retaliation

I have been rather ambivalent about the ongoing struggle between CUPE 3903 and the York Administration. When I say ambivalent I mean that it has been an ongoing  argument between both sides, and while I am principally behind the Union, I am also on the side of the student, an identity perhaps I haven’t been giving enough credence to. This is not to say the student cannot also be a member of the Union in terms of understanding and empathizing with their goals, but simply that as a body of students, I recognize the precarious position, financially or otherwise, that is now been their fate for the last three months. Many people have been hurt by this, and one of the problems that CUPE has been having in their relationship to the students is earning their trust and shouldering the full responsibility of their actions. The ideal situation would have been that this negotiation (or lack thereof) could have happened without putting the students at any disadvantage, that somehow Union activity could be kept separate from those who partake of their ‘goods’, the commodity which they are selling – in this case education. I know that on some level it is naïve of me expect this, since in any battle there are those who lose, regardless of whether or not they belong to the winning side. But the Union is in the right. The battle they are fighting for is the battle we are all fighting for – a more equitable position in society, something more just, something more virtuous. We are all workers (I sound like an old communist tract!) and we are given but a portion of our dues.

But now, with this new development of the Province of Ontario stepping in and McGuinty legislating a “Back-to-work” mandate, I have been put off immensely. Somehow I do not think the Province should have this power. What is between the Unions and the Employers is none of their business, and they should have no right to stick their nose into the beehive. Because if they do they inevitably put their weight behind the Employer, and whether intended or not, nullify the whole point of having a Union in the first place. What is the use of legal strike action if there is no risk involved? That is why the power relationship exists in the first place – risk. The Administration depends on the workers to provide its income, and when it forgets (as it is apt to do) that what it depends on are real live human beings, and begins to inch on their share of this symbiotic and – yes! – equal relationship by cutting into their due portions, the Union should be able to remind them by taking away their work. Negotiating through Collective Bargaining equalizes the differences and, in the best of situations, brings about a healthy resolve to both parties, if only by painfully reminding the Administration that they wouldn’t exist without those whom they employ. But the Province should have no stake in this. So why do they legally do?

Professor David J. Doorey of the University’s law department has a very interesting post about the matter. There is, according to him and a number of other devoted purveyors of law, a very real possibility that CUPE can take on the Provincial Government and actually take them to task on their supposed ‘rights’ against strike action and collective bargaining. He traces the right of the Province to implement Back-To-Work Legislation to section 2(d) of the Charter, which guarantees “Freedom of Association”, which basically enables the Unions to function. After the Health Services fiasco and the Dunmore incident (which was a case “involving the exclusion of agricultural workers from protective labor legislation”), the Supreme Court has been expanding the rights bestowed by Section 2(d). Also, and this is the most important factor, Canada has ratified the conventions proposed by the International Labor Organization, specifically Convention 87, which has been read by the ILO’s experts to include an extensive right to strike. And the Supreme Court has said that the “Freedom of Association” stated in section 2(d) includes at least as much power and inclusion as C87 of the international charter. So what does this mean? It means that the Province is playing a very tricky game of hardball, trying to see how far they can push their moneybags around before somebody calls their bluff. While international embarrassment by the ILO might not sound like a particularly grim prospect for Canada, there is the very real possibility that a firm ruling by the Supreme Court on clarifying these issues between Section 2(d) and C87 will have a lasting impact on the labor sector, and bring that more ‘equitable society’ ever closer to realization. Yay!

BTW, you can write to your MP and tell them how disgusted you are by this situation. How disgusted, frustrated, repulsed and betrayed you are by it, and how your faith in Justice, Virtue and the Morality of the State has been unspeakably shattered by this heinous development, and how you will hitherto walk the earth as ghost, your frail body wracked and dying from being conscientiently vicitmized in such an atrocious, unethical way.

the balls on galloway

A friend introduced me to George Galloway a radical-left/socialist leaning British MP, who has a knack for knackering people. Check out this interview with him in 2006, talking about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Old hat, but important hat, considering what is happening right now; it is of special interest since he addresses the bias resident in the major news broadcast companies. He is specifically calling out the Murdoch owned Sky News in the UK, but his criticisms can be easily extrapolated to Fox and CNN in the States. In any case he destroys this poor woman.

I had an argument (to put it lightly) with a friend recently about my hatred of CNN, which generally tends to be right-leaning, but more towards a rather luke-warm and avoidant Center. I suppose my political opinions would place me quite comfortably in the left, so my opinions are (most of the time) not their opinions. However I’m becoming increasingly tired of referring to myself as left or right or center or left of center or right of center or  2.4 cm right of left of center. All these categorizations tend to do is place you with your back against the rhetoric wall, and you are consequently forced to absorb, as if by osmosis, the colorings of all other policies belonging to that particular wall. I want to avoid these walls at all costs. I don’t want ancillary opinions forced upon my consciousness just because I happen to agree with some of the ideology. So, what then is to be my guiding principal, my oar in the muddy waters of political opinion? Humanism. That’s all. That should be enough for anybody.

Of course, that’s not to say that Humanism too has its thorny elements – I’m not denying that. One has to merely think about the issues over-population and the problematic “means vs. end”, and Humanism begins to show its cracks. But then, I am not looking for the perfect oar – that is futile and naive. But for now, it is defenitely a sturdy and dependable one.

some relief

Here’s a short collection of works from Bas Jan Ader, a conceptual artist who disappeared in 1975, when he decided to cross the Atlantic in the smallest sailboat ever. He was shaded in obscurity in his own lifetime, but has since become something of an icon, who with his small collection of works has inspired and broken many less head-strong artists. The third piece in this video, “I’m too sad to tell you”, is one of my favourites, playing both on our own responses to sadness and what we expect of a sad person, as well as the medium of film he uses to potray it. The “Fall” pieces had me laughing for some time at their sombre ludicrousness – that sense of playfulness is something you see very rarely in artists these days.

more about “U B U W E B – Film & Video: Bas Jan A…“, posted with vodpod

surfacing

It has been some time. The reason for my absence is, perhaps, something some of you know or have suspected. It is difficult, battling with depression. Sometimes it overtakes me for no apparant reason, or to put it more clearly, for reasons that collide and converge until the pain is too much and too big to ignore, and I am forced to sink into its boiling core. It is something I have been battling since adolescence, and it is something I suspect I will be fighting for a long time yet. I have had much time to think – perhaps too much time to think – and have come to numerous theories on the nature of my feeling (or lack of it). But I will not bore you with any of it here. I briefly considered going into a detailed explication on my hello-goodbye illness, but I am afraid it will come out as indulgent, petty, narcissistic, and endlessly self-pitying. This is probably because it is all of those things, so I rarely talk about it or feel the need to justify its seriousness. I am grateful that there remain a few friends I can confide in, should the need arise, and they have done much to alleviate its more threatening outcomes. The depressed person is always caught in endless anxiety over how much trouble they are putting their friends into, on just how much they are bothering them in their lives and becoming needy or pathetic. I am ashamed sometimes when I reach out from my well to the warmth of others, because I know that the face I dredge up to present them with will be blind to their own problems, or jokes, or non-sequiturs, and will only have a voice for its own agony, which is badly articulated and when finally talked about, diminished in the light of other eyes. It is this diminishment that I fear, this essential méconaissance at the heart of communication. So I remain silent – it is better this way, it is less painful. All things come to an end, and so I eventually trudge out of the murky depths and put on an acceptable face. It has run its course.

Of course this has been an unusually long period, perhaps the longest that I can remember, and I fear that this might be a sign of some worsening mental degradation. If I happen to be having coffee and see a horse being flogged in the street, and consequently run out to fling my arms around it while fainting to the ground, only to wake up insane and rambling, then I suspect you shall hear of it. Until then, know that I will do my best to keep this blog up and running, for it is perhaps one of the last objectifications of my need to be spectated, and one I can stand to admit being so.

I have of course, been writing, and it gives me great comfort to know that whatever happens, I will always be doing this. My first story was rejected, but apart from a brief moment of disappointment I felt only a greater and strengthened determination. My second is well on its way and I am doing my best with it. When so much potentiality has been drained from me, it is a relief to realize that this, that my need to tell stories, to explore myself and my world through language and imagination, that this final drive is as inseparable from me as breathing. I will not give up. Like that pink robot bunny from those commercials, or numerous cloying examples of under-privileged men and women overcoming infinite odds to achieve success at the end, or America’s continual reassurances that what they’re doing isn’t imperialism but democratization, or the eternal trendiness of Converse shoes and the color black.

In any case, “How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live it once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you – all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, ‘Your are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?’ would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

So said Nietzsche. And it is good thought. It is crippling or empowering. It is utter destruction or blinding grace. I teeter between, and carefully watch where the chips fall down.