Election Special

It’s not just that Harper and the Tories are so smug in the wake of their majority win.  It’s that they’re churning out the propaganda with such vigour.  I feel like we’re heading into territory I’ve not experienced since I’ve been old enough to vote:  the Americanization of our federal politics.

As a Canadian, I try to avoid writing about American politics.  But in this case to do so speaks to my point about what’s happening in our own nation, so bear with me.  One aspect of American politics that has always maddened and horrified me is the far (or perhaps not so far) right and ur-Republican m.o. of always being in disagreement with the Democrats no matter what–good of the nation be damned.  There is a power hunger in the right that trumps any bi-partisan effort that could actually better the lives of actual Americans.  Rather than working with their counterparts across the aisle to do the right thing, they prefer to keep up a deafening chant of misinformation, misdirection and pure mischief.

If George W. Bush had managed to have Bin Laden killed, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, the pundits on Fox News, and all of their friends would have been crapping their pants with happiness and there wouldn’t have been a word of negativity.  But it happened under Obama’s watch, so suddenly it’s problematic that Bin Laden was given a respectful burial (hell, it’s the least you can do after assassinating someone).  And apparently Obama’s announcement was riddled with too many personal pronouns.  Seriously?   And this gem:  George W. should get credit despite his being out of office for over three years now.  Right.  Totally.  Amazingly, Obama has to watch his step so that it doesn’t look like he’s trying to politicize this issue for his own gain because somehow it would be in bad taste.  Can  you imagine the Bush administration not taking credit for this?  Yeah, me neither.

How does all this negative nay-saying help the nation or add to the dialogue in a meaningful way?  You’re right.  It doesn’t.  But frankly, those are fairly innocuous examples.  The real problem is when you get right wing blowhards repeating the phrase “death panel” over and over again, when an affordable and sustainable health care bill is the goal.  Worse than a dip in approval ratings for the Obama administration, you have the very people who should be happy about some sort of universal health care legislation, fighting against it–to their own detriment.

I’ve often sat back, if not smug, at least relieved that I don’t live in the US and that I’m not having to wage war against right wing whackos who would work this damn hard to ensure that so many Americans don’t have health care.  The same people who, as Dan Savage so aptly puts it, “only want to shrink government enough so they can cram it into your vagina,” removing our reproductive rights along with LGBT rights and the rights of anyone who isn’t an old, straight (or at least closeted), rich, white man.

But here I am presented with a majority Tory government.  A government that, as a minority, was found in contempt of parliament.  And the biggest snow job they’ve perpetrated is to convince Canadians that being in contempt of parliament–the first government in any parliamentary democracy in history to do so–isn’t a big deal.  Further, they’ve also convinced many Canadians that the no-confidence vote by the Libs, NDP and the Bloc can be likened to them picking up their toys and saying they’re going home like petulant children, rather than the MPs doing exactly what they’re supposed to do when the Speaker of the House finds a government in contempt.

So we’ve got a government breaking the rules of governance, opposition parties doing their duty and a majority of the voting public seeing the election as a nuisance that they didn’t want.  And blaming the opposition parties for it.  Dear God, Harper has us all right where he wants us.

What’s noteworthy is that the Tories were not always this slick.  It seems like something the Harper government has ushered in along with a striking decrease in transparency.  One wonders what they’ll fail to disclose next.

In the face of this,  throughout the election, the Liberals did exactly what the Democrats always do–the wrong thing.  They tried to answer misinformation with facts.  Facts don’t work.  The Republicans, like all right of centre parties, are very good at one thing and that’s repeating the party line so often that it starts to sound like truth.  They were the creators of “truthiness,” not Stephen Colbert–he just gave it a name.  Left of centre parties, like the Liberals (well sorta) and the Democrats, are notoriously bad at this.

This would seem to leave us in a pretty bleak situation, but I have hope for two reasons.  If there’s one way in which the Liberals are different from the Democrats it’s that they don’t have an inferiority complex.  The Liberals have known power before and they will fight to get it back.  Ignatieff, perhaps the party’s biggest liability in this past election, has stepped down as leader of the party and I look forward to who will step in (please Justin Trudeau, please).

I also expect that this heart wrenching defeat of the left (NDP wins aside) will galvanize the Liberals and the voters who want to see them back in power.  I, for one, certainly plan to be more involved.

The Canadian Connection

“Coming up, the Canadian connection.”  This aggravating little phrase is one I’ve heard pop up all too often on Canadian newscasts of late.  I don’t know how long this has been going on, but I’ve noticed it a great deal in the past few months.  No matter what the news story–whether the unrest in Tunisia, the revolution in Egypt, the quake and tsunami in Japan, or the war we’re not waging in Libya–over and over the Canadian connection was mentioned.  Whether it was the Canadians fleeing Egypt on a plane that the Canadian government wasn’t going to pay for or the fact the top dog of NATO’s mission in Libya is Canadian Lt-Gen Charles Bouchard, it seems we need to know that for every international story there’s a tie-in that’s specific to our home and native land.  Watching news of these unprecedented events around the world, I’ve wondered:  why we do need a Canadian connection at all?

Answer A:  Insecurity. This was my first thought.   There is this national insecurity we have as Canadians that often has us falling all over ourselves to try to prove that we’re as cool as our cousins to the south, and so when I hear Peter Mansbridge announce that he’s going to tell us about the Canadian connection after the break, I cringe.  I cringe at what that would sound like to people in other countries.  I’m reminded of times during Oscar season when some gaffer who was Canadian would be mentioned on the news because he had something to do with Black Swan.  I’m making that one up, but you get my drift; the connections are generally so incidental as to be unworthy of mentioning at all.  But there it was in a freaking national news cast.  When this happens I just silently rejoice that no one outside of Canada is watching The National.

Answer B:  Da Money.  As you may or may not know the news has become harder and harder to monetize as readership online has caught on like wildfire.  One of the strategies thought to stem this tide is going local.  Yahoo and MSN news are not going to report on something that is only relevant to me in Bloor West Village, so that particular, tiny market is all ready to be served.  In the same way, I wonder if news makers feel that they have to pander to their Canadian viewers by making them believe that even the most obviously foreign story somehow has a uniquely Canadian connection to it, no matter how lame the connection.  But honestly this doesn’t really ring true to me.  Because an entire country is not a “local market.”  What’s relevant to me on the local level is not what’s relevant to my parents on their local level thousands of miles away in another province.  And so, with great sadness I come to my final conclusion.

Answer C:  North American (or at least, Canadian) Self-Absorption.  We shouldn’t need to hear about the Canadian connection in order to keep us interested in the plight of fellow human beings stuck in awful situations on the other side of the world.  But I think we do.  Just because I personally find it offensive that media makers think I need this, it doesn’t mean my fellow citizens do.  While it’s important that the few Canadians living in Egypt get out of the country safely, it’s not the main story.  The main story is about an entire nation rising up to demand rights and freedoms that we take for granted on an everyday basis.  While I’m sure this is a very important time in Lt-Gen. Charles Bouchard’s life, that’s not the story.  The story is a tyrant who has never needed to have the people on side because of massive oil wealth whose despotic reign may finally be coming to an end.  While I’m glad that Canadians ponied up and gave money to not-for-profits sending funds to Japan, that’s not the story.  The story is over 10,000 people killed and many more suffering in some of the most awful disasters that could hit one nation in such a short period of time.

I say, let some blogger like me cover the Canadian connection.  When our national news outlets go for the connection, it seems petty and sad and immature.  I’d like to think that we’re bigger than that, smarter than that, and more fundamentally caring of other human beings than that.  I’d like to think we can hear a story about people suffering on the other side of the globe and not need to have the other 1/2 of the newscast spent talking about how it will affect our gas prices in order to keep us engaged.  But I may be giving us too much credit.

Great Hair

Paul Mooney cameo notwithstanding, I was still reluctant to see Chris Rock’s Good Hair back when it was the buzz of the Toronto Film Festival.  I mentioned to a friend that I was scared that he’d have this amazing platform to say something about the politics of beauty for black women in a white world, and he’d go for the laughs instead.  But then someone told me about the James Brown/Al Sharpton thing (click on this link for a spoiler) and I couldn’t resist.  So I bought my ticket and watched it and laughed my ass off.  Raven-Symoné (Cosby grand-kid) turns out to be one of the funniest people ever.  But then a couple days later, I got kinda mad.  Because he’d done exactly what I’d dreaded:  he took a really big issue and mostly went for the laughs.  And I also think, maybe, did more harm than good.  Because now every white man or woman who sees this film thinks they *know* black hair.  And they don’t.

I’ll skip the sordid tale, but by way of a very winding road, I caught wind of a documentary that pre-dated the Chris Rock affair, dealing with black hair.  After having seen Good Hair I was now dying to see a serious take on the whole thing.  However, I didn’t know the name of the film.

Luckily Google is probably God or at the very least, the anti-Christ.  Using an incredibly vague search string I managed to track down the film I was seeking–Black, Bold and Beautiful:  Black Women’s Hair.  To my great joy, the Toronto Public Library had a copy of the film and so now I’ve finally gotten to watch this bad boy.

The film is only 40 minutes long and so, while the film maker does touch on some really great stuff, there’s simply not enough time to get deep into it.  I almost feel like each possible incarnation of a black woman’s hair—weaved, braided, dreads, locks, straightened, natural—could warrant a two-hour film unto itself.  Kudos though for the really raw talk between a number of high school students about why they do or don’t wear their hair natural.  One teen boy with locks even talked about his feeling that it started at slavery with the “half-breed” kids of slave-owners who had “good hair.”  A woman named Amuna talks about her parents’ feeling that natural hair wouldn’t work if she was trying to climb the corporate ladder. Luckily she isn’t trying to do so—she works in not-for-profit.

Even without a really in-depth look at the politics of hair, the film resonated a lot more honestly for me than Chris Rock’s dogged insistence on declaring the weave the only thing black women are doing.  I guess in Hollywood, where everyone has to pretend they have long hair unless they’re being political, that is the case, but that’s not the story down here in the real world.

Black, Bold and Beautiful was made in 1998, so we’ve had a decade as black women to feel more comfortable in our skin—or in our hair, as it were.  And there have been shifts.  I don’t think that in corporate North America, braids would have cut it back in ‘98, and now, I think in some spaces, you can do it.  But afros are still kinda hard to get past a hiring committee; unless it’s a very conservative looking one—not a big, joyful afro, but one that’s braided down and tamed.  “Tamed” was a word that Amuna (probably my favorite woman in the film) used to refer to what goes on with little black girls and their hair.  She talked about the hot comb and I started laughing out loud.  I remember so well sitting in the kitchen trembling with fear while my mother hot combed my hair (for those who need an explanation, you heat an iron comb on a stove burner and comb it through the hair).  But of course to tremble too much was a bad idea, because then I’d get burned.  But times changed, and I moved on from the hot comb.

When Janet Jackson was at her zenith, I had Jheri curls and because it’s far too thick for that style, my hair broke off steadily for a year until, by the end of fourth grade, I had a hairstyle that was less Jackson family and more Grace Jones circa 1986.  We tried to make it kinda fly and avant garde, but I knew that I basically looked like a boy.  Finally, in fifth grade, when my hair had grown back in a bit, I got it relaxed and I’ve never looked back.  I’ve had a few years of braids but it’s mostly been about the relaxers.  The “creamy crack” as it’s referred to in Good Hair.  And I really like my hair.  It’s taken me about a hundred years to find a style that works for me but now I really like it.  But somehow that doesn’t seem to be enough.

Aisha, a teenaged girl in Black, Bold and Beautiful, talks about black women being “foreign” to themselves if they aren’t wearing their hair natural.  On one level her statement just makes me irritable.  I don’t feel foreign to myself.  But on another level, I have to admit, there’s this part of me that feels like I’ve copped out in some way.  Like I’m not willing to make the statement that wearing my hair natural would make.  But that’s one of those things that kinda bugs me—that wearing my hair natural would automatically make some sort of statement when I’m just trying to look my best like everyone else.

I guess it comes down to this push and pull between the reasons behind what you do with your hair as a black woman.  Are you relaxing your hair because you’re trying to conform to a white standard of beauty or are you relaxing your hair because it’s easier to manage that way?  Or both?  I’d venture to say that for most black woman it’s door three.  But I just think it sucks rocks that we even have to think this hard about it, that there’s even a conversation to be had.  Don’t get me wrong, I want to have the conversation, because I think it’s really, really hard to never see around you, realistic representations of beauty in your own skin colour—that’s fucking hard to put up with.  But it also makes me tired that the conversation needs to be had at all.  It would just be so much cooler to live in a world where there wasn’t the white beauty comparison in the first place.

(Funny side note, there’s a song featured in Black, Bold and Beautiful, called “Luscious, Luscious” is by the 3-woman group called Women A Run Tings.  I used to go to church with one of the band members back in the day.  She’s doing solo work now.  I love films made in Toronto.)

So I feel like I’m going to end up coming back to this topic at some point.  I feel like another film needs to be made.  But for now I can assure you that my hair will look the same next time you see me.