Ah! I grew an opinion!
So back before the turn of the year I was invited by my cell phone provider to choose a gift from a handful of largely cell phone related gifts and magazine subscriptions like Chatelaine or Marie Claire. Being the media junkie and quick number cruncher that I am I quickly decided on a 6 month subscription to Mclean's which is generally a little too right-wing for my liking but I harbour fond memories of dinner table discussions certain articles from the rag prompted in my youth, I get 26 issues out of those 6 months and it was better than a leather case for a blackberry I don't own. I received my latest installment today and lo and behold, before the table of contents, before the letters to the editor even before the ads there was an open invitation to readers to stand up and defend their freedom of speech in the form of an article written purely in defense of an excerpt from Mark Steyn's book America Alone published by Mclean's back in October of 2006. My initial reaction to today's article a sort of half giggle/half snort at Mclean's running to mummy and daddy public in their own defense. And then it dawned on me that this is a national publication which informs a large portion of the Canadian political body devoting three glossy, tree killing pages of their magazine to defending their freedom to print what has been accused of being a racist, Islamophobic article. So of course I had to go and read the original thorn of an article.
I have to admit that I really wanted to like the article. I wanted it to be clean and Canadian, innocuously reflective of a healthy national curiosity toward events which have greatly impacted our collective welfare over the last few decades. I wanted to be fed demographic truths with a self-deprecating slant and a dotted line of familiarity between this and our current national identity crisis. Unfortunately the article is none of this. At its most basic level it's an article containing purely demographic argument as to why we westerners should be concerned about being taken over by the Islamic world without addressing any of the issues, be they objective or subjective, the author feels would be problematic to the health and welfare of western civilization beyond a glossed-over claim of 'difference in world view'. In and of itself that's somewhat forgivable but there are also a lot of allusions, veiled implications and half-truths in the article which make it come off as a reactionary, fear-mongering, paranoid rant against the brown man's place in our society. Mostly it's an insult to our intelligence. Steyn calls for a blind rise to action in the name of democracy while citing falls of conveniently recontextualised (and therefore irrelevant) European socialist ideals as a motivation. He makes national identity and religious identity out to be the same thing. He even gets into my biggest pet peeve: cultural evolution. You know, because we westerners have the super-human ability to jump ahead on the scale of human decency and to make the development of a culture absolutely measurable via metaphorical carbon indicators discovered solely through our own 'successes'. Ugh. I hate that. He's basically standing on top of the sand pile saying 'their crass cultural imperialism is going to kick the ass of our crass cultural imperialism if we don't get our pin-striped, pampered, geriatric asses in gear' without providing any real backup for the claim. It's a stretch to make an unbiased, unracist reading of the article. It's easy to make a racist reading of it. Seriously. Qu'estce-que fuck? I'd like to know what made them think it was a good idea to print the excerpt. If I were Mclean's I would be shaking in my boots in the face of complaints to human rights commissions too.
That said, I do feel that the Ontario and B.C. human rights commissions (nothing has been said at the federal level so far) are out of order in getting involved in any of this. Their position of power in backing a claim based in vague, outdated and therefore infinitely exploitable policy is being abused with every statement they make with regard to this affair. For entities which are supposed to act out of constructive, empathic support to victims of hate crimes we've seen some pretty reprehensible behaviour: the Ontario commission siding with Mclean's and Steyn and all but dismissing it while the the B.C. commission is going out of its way to fit the rag and the author into the same ill-fitting hair shirt - both commissions doing their thing before consulting a jury of peers and certainly before taking steps toward reparation which is kind of what we pay them millions of our tax dollars to do...because, you know, we kind of voted in a couple of people a couple of times who decided that was the capacity in which we wanted the human rights commissions to function and stuff. So...ummmmmm...I'm kind of wondering why we should be so worried about Muslims (who have significant representation in Canada because of this nation's democratic leanings) eroding democracy when we seem to be doing a bang-up job of it on our own...but what do I know? I'm just a tax-payer and a voter.
I think I'm done bitching. All evidence points to some breakage in the apparatus and we the citizens, the Muslim-Canadians, the Catholic-Canadians, the Anglo-Canadians, the Chinese-Canadians, the Christian-Canadians, the First Nations-Canadians, the French-Canadians, the Afro-Canadians, the Pagan-Canadians, the Gay-Canadians, the Pasty White-Canadians...you know what I'm getting at...we all keep expecting it to run while it's broken. I fear that the outcome of this is going to be a band-aid solution to a festering issue without any actual investigation into its root causes or significant discourse around amendments to the poor, broken political toys we call 'freedom of speech' and 'human rights'. I recognize that we're talking about laws and foundations upon which nations are built. I recognize that there are other hot, press-worthy issues and similar situations which are being back-burnered to this simply because this one is about the impetuous 4 year old that is the Canadian press. I don't expect perfection. I do expect revision of our vague policies. I do expect my government to spend my tax dollars exploring this. I expect to not see any more of Mark Steyn's paranoid, xenophobic spiels published in the next dozen or so issues of Mclean's still coming to me…or in any other politically influential, national magazine for that matter. I do expect lengthy and heated debates around this at my dinner table and I absolutely expect to continue to provide a halal alternative to hot dogs at our parties in consideration of our Muslim friends.
I have to admit that I really wanted to like the article. I wanted it to be clean and Canadian, innocuously reflective of a healthy national curiosity toward events which have greatly impacted our collective welfare over the last few decades. I wanted to be fed demographic truths with a self-deprecating slant and a dotted line of familiarity between this and our current national identity crisis. Unfortunately the article is none of this. At its most basic level it's an article containing purely demographic argument as to why we westerners should be concerned about being taken over by the Islamic world without addressing any of the issues, be they objective or subjective, the author feels would be problematic to the health and welfare of western civilization beyond a glossed-over claim of 'difference in world view'. In and of itself that's somewhat forgivable but there are also a lot of allusions, veiled implications and half-truths in the article which make it come off as a reactionary, fear-mongering, paranoid rant against the brown man's place in our society. Mostly it's an insult to our intelligence. Steyn calls for a blind rise to action in the name of democracy while citing falls of conveniently recontextualised (and therefore irrelevant) European socialist ideals as a motivation. He makes national identity and religious identity out to be the same thing. He even gets into my biggest pet peeve: cultural evolution. You know, because we westerners have the super-human ability to jump ahead on the scale of human decency and to make the development of a culture absolutely measurable via metaphorical carbon indicators discovered solely through our own 'successes'. Ugh. I hate that. He's basically standing on top of the sand pile saying 'their crass cultural imperialism is going to kick the ass of our crass cultural imperialism if we don't get our pin-striped, pampered, geriatric asses in gear' without providing any real backup for the claim. It's a stretch to make an unbiased, unracist reading of the article. It's easy to make a racist reading of it. Seriously. Qu'estce-que fuck? I'd like to know what made them think it was a good idea to print the excerpt. If I were Mclean's I would be shaking in my boots in the face of complaints to human rights commissions too.
That said, I do feel that the Ontario and B.C. human rights commissions (nothing has been said at the federal level so far) are out of order in getting involved in any of this. Their position of power in backing a claim based in vague, outdated and therefore infinitely exploitable policy is being abused with every statement they make with regard to this affair. For entities which are supposed to act out of constructive, empathic support to victims of hate crimes we've seen some pretty reprehensible behaviour: the Ontario commission siding with Mclean's and Steyn and all but dismissing it while the the B.C. commission is going out of its way to fit the rag and the author into the same ill-fitting hair shirt - both commissions doing their thing before consulting a jury of peers and certainly before taking steps toward reparation which is kind of what we pay them millions of our tax dollars to do...because, you know, we kind of voted in a couple of people a couple of times who decided that was the capacity in which we wanted the human rights commissions to function and stuff. So...ummmmmm...I'm kind of wondering why we should be so worried about Muslims (who have significant representation in Canada because of this nation's democratic leanings) eroding democracy when we seem to be doing a bang-up job of it on our own...but what do I know? I'm just a tax-payer and a voter.
I think I'm done bitching. All evidence points to some breakage in the apparatus and we the citizens, the Muslim-Canadians, the Catholic-Canadians, the Anglo-Canadians, the Chinese-Canadians, the Christian-Canadians, the First Nations-Canadians, the French-Canadians, the Afro-Canadians, the Pagan-Canadians, the Gay-Canadians, the Pasty White-Canadians...you know what I'm getting at...we all keep expecting it to run while it's broken. I fear that the outcome of this is going to be a band-aid solution to a festering issue without any actual investigation into its root causes or significant discourse around amendments to the poor, broken political toys we call 'freedom of speech' and 'human rights'. I recognize that we're talking about laws and foundations upon which nations are built. I recognize that there are other hot, press-worthy issues and similar situations which are being back-burnered to this simply because this one is about the impetuous 4 year old that is the Canadian press. I don't expect perfection. I do expect revision of our vague policies. I do expect my government to spend my tax dollars exploring this. I expect to not see any more of Mark Steyn's paranoid, xenophobic spiels published in the next dozen or so issues of Mclean's still coming to me…or in any other politically influential, national magazine for that matter. I do expect lengthy and heated debates around this at my dinner table and I absolutely expect to continue to provide a halal alternative to hot dogs at our parties in consideration of our Muslim friends.