Silenced Dissent: Four Short Texts on Israel/Palestine

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The four short texts reproduced here, which date from 2002, may be of interest as samples of the routine exclusion by the Canadian media of voices dissenting from a pro-Zionist political orthodoxy. These texts have not previously been published.

 

1. Margaret Wente and Ariel Sharon: Letter (unpublished) to The Globe and Mail, 9 March 2002

To the editor, Letters Page:

Margaret Wente enlists support for the Sharon government by claiming that Israeli “fair-mindedness and compromise have led to a murderous dead end” (“Why they booed Bill Graham,” March 9).

Would she describe as “fair-minded” the processes of expropriation, settlement and cantonization that went on under South African apartheid? Why does she find similar processes acceptable when applied to the Palestinians of the occupied territories?

As for “compromise,” it was the Sharon government that closed down all negotiations. Twice in recent months when lulls in the violence opened the possibility of renewed talks, Israel launched renewed attacks (including targeted assassinations that might fairly be described as “murderous”).

Wente paints a dismaying picture of Muslim anti-Jewish sentiments, and of Yasser Arafat's duplicity. Given the enormously greater power held by the Israeli Prime Minister, his record is rather more dismaying. Sharon's paratroop unit perpetrated well-documented massacres of civilians in 1953, and there is compelling evidence that the appalling 1982 massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila were carried out under his orders.

Current Israeli reprisal attacks upon civilians reveal a willingness to repeat this behaviour on a massive scale. Canadians should unequivocally condemn these acts of state terror.

 

2. Phone-In (not broadcast) to the Talk-Back line of CBC Radio's “As It Happens,” 11 March 2002

This is Michael Keefer calling, from Toronto. I'd like to respond to the claims made on your show by the scholar from the “conflict resolution” institute at Bar Elam University in Israel whom you interviewed yesterday.

The violence on both sides of the Israeli-Palestine conflict is sickening, but there's no need to misrepresent historical facts as he did. Since 1977—that's twenty-five years ago now—the PLO has repeatedly offered to renounce violence and to recognize Israel's statehood in return for a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. It's a fact that the Sharon government unilaterally shut down all negotiations. It's a fact that the Israeli occupation, the building of settlements, the bombing of civilians, and the bulldozing of houses are all violations of international law.

And finally, there's good reason to believe that Prime Minister Sharon is guilty of war crimes. This is the man who oversaw the massacre of 2,000 civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.

It looks as if he's up to his old tricks again.

 

3. Rex Murphy's Abuse of NDP MP Svend Robinson: Letter (unpublished) to The Globe and Mail, 20 April 2002

So what is it exactly that Rex Murphy finds so contemptible and absurd about Svend Robinson? The state of Israel is enforcing its continuing illegal occupation of territories conquered in the war of 1967 by deploying overwhelming military force against Palestinian cities, towns, and refugee camps. Not merely are Israeli forces rocketing and bombarding civilian populations; they have also attacked hospital facilities, ambulances, and medical personnel. Civilians injured by Israeli military action have been actively prevented from receiving medical assistance, and left to die in the streets. There is mounting evidence that hundreds of civilians have been killed, and that Palestinian fighters and civilians captured by Israeli forces have been tortured and summarily executed.

These policies are being directed by an Israeli Prime Minister who provoked the present intifada eighteen months ago by invading the precincts of the Dome of the Rock with a large “protective” force of police and soldiers; who sabotaged and cancelled the already faltering peace negotiations as soon as he came to power; and who has, in addition, a well-documented record as a war criminal that now stretches back almost a half-century. (Ariel Sharon's responsibility for the massacres of civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982 is well known—but he first made a name for himself in August and October 1953, when the paratroop Unit 101 which he commanded massacred over 100 civilians in night-time “reprisal” attacks on the El-Bureig refugee camp and on the Jordanian village of Qibya.)

In the face of George Bush's declaration that Prime Minister Sharon is “a man of peace,” Svend Robinson is one of the very few politicians in this supine country who has had the guts to speak out against Israeli state terrorism, and to make the more significant gesture of travelling to the places where war crimes are still being committed to speak out against them there.

Robinson must have guessed that many in his own party would be too confused or too cowardly to follow his lead; he must have anticipated that Canadian supporters of Israel would attempt to smear him as an antisemite; and I'm sure he knew that his principled acts would be subjected to ridicule by every oily orthodox pundit in the country.

I honour Svend Robinson for his courage in defending human rights and international law.

(Professor) Michael H. Keefer

 

4. Incitement to hatred: Letter (unpublished) to The Toronto Star, 2 December 2002

I am writing in response to Rosie DiManno's grotesquely one-sided column (“Latest attack on Jews,” 2 December 2002), to express my shock that the Star would print what amounts to an incitement to sectarian and racial hatred.

One premise of DiManno's column is entirely correct: people everywhere, no matter what their religious or political commitments, should be prompt in condemning terror attacks upon civilians. She is thus right to criticize Muslim authorities who have failed to condemn the murderous attacks upon Jews in Kenya.

But let us pretend for a moment that the old notion of journalistic balance has some meaning. DiManno characterizes Palestinians as “bleat[ing]” when they plead for justice in the face of an illegal occupation in which they are subjected to Israeli state terror—which includes ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate attacks upon civilians, and a systematic denial of medical assistance to the victims. When has DiManno ever raised her voice against these crimes? Would she dare to describe as “bleating” the outcries of Israeli civilians who have been injured or bereaved by suicide bombers?

DiManno compares violent Islamicists who commit acts of terror against civilians to “cockroaches.” Would she dare to describe as vermin those members of the Israeli Defense Force who have committed acts of terror against Palestinian civilians? Would she, for that matter, apply to Judaism or to American Evangelical Christianity the same analysis that she applies to Islam?

Whether one believes, with DiManno, that Islamicist terrorists are motivated by an irrational hostility to the West and to Jews, and only opportunistically took up the cause of the Palestinians, or whether one sees a connection between the state terrorism inflicted by Israel upon the Palestinians and the retail terrorism practised by violent Islamicists, there can be no excuse for speaking of an entire people in language normally reserved for farm animals.     

Revolution Inc.

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First published in the University of Guelph's weekly student newspaper, The Ontarion 134.13 (12 April-2 May 2001): 5. I have corrected one notable error, and have added footnotes, which did not appear in the text as originally published; the third, fourth and fifth of these notes cite sources which I drew upon in writing this piece. My concluding suggestion of a Latin motto for graduating students also did not appear in the article as first published.

Gnothi seauton in the Greek original, Nosce teipsum in Latin translation: “Know thyself.” Even the current arbiters of cool would have us accept this injunction of the Delphic Oracle as a goal of human thought: when in The Matrix Keanu Reeves is taken by Samuel Jackson to meet THE Oracle, he finds a Hollywood-Idiot-Latin version of the saying hung up over her kitchen door.

But when the Roman poet Virgil declared that person to be happy who knows the causes of things—Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas—he was suggesting that knowledge of the self won’t take us very far unless it includes knowledge of the world which contains and conditions that self.

Virgil’s words—Rerum Cognoscere Causas—are actually the motto of this university. They imply a commitment to developing an understanding of what's going on, a commitment, if you like, to truth. (In recent years that motto has been largely displaced by a more banal English tag, “Changing Lives, Improving Life”—which, though pleasantly up-beat, contains no reference to knowledge or truth.)1 But the University of Guelph's original Virgilian motto—adopted, one would suppose, at the time of its founding in the 1960s—was a sign that the institution believed itself not just to be imparting knowledge (skills, theories, or facts), but also fashioning people who, through an understanding of the causes shaping them and the world they inhabited, would be able to participate in a principled, creative re-fashioning and transformation of that world—and perhaps of their own identities as well.

The functions and the self-understanding of universities have themselves been radically transformed since those far-away 1960s, as one result of a socio-political revolution which has swept across the English-speaking world, and which in its further expansion has taken the name of “globalization.” I’m talking about the Corporatist Revolution.

Never heard of it? If so, you’ve just illustrated Lifton’s Law, a paradox formulated in the 1980s by the American psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, according to which there’s an inverse relationship between the actual life-and-death importance of any aspect of contemporary history and the likelihood that it will receive any attention in our university curricula.2

But even if we’re too ill-informed or too diffident to have taken note of the fact, the Corporatist Revolution has happened. In the U.K., starting in 1979, it took the form (as Christopher Hitchens says) of “sado-monetarism”: Mrs Thatcher, the Iron Lady, set out to handbag the welfare state and make social democracy a distant memory. She succeeded.

The “Reagan Revolution” began in 1980 in the U.S. Despite all the talk about debt reduction, Reagan’s strategy (as his first budget director indiscreetly revealed in 1981), was to rack up deficits so huge that no future government would be able to undo Reaganite cuts to social spending. The idea was, effectively, to bankrupt any future other than the one intended by Reagan and his handlers.3

Having elected Brian Mulroney to power in 1984, Canadians found themselves being overhauled for entry into the Reaganite world of deregulated capitalism: with the FTA and then NAFTA we abandoned all but the flimsiest pretence of national control over natural resources, economic policy, and Canadian culture. In 1993, we threw out Mulroney’s heirs—only to put ourselves into the hands of Jean Chrétien, a more fervent admirer of Reagan and his works than even Mulroney had been. At that point we began to learn what it means in this era to be “open for business.”

(You don’t like massive cuts to medicare, the elimination of transfer payments in support of higher education, or the prospect of finishing your university degree tens of thousands of dollars in debt? Sorry, folks: that’s part of the package.)

But Canada had to wait until 1995, and the Ontario electorate’s approval of the “Common Sense Revolution,” to hear from a true philosopher of the new order. The moment came when John Snobelen, Mike Harris’s grade-eleven-drop-out minister of education, decided to strut his stuff in front of a gathering of ministry bureaucrats—and was vain enough to have his vapourings captured on videotape.

In good Reaganite fashion, Snobelen explained the need to “bankrupt the actions and activities that aren’t consistent with the future we’re committed to.” The initial phase of this process would involve “creating a useful crisis.” “Yeah,” he said, “we need to invent a crisis. And that’s not an act just of courage—there’s some skill involved.”4

Skilfully or not, the Harris government has applied this philosophy of invented crises and selective bankrupting to Ontario’s universities. Institutions that were already crumbling due to many years of underfunding and the recession-years cuts of the early 1990s were hit after 1995 with a massive withdrawal of funding. A fraction of the money that was withdrawn is now being restored in the form of capital spending programs, but these are targeted to areas like information technology, engineering, and the health sciences. (The pure sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences are evidently in line for the bankrupting prescribed by Dr. Snobelen.) Morever, the restored money is being made available only in cases where matching funding can be raised from outside sources, thus ensuring corporate control of a remodeled higher education infrastructure. As finance minister Ernie Eves put it, “The private sector … believes it’s best to have some input on the ground floor of the postsecondary education system.”5

The Harris government is well aware that Ontario’s deliberately weakened universities are now facing a demographic double-whammy. In 2003, thanks to the elimination of Grade 13, the annual cohort of applicants to Ontario universities will be doubled in size. And in the two following years, due to what demographers term “the baby-boom echo,” the annual cohorts will increase by about fifteen per cent.

The government’s response? Thousands of positions for “university” students are being prepared at Ontario’s community colleges, and legislation has been passed to allow private degree-granting institutions to establish themselves in Ontario. “Digital diploma mills,” as historian David Noble calls them, already exist in the U.S. These low-overhead distance-education operations employ ill-paid faculty on revolving-door contracts to provide large numbers of students with job-market training in a manner that maximizes the institution’s profits.6

Sounds appetizing, doesn’t it? But they must be needed here, since our publicly-funded universities just can’t seem to do the job. And once they’ve set up shop in Ontario, the diploma mills will most likely be eligible for public funding on the same basis as public universities. (Check the fine print of NAFTA.)

But what can we say about the corporatist form into which our existing universities have morphed during the past two decades?

First and most obviously, the corporate university is controlled by corporate interests, rather than by representatives of any larger public interest. I’m not thinking so much about who controls the Board of Governors, though that’s important enough, as about the fact that the research agendas of many academic units are under direct corporate control—with obvious implications for the orientation of their teaching.

I’ve pointed to the Ontario government’s decision to let corporate interests in “on the ground floor.” The same attitude is evident in the Chrétien federal government. After withdrawing money from the three Councils responsible for the public funding of research in medicine, the natural sciences and engineering, and the humanities and social sciences, the government poured resources into a new Canadian Foundation for Innovation, which provides funding only to researchers who can organize “matching funds” from private sources.

Guess how much corporate funding is available to researchers who want to do work critical of genetically modified foods. Guess what happens to the academic careers of scientists who can’t secure research funding.

In other respects as well, the corporate university will be responsive to the selfish desires of a social elite rather to the larger interests of society as a whole. Why should this come as a surprise? According to the Toronto Star’s headline story of March 16, 2001, three per cent of Ontario’s families control 27 per cent of the total wealth; and the richest twenty per cent of Canadians saw their wealth increase by 39 per cent from 1984 to 1999, while the poorest forty per cent made no advance or became poorer.7 Wouldn’t it be more surprising if a social elite that has bent the tax regime so far to its advantage were to neglect twisting the higher education system in the same direction?8

High tuition fees? That might be a matter for concern if we thought the institution retained any function of ensuring social mobility. The children of the rich can manage high tuition fees. Don’t worry about the others: if student loan debt has risen by six hundred per cent since 1984,9 won’t those who carry it be all the more likely to behave like good selfish free-market individualists when they graduate with thirty or forty thousand dollars of debt, and with a hot charge of resentment against the society that laid this on them?

As for the notion that a university might exist to provide our society as a whole with a variety of institutionalized forms of critical self-understanding—I’m sorry, that one’s going a bit blurry on me. Rerum Cognoscere Causas: is that some kind of a tip on what to do with my ten-cent NASDAQ stocks, or what?

Perhaps we need a Latin motto for graduating students, and not just for the universities that (thanks to the invented crises of Snobelen & Co.) have become dependent on ever more burdensome tuition fees.

Here's one for a start: Sperare Videor Aes Alienum Exsolvere. It means: “I flatter myself with the hope of paying my debts.”

 

 

NOTES

1  There was an odd factual error in my text as first published: I identified Rerum Cognoscere Causas as “the motto of the university where I did my graduate studies in the late 1970s.” A strange mistake, given that by 2001, when this piece was written, I had taught for more than a decade at the University of Guelph. The motto of the University of Sussex, where I did my doctoral studies, is actually “Be still and know,” which is lifted from Psalm 46. I can guess why I might have forgotten that fact. During my time at Sussex, the university's motto may have seemed a faint exhortation addressed to recalcitrant students whose learning processes involved activist praxis as well as quiet reading: for at least two years the undergraduate student union was led by members of the Situationist International, who in support of what they understood as just causes and a project of understanding the causes of things recurrently occupied the central administrative building, Sussex House. I've altered this paragraph to correct the error.

2  See Gillian Thomas, “Lifton's Law and the Teaching of Literature,” in Literature and Politics/Literary Politics, ed. Michael Keefer, special double issue of Dalhousie Review 66.1-2 (1986): 14-21.

3  See Budget Director David Stockman's interview with William Greider in the Atlantic Monthly (November 1981).

4  See Richard Brennan, “Minister plotted ‘to invent a crisis’,” Toronto Star (13 September 1995): A3; Lisa Wright, “Apologize for remarks Harris tells Snobelen,” Toronto Star (14 September 1995): A3; Thomas Walkom, “Snobelen scales windy heights of bafflegab,” Toronto Star (14 September 1995): A25; and “Harris Mainly Mum on Plans for Post-Secondary Education in Ontario,” CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin (November 1995): 6.

5  Quoted by John Ibbitson, “Universities and colleges get big boost from Ontario,” Globe and Mail (23 February 2000): A1, A7.

6  See David Noble, “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education,” Toronto: distributed by OCUFA, October 1997; and “Digital Diploma Mills, Part II: The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction,” Toronto: distributed by OCUFA, March 1998. For some historical context, see Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988); and Neil Tudiver, Universities for Sale: Resisting Corporate Control over Canadian Higher Education (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1999). Parallel developments in the U.S. have been analyzed by Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

7  Elaine Carey, “Rich, poor are even wider apart,” Toronto Star (16 March 2001): A1, A10. Carey observed that in Ontario, the richest 3.1 percent of Ontario families control 27 percent of the province's wealth, while in Alberta and B.C. a similar proportion—3.2 and 3.3 percent respectively—control 36 percent of the wealth in those provinces.

8  Relevant data from the U.S. is provided by Hendrick Hertzberg, “Generous George,” The New Yorker (12 March 2001). “The Administration has dismissed, but has not been able to refute, independent analyses showing that forty per cent of the benefits of the Bush tax cut will accrue to the richest one per cent of taxpayers; that the bottom eighty per cent will get less than a third of the benefits and the bottom twenty per cent less than one per cent; that all the benefits of the proposed abolition of the estate tax will go to the heirs of the richest two per cent; and that the richest six per cent of that two per cent will rake in half the estate-tax pot. The shape of the Bush tax program represents a seismic shift in the overall tax burden toward the bottom of the economic scale. And its size represents a massive diversion of actual and potential resources away from public activities that benefit the whole of society—activities like education, public health, and environmental protection, the very ones Bush endorsed at the outset of his speech—and toward the single purpose of augmenting the net incomes of the comfortable” (pp. 41-42). From 1992 to 1998, moreover, “the average after-tax income of the richest one percent rose from about four hundred thousand dollars to just under six hundred thousand, and from 12.2 per cent of the national net income to 15.7 per cent. (Disparities of wealth, as opposed to income, are, of course, much higher.) Really, now—how urgently do these good people require a new subsidy from the other ninety-nine per cent?” (p. 42). The richest one percent versus the remaining 99 percent: this opposition would resurface a decade later in the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

9  Carey, “Rich, poor are even wider apart.” In remarking that Canadian student loan debt was six times as high by 1999 as it had been in 1984, Carey highlighted the story of a Ryerson student who, despite having worked twenty hours per week as a waiter in a campus bar, was going to graduate in 2001 with a debt of $40,000 in student loans.   

The Chomsky Nomination: A Response

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In late 1998, my colleague Ajay Heble and I nominated Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT for an honorary doctorate at the University of Guelph, an honour which Chomsky graciously agreed to accept. During his visit to Guelph in February 1999, Professor Chomsky showed his characteristic generosity: in addition to his address at the commencement ceremony, he found time in a tight schedule for what amounted to a seminar with student journalists, and spoke to an overflow crowd at Chalmers Street United Church—where the Chomsky lecture was appropriately introduced by Guillermo Verdecchia, co-author of the hit play The Noam Chomsky Lectures. The church was packed, as were two large meeting rooms linked to the main event by video feeds. As is his habit, Professor Chomsky refused any honorarium; with his agreement, the proceeds from ticket sales were donated to organizations working in solidarity with the people of East Timor and Haiti.

On December 1, 1998, after the University of Guelph had released the news that Professor Chomsky would shortly be visiting our campus to receive an honorary degree, the university's student newspaper, The Ontarion, printed an interview with Professor Heble and myself about this approaching event. Then on February 2, 1999 one of the newspaper's editors published an editorial which clumsily accused us of having effectively misled the University's Senate in our nomination of Chomsky. The following response appeared in the next issue of The Ontarion, on February 9, 1999.

 

The Editor, 
The Ontarion, 
Room 264, University Centre, 
Fax: 824-7838. February 4, 1999.

 

To the Editor:

The remarks directed against me and my colleague Professor Ajay Heble by Jayson McDonald in his editorial of February 2nd (“An honourary [sic] criticism”) contain an interesting mixture of malice and misinformation.

This editorial claims that, having nominated Professor Noam Chomsky for an honorary doctorate at this university, Dr. Heble and I subsequently revealed political motivations for the nomination which we had concealed from the University's Senate. Referring to a news item that appeared in the December 1st issue of The Ontarion, McDonald writes that

Heble and Keefer spent a full one-third of that article describing their political “rationale” for nominating Chomsky when indeed it had little if any mention in their actual nomination letter or the final selection made by the U of G senate.

As McDonald himself notes, the article in question was written, not by us, but by an Ontarion journalist. It is a novelty, I believe, for people who have been interviewed by a newspaper to find themselves reproached by one of the editors of that same journal for the arrangement and emphasis of the resulting story.

In addition to McDonald's unpleasant insinuation of bad faith, he is also making a claim, in the sentence I have quoted, about the substance of our nomination. That claim is false.

Our letter of nomination, after signalling the unparalleled impact of Professor Chomsky's work in linguistics over more than four decades, and after indicating his influence on a wide range of cultural theorists, went on to propose that this great thinker deserves our respectful attention for other reasons as well. “In addition to being a scholar of worldwide reputation,” we wrote,

he has also repeatedly been described as the exemplary public intellectual and oppositional thinker of our era. Since the mid-1960s, when he became an outspoken critic of the American wars in south-east Asia, Noam Chomsky has devoted his scholarly energies, his analytical lucidity, and his powers of ethical discrimination to a long series of searching analyses of military aggression, human rights abuses, political and economic injustices, and the systems of misinformation and propaganda which help to make them possible.

One of two things becomes painfully clear: either Mr. McDonald had not bothered to read the letter of nomination and was misleadingly making it seem that he had, or else he had indeed read it and was offering a misleading impression of its substance. But he must have read the text, since he knows that it contains no reference either to Mr. George Walker Bush or to the University of Toronto.

It would of course be a very strange thing if it did. But I do not think, on the other hand, that there was anything very astonishing in the fact that the University of Toronto's presentation of an honorary doctorate to ex-President Bush a year ago came up during Professor Heble's and my interviews with The Ontarion. That award had been vigorously opposed by many faculty members of the University of Toronto, and had entered the public record as a matter of controversy. As is well known, throughout Mr. Bush's career as director of the CIA, Vice-President and President, the most trenchant and persistent critic of the many violations of international law and of human rights over which he presided was none other than Noam Chomsky. And as I have indicated, our nomination of Professor Chomsky foregrounded his tireless efforts to promote justice no less than it did the exemplary intellectual rigour of his work as a linguist.

But perhaps we ought to raise our eyes from this petty dispute to the rather more important fact that during the coming days our campus will be honoured by the presence of one of the greatest scholars and public intellectuals of our time. Can we hope that The Ontarion may yet find some more adequate means than Mr. McDonald's editorial of responding to this event?

Michael Keefer

Associate Professor
School of Literatures and Performance Studies in English

A strange saga: Despite reports and fans, a heritage bridge in Eden Mills is in danger of being destroyed

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First published in The Record, Kitchener, Ont. (30 May 1998): A19.

Eramosa Township may be the only place in Canada where a man can saunter out of his house at 6 o'clock on a Monday evening, stumble home at 3 a.m., tell his wife he's spent the intervening hours at a meeting of the township council, and be believed.

It's not that people are abnormally gullible in this little corner of rural Ontario, or that we're so tired of life we have nothing better to do than cool our heels in the township's barren council chambers. Yet odd things have been happening in those chambers recently, and the oddest of them have to do with the heritage Bowstring Bridge in my own village of Eden Mills.

Just 50 miles west of downtown Toronto, a side road winds down from the Guelph Line into the Eramosa River valley.

The houses on either side are mostly mid-19th century and there are two stone churches of the same vintage, a stage-coach hotel (now a private home) and a couple of ruined mills.

If you've had the good sense to bring a canoe, you can drift on the millpond (restored by villagers with 3,000 hours of volunteer labor and $60,000 worth of fund-raising), encountering beaver, snapping turtles, kingfishers, a great blue heron—or perhaps even the osprey that pulled a bass out of the pond not 30 feet from where I was swimming two summers ago.

The population swells

Sleepy Hollow? Hardly. On the second Sunday of September every year, thanks again to the work of volunteers, this village hosts one of Canada's major literary events, the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, where many of our finest writers give open-air readings of their works, and the village's population swells for the day from 350 to as much as 5,000.

But Eden Mills has also become the focal point of a long-running political controversy. In the middle of the village, straddling the east branch of the Eramosa, stands the Bowstring Bridge—a graceful survivor of pre-First World War technology, and a structure, according to the Ontario Ministry of Culture's conservation review board, that is of provincial, national and international heritage significance.

In the United States, heritage experts tell us, this bridge would be protected by inclusion in the National Registry of Historic Sites. But since we are in Eramosa, township council wants to tear it down. And although the Ontario government has assessment procedures that are designed to prevent such aberrations, no one seems willing to apply them.

But I'm getting ahead of my story. It wasn't until late in 1993 that council, which had previously supported retaining the heritage bridge, for unknown reasons changed its mind.

Threat was frightening

A majority of village residents petitioned council to preserve the bridge; it responded in the spring of 1994 by threatening to impose an area tax levy of some $2,500 per household for the full cost of bridge repairs. Although clearly illegal, this threat frightened some villagers.

Over the following months, the evidence in favour of retaining the bridge mounted. Council members learned that the provincial Ministry of Culture rates the bridge high among Ontario's heritage bridges, and Ministry of Transportation officials stated that it could be rehabilitated for a fraction of the cost of a new bridge.

Village residents secured assessments of the bridge by three experts of international standing in heritage architecture, traffic engineering and urban planning. All three recommended its rehabilitation, on grounds that included heritage factors, pedestrian and traffic safety, and the village's social and economic well-being.

These recommendations were echoed by the 82-page report of a committee of council itself. The provincial minister of Culture wrote to offer her assistance and co-operation in preserving the bridge.

But council wasn't going to let its head be turned by mere facts, or by such trifling considerations as democratic due process. On Aug. 22, 1994, council announced that it would not have space on its Sept. 6 agenda to hear any delegations from Eden Mills.

But at that Sept. 6 meeting, a previously tabled motion was revived—even though the bridge wasn't on the agenda and even though no formal notice had been given. At 2:15 a.m., an unusual hour for business of any kind, let alone business not on the agenda, council voted to replace the bridge.

One might think that even the most mulish township council wouldn't want to repeat a trick like that. But this council has since openly proclaimed its intention to “open up Eden Mills to the trucking industry.” We're not talking subtle here.

Early this year, the Ontario Ministry of Culture's conservation review board held a three-day hearing about whether or not the bridge's heritage status should be removed so council can demolish it.

On April 6, 1998, the board announced that it found the evidence in favour of preserving the bridge “overwhelming.” The board found Eramosa Township council to be in contravention of the Ontario Heritage Act, declared that demolition would contravene the township's own official plan and the Grand Strategy (the Canadian Heritage River management plan for the Grand River basin, which includes the Eramosa), and stated that Council needed to do a full environmental assessment of the project.

Reeve David Adsett announced a public meeting on Aril 14 to discuss these findings. On April 12 he cancelled this meeting, promising to re-schedule it. And then, on April 20, with no public notice and at a meeting whose agenda contained no inkling of the matter, his council voted—in defiance of the conservation review board's report—to remove the bridge's heritage designation and to let tenders for its demolition.

A fight is brewing

The Friends of Eden Mills, a group of local ratepayers, has taken the township to court; a judicial review of the township's decisions is scheduled for the week of June 3.

As might be expected from a village like Eden Mills, there's a literary angle to the story. Jeffrey Stinson, the heritage architect who assessed the Bowstring Bridge in 1994, is an expert on the 1925-1930 construction of Toronto's Bloor Street viaduct over the Don Valley—an engineering feat that forms the context for Michael Ondaatje's novel In The Skin Of A Lion.

In his 1994 assessment, Stinson went so far as to compare the Bowstring Bridge to to the Bloor Street viaduct: “Although from the perspective of a government official at Queen's Park this bridge may seem small and distant,” he wrote, “it is of greater importance to this locale than the much larger bridges over the Don Valley are to the Toronto community, which interacts with them in less significant ways.”

If township succeeds in demolishing the Bowstring Bridge, something more precious than steel and concrete will be lost. The bridge is at the heart of Eden Mills: it keeps fast, heavy traffic out and safeguards the human scale of a village that is unique in retaining a largely 19th-century streetscape.

So what are Eramosa council's motives for destroying this bridge and gutting our village? What exactly is being hidden—development interests, aggregate hauling interests—inside the skin of this mule?

 

Michael Keefer of Eden Mills wrote Lunar Perspectives and is a professor at the University of Guelph.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hard Man of the Far Right

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First published in Canadian Literature 156 (Spring 1998): 131-33, http://canlit.ca/reviews/man_of_the_far_right. My title for the review was “Hard Man of the Far Right,” which was meant as a mocking allusion to the Glasgow term for a street tough—“wee hard man”—but may have been understood by the book review editor in another sense; the review was published under the title of “Man of the Far Right.”

Review of David Frum, What's Right: The New Conservatism and What It Means for Canada (Toronto: Random House, 1997)

What kind of phenomenon exactly is David Frum? And what claim can he make upon the readers of this journal? For although he produces books (first Dead Right, now What's Right, a collection of articles dating from 1988 to 1995), Frum is not, in any sense that counts, a writer.

David Frum's domain is current politics, and yet he has little in common with political scientists, who reputedly feel some concern about verifying what they represent as historical facts. Frum, in contrast, reprints here a piece written in 1994 in which he complained that “Ontarians have been cheated by an NDP government that has doubled its spending in a decade.” (Does he really think the Rae government was elected to office in 1984?) And in October 1995, just before the Québec referendum, he wrote in the Financial Post that English Canadians “have calmly agreed to be ruled by national governments that the majority of English-speakers had voted against: without its Quebec seats, the Liberal Party would have spent the forty years 1953-1993 in opposition.” (Has he never heard of the Tory governments of Diefenbaker, Clark, Mulroney and Campbell, which ruled Canada for sixteen of those years, or forty percent of the total?)

Although Frum often adopts a prophetic tone, this is not a vein in which he has been uniformly successful. In September 1995, for example, he wrote that “unlike the soon to be utterly forgotten Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich ... is poised to dominate American politics for a generation.” Well, now he's got Clinton to kick around for another four years.

It's easy enough to be mistaken in that sort of way, but when Frum combines sanctimony with prophecy the results can be less amusing. In 1988 he attacked Canadian anti-apartheid campaigners in these terms: “Political morality is a morality of consequences, not intentions. You may intend to achieve a peaceful, non-racist South Africa—but if the predictable consequences of your actions is [sic] civil war and dictatorship, then you are behaving immorally.” Since he elsewhere signals his hostility to what he calls “the ANC view of South Africa,” Frum must have found Nelson Mandela's peaceful and democratic succession to power—due in large part to mounting international pressures against apartheid—a serious disappointment.

Yet if he is neither a political scientist nor altogether a prophet, Frum is more than just a journalist. Most of the pieces reprinted in What's Right belong to the familiar category of political punditry. Others, however, such as his address to the 1994 convention of the Ontario Conservative Party (which concludes with the exhortation, “You must not be intimidated. You must be of glad heart. You must not surrender. You must win”), are clearly something else. A person who serves as adviser to a political party, speaks from the rostrum at its annual convention, and then analyzes and celebrates its electoral victory in the mass media, is practising something more than traditional journalism. George F. Will pioneered in this line when, after serving in 1980 as Ronald Reagan's paid coach for his television debate with Jimmy Carter, he faked a pose of journalistic neutrality in the Newsweek column which solemnly awarded his own man the victory. But Frum is out in the open—at least since achieving prominence as a marriage-broker with his 1996 “Winds of Change” conference, in which Conrad Black and other media right-wingers, acting as shapers rather than mere analysts of Canada's political destiny, were meant to agree in closed sessions upon a plan for pushing the Conservative Party into the embrace of Preston Manning.

A means of describing Frum emerges in his own statement that “It's the job of political entrepreneurs to devise coherent messages, based in sincere conviction, and to sell them.” The message of this political entrepreneur is indeed coherent: Frum wants to eliminate welfare, medicare, equity policies and programs designed to benefit visible minorities, human rights commissions, student loans, government funding for the arts, the humanities, and public broadcasting, as well as programs in support of advanced technology, fuel efficiency, transportation, waste recycling, and exports. Government, he believes, has no business “monkeying around in the private economy”: in his view there is no other kind of economy. Frum also believes—and he shared this wisdom with Ontario's Conservative Party convention in 1994—that “The key to political courage is knowing to whom to listen and whom to ignore.” Thanks to advice of this kind, Ontario's premier has turned the legislative buildings at Queen's Park into a fortress, and his education minister, a grade 11 drop-out, shuts his door in the faces of university presidents, though not those of corporate executives interested in profiting from the privatizing of public institutions.

It may be significant that Frum's definition of the job of a political entrepreneur contains no reference to truth. He does indeed state that he's “a conservative because conservatism is true.” But like fundamentalists of all kinds, Frum finds that the possession of one large Truth absolves him from any need to give serious attention to the smaller but less simple truths that are bound up with the material realities of our social being. In 1988, for example, he scoffed at opponents of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement who warned that it would do irreparable damage to the industrial sectors of the Canadian economy. In 1995, by which time their warnings had been borne out by the slump of the Ontario and Québec economies and by falling family incomes across Canada, Frum found it expedient to blame these effects upon high taxes. If he weren't so obviously “sincere,” one might be tempted to accuse him of intellectual dishonesty.

This book is littered with parallel examples of factual errors, statistical manipulation, gross distortion, and those strategic lapses of memory that I have elsewhere termed “subtractive politicizing.” Applied to his own work, Frum's claim that “the ideas with the most power are conservative ideas” seems idiotically mistaken: in comparison with opponents such as Linda McQuaig, John Ralston Saul, John Warnock, or Maud Barlow, he is a water-spider.

But how, then, can we explain the accolades Frum receives from such American right-wingers as William F. Buckley, Jr., Peggy Noonan and George Will? The answer lies, I think, in his extremism. Where other neoconservatives call for budget cuts, Frum says that $300 billion (one-fifth of the total expenditures of the US government) should be chopped in a single day; where others propose to cut back welfare expenditures, he wants to abolish welfare. Sub-Nietzschean posturing of this sort apparently has its pleasures (the underclass resent the treatment it's getting? we'll show them ressentiment!), as well as earning the admiration of one's neoconservative peers. There may also be political benefits to it: as Frum says, “People are tired of the constant moaning they hear about the poor.... I don't think Republicans should go out of their way to be callous. But ... [i]n the current environment, being accused of callousness might even be to the party's advantage.”

There is a sense, however, in which Frum's claim that “the ideas with the most power are conservative ideas” is perfectly accurate. In John Ralston Saul's apt phrase, the man is a “courtier” of an anti-democratic corporatism—or, to be more blunt, a cat's paw of Conrad Black. There is indeed power behind his ideas. If we owe it to ourselves to expose the vacuity of David Frum's claims to moral or intellectual cogency, we also owe it to whatever sense of collectivity, community or mutual sharing we wish to sustain in this country to take him—and his backers—very seriously indeed.

Manichaean Labelling

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First published in Books in Canada 26.6 (September 1997): 40.

It is perversely flattering to read, in Professor Joseph Knippenberg's review of my book Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars (February), that “Keefer poses as great a threat to the independence of the university as the corporate interests against which he inveighs.” Since Knippenberg believes that corporate interests (“rug merchants”, he calls them) indeed threaten the independence of universities, this is a serious charge. But even in the climate of paranoia created by the PC controversy, and analyzed by my book, it sounds just a bit silly. This is one book, after all, and there are big-time rug merchants out there.

Although he doesn't acknowledge the fact, the habits of mind Knippenberg reveals in his review are studied at some length in my book. These include a tendency (widespread among contemporary conservatives) to understand cultural debate in Manichaean terms, as a no-holds-barred struggle between the children of light and the servants of darkness; and a related tendency to substitute abusive labelling and paranoid distortion for responsible analysis.

Knippenberg's sense of what precisely he is opposing may seem confused. At one point he identifies my position as a “liberal or social democratic egalitarianism”; at another he finds my arguments “reminiscent of the worst kind of Marxist reductionism.” Is he genuinely unable to distinguish among positions any distance to the left of his own, or is it his habit to paste a “Marxist” label on any argument that makes a dent in conservative dogmas? He is in any case persuaded that a book which exposes the fatuities and the falsehoods of recent conservative attacks on humanities curricula, and which argues that feminist, materialist, and postcolonialist scholarship, far from being antithetical to our humanist traditions, can bring young people to an enhanced and humane appreciation of western literary and philosophical traditions, must be very wicked indeed.

One of the rhetorical postures that Lunar Perspectives dismantles (here following Northrop Frye) is the pretence that the university is an ivory tower, divorced from social concerns. From this Knippenberg deduces that I believe in power politics of the most brutal kind. Setting aside my repeated insistence upon civilized dialogue and my hope that, given good faith and interpretive patience, even people with the most radically divergent opinions might be able to arrive at a common understanding, Knippenberg tries to pin on me a view of the university as simply “a ground to be fought over and captured, either by the oppressed or by their oppressors.” This particular donkey's tail is his, not mine: if he thinks it will keep the flies from settling, let him wear it himself.

“Keefer's university,” Knippenberg declares, “is not one that I can respect or defend.” I'm sorry to hear that. For if I did have a university all of my own, his opinions would be welcome there, as part of the free and lively exchange that I see as one of a university's defining features. And who knows, perhaps at “Keefer's university” he might learn to be a more careful reader, and a less blinkered interpreter of what he reads.

Michael Keefer
Stad aan't Haringvliet, The Netherlands

Orange Groves and Drrradio Clásica: Home Thoughts from Andalusia

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This short essay was written in December 1996, in the village of Chite in the hills south of Granada where we lived for seven months. I shopped it around to several Canadian newspapers, which were (unsurprisingly) not interested in printing a critique of their own bondage to advertisers. The piece has not previously been published.

Even in December the white adobe houses of this mountain village are washed in a strong Mediterranean sunlight.

Most of the young adults have gone off to join the twentieth century in cities like Motril or Granada, leaving the middle-aged to herd goats or lead their mules every morning down to the orange and olive orchards that surround the village, and the old men to display their leisure in public by clustering in the hottest corner of the square to gossip and grumble together.

The women are invisible, except for occasional sorties, until late afternoon. Then they emerge to dominate the paseo, strolling through the village in twos and threes, while the men retreat to Carmen's bar or the Noche Azul: the Blue—or let's get poetic—the Azure Night.

There one or another may raise his voice in the quavering lamentations of the flamenco cante jondo, or deep song. I have heard this same wonderful music from the throat of an elderly neighbour as she sat husking almonds by her open front door.

All very exotic, no? Especially if we add the high sierras brooding over an arid landscape, and the many traces, from the Alhambra in Granada to the irrigation system that gives this village its orchards, of a once-glorious Islamic culture.

But this corner of Andalusia, scarcely touched as yet by the mass tourism that has spoiled the Costa del Sol, is no more typical of contemporary Spain than the fishing villages of Nova Scotia or the Pacific northwest are of Canada.

The thought tips me into comparisons of this foreignness with the land I know best, and more particularly with the Ontario “heartland” that is my home.

By the measure of GNP, for what that's worth, Spain has for some years had more right than Canada to sit at the table of the G7 industrialized nations. But Spain's economic spurt since it emerged from the long darkness of the Franco dictatorship has come at a cost.

Traffic congestion in Barcelona or Granada is only slightly less nightmarish than—well, than Toronto's. And Spanish political leaders seem nearly as benighted on environmental issues as—well, as Mike Harris and his environment minister, if there's still such a post in the Ontario cabinet.

Let's turn to newspapers. In Canada, some 60 percent of all dailies are now owned by Conrad Black, under whose guidance they are becoming ever more completely vehicles for the sale of a tranquillized readership to the papers' commercial advertisers.

Try by comparison Ideal, the main regional daily of Andalusia. A typical midweek issue contains 56 pages, tabloid format. Almost three-quarters of the copy in front of me (41 and two-thirds pages) is devoted to news stories, for the most part written by Granada-based journalists rather than wire copy, and to editorial comment. Classified ads and small announcements by municipal or regional governments take up ten percent of the remainder, leaving some eight and three-quarters pages for commercial advertising—about 15.6 percent of the total space.

Compare these ratios with those of any of the papers in Conrad Black's Canadian stable: it's an instructive way of spending fifteen minutes. You'll see at once why Mr. Black's wallet is so fat and why, despite the physical bulk of his papers, their news and editorial content seems so thin.

El Païs, the principal national newspaper, has a ratio of news and editorial content to advertising similar to that of Ideal. In a typical Saturday issue of El Païs, you'll also find eleven or twelve full pages of book reviews, and a further ten pages of commentary on music, theatre, art, television and popular culture. Though I retain a perverse fondness for English Canada's “national newspaper,” the Toronto Globe and Mail, I have to admit that it doesn't come off very well in any comparison with El Païs.

Turn on the radio, then. (When I'm not listening to my small collection of cante jondo tapes—mostly singers of the 1930s who rejoiced in names like Niño Gloria, Niño Isidro, and Pericon de Cadiz—I have the radio going by my writing desk.) On the FM band there are two, count 'em, public networks with national and regional programming. One is devoted to news and public affairs; the other, Drrradio Clásica (I'm spelling it as I hear it), offers a rich blend of classical music, baroque to contemporary, and of folk music from around the world.

I think by comparison of CBC Radio, which thanks to Jean Chrétien's broken election promises is firing hundreds of technicians, programmers, and announcers.

But my neighbour is singing again. I turn off my radio and listen to her voice rising from the other side of the narrow street. It is an old song, of a young man taken from his girl and his orange grove to fight against Napoleon's army and stain the soil of a distant hilltop with his heart's blood.

My neighbour does not read El Païs or Ideal; nor does she listen to Radio Clásica or the news. Apart from what the TV soaps have taught her, I suspect that she knows as little of the world outside this pueblo as I know of Mars. Yet if the news media of our countries have any say in the matter, her grandchildren in Andalusia have a better chance of growing up into well-informed citizens than my children—or yours—do in Canada.​      

Hot Button Academic Politics

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First published in the Toronto Star (24 September 1996). On the same day I received an email message from Professor Emberley: “Thank you for your mud-slinging, ideological squib on my book in the Toronto Star. You are obviously so mesmerized by the Zeitgeist that you cannot even see what's at stake in the university debate. Where there could have been an opportunity for us to have an interesting discussion, you evidently have dismissed me as 'intensely conservative' and 'ignorant.' Well, I suppose that's why the public thinks so poorly of academe—warring over turf, while ignoring the true needs of the students. I was utterly appalled.”

 

Review of Peter C. Emberley, Zero Tolerance: Hot Button Politics in Canada's Universities (Toronto: Penguin, 1996)

 

It might seem hard to imagine a better guide to the embattled terrain of Canadian higher education than Peter C. Emberley, a product of three distinguished institutions of higher learning, the director of Carleton University's new College of the Humanities, and author now of three books on what he calls “hot button” issues affecting Canadian universities.

Emberley's diagnosis in Zero Tolerance is direct and simple. Canadian higher education has been politicized by the corporate right and the “cultural left,” and “the plainly evident collapse of the university” is the result of “turf wars” and “a fierce jockeying for power and control” between groups that neither know nor love the university, but “are pursuing their own political agendas.”

This diagnosis is elaborated in nine wide-ranging and often exhaustively researched chapters. A tenth and final chapter restates Emberley's positions on key issues including tenure, public accountability, the relation between teaching and research, tuition fees, inclusivity, core curricula and academic freedom.

Zero Tolerance is valuable for the information it brings together on many of the issues currently under debate in and around Canada's universities and colleges. However, Emberley's assessments of the material he has assembled are often oddly inconsistent—most commonly at points where his posture of judicious neutrality breaks down in the face of a desire to advance his own intensely conservative cultural politics.

Thus Emberley correctly identifies recent steep increases in tuition fees, along with income-contingent loan repayment schemes, as a privatizing of public debt, and as a transfer of that debt from the baby-boomers who benefited from generous social and educational policies to a younger generation which is being denied the benefit of inexpensive access to higher education. However, he prefers to interpret these developments as “a form of moral education” which will teach this generation of students that “there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.” (Clichés of this sort, notably that weary equation of university study with “an odyssey,” resound through the book.)

Emberley's pose as a defender of the culture of humane scholarship is more directly self-contradictory. He denounces terms like “discourse,” “marginalization,” and “inclusivity” as “pseudo-intellectual jargon.” He heaps scorn on those who protest against cuts of 25 percent in university library acquisitions, since “about that proportion of library holdings is 'research' that has done little more than pad faculty résumés.” (One wonders, in passing, what proportion of his own writings Emberley would dismiss as “padding.”) He is no less contemptuous of faculty who feel threatened by “the bogeyman of the corporate world.” In his view, “It is only because teaching and research have been gutted of most of their meaning that the issues of the relevance of what faculty do have become so volatile.”

After this, Emberley's suggestion that “the major culprit” in his story is “the cultural left's identity politics” comes as no surprise. Some readers may accept his definition of postmodernism as “an intellectual tool currently being used in various social sectors to rewrite history and to re-engineer the evident experiences of living.” Many, however, will be shocked to find that his prime example of a “postmodern” rewriting of history is the United Church's recent apology to First Nations people for the suffering it inflicted on them through such “Eurocentric” projects as residential schools.

Emberley's loathing for those tendencies in contemporary scholarship that he lumps together as “postmodern” is exceeded only by his ignorance of recent work even in fields so directly relevant to this book as social history, cultural theory, and the sociology of education. (Thus, for example, Paul de Man's name heads a list of French academics “who helped inspire the May 1968 Paris student revolts”—though de Man made his academic career in the United States, published his first book only in 1971, and never had a significant following in France.)

None of these objections would count if this book projected a compelling vision of what liberal education is or ought to be. But here Emberley offers little beyond gush about the aspirations of young people and vague remarks about core curricula. Perhaps he is holding his best thoughts back for the benefit of his students and colleagues at Carleton.