A quick notice of tendencies in relation to the question of deployment thus far: the rhetorical and logical strategy of choice for Harper and his Conservative ministers has been one of apprehending and discerning the will of “the Canadian people”, of the Government leading the charge and suggesting that they have pre-emptively registered Canadians’ collective desires to extend the mission. This strategy operates already in past-tense, which means that the Government’s read of a legible national political sentiment has been properly interpreted; the reading is complete and correct.

But have our sentiments been captured and, if so, how? The suggestion that there is consensus on this, that support is altogether clear and undeniably natural under the circumstances, has a determinate effect on how we may code or conceptualize dissent on this decision, which is to say that, should you oppose, you must be incapable of seeing the writing on the wall. Hence, how could all four federal partiess not support the mandate, how could they hypocritically walk away from the troops, only to trap themselves in the confessional position of, “I support our troops but…”

Further, there’s been an implicit kernel circulating across the field of this argument, one that suggests the automated mandate of the military to fulfill its goals and achieve the dutiful completion of its mission as part of its institutional identity and national obligation. Harper locates the kernel when he says, “Our men and women need to know that we share their goals, support their efforts.” The kernel subsequently settles into a little discursive fold: Harper is in effect asking how the Canadian population would dare prevent and refuse our armed forces fulfillment.

Well, to respond, their efforts – whether fight or roaming dirt tracks in Afghanistan or on-base in Shiloh or Petawawa – are “supported” regardless as they’re a national organ directed by the federal government. Their operation is a result of the complicated ways in which our subjectivity as citizens is conferred and produced; the entitiy of the military is internal to Canada itself, regardless of scope or role. This is not to induge in military mythology but rather to acknowledge that, like other institutions, the military has a small psychic role in constituting the idea of Canada, much like Wildflie and Fisheries or the Ministery of Natural Resourses. The armed forces are tasked with their mandate, applied as force, put into place, orchestrated by politicians acting on behalf of Canada’s variable citizenship. Harper implies that not extending the mission will nullify the possibility of goals being completed. Certainly, there are operational goals, part of the mission as such. Yet, the comment connotes a refusal of some grand triumphalist endeavour, which, when one opposes or questions, is seriously retarded and damaged.

But fruition and success are relative. The armed forces will continue to successfully “be” the armed forces; their ontological identity and their structures and relations to a larger public or society will not be diminished. Though Canada’s military culture has received more emphasis under Harper (some suggest there’s been a soft policy coup), the armed forces do not possess the power or clout of the U.S. military-industrial apparatus, whose runnaway resources and sheer scale largely dictate American foreign policy and perpetual military readiness. They prioritize the application of political power, perhaps reversing Clauswitz’s axiom: politics is war by other means in its most profitable and mass-culturally normative form.

Though the ‘long war’ tends to place Western militaries on a similar footing, inducing all the worst aspects of arguments cvilization clash and unified security measures, Canada’s military exists in a different national political universe. Our armed forces members will continue as military operators, military subjectivities, as institutionalized members of an organization with particular social and cultural elements and orientations. Which is why choosing to not extend the mission is no affront to goals but perhaps, instead, suggests some recognition of the precarity of placing bodies in limit-environments and the requirement of sound justification for that decision. Their dutiful performance is no reason to not make a political decision by government in Parliament after debate to stop their activities. We do not betray their desires to meet their goals because their goals are our goals, which are the goals that are supposed to direct their efforts; if they’re not, and if we have little interest, our lack of ‘political will’ (as apathy, opposition, informed dissent, or otherwise) will become apparent, expressed by our members of Parliament…at least (with some naïveté) , this is how democracy in the strict sense, as a representative apparatus of elected officials, is designed to function.

Obviously, the added dynamism of political practice makes plastic the function. The infinite calculations required by the play of language games, discursive manoeuvring, and affective remarks where rhetorical procedures unfold in specific argumentative context all load the act of ‘representation’ with the noise that is the political norm. Yet, Harper’s “being out front on this one” places faith in the governmental apparatus to detect the national will, one that is reflected directly by dictate and imposed as such, which is why Harper stated his intent to extend the mission an extra year regardless: “At the whim of the desires of Canadains, how could I not? Our military is in place, the wheels are turning, we don’t cut and run, this is no time for politics…” and so on. His threat about getting a mandate for Afghanistan from “the Canadian people” and subsequently turning it into a testing of the potential electoral waters lays bare the pursuit of partisan political aims. Not that I expect antiquated “objectivity”; rather, Harper’s “straight talk” relies on a lot of other threads to maintain the entanglement of power.

During the press conference in Kandahar that announced the death of Goddard, one of her superiors repeatedly emphasized the self-perceived weight of duty and its inherent pressures considering the territory and practices of the armed forces. Goddard’s death grounds what constitutes duty; death is traditionally presupposed as duty’s logical end, as sacrifice for the cause. The general celebrated the professionalism with which duty is undertaken in the face of diffuse threat pacified not so much by force than by procedure and military habit that attempts to make dutiful death an anomaly. Primary definers, whether the PM or generals, push the duty argument to shame opposition. I suspect the duty will be undertaken regardless. As has been explicitly expressed, military duty here is a predicate of vulnerability. The politicized duty argument takes, in large ways, this vulnerability for granted, as it becomes the hollow leg upon which “duty” is made to stand; duty becomes utility, instrumental in justifying decisions.

The decision to keep troops on the ground is a measure of this duty against the conditions in Afghanistan: the equation follows that Canadian vulnerability in a combat role is worth it, a trade-off for the betterment of intensely vulnerable Afghanistan. Hence the possible benefit of generalized contribution via military presence, which supposedly has been weighed and registered, or at least that is how this version of the narrative goes. Yet, passing off action and participation as an actualization of military duty is problematic, as it automates the legitimacy that the government espouses to make these decisions, deferring to military motivations, denying that legitimacy rests in responsibility and choice on the legislative and administrative insides rather than emanating from elsewhere.

In shutting down media access to the event, Stephen Harper and Gordon O’Connor have stated repeatedly that the return of bodies from Afghanistan is a private affair for family and military officials. The sacred aura of the bodies and the affiliated grief and mourning are off-limits, at least initially, to the interrogative organs of a liberal media and the public it conceptually presupposes and implicitly “represents”. Thus, there is an opposition hatched immediately between, on one hand, some imagined Canadian public who share in this event and, on the other hand, the private desires of the governmental institution (the military) and the families whose members made “the ultimate sacrifice”.

Surely, we could make much of the rhetorical bombast, the cliched utterances, the idotic idioms, and the bureacratized military speak that saturates and butresses the discourse around exactly what is ongoing in Afghanistan, which is to say that this recent thread is bound up in that entanglement of meanings and motivations. In relation to this particular instance, what is worth mentioning is the tension between how these now-dead bodies are not for public identification or consumption whereas, given their prior status less than four days ago, they most certainly were.

The government has no problem in positioning soldiers’ contributions in relation to the wider Canadian public in moments of success or even standard operating procedure whereby death is outside the circle of immediate consideration. See Stephen Harper’s recent spectacle-oriented, image-heavy visit of Afghanistan as a tactic aimed at driving this home. Soldier’s bodies mattered greatly then, especially when the PM performed his best rendition of “out on the frontier” by donning his safari duds and mimicing soldiers by playing dress-up with helmets and flak jackets and head-sets. This is no anomaly: sallying up to the armed forces to legitimize the mission is a standard device based on contiguity and the contact of direct connection, much like product placement.

Recall Chretien’s visit to Bosnia in the mid-1990′s. Standing on the besiged airport tarmac in Sarajevo, his accidental putting-on-backwards of his blue peacekeeper helmet was perhaps the most ironic display of legitimacy: his presence lent support but the backwardness of the helmet screamed of the problematic terms of the recent Balkan wars and the bungling intervention of the UN. These kinds of acts and gestures serve to make political will legible; they’re highly symbolic relays contextualized in specific signifying regimes. Public cultural literacies around aspects of sacrifice, contribution, and the heritage of service of Canada abroad are inexorably excited in these kinds of displays and exhibitions. Hence Harper’s legitimizing visit and on-site endorsement.

Currently, though access has been refused, the returning bodies, out of sight, still signify an absence, which is to say that even in death and even in our seeming lack of access to the return of these bodies, value is still extracted from them by the primary definers dictating the events – the federal government and its political interests. This extraction rhetorically signifies what is appropriate and what ought to constitute the status quo in terms of what we can and cannot access vis-a-vis understanding and reflecting on our role in “the long war” and, further, what is appropriately advanced to champion the public and what is not. Note that access to the bodies departing Afghanistan was offered, as if to safely contain the fall-out of death inside the boundaries of the abject environment of “war”, preventing the leaking of death from militarized Kandahar to the safe and civilian confines of Trenton.

So, the comparisons of Harper to Bush are not advanced simply via a decision made regarding access to an already-cermenonial and symbolic event: the larger comparison – the one that is most probematic – is the coding of this event as residing somewhere outside the realm of what constitutes normal public desire, where wanting to access the return of caskets and bodies translates to a lack of compassion, a lack of care, a lack of concern and respect, a lack of knowledge as to “what’s really going on here”and how it registers. In all, a lack of emotive comportment and dutiful response.

As most are sure to surmise, this is careful moderation and the subsequent modulation of a jumble of events; or, rather, it is the opportunistic management of an event and its controlled supply to a public that may or may not actually care to attend to this event and its narrative franwork at the outset (i.e., we don’t have the slightest care about what’s happening in Afghanistan) . If the latter is the case, then this is about laying foundations for awareness; if it is the former, it is a matter of how to make these bodies matter. Either way, this is and continues as a political supply of perception.

This is not to suggest that we miss this point nor that we lack the ability to critique. Instead, it suggests the paternalistic conception our administrative handlers have of the infantile “us”.

Emerson’s post-election party switcheroo has been drawing the ire of his constituents, opposition MP’s, and even members of his new party. Emerson’s party-swap, his disdain for his riding’s collective wishes, and his adamant statements about shaking off “trivial” concerns in order to serve “the Canadian people” through an important position in the current government has been a rather stinky affair. Harper’s own endorsement of and flacid support for Emerson has been the stuff of trite rhetorical flourish; apparently, Emerson’s the right man for the job and Harper’s self-celebrated willingness to look beyond party lines – much like Emerson’s “willingness” to serve beyond his old party affiliation – constitutes the real ethos of Candian duty and public service. Harper has made it clear that Emerson has ample Cabinet experience that would only benefit the country and the government’s profile. Besides, according to Harper’s rhetorical sandwich, why would any well-reasoned Canadian stoop to personal attacks in order to prevent Emerson from making this contribution to governance and the common political wealth of Canada?

As Hedy Fry’s line of questioning makes explicit, Emerson has been an opportune target for pinning hypocrisy on a government intent on pushing through ethics and conduct legislation vis-a-vis MP and ministerial conduct, which is to say this is all one more half-arc in the spiral of hypocritical, self-referential, and near-cybernetic discourse of parliamentary political practice. Of course, that the Liberals lead the charge in condemnation is not without some irony, if it can even be called that: perhaps irony ceases when playing and calling the hypocrisy card becomes the very mode of operation. This is the stuff of murky integrity soup.

It is worth noting that Emerson’s move, though, has not been sexualized, gendered, and pathologized like Belinda Stronach’s floor-crossing last year. Throwing off the Conservatives and choosing to become a Liberal, Stronach was the target of sexualized and gendered remarks seeking to connote her move as the work of a slutty and promiscuous philandering bitch. Stronach’s being embroiled with Peter Mackay – now the Minister of Foreign Affairs – only amplified her potential as a target for sexualized comments that questioned her loyalty to the Conservative Party, as if her romantic falling-out with Mackay signified further her standing as a hysterical whore on all accounts. Nasty stuff.

We haven’t heard the voiciferous sexualizing and gendering of David Emerson and that’s no coincidence. Though his motives have been questioned, he retains his manhood, his male privilege, and the ability to frame the switch in terms of procedure and intent. Emerson’s move is rendered, then, as the product of miscalculation and misreading, of improper reasoning on his behalf. It may be scheming, corrupted, and inexcusable but it is still the stuff of decision. He’s right or wrong, good or bad, depending on where you stand. The Stronach incident unfolded in an entirely different way. Her loudest critics defined and reduced her to some naturalized and rudimentary standing as an unruly woman without scruples tied unapologetically to the whimsy of her “innate” feminine drives. Eemerson, meanwhile, retains his normative masculine standing as a political operator.

Hedy Fry may have proceeded in this critical direction to point out these descriptive and conceptual biases; I haven’t checked the transcripts. What remains is that the crux of this scenario is very much the problem of a cultural politics of governance and institutionalized political practice. To simply call Emerson a whore misses the point because it elides the most basic (if abstract) questions we ought to be asking: who gets to become what and in what context? Who is motivated by what and why is that motivation available and attributable? Why do “they” have that determining privilege and power as such?

Statistics Canada recently released its 2005 annual National Balance Sheets and the numbers are certainly worth a look. Three notable figures:

1.) the average net worth of every Canadian citizen is hovering at $137, 000; this puts the national net worth somewhere around the 4.5 trillion dollar mark. whew: we’re fat cats, or at least a segment of the population tends to fatness and is maxing out on the chin ups to reach and exceed the “affluence” bar…

2.) this represents a $5600 dollar increase per citizen from 2004; overall, national net worth grew and expanded just over 5% and national wealth (non-financial assets) grew at a rate of 5.5%, which is down 0.1 from 5.6% from 2004…

3.) as per this study, each Canadian citizen has accumulated 1.08 of debt for every after-tax dollar of income…

I recall a recent interview with on CBC Radio with Addison Wiggin, contributor to The Daily Reckoning and co-author of Empire of Debt, a book-length condemnation of America’s overwhelming financial debt, in public, private, and personal contexts. Wiggin is generally critical of the “keep consumers spending” cultural mantra; it functions as the deferral device/band-aid fix for any and all problems in an economy and society that are overdrawn and overdeveloped, running on virtual fumes and ghostly traces.

Wiggin calculates that the U.S. is running a debt load of approximately 8 trillion dollars. Massive public debt has become the model for private citizens…Certainly we could extend the trajectory here and expound on how and why the U.S. carries such a massive debt, requiring the order of 563 billion dollars for its military budget this year alone. If the previous source is perhaps “too” partisan and problematic, the White House has the Department of Defense sitting at an “outlay” 463 billion dollars. But what’s a 100 billion in the face of 8 trill? 0.0125 %.

Wiggin went on to offer that Canada is doing relatively better but – like many (over)industrialized states that serve as flowing conduits for fluid multinationals and commodity markets – it ain’t sitting pretty.

Canada’s running federal surpluses in relation to the budget, which signifies fiscal responsibility; plus – and I love this – “[We’re] running good debt-to-GDP ratios”. But the stinger: Canadian federal debt (net) is hovering around the 530 billion dollar mark (523.6 billion in 2004). With about 32 million citizens, that puts us at approximately $16, 500 a head.

Further, this is simply federal debt. For an accumulation of federal, provincial, and municipal debt, The Stingy Investor is running a real-time debt clock. At this moment, we’re collectively running a debt of about 805 billion dollars, which works out to about $25, 200 bucks per person.

One more shot to the gut: toward the end of his discussion, Wiggin added that one ought to consider the 74 million credit cards currently in circulation in Canada and that the national savings rate in Canada is sitting at less than 1%…

Self-governing economy, right? Feed in proper inputs? Presto magic outputs. Capital rights these wrongs and the market will naturally – as the endlessly differentiating code of choice for most and many – diagnose, adjust, and rearticulate these tedious details. Debt, it seems, is simply and seamlessly embedded. To borrow from Kurt Vonnegut: “So it goes.”

The recent completion of the 2006 World Social Forum – held simultaneously in Caracas, Venezuela and Bamako, Mali, with another session planned to follow in Karachi, Pakistan this March – added extra emphasis to recent early morning activities. I spent some time over coffee reading another thought-provoking, motorized essay from the February issue of The Walrus. With “Bolivar’s Ghost”, by Pedro Sánchez and Gord Westmascott, I encountered a descriptive and concise piece functioning as a where-we’re-at-now summary mapping the recent confluence of political and social shifts in Latin America.
While reading and sipping, I realized three things:
1.) That I had, without much thought or self-awareness, engaged willfully with the text, taking for granted the coupling of coffee-as-morning-comfort and the essay.
2.) Further on this trajectory, that my coffee connected directly to this assembly of global and local issues as per the program of the World Social Forum; the coffee itself was a vehicle, a thing fully immanent and emergent and incorporated (Fair Trade? Starbucks?), which is to say that I was no longer a bystander at my kitchen table.
3.) That I was planning – the very evening I was reading – to catch Black Coffee), a two-part documentary on TVO interrogating the historical inequities and exploitative inequalities of the global coffee trade. Apparently, coffee is the second most valuable legally traded commodity in the world, behind oil.

I was traveling in two participatory directions: political praxis at a remove (i.e., arming myself with knowledges and discourses pertinent to things ongoing in South America, Black Coffee viewing); and consumption of a desired product with a very dirty and past and present (i.e., coffee as a commodity that travels in productive and industrial vectors refined through centuries of colonial, imperialist, and neocolonial exertions of repressive force as political and economic power).
Pause affluent sipping.

Thinking back to the article, Sánchez and Westmascott do well in tempering the enthusiasm expressed by many in relation to the social turn in Latin America. They point with certainty to potential possibilities for new state policies and reforms that will counter decades of state-enforced and forcefully-backed strategies of marginalization, criminalization, and exploitation of impoverished and indigenous peoples in the south. They also suggest that the efforts to develop Mercosur, a continental trade alternative to counter the FTAA (Free Trade of the Americas Agreement), show promise. Yet, they also warn onlookers and interlocutors against easy attempts to fashion some sort of tangible solidarity among these countries, arguing that we ought to be weary of the violent history of relations between and among South American states, which exist firmly in their own tenuous hegemonic circuit. Their suggestion is that things have a capacity to proceed in a democratic direction but that we’d do well –especially as onlookers at a distance – to support the trajectory with a kind of cautious optimism.

Toward the end of their essay, the authors attempt a diagrammatic rendering of the oppositional situation as it currently stands: urban elites – both well-intentioned and indifferent –benefiting from years of repressive governance and neoliberal policies; and politically empowered groups of an entirely different peasant and working class strata, attempting to penetrate the center of the institutionalized political apparatus, literally encircling urban areas in growing numbers. There’s a momentum gaining energy by the day. Whether it will remain in confluence or will diverge and devolve in unpredictable ways is the question the authors leave us with. The situation is a state of emergency: literally, something has emerged with a weight and a resonance but it is also something that, time-pending, could become an emergency in the negative sense vis-a-vis the accidental and the catastrophic, i.e., renewed repression, external political and military pressure…

I found myself connecting this to some discussions we’ve had here in relation to the idea of momentum, particularly in relation to the uprising dans les banlieues in French cities in late November 2005 (see: On Paris Burning). Barrios, favelas, shanty towns, and the concentric rings of urban ghettos: these emerged as a result of massive post-industrial capitalist reforms aimed at driving people from rural communities and/or peripheral territories. This points to a similar wave of migratory flows, a pattern of development and orientation that once again posits the city — even as wired global hub now existing more “vertically” its anachronistic “horizontal” arrangement—still as a formidable structure of defense-in-depth, a fortress keeping people out. Despite our (Western gaze? Northern gaze? Fractured & discontinuous gazes?) idealizations about the integration of the cosmopolitan place of the global polis, the idea of the city still remains a very physical and opaque place in many contexts.

In Sánchez’ and Westmascott’s recounting of the 2003 “gas wars” in Bolivia, they describe the efficacy of El Alto, an edge-ghetto and deregulated “twin-city” of La Paz, as both a community and a staging area. It served as the place from which Evo Morales – now, the first Aymaran (indigenous) president in Bolivia’s history – and the massive coalition of affiliated groups, organizations, and supporters (Hardt and Negri’s the wealth of the poverty of the multitude?) collectively uttered their tactical aim directed at La Paz: “Not one drop of gas.” The popular mobilization of people taking to the streets in protest and occupation shut down La Paz and prevented the import of gas into the city, shutting it down.

On these problems, and in connection to the sorts of events we’ve witnessed in France, Paul Virilio offers a salient remark:

“The desert is spreading, they say. Yet, it is not the desert that is spreading over the planet, but the urban wasteland – the place where, without ever mixing, the multitude of ethnic microcosms survive – in the shanty towns, the half way hostels, the sink estates…Recently, when some young North Africans were asked why the did not want to stay in the Maghreb [the expanse of territory west of the Nile and north of the Sahara desert – North Africa] and preferred to emigrate [to France or, generally, Europe], they replied, with the simplicity that comes with stating the obvious: “Because there’s nothing here to take!” They could just as well have said, “Because it already looks like a desert here!” The ‘deportees’ in the ‘camps’ of our urban wastelands are not, as our ministers go on joyfully repeating, ‘savages’ or even ‘new barbarians’. In reality, they are merely indicating the irresistible emergence of a previously unknown level of deprivation and human misery. They are waste-products of a military -industrial, scientific civilization which has applied itself for almost two centuries to depriving individuals the knowledge and skill accumulated over generations and millenia, before a post-industrial upsurge occurred which now seeks to reject them, on the grounds of definitive uselessness, to zones of lawlessness where they are exposed defenceless to exactions of kapos of a new kind.”
(Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, 62)

While Virilio tends toward overdeterminations of the hagiographic type (the “technophobic monk” as critic), there’s some resonance to his remarks. The outskirts are a fall-out zone, a kind of wreckage and ruin that is re-built by communities making due (noun) but also making do (verb) with what they have in and around themselves. They serve very clearly as relays for the “deprivation and misery”, the measure of startling discrepancies of scales of resource allocation.

Though the suburban ideal in North America is still thriving (relatively), the formation of edge-cities and ethnoburbs suggests both the intersection of different territories and the articulation of overlapping places existing within the same nominal spaces within those territories. This is to say that perhaps it’s less a matter of mixing and more a matter of aggregation, especially in Canada and, specifically, in Toronto where the population is radically heterogeneous and less homogeneous; or rather, difference is easily detectable via appearances. The polarizing distinctions one can make in El Alto/La Paz or even in Paris’s outlying districts are more difficult in Toronto but all the more important when you consider the kinds of fragmentations that could or can occur.

As for connections between these territories and zones and places? Well, global popular culture weaves through them all, a transnational circuit with an autonomy all its own, mediated and remediated in different ways and at different rate. Matthew McKinon’s current CBC online feature, Hang the DJ, offers a take on how the practice of hip-hop interacts with these kinds of prominent political and social problems. He devotes one installment to hip-hop in la banlieu and also devotes a section of his discussion to hip-hop in relation to “the culture of retribution” and the increased incidence of lethal gun violence in Toronto. I have no doubt that there are currents of hip-hop running through El Alto, indigenous-inflected hip-hop as a vehicle for political expression. I expect that the hip-hop will soon augment the coffee exports and the grassroots political praxis driving potential social transformation; I can hear, with an air of global celebrity (M.I.A.?), the messianic coming of a Bolivian MC from the tough streets of El Alto…

[Note: for the record, initiate celebration. This is my first generation using Open Office, which is now running brilliantly on my laptop. Go open source.]

Bear with me.

Last week, Nat and I headed down to the besieged Gladstone Hotel for a reading and discussion of two new books by their respective Toronto authors. It was an event hosted by Pages Books, one of Toronto’s better independent bookstores, and was part of larger winter/spring program, entitled “This Is Not A Reading Series.”

First, on “besieged”: the Gladstone—still a darling (in my mind) among the refurbished and retrofitted “cultural venues” on the Queen West West strip (maybe one “west”…?)–is in the midst of working hard to retain its singular status and resist the generic flattening vis-a-vis other related places nearby. I tend to think that, for the most part, a lot of those places constitute a familiar but derivative arts-&-culture vibe, but I don’t want to suggest a valuation based on degrees of fidelity to some credible and “authentic” ideal (though words like “derivative” certainly go there on their own accord). The Gladstone hasn’t been as rigorously colonized and uptaken as some of its cohorts and has, after a very generous and gorgeous renovation phase, yet to have its intestinal track removed by any combination of overdevelopped commercial interests and the commodifying cooling agents from the city’s other geographies.

So, you guessed it: these things coincide with the much-discussed g-word, gentrification.

Gladstone is somehow managing to straddle the interests of local communities without imploding under its own vision, without outstripping its own local and rooted character in the interest of something else. Certainly, it’s already an iconic fixture; further, its an index, symptomatic of the development both intentional and unintentional ongoing around it; yet, lastly, it has yet to succumb to symbolic status as a representation of what happens when good ideas are extracted and exhausted to the point of having little to do with the mandate with which something begins. The Gladstone is fighting its own becoming an agent of gentrifiction…

Cosmopolitan literary hermenuts notwithstanding (i.e., uppity Nat and I), the above-mentioned reading pitted Toronto’s ideal-type benefactor of nepotism—all-the-parties socialite and part-time columnist Leah McLaren—against Katrina Onstad, a local cultural critique and commentator on Reel-to-Reel, Toronto’s own film/cinema weekly program on public-access, non-profit TVO. “Against” is the operative word: McLaren’s book, The Continuity Girl, follows the epiphanic exploits of a continuity girl (or person, the one on film sets who at the director’s side and who, take-to-take, ensures continuity and the consistency of the mise-en-scene and all diegetic things generally) living life meaningfully amid “sperm banditry” and “murky social waters” in a journey-themed trajectory of redemption; Onstad’s novel, How Happy to Be, is a tongue-in-cheek critical assessment of fictive Maxime, a vapid and vacuous manifestation of the local media scene and opportunistic purveyor of her own celebrity status.

(Onstad is taking aim at the scene; McLaren resides within in it, though perhaps Katrina deserves more scrutiny- she too is part of the craftiness of “cultural work.”)

Though I overdraw and reduce whatever potential and capacities these books may possess, the point is that the cosmopolitanites in tow were on-site at the Gladstone for a battle: suggestions had circulated that Onstad’s character bore more than coincidental resemblance to Leah, the self-absorbed manufacturer of drivel so-called “smart” people like to hate. Nat and I, as tortured McLaren haters (who can no longer withstand the trashy personal machinations of her “column” in the Globe and Mail’s Saturday Style section), acknowledged that our desire to partake in the event was mostly an exercise in voyeurism of the best kind: we wanted Onstad to roast McLaren. Suffice to say we were disappointed: everything was polite; there were a few remarks issued by Onstad that drifted into the realm of insinuation but we heard agreements of a politely conceded common point-of-view between “authors” rather than a more political and socially inflected debate. We spent most of the time selfishly belittling others around us, playing the game of “Who here is here for ‘encounters with literature’ and who is here to see a roast?” Then we realized we were just as petty and vacuous so we decided it was time to go.

The Gladstone is a hub for this, a dependable conduit, a cultural machine, a place i could fit into my circuit and feel relatively good and decent about patronizing: it leant itself to a kind of suture that wouldn’t want ruptured, that I could swallow in its seamlessness and my familiarity with it. Leaving, what remained in my head, then, was the notion of continuity (McLaren be damned for suggesting its efficacy). I caught myself thinking along a trajectory of the local character of the immediate Gladstone environment, the gentrification issues and processes in the city, and the implicit demands made by local residents who patronize the area to love and live locally, close to the ground in a particular neighbourhood, who also attempt to carve out a space that activates an anachronistic sense of the goodness of the mythic urban versus the vacuum of the suburbs and Toronto’s edge cities.

I realized that, in terms of the inputs one would desire supplied, the matter was one of a logistics of continuity: literally, the desire for a continuous kind of environment where one can live locally, without car or commute or other late-capital ill, a kind of city life as political praxis as argued (some time ago) by gentrification scholars David Lee and Michael Caulfield. Then, I started to think about the class-dimensions of these demands (Who can afford to live in the neighbourhood? At the expense of whom? Bourgeoise-what?) and further, had a bell ringing in my head in relation to a housing ad that Nat had read me recently. The ad, listing amenities and stating at the outset the apartment’s proximity to the West-End YMCA (Dovercourt and College) also included under “amenity” (i.e., bonus, motivation) the new local Starbucks as a definite asset. Starbucks: one syntatic piece of urban grammar required for continuity; assembled, editing, juxtaposed with the YMCA—a perfect continuous link, Starbucks, like a visual match-on-action or a rudimentary sound bridge, is a continuity device.

Now, I tend to think that the whole “Starbuckization” discourse is moot to the extent that if it takes the erection and installation of a Starbucks outlet to set off the alarms, we’ve all missed the boat by a good 5-7 years. People should be raising their eyes when the 7-Eleven comes out to play. Brand, symbolic power, ubiquity—whatever. Starbucks is but the finishing move in a series of events that prepare and pave the way, that prioritize its very own inclusion to the amenable list as a defining pillar of the community akin to something like the West-End Y. Actually, Fuse Magazine’s recent issue, “Pimping the ‘Hood”, gets at this prodcutively and in a Toronto-context, right from the bombastic graffiti on the new Starbucks at Queen and Dovercourt reading “Fuck You Drake [Hotel; cohort, but no equal, of the Gladstone], you did this.”

One more thing on Starbucks: beyond the coffee-shop fall-out zone map I want to create, I notice that there is never any consideration of Starbucks as a franchizing vehicle for economic and commercial integration by newcomers to these neighbourhoods, especially immigrant families attempting to carve out a space in service or retail. It is newly arrived families who undertake the operation and management of these places, which themselves serve as ways of participating in public life; hence the coffee house and its legacy… Certainly, the globalizing impetus of Starbucks as a hegemonic corporate entity and cultural agent of Americana leaves little for debate; I don’t doubt this and I want to redeem less of it. 2 dollar coffee is not fair trade by any extent, regardless of the official seal. Yet, getting beyond a monolithic conception of how these outlets become specific avenues to those who undertake their operation is of great concern. This opens a whole other series of debates about so-called “integration”, about who one’s neighbours are, and who we or you or I think they ought to to be.

Further, in terms of continuity and amenities, ongoing in Toronto is the development of self-enclosed and contained “communities” usually comprised of new mid- to high-rise condos with an offering of affiliated retail and commercial-corporate spaces to keep residents tied locally to their most necessary and relevant consumer/lifestyle requirements. One such place under construction goes by “Battery Park”, no doubt drawing on mythological connotations to the urban zest of New York’s place of the same name. They’re effectively touted as ergonomic and efficient modes of contemporary urban life, little concentrated islands of urban experience. Again, the question begins as one of artifice and authenticity but any urban space is artificial at the outset, a built-environment with tendencies to synthesize and self-organize in certain paradoxical ways, freely but with the soft guidance of what its users and residents as citizens express and demand. That’s why most of Montrèal has a depaneur, a fruit/vege shop, and a small cafe. Recall also the Parisian entresol as the example of choice for this sort of constructed proximity and density of action.

But these new continuity communities are an entirely different thing. They’re preplanned and are totally modular, and as such can travel and establish a kind of monoculture of the worst kind, enabling an altogether different “garrison mentality” than Northrop Frye intended. Also, something is driving this market and that drive is desire. These new organized environments remind me of a film, Waydowntown, where four (?) co-workers wager on who can stay inside the longest using the interconnected PATH-like elevated and enclosed pathways in downtown Calgary that run between their condos and the commercially-oriented skyscrapers within which the work. Though they each in turn redeem the outside, taking the mildest of discontinuity over the hegemony of coherence, there’s a hint of something ominous that remains unsettling. I don’t mean to offer a didactic analysis of the film but rather want to suggest that this enclosed and contained little environment raises the stakes as to who does get in and out, and who and what we want our neighbors and urban environments to become. Dionne Brand’s complex and resilient novel, What We All Long For, comes to mind. What tendencies are becoming embedded? What are we embedding?

Regarding the plight of the Queen Street corridor—both in and of itself and in relation to communities like Parkdale, which have been bracing for years against developmental fall-out—there’s a debate on the table over the planned building of two higher-rise condo complexes just south of Queen Street near Dufferin Avenue. Word is that, in their planned form, the buildings as designed would cast shadows at certain points of the day on to the strip, leaving residents and local-venue users alike miffed and frustrated. The community of cultural workers, weekend tourists, and working poor would have to absorb more in the way of demands placed on local services and daily living space while also giving way to the condos, which would bring the pre-packaged continuity components, ironically drawing business away from local independent haunts that most likely serve as symbolic draws for the efficacy of the cool-factor of the development itself. Talk about feedbacks. Whether this would erase the Gladstone from the paradigmatic warehouse of experiential elements vis-a-vis some sort of local continuity is the question. If I can’t head down to the joint to see literary slurs and make self-deriding fun of the local hipsters, or if I have to do it farther west, I’ll know that things have moved to the point where the status-quo is less disposed to disjuncture and more oriented to a kind of territorialized seamlessness that is clinical in outlook and barrier-like in type.

Neil:

In desiring some things to adhere to me: summation (with associated
words and diagrams), or the art of the elegant ergonomic shortcut,
(il)legible for you, I plead lame and guilty (that blockage on which we
thrive) and offer with the hope of any and all that I become what I
attempt to do. Be generous as I stand on the shoulders of one lumbering
giant and proceed to slide down his slippery back…
Remember, freedom is a relation.

“There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another
book. This second way of reading is intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric circuit.”

Gilles Deleuze, Letter to a Harsh Critic, 1977
(naively cited, mired, and admired)

“neil in turkey”, natalie kallio
“exmpire ii”, andrew zbihlyj
“collaborators”, margaux williamson

A few snippets, assembled in juxtaposition, about our intersections with “energy” and “environment”, those categories we tend to compartmentalize as if they were external and container-like things (much like our thinking about “culture”) that we periodically inhabit and fill with temporary purpose and meaning. In feigning autonomy and control in relation to these containers (and in “inventing” them in the first place), we foster an understanding of energy and environment that ultimately handcuffs us, denying the fact that they are things that we practice and modify and alter—and that subsume and modify us—daily. We are in them and, well, are them, especially the in relation to the environment/ecology-side of things: organic bodies of biomass; walking batteries; engineers of complex territories and networks; plunderers; epidemiological entities; accruers of toxins; mutators of toxins; vehicular vessels for toxins; telescopers and outstrippers of evolution; ecological negotiators.

Note: I scratch the surface of what is most likely years of attempts to explain and allow for socially and culturally mediated versions of ecological and environmental thought.

First, an email exchange between a friend and I on this point with a sensitivity to our shared Canadian context:

me: “…i am hesitant to use the label (‘environmental issues’) as it suggests the container-like status of the environment, as if it were some external thing rather than something that mediates us and that we mediate daily…that conceptualization of the problem is the problem. it’s ecological at the outset, even if the inputs are built, are concrete and smog…”

he: “Thanks buds…you hit the nail on the head with the ‘environmental issues’ comment. Another of my vicious pet peeves.”

Second, a question to him, following my reading of Arno Kopecky’s “The Hydrogen Generation” in the current issue of The Walrus.

Some context: Kopecky documents Iceland’s attempt to transition from oil- and gas-based energy consumption to geothermal and hydrogen-based sources. The small island-state’s economy and energy demands provide for an interesting little laboratory in real time and space. Working through the geographic and geological specificities of Iceland, Kopecky provides a pedestrian but instructive stroll through alternative energy sources that satisfy some threshold of environmental and ecological sustainability. Though Kopecky (and I) tend toward conflating, on one hand, the source of generation and means of production with, on the other, matters of delivery and transmission (a function for Kopecky’s composition, I suspect, of article length and the venue of publication) he makes a didactic, compelling, and useful argument. Alternate energy sources can supplement or even (ideally) replace non-renewable fossil fuels (dirty extraction, lengthy processing, geopolitical upheaval), as is the case in Iceland: geothermal heat, hydrogen fuel cells, photovoltaic cells and solar power, wind power. Kopecky discusses the potential effectiveness, the cost and expense of implementation, and relative efficiency of these particular generational capacities; further, he suggests we ought to start investing here in Canada (the PEI wind farm is a good place to start).

Having read this, I emailed my same friend with:

me: “We need some help; federally and provincially, we’re doing fuck all, aren’t we?”

he: “Well…I guess the quick answer is that is, yes, we are doing fuck all.”

Third, this was no news, though, and our rhetorical flourishes were accompanied by simultaneous announcements elsewhere, namely by the Ontario Power Authority, the body “responsible for ensuring an adequate, long-term supply of electricity in Ontario.” The OPA announced the release of their report (“Supply Mix Advice Report”; see http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/), which predicted and addressed the province of Ontario’s increasing energy demand and the impending and inevitable crunch. While playing the “correct” cards and calling for the closure of Ontario’s pollution- and emission-heavy coal-fired plants (dirty? jobs displaced? localized economies and flows stunted?), the OPA issued forth this gem: “It’s obvious that we need more power plants.” No reduction, no strategies for alternate systems, sources, or generational capacities. No “cultural” approach to cultivating a green ideology of conservation and moderation, of arguing that less is really more, at least in the end…nope, just more power plants. Period. So, of course, what kind of plants? Nuclear. In fact, the report advocates for 24 new nuclear reactors on top of the world’s biggest nuclear power facility, the Bruce Nuclear Power Station on Lake Huron, Darlington Power Plant outside of Oshawa, and Pickering’s own nuclear power station with its four offline reactors gathering cobwebs after leaking tritium into the groundwater for 18 years in the Greater Toronto Area. Also, according to a recent The Globe and Mail article, the world uranium market is booming with demand exceeding supply and uranium prices going through roof. So it seems like an opportune time to dive-in and fully invest in procuring more uranium. Give the folks at Cameco (Canada’s uranium mining specialists) more opportunity to press the issue and “stabilize the market”. Consider another remark from my friend:

he: “I just get so frustrated when I see big-time, international economic players steadfastly determined to cash in on all remaining oil. Because as long as you have one country willing to do this, no single country like Canada will go out on a limb politically, and put their own country at a disadvantage economically.”

Replace “oil” with “uranium” and abracadabra…Consider Alberta, tar sands, and know that producing a barrel of tar-sand oil requires the equivalent on the extraction and processing side. The capital keeps moving but the oil will not. The answer: go nuclear. Consumers, corporations, the movement of capital: all are external to the “environment” and all in need of “energy” for electrical power.

Fourth, according to the Canadian Nuclear Agency (http://www.cna.ca/english/index.asp), nuclear power generation is “clean, reliable, and affordable”. Hhm? Clean? No visible emissions but leakage, radiation and meltdown potential, and a degrading 12000 year-old waste-storage problem that we cannot even adequately sign and signify, a problem that we have yet to begin to manage and administer in ways that are reliable, secure, and safe. Peter van Wyck’s recent book, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat, accounts for these issues in spades. We’re willing to expose ourselves to a threat that can be justified by what, borrowing from van Wyck, we could call a willingness to allow for and accommodate a “maximum credible accident”. Or rather, a big mess that with which we’re willing to flirt, which could become catastrophic like, say, the Chernobyl meltdown or Three Mile Island. But these are anomalies, right?
So, then, fifth, a quote from van Wyck’s book that relates directly to the OPA’s announcement for more power, for choosing nuclear over coal and nuclear over other potential options and investments. van Wyck builds on the thinking of Ulrich Beck, a theorist of the concepts and construction of risk and threat:

“…Risk is calculable (by definition, and therefore, arguably), while threat, on the other hand, is not…From this point of view, the presence of modern threat is in no meaningful way an environmental problem. It is, rather, an institutional crisis. Threats are slippery things. They are, observes Beck with concision, ‘produced industrially, externalized economically, individualized juridically, legitimized scientifically, and minimized politically.’ And in public consciousness, the surplus of possible threats allows for easy substitution, modification, and transportation. “Just in time” threats. If air pollution from coal-fired energy production is the threat du jour, or if it simply is the volatility of Middle Eastern oil prices, nuclear power generation may reenter the market “defensively”, through the back door of current anxiety and collective forgetting. In the language of game theory, ecological threat is a negative-sum game of collective self-damage.” (91-92)

Collective self-damage. Daunting. I have no solution as yet nor do I have a great way to end this thread. I smell profit and ease over sustainability and perceive an industrial infrastructure that is embedded, that would require immense retrofitting much like that required by our understanding of and encounter with “the environment”. I suggest that we hurry up and get inside “environment” and “energy” before we collectively and selfishly forget not only the problem but the very immense and scale and scope of the stakes.

by Risa Dickens.

Part 1.
Editing Openness: Lessons from Open Source.

I’m really glad Christian drew the issue of edited openness into the comments about space and scale which followed his recent post from Yellowknife.
Personally, I think a lot about how public spaces can become healthy ecosystems, instead of slipping towards inequality or control. I am half of the team that’s spent the past month building Indyish, and some of every day for the past two years building Open. And I am the one who most often edits our Openness.

Building Open is an idea that bumps up against every one else’s ideas about what Openness is or should be. Building this site and evolving it has challenged my own thinking-through of the processes developed in the open source community (the subject of my MA thesis, still in draft form). And that was sort of the original intention.

Often, questions ethical and practical that I’ve encountered here have sent me back to open source, looking for suggestions.

Open source development has played out in as many different ways as there are different, successful open source companies. For Open Journal I have been following the templates created by Open Source leaders like Linus Torvalds- the genius coder and “benevolent dictator for life” behind Linux, the kernel of the central open source operating system. (Linux sits at the heart of most open source-enabled innovations, including the Apache servers that run most of the Internet and the small computers that coordinate the self assembly of the floating blimps in Julien’s arty robotics.)

The collaborative process that built Linux is layered and complex now, but it still boils down to this:

Anyone is welcome to submit bits that they think will work. Linus Torvalds, recognized for having built the entire first draft of the kernel on his own, and for having made a beautiful and smart thing, has final say on what goes in and what doesn’t, and what needs fixing for it to work.

Decisions are resolved pragmatically- does this work well, logically, efficiently, does it work well over time, does it scale, does it allow for and enable growth..?

If a contributor fundamentally disagrees with the decisions being made by Torvalds, they are welcome to attempt to fork the code. “Forking” is to take all the openly available material from the Linux code (which is all the Linux code) and build it in whatever new direction you like, and see if you can get people to work on it with you. Forking is an essential function in the ecosystem that is Open Source. And it’s something we’re open to as well, because our interest is always in building and being part of healthy ecosystems.

The importance of the right to fork makes sense when you think about the open source system on an extra-large scale. (And thanks again the Christian, for drawing our attention to differences in scale.)

Thinking about open source requires a kind of sliding scale- one that can see the individual creative spark alongside the enormity of the network.

Open source is bigger than any one project, (and many projects, like operating systems, are massive in size); it’s bigger than giant networks of projects like Sourceforge; bigger than the legal and business realms of open source and things like Creative Commons; bigger than it’s subtle role in enormous battles like the ones playing out in the music and motion picture industries. Open source is big, and so this question about scale is huge because it points to how hard it’s going to be to build things that will survive the size of the open source network. Not to mention how hard it can be to know which directions will prove right in the long run.

Will a choice continue to seem smart as it gets applied to increasingly various scenarios, in all kinds of chaotic and tugging contexts? Will a system stay quick and light across the infinite variations of software and hardware?

Will an idea that seems brilliant to me in my bubble of books continue to be meaningful when it’s read against knowledge from other disciplines? Or will I then hear in it what I couldn’t before: the repetition of super-sized buzz words, beneath which I have hidden my secret confusion.

Sometimes I think people do this: bury big haunting questions in fascinating twists of words.
Sometimes I think this is the result of individuals or groups believing they should build an operating-system-sized theory on their own.
Challenging this misconception is, in part, the idea behind OpenJournal.

Part 2:
Our Working Philosophy.

As I wrote in the copy for Indyish, I’m interested in editors. I think everyone needs an editor- every idea needs to get shaken up by other perspectives and also needs to get reworked a few times by its original fashioner. Good, complex things don’t get built by one person in one try. As Torvalds pointed out, it generally takes one set of eyes to see the spark of a new idea, or to correctly identify the crux of a problem that needs solving, and another set of eyes to solve it. An organized but open network is necessary to connect the eyes and minds that together can solve problems. People, I think, flip back and forth between both sides of this job all the time, but wherever they are on that road they still need those other perspectives to bounce off of.

I want Open to provide the time and space for theories to be considered, tempered, and reworked. And I want the people behind Open to get to play whatever useful role we can in that process. And if at any time someone would like to fork the theory we’re working on, or would like to post an unedited version of their writing on their own website, or would like the entire history of the edits we’ve made together to be published alongside their final version, then Open would be super into that.

Part 3:
Why Edit?

Because we are trying to bring out the best in each other’s theory and writing.

Open is not just a blog- it’s not a group diary where anything goes. If there were no spaces like that- if it were impossible to get access to your own space for publishing on the web- then we would have felt the need to provide that. But Blogger, Myspace, and the Mac version of blogging tools – not to mention free and open source systems like WordPress- answer that need bountifully.

So instead, at Open, we’re building theory collaboratively. And a project that big needs a project manager. And that’s been me.

Part 4.
The Flaw in Systems.

I stand by my edits and by the careful and continuously evolving thought that’s gone into Open so far. And in general, people seem to find the fact that an editor will look at their work to be quite reassuring- it allows them to take chances. And we love that. But it means that there’s always more editing to be done. And so it seems there’s a flaw in the system. And it’s a flaw linux encountered eventually as well.

Linus Torvalds is fricken smart but he isn’t perfect. (nobody is, hence the title of my thesis: “no one knows everything.”) At one point in the now-nearly-mythic linux history, Torvalds made some mistakes and got tired and defensive.

But actually, maybe this wasn’t a flaw. Maybe it was just the rumblings of a system getting bigger and approaching a phase transition. And maybe we’ve reached this kind of a stage with Open as well.

Ryan Carriere died heading home to help his daughters with Halloween costumes.

1: Dying to ride
By LESLEY MCALLISTER
Local artist in tragic Queen West accident yet another casualty of city’s neglect of cyclists

The group gathering on the corner outside the Gladstone Hotel is swelling by the minute. Candles are being lit, blowing out in the evening breeze and being lit again. It looks like the whole neighbourhood’s come out to honour Ryan Carriere, the cyclist killed here a week ago today when he was struck by a truck making a right turn and dragged under the wheels. I knew Carriere for seven years as my neighbour, the way you do when you share a walkway and a fence in need of repair. I didn’t know he was a gifted comic book artist, that he made wonderful little books based on the natural world he came across in the backyards and laneways of Parkdale. The day before he was killed, he’d been here at the Gladstone, selling his work at Canzine. We’re waiting on the cyclists coming over from City Hall so the vigil can begin. They arrive in good form with a clanging of bells, lay their bikes down on the spot where the accident happened and once again unroll the banner: A Cyclist Was Killed Here. We number in the hundreds by now and spill onto Queen, closing down the intersection. It’s pretty amazing. I didn’t feel much like cycling across Queen in rush hour in the dark. I’m sad, scared and really, really angry. Our city has failed absolutely to make our streets safe for cyclists. Our bike lanes are ineffectual. Stopping lines at intersections aren’t clearly marked. And we’re still waiting for the city to act on the coroner’s recommendation for safety skirts on trucks, a recommendation that came out of the death of another young cyclist a year and a half ago. Carriere made the ride along Queen every day to and from his job as a letter carrier at the Dovercourt postal station. It’s four blocks, five minutes at most. It was a clear afternoon, and he was heading home to help his daughters Minnow, eight, and Plum, five, get ready for Halloween. He cycled because he cared about the planet. He was a tree planter and an enthusiastic grower of luscious-looking green beans. One time he and the girls came over to my yard to help free a possum that had a grocery bag wrapped around its neck. The possum ended up in his book Animals We Have Known. Cyclists in Toronto are also becoming an endangered species. And until we’re willing to give up the automobile as our sacred cow and build dedicated bike paths along major streets, they’re going to keep getting killed. And we’re going to have to keep meeting like this. “Ryan! Ryan! Ryan!” we call out to the ringing of bicycle bells. “We’ll miss you!”

ii.)
“Cyclists make good hood art”, Letters, Now Magazine, November 17-23, 2005, 10

Despite your furry-headed sense of entitlement, city roads were not made for cyclists, but for a little invention we call the automobile. If you want to play with your bicycle, go to the park, ride along a bike path and ring your little bell. Have fun—just leave the streets to people engaged in adult pursuits such as earning a living. Bicycle Luddites at play in the 21st century are destined, nay, begging, to become hood ornaments. Dingaling.

Andrew Matheson
Toronto

iii.)

To Andrew Matheson,

Andrew: wow. Very clever. “Dingaling.” Nice stuff, the automatopoeia, itself tastelessly verging on “malicious”. No doubt the mailbag will be full next week on account of your diatribe. Incendiary mission accomplished.

First, I thought you were being ironic, which is admittedly dubious given the context of your remarks—though not altogether unexpected. It’s reassuring to see people willingly resort without qualm to cheapened remarks at the expense of someone’s untimely death. Smooth. I suspect you think I take the same opportunity. Well, read on and see for yourself.

Regardless of initial reactions, I still thought that I could redeem you, thinking, “Maybe this guy is ‘really committed’ to whatever anti-something scene or lifestyle he envisions for himself. Maybe he’s just scared and has no sense of decorum or sympathy, which he believes to be ideological and bourgeois and petty.”

I wanted to believe that that was what you thought, even if your commentary was a callous and malicious expression of caustic cynicism, which for you is some sort affirmation of your life. There seemed to be some (small) point of rupture where your façade was penetrable; I hoped to hear in the distance your laughing at yourself as you rattled off, with flair, your triumphant vision for the 21st century.

In this vein, I thought that responding was simply an exercise in entertaining your opportunistic whims and your tactless discursive and rhetorical gamesmanship, exercised for whatever self-serving reasons.

Then, as I considered things further, I thought, “This guy is serious,” and then I paused. Then I wondered where you lived, where you travelled, what sorts of things you did during your daily routine, figuring it would be worth confronting you or calling you out. I wished some pain your way.

Then I stopped thinking along that trajectory. I realized that you’re a small, feeble, sad infant of a person who equates wisdom with consumption and maturity with possessing and operating a motor vehicle. Seems your sense of driving and its discontents are things that are exactly vehicular—linear, aligned, no regard for what happens outside that line of flight. You’re bent on attaching so much significance to your car, your capital-intensive signifier par excellence.

Hearing you issue comments like “Luddite” is problematic: did you take no notice of the smog warnings this summer? Is making a living via driving your mobile furnace—to earn cash only to feed back into the maintenance and cost of your vehicle—really that efficient? I guess you don’t take much notice of it outside the “earning a living” aspect that drives drivers like yourself, with whom you identify. Anyway, I’m probably wrong: you’ve probably calculated that cost and extended yourself well beyond your limits to maintain that habitual pattern because, after all, that’s the basis of one’s adult pursuits, right?

Funny, though: Ryan Carriere was riding home. From work. After a summer of working as a treeplanter, most likely to augment his income to help his family. The day he was—let’s not mistake it for a neutral “death”—killed, he was riding home from work. To his family. To help his kids get ready for a night out.

Though I contend that any accident is by no means an anomaly—it’s an emergent part of any successful system that exists prior to success—there is certainly something to be said about the object of risk and the lurking supplement of threat that affixes itself to any of our everyday endeavours. Or maybe not yours, Andrew, as you’re an adult who makes good decisions and drives his car to work. You protect yourself; you’ve got no time for the park. You equate work with your car and your lifestyle and the things that are really important.

Unfortunately, riding in the city—or rather, in a city populated by ignorant and indifferent people such as yourself—is often fraught with risk, though it ought not to be. Ryan Carriere’s death provided a relay for the sort of environment with which we all contend: a territory laden with threats and dangers that we take for granted, threats we defer and deny because we treat them as if they are and remain natural.

I wonder, Andrew, what you make of automobile accidents? Vehicle-related deaths? Should we mourn them any more—or at all—because they involve your so-called adults who cruise around inside of a secure, fibreglass carapace while claiming they didn’t have choices about their own locomotion?

Cars aren’t natural; at least, their use need not be inevitable. They’re products of an industrialized drive for profit, the sign of commodity and incorporated interest intent on producing need and prioritizing desire at the behest of all else, namely your lungs, your health, and all the cellular membranes in your body. Make no mistake: this connects to things that are happening thousands of miles away and deep inside places you can’t even see or sense. Toxic.

In the simple act of choosing to ride—a choice you ignore and erase from consideration—Ryan Carriere encountered an assembled set of forces—car-driven, time-binding, rush-prone, remorseless—exerted in an environment within which little respect is given for those who attempt, even in minute ways, to alter the things taken for granted. That, Andrew, is the basis of invention: questioning assumptions, those depoliticized nuggets of “common sense”.

That is what’s foreign to you, and what Ryan Carriere had in spades: inventiveness, awareness, and responsibility. In a word, an ethic. The ethic exacted his life. Sound grand and pathetic to you? Probably. Really, it is so simple. I drive a wedge between us but I maintain I can teach you.

I wish you could have seen and heard the vigil for Ryan Carriere. It was a lesson in efficacy, in recognition, and in community affect. A singular moment of the wealth of the poverty of the bike-riding multitude in mourning, very much unlike the solidarity of the multitude that trades in alienation and frustration induced by traffick-heavy commutes, the occupied bounds of the mobilized bubble, and the road-borne vectors traced daily.

I hope some sympathy comes your way via something less severe than your own maligned injury or demise; though I fear that, given the choice you make daily (whether you consciously make it or not), it may take massive and monumental trauma to move you to a massive shift in conception. That’s the real irony, Andrew: the trauma is all around but for you, it’s not legible. You’re too busy bounding your world with “us and them”. You lack the grounds for the kind of perception required, which is what saddens me most. Dingaling indeed.

Sincerely,
Neil Balan