwar dollars were suddenly worth more in Paris than the trouble it took to get there. But no point in travelling to Paris if you can't tell your cute but condescending waiter, "Oui, j'ai visitée New York et j'ai vu votre statue surdimensionnée." 

From the sounds of it, White spent more time in his hotel room reading the papers than swinging it outdoors during one of NYC's (read: Manhattan's) hottest Julys on record. Below is a passage that foreshadows both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and the 9/11 WTC attack:

"Since I have been sitting in this miasmic airshaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest airshow ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn't attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn't even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this airshaft to fly over. " (22)

An American Immigrant

He left Powell River, B.C for San Francisco twenty years ago, to take up the truth in the wake of 9/11.

With irony dying, and fiction not far behind, a growing interweb presented itself as one book, and he read into its fictions a truth that suited him and those he messaged with. 

Home was a storage container, and he worked with hemp to make his living: bracelets for students, to be sold on the sidewalks of Berkeley, an imaginarium their Boomer parents still sigh over, as in, Oh, for me? How sweet.

"He was very shy," people said. "He had a hard time making eye contact." And one wonders what those who found him shy made of him saying so -- how "hard" it was -- if he had.

If he were a Black man we might not have the information we have on him, framed instead as a violent attacker, not an eccentric in a village (Berkeley) of eccentrics, the only one clothed at a nudist wedding.

If he were anything but a white man there is a very good chance he'd be dead by now.

"Transition/ Transmission"

Our new NDP provincial premier David Eby has announced his transition team, which is a strange way of putting it because its members will be sticking around long after Eby settles into his new chair -- or until he sees fit to replace one or more of them, or they leave on their own accord.

Eby is the first lawyer to hold the premiership since the short-lived reign of NDP Ujjal Dosanjh (2000-2001), who was nominated at a party leadership convention after he replaced the short-lived reign of NDP Dan Miller (1999-2000), who was selected by party caucus members after NDP Glen Clark's sudden resignation in the face of accusations that he rubber stamped a casino application in exchange for a deck on his house.

Of this four person team, the person I am most curious about is Shannon Salter, a former litigator and deputy attorney general whose new duties include deputy minister and head of the public service. Expect some buyouts and amalgamations, some dyeing of the red tape pink as this newer and younger NDP leadership group seeks to bring our provincial bureaucracy up to speed with a world that has given up the consistency of jogging for the whip-snap of wind sprints.

A Peace of the Pie

This morning I awoke to news of Israel and Lebanon signing a deal to recognize each other's borders on the Mediterranean Sea. Quite an accomplishment for two countries that have been at war with each other since the 1948 implementation of the state of Israel.

Terms of the deal are focused on two gas fields: parts of Karish, which is a confirmed field, and Qana, which is a prospective field. Israel gets full rights to Karish, while Lebanon gets the rights to Qana, with some potential revenues from that part of Qana in Israeli waters going to Israel.

Like all deals between enemies, this one is brokered by a third-party: the U.S. So if something goes wrong, the U.S. will be blamed. But the real dealmaker here is Russia, whose threat to cut off its gas supply to Europe has created a situation where enemies can be partners -- if the stakes are high enough. That the source of these stakes should come from that which is killing the planet (fossil fuels) is somehow beside the point.

So my question now is, does Hezbollah have a climate policy? If not, why not? They have policies on most things concerning political economy and civil society. A quick search ("Hezbollah climate policy") revealed nothing on Google Scholar.

Confessional Approval

In Psychopoltics (2017), Byung-Chul Han writes:

“Every dispositive – every technology or technique of domination – brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects materialize and stabilize dominion. Devotion and related words mean ‘submission’, or ‘obedience’. Smartphones represent digital devotion – indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary – which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital.”

In "Missionary Positions" (1995), Gina Dent devotes much of her essay to a "missionary feminist" who presented at a Minnesota conference on feminism. Here is the concluding paragraph:

"My Minnesota missionary attempted to gain the authority to take control of our collective stories simply because she was speaking from personal pain. When these gestures are legitimated by an audience of converts, they create the appearance of putting oneself on the line. They may well come from the good intentions of promoting another way of being in the world, but confession is less about changing positions than converting souls. There is no purity in that."

Rodney Graham (1949-2022)

Like most of the world, I learned yesterday of the passing of the artist Rodney Graham after a relatively brief illness. Relatively brief compared to the rest of his life, thankfully, though 73 is too young for someone as youthful and curious as Rodney. 

I first met Rodney in the late-1980s, when I busked with Hard Rock Miners on Robson Street and he worked around the corner at the Alberni Street liquor store. The designer Dean Allen lived above a shop on Robson, and it was at one of Dean's parties that I was formally introduced to Rodney and Shannon Oksanen. I arrived after an evening of busking, and Rodney, who often walked past us lost in thought, asked me about the Miner's repertoire -- questions that implied he was listening and indeed knew more about jug band music than we did. So my first introduction to Rodney was as a teacher of sorts.

As my writing life came to replace my musical life, I began to spend more time looking at visual art and, when not writing poetry and fiction, accepted invitations to write catalogue essays and exhibition reviews. It was through artists like Stan Douglas, Mina Totino, Judy Radul and Ken Lum that I came to know Rodney and the local art scene that linked them, a supportive scene that valued the ways in which an artwork is conceived and realized more than the commercial success by which "success" is often measured. At that time Rodney was a critical success -- an artist's artist whose work was as thoughtful as it was fun. It wasn't until the late-1990s that he achieved success at both levels.

During the oughts and early-teens I would see Rodney almost every Wednesday night at a South Granville salon hosted by artists Neil Wedman and David Wisdom at a now-defunct New Orleans themed bistro called Ouisi. Even if you weren't interested in obscure psychedelic bands, early Popeye lore or anything made by Roger Corman's American International Pictures, these sessions were magical, and the breadth of Rodney's wit and insight was often on display (to say nothing of his generosity, for on many occasions he quietly picked up the tab). Along with artists and writers, the salon was equally populated by those from other walks, many of whom came and went. One semi-regular was the hypnotherapist Sarah Lightbody, whose VHS copy of Seasons in the Sun (1987) was passed on to me by Rodney, with the promise that I return it to Sarah after I'm done with it. So Sarah, if you're reading this ...

I have many fond memories of Rodney, both the person and his remarkable body of work (from the early films, sculptures and writings to the later Walter Mitty works and abstract paintings), but I'll sign off with a memory that, in a way, bookends my busking days on Robson, when I'd see Rodney walk past us. It was at a downtown restaurant, during the restaurant explosion of the early-2000s. Judy and I were being led to our table by the maitre'd, and as we turned a corner, there was Rodney reading a paperback and poking at something in a bowl. We waved but he didn't see us, and we turned another corner and let it be. An hour later, after our server cleared our dinner plates, another server arrived with two magnificent tiramisus. "Nice! But we didn't order dessert." At which point the maitre'd swooped in and whispered, "Compliments of Mr. Graham."

photo: Alex Waterhouse-Hayward