Ode to beavers

Who could ever forget the Elgin Street Irregulars' historic, heady foray into the (very likely lucrative, if we'd ever actually winched our notoriously incoherent act together...) BeaverBalls™ biz?

Yup, we've long reserved a warm spot for Castor canadensis and his charming, if strange, habits. Such as (allegedly) eating his own testicles when threatened.

So, it is with a certain, ummm, proprietorial disdain that we tee off to trash conservatory senator Nicole Eaton's (ev)ill-conceived proposal to replace Our Illustrious National Rodent with some polar bear.

If beavers were ever to actually chew off their own business to spit at somebody, they might wish to begin with Ms. Eaton.

Her cover story is that the Beav is a "dentally defective rat". We need barely slow down to point out that slagging rats places her in the position of badmouthing many sitting members of her party, before hitting the gas to note that the more plausible reason for her libel of our furry pal is that, while he's claimed squatters' rights to the national identity for centuries, he was only officially installed in 1975. Under, you guessed it, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals.

It takes no genius to see that the focus of the Harper Government™®© since gaining its coveted strong stable majority™®© ain't so much the stupid economy as tearing down, stomping, burning, shooting and pissing on any and all things liberal. And calling it nation building. ™®©.

So despite the senator's cutesy persiflage, we can, ummm, probably agree that this is one more case of these guys' systematic scorched-liberal policy, as they try to replace all those inconvenient decades of collective national memory with (yet more) crap, artfully spin-doctored from the whole cloth.

Do I have to stoop to quoting literary classics, like some intellectually-bankrupt Ottawa Citizen columnist? Yes? Crap. Okay:

"If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

You already know the book. Oh, never mind. I digress

Base image: Wikimedia Commons

Try to occupy *this*

Most mainstream news media (and current perversions thereof... but dear me, I digress...) can't seem to wrap their collective consciousness around Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots.

As OWS went globally local this past weekend, they're finally trying to get to it — but news TV's hair and teeth types continue to deride and whinge over what they see as Occupy's deal breaker: no focused definition, agenda, leader or spokesperson.

Thing is, media and other big-organization complaints are more about fossilized reporting conventions than Occupy's relevance.

See, sometime mid-late last century, many media honchos and theorist types actually fretted about balancing news coverage (so quaint!) in the screaming dive toward daily deadlines. The only way they saw to do that real fast was to pigeonhole every story into a prefab template. One US network news president famously wanted to stereotype every item as a black hat/white hat Old West shootout. Somewhat more thoughtful types — well, okay, media theorists* — felt you might run to maybe a half-dozen prefabs. Still amounts to fillin' blanks with dates, names, a few telling details. Voila! News story! Like any sausage machine, it works adequately as long as you don't get all hung up on finesse.

But to get names and telling details in nanoseconds, which is all anybody on a 24 hour news cycle budgets for anymore, ya gotta have easily-contacted traditional organizations with official spokesthingies, cued to bark out bullet-point "positions" in predigested clips.

It's why many news items are tiny, dumb cartoons. It's also why many are spun to hell by the groups that can pour money into blendering up self-serving bullet points like so much liquid pig shit tasty frozen martinis and firehosing 'em at reporters.

So, the major objectors to Occupy Wall Street's style: people in news who want fast chicken nuggets to slot into a standard story; and people and groups holding some traditional form of power, who seek potshot targets with which to neutralize — or better yet, blacken and bury — a movement and retake what they see as the agenda. To occupy Occupy, as it were.

I'm pretty sure that OWS' amorphous squishiness is as frustrating to old media as its very tangible if unfocused discontent is to business-as-usual forms of power. This rabble ain't so easily cartooned or contained, when you can't find rabble-rousers or messages to pinpoint bomb. Could explain why Occupiers are covering their own revolution rather well in diffuse outlets like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook anonanon. Unhindered by convention, they get it. Anti-antisocial media at its best!

Coyote News, though we sometimes fly with the turkey vultures, is cool with it. Because it really, really pisses off political types desperately seeking some easy in, to either smear or co-opt the whole thing. And our embarrassing, illegitimate cousins at Fox and Sun, ummm, News. Did we mention them? Kinda flailing at the whole discrediting thing. Snicker...

* You, my doggybloggy reader, are of course so interested in this stuff that you will read further, maybe something like Making News (Gaye Tuchman); Deciding What's News (Theodore Gans), or Discovering the News (Michael Schudson). Because you're not the type to take your entire daily news/info/bloggossity hit on a smartphone in that two-minute lineup for your latte. You're better than the mere latte-rati...

In the blood.

Repeating a Harper Majority Government (™,®,but especially ©...) mantra that already glitters with either the polish of hard wear or that sparkly Twilight vampire crap, the federal anti-labour minister has ordered Air Canada's flight attendants' union straight to a procedurally-sketchy Industrial Relations Board arbitration tomorrow. Do Not Strike. Do Not Pass Go. Definitely Do Not Collect $200.

She opines (again) that these people must not be allowed to hurt the economy. Probably better than when she opined that "cancer is sexy," huh?

"These people" took a 15 per cent pay cut back in the day when Air Canada was hurting, and are still starting out at a monthly wage that barely covers a so-so one-bedroom apartment in downtown Ottawa, never mind the food and utilities. Forget cable. Even basic.

But, hey! If you could afford that hookup, the new retrosoap Pan Am's success would prove that the job's glamour still totally makes up for the poverty, obscene shifts, and antediluvian management. Right?

Apparently it's okay for these people to hurt, as long as "the economy", usually limned as some kind of shadowy, all-powerful, yet strangely fragile third person, does not. This quasi-person must be protected with the kind of dumb, short-term union-shafting tactics that, down the line, inevitably will lead to bunch of (here's an economic term, for, ummm, trained economists...) pent-up demand. From labour.

It has apparently not yet dawned on too many Harper Majority Government (™,®,but especially ©...) types that the economy is made up of individuals. Like, say, flight attendants. And that if you pull this shit enough, they'll eventually get pissed enough to come back at ya.

About the first time Lisa Raitt started dropping legislative howitzer rounds on any union that even smelled like it might be thinking about a strike, she began to tell interviewers that she grew up in an old-school union family in Nova Scotia, that her affinity with labour was "in the blood".

Was it really only this past June that she could still pull that one straight-faced? At the time, the great grey Glob said she was "an awkward foil for critics portraying the Conservative government as an enemy of Canada’s labour movement."

To establish that article's background (and to launch my now-trademark digression, a full nine paragraphs late in my books...) one must note that its top photo is of Ms. Raitt, sportin' what looks, to my jaundiced yellow eye, suspiciously like a blue sweater, and, ummm, cuddling an expedient kitten.

In retrospect, that should have been the only tell that we really needed, to give context to her poker-faced claims to blue-collar cred...

The struggle continues

This week, there's a new tear in the fabric of downtown Ottawa.

Zoom writes about it here. I don't have anything to add to that very fine obituary, except to think that Elmaks, of Swap Box Ottawa fame, deserves to be recognized one more time in our blog space, as well as Zoom's. And in a lot more places as well.

RIP, Elmaks. Thank you. The struggle continues... and the rest of us will remember you well.