Rick Salutin

What happened to liberal politicians? Sadly, they got smart.

rabble staff — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 13:51:21 +0000

Friday, February 17, 2017

Whatever happened to liberals? Sadly, they got smart.

For this insight I'm indebted to U.S. journalist Thomas Frank, whose 2004 book, What's the Matter with Kansas? explained the success of right-wing populism in the George W. Bush years and whose recent, Listen, Liberal, described the Hillary Clinton debacle in advance. He lectured in Toronto last month. It served as a booster shot.

I was always perplexed by Obama's infatuation with "smart guys" like Bill Gates or Larry Summers. I'd assumed anyone who knows these certified smarties must also know they come with limits and are less than advertised.

Smartness has subtly insinuated itself everywhere -- except, apparently, among voters. Smart won't ever replace fair; that's just stupid.

In times of despair, utopias are preferable to dystopias

rabble staff — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:00:49 +0000

Friday, February 10, 2017

There's something touching in how sales of 1984 have risen since Trump. Amazon is out of stock. Other dystopian novels, like Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, are doing well. It's one way to deal with a shock to the system: buy a book; then, basically, let it sit since it probably won't have much to do with what's spooking you on CNN. It's about the illusion of control.

Dystopias are warnings, utopias are yearnings. They keep chugging ahead into the future, unlike dystopias, which are meant to forewarn but can as easily depress and demobilize.

Unmasking the extreme right threatening U.S. liberal democracy

rabble staff — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 13:22:58 +0000

Friday, February 3, 2017

In the interest of knowing your enemy, here are some thoughts on what former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, a.k.a. Trump's Brain, represents. Whether these two in fusion -- a political Vulcan mind meld -- can uproot two centuries-plus of American liberal democracy, is what's at stake in the coming years (or weeks). For instance, are Bannon and the alt-right, for which, he acknowledges, Breitbart has been "the platform," racist?

In the interest of knowing your enemy, here are some thoughts on what former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, a.k.a. Trump's Brain, represents.

Buffoon or manipulator, Trump rightfully inspires fear

rabble staff — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 14:38:41 +0000

Friday, January 27, 2017

Which Trump were you watching last weekend? The moronic mediocrity with a skimpy vocabulary who can't keep focussed and who's as self-absorbed as an infant? Or the shrewd new president who bolstered his crucial constituency in the rust belt and dealt with an economic abyss that no one else over the past 30 years dared touch? Me -- I'm rivetted by both and, as a result, more than a bit confused.

Which Trump were you watching last weekend? The moronic mediocrity or the shrewd new president who dealt with an economic abyss that no one else over the past 30 years dared touch?

W.H. Auden's poetry resonates on Trump's inauguration day

rabble staff — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 13:25:33 +0000

Friday, January 20, 2017

How did Auden (W.H.) get it so right? He died in 1973, but his lines come to mind during the 21st century's most wracked moments.

Sept. 1, 1939, was written around that date from "one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street" in New York, at the end of "a low dishonest decade," the 1930s. It included the Great Depression and the global spread of fascism, with World War Two just ahead. Fair enough, he was there.

But on Sept. 11, 2001, with Auden long dead, his poem seemed to rise from the rubble in Manhattan -- reprinted, quoted, viral etc. That was at the end of a proud, boastful decade, which followed the Soviet Union's demise, with smug Western declarations of victory and much reaping of economic spoils.

How did Auden (W.H.) get it so right? He died in 1973, but his lines come to mind during the 21st century's most wracked moments.

Joseph Boyden controversy sheds light on community and belonging

rabble staff — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 16:24:03 +0000

Friday, January 13, 2017

I found Joseph Boyden's interview Wednesday on CBC -- in a word rarely called for -- unctuous. He surfaced three weeks after saying he wouldn't deal with questions about his Indigeneity publicly but only in a "speaking circle." This after filling what he calls "airtime" for 10 years on every form of media.

Now he's back out there on CBC and in the Globe, though solely with "acceptable" interviewers. APTN, which started all this with a cautious, respectful piece by Jorge Barrera on Boyden's claims, called it a "PR push."

What makes you part of a community is those concrete connections, known to you and acknowledged by others. It isn't the stories you hear or tell, pace Boyden.

Justin Trudeau may be the last neoliberal standing

rabble staff — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 14:12:53 +0000

Friday, January 6, 2017

Let's be clear on why Trump won. (Won the Electoral College, not the election. A strong enough majority of Americans voted against him.) It wasn't because of racism, fear of immigrants or misogyny. White supremacists and Confederate flag buffs didn't do it -- though they backed him.

He won because he carried four states in the rust belt, where factories once guaranteed people decent lives and which Democrats had always taken for granted. Hillary didn't even campaign there. Without them, Trump loses. In those states, the issue was hatred of free trade, largely in the form of NAFTA. It's now so despised that the term, free, is absent. People refer disgustedly merely to "trade deals."

Like the Clintons and Blair, Trudeau exudes empathy for the excluded -- while clinging fiercely to (free) trade deals.

Joke news provides hope among stories on 'fake news'

rabble staff — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 08:20:44 +0000

Friday, December 30, 2016

This was the year of fake news, as I keep reading. But so were most years preceding it. In 1897 newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst sent ace illustrator Frederic Remington to Cuba to cover a revolutionary war against its Spanish rulers. Remington wrote to Hearst that he found no revolution and there would be no war. "You furnish the pictures," wrote Hearst, "and I'll furnish the war." War duly followed, and the sorry saga of Cuba-U.S. relations, still ongoing.

Stories about fake news as a major problem, are fake news.

Culture is the last great British export

rabble staff — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 14:24:09 +0000

Friday, December 23, 2016

I hated myself for loving The Crown -- the Netflix series -- so ardently that I devoured the first 10 hours as soon as they went online. I've always been revolted in a morally smug way by anything in popular culture that suggests some lives count more than others. That goes particularly for celebrity coverage. It leads people to undervalue their own lives and overestimate the merits of being famous. There are people who sound more intimate with media figures than with their own family -- as if they know them better.

Besides, what Dickens said about the endless law suit in Bleak House should've applied to The Crown: "It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing."

England used to be the heart of the world's ruling empire. It imposed its self-serving version of "peace" everywhere. Nothing's left now but culture.

Slowly but surely, Kathleen Wynne reveals herself to be a standard issue Liberal

rabble staff — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 14:33:59 +0000

Friday, December 9, 2016

I still think she's salvageable, said someone normally NDP but who's given up on provincial NDP leader Andrea Horwath. She meant Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. It's hard to recall the hopes Wynne once inspired and how fresh she seemed. Let's refresh our memories.

When she ran for Liberal leadership in 2013, she'd be asked, portentously, if she really thought someone like her could succeed in Ontario politics. What you mean, she'd say brightly, is: Can a lesbian from Toronto become premier? The way she put it made you think: Perhaps. It was bracing and confident.

It's hard to recall the hopes Kathleen Wynne once inspired and how fresh she seemed. Let's refresh our memories.

Failure of democracy has many root causes

rabble staff — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 14:14:12 +0000

Friday, December 2, 2016

The failure of democracy? An academic study published last summer, which is rather suddenly being hailed in places like the New York Times, claims "an entire global generation has lost faith in democracy." Citizens "have grown jaded." This applies to youth especially, who call elections "unimportant" and say "a democratic political system" is a "bad" way to run things.

But is it really so? Young Americans who enthused over Bernie Sanders in the primaries, skipped the election because it wasn't democratic enough. People in Greece, Spain or Italy, left old parties and built new ones for similar reasons.

Politics is rife with failures of all kinds. Take for instance the failure of identity politics in the U.S. or the failure of political rights under Fidel Castro.

The threat of Trump isn't Trump

rabble staff — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 14:47:17 +0000

Friday, November 25, 2016

It will be an odd experience: the Trump years. On election night I thought the main task would be deciding what to do about them -- and in less than a day, young (mostly) people were in the streets across the U.S. protesting. Hallelujah. But it's also going to require a lot of thinking about what's going on. We'll need to think our way, as well as act, through the experience because otherwise it will be overwhelmingly upsetting and nobody will get any decent sleep.

In this task, I'm indebted to a Globe and Mail editorial about Trump's newly appointed "chief strategist" titled, "Steve Bannon isn't the problem, Donald Trump is." It helped because it made me realize that I think Donald Trump isn't the problem, Steve Bannon is.

The true danger of Trump isn't the man himself -- it's capable, malign people insinuating themselves under his umbrella and pursuing their own ambitions.

U.S. presidential debacle rekindles electoral reform debate

rabble staff — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 15:10:48 +0000

Friday, November 18, 2016

Electoral reform never seems to quite fall off the agenda. The presidential debacle in the U.S. -- Clinton won the popular vote but Trump will be president, just like Gore and Bush in 2000 -- has rekindled the debate down there.

Since we're supposed to already have democracy, it always comes as a surprise to realize we aren't there yet.

You'd think we were stuck in the Britain of the mid-1800s, the heyday of Chartism. It was a mighty mass movement of working people whose lives and communities had been shattered by, among other things, free trade! Their solution wasn't a Marxist overthrow of "the ruling class" but extending the vote to all (meaning, at the time, all men) rather than only the rich.

Since we're supposed to already have democracy, it always comes as a surprise to realize we aren't there yet.

Building a mass anti-Trump movement to bring democracy back into politics

rabble staff — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 14:13:32 +0000

Friday, November 11, 2016

How impressive were those protests across the U.S. on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after Trump won? And he hasn't even deported anyone yet. Imagine what will happen when he does.

I say this not just as someone moved by any political activity that looks beyond casting a vote. Impressive because they have already answered a question that hung in the air once the result was known: What kind of opposition or resistance makes sense for the Trump years ahead?

What kind of opposition or resistance makes sense for the Trump years ahead? The U.S. needs a a popular resistance movement coming from the ground up, mobilizing huge, diverse numbers in the streets.

U.S. voters prepare for agonizing choice on election day

rabble staff — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 13:07:31 +0000

Friday, November 4, 2016

Given the choice between a crook and a sleaze, you'd normally think people would opt for the crook. Crooks can be très charmant, like Cary Grant in It Takes a Thief or, more recently, Matt Bomer in White Collar.

Crooks can be virtuous, like Robin Hood, which may be how Clinton sees herself: Bill and I cut corners so we can win power and use it to do good. Why is she the crook here, although Trump, too, has a long record of crookedness and there are obvious crossovers by both? Because she's the one named by the U.S.'s number 1 cop: the big G-man himself. The FBI targets crime, not sleaze.

Given the choice between a crook and a sleaze, you'd normally think people would opt for the crook.