When I started work at Memorial University ten years ago, my wonderful colleague Rob (one of two wonderful Robs in my department at the time) was touring me around campus, but the campus was not as wonderful. We started with our building: the Arts and Administration Building. I think this structure dates to the 1940s (the university having been established officially in 1949), with our St. John's campus opening officially in 1961, but I might be off with these dates. Regardless, the passage of time has not treated it well. When I first walked through the it, there were patches and lines of tape on the walls everywhere on the third floor, which houses our department. "What's with that?" I asked Rob. In what I later learned is Rob's deadpan sense of ironic humour, he said something like "Oh, that's the recent renovation--and I'm sure they'll finish it any day now."
      That wasn't the extent of the damage to fix, either. There was a hole in the ceiling in the men's washroom above one of the stalls, which had a privacy barrier that was loose. (From a hushed voice, I heard once that it leaked onto one of my colleagues, and I heard that from the source—not of the leak but my colleague.) There was more tape on the walls. The tile around the urinals was cracked and missing pieces. One of the toilets was out of service. I am aware that the university is a space of privilege, including the spaces of the Arts building that are associated with a cultural elite, but what I’m describing also illustrates uneven development on a local level. The building was in rough shape, unlike the Engineering and Medicine buildings across the road.
       Ten years later, almost no visible repairs have been conducted on the third floor of Arts, except for a new grippy set of tiles was installed around the urinals a couple of weeks ago, inspiring this post, if inspiration can be said to come from below (rather than from a hole in the ceiling). Admittedly, we renovated our main classroom, A-3018, not long ago, with a new whiteboard, and other classrooms have had minor technological upgrades. I specified "visible" because the Arts building has also had frequent asbestos abatements, as a lot of places on campus have, which might have been the original cause of the holes in the walls. The holes, of course, are not “original” in the sense that this building was once new and then probably well-maintained while it seemed like an asset to keep.
     Irrespective of the history of this built environment, on top of the discomfort of working in these less than encouraging conditions, I have become increasingly concerned that they also deter students from enrolling in the humanities, and they are probably something of a shock to prospective job candidates and guest lecturers whom we have invited here to St. John's. I imagine that the lecturers and anyone coming to a public lecture or event might be dismayed by how quickly the nicely appointed foyer (however patriarchal and imperial its statuary may be) degrades, a hallway or a stairwell later, to the junky spaces that are common here. Prospective students moving through campus would naturally feel more attracted to Engineering, Medicine, and Core Sciences, which have better-maintained or newer facilities. The so-called decline of the humanities—like talking about the near-extinction of the American buffalo—implies a natural occurrence and disregards the agency at work: an administration and a government that invest in some parts of the institution far more than others, with the effect of deliberately shrinking other parts. Who can blame students for enrolling in STEM fields when they get the message, through the medium of the space (in Marshall McLuhan’s terms), that they’re not welcome in the humanities here? Who can blame candidates who turn down our jobs, or our professors (our colleagues and friends) who move, mid-career, to other universities?
    A public has to have a dimension of invitation. The American literary and cultural scholar Michael Warner’s view of publics is that they are created by an address: “Hey, you, this might interest you, so listen up!” (That is definitely not a quotation.) A public tends to be inviting--though there are some prominent exceptions in the tribalist publics of American society today, the eve of the American election. I don’t remember if Warner considers the issue of the site of the public in Publics and Counterpublics (2002), but it seems obvious that the space in which the public can gather, or can be constituted, would be instrumental to the character of that public. If the site is the medium, it is also the message. If the message is also a “hail” or an interpellation in the Althusserian sense, it provokes ideological responses. Arena politics is likely to be combative; the presidential hopeful (maybe not the best word) Donald Trump invited the wrestling icon Hulk Hogan to tear off his shirt at his Madison Square Garden rally.
​    In the usually more modest and usually more moderate environment of a Canadian university, the site of the public is often a convocation hall, where family and friends are warmly invited to celebrate the graduands and graduates of that year. To a lesser extent, it is also the lecture hall, where public talks occur for more informative and educational purposes. The classroom, too, is a site of the public, or at least a semi-public, because in theory everyone is “invited” (to pay tuition and) to join the class. If there is a prerequisite or enrolment cap for the course, then maybe it is semi-private not semi-public. In my seminar on public intellectuals in Canada, we recently decided that our Go Public assignment might involve a talk given when a guest learner has come, by invitation, to effectively publicize the semi-private/semi-public of the classroom. We have modest hopes for such an event: the guest, unaccustomed to the methods and materials of the course, might learn something, and so might we, through the process of translating knowledge and bringing our guest up to speed.
    The guest might teach us something too, but in the broader scope of declining enrolments and defunding/deteriorating in the humanities (and social sciences), I think we are turning away a lot of potential guests, whether they are students, their families, or our job candidates. I wonder too when was the last time a local or provincial or even federal politician walked through the halls of the Arts building. Has the government turned its back on us, or have we not been welcoming enough? I suspect a little, or more than a little, of both. Ten years later, and more for others, we are living and working with that problem. And not only “with” it. We’re in it, all the way.

Works Cited

• Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Princeton University Press, 2002.

     Yesterday, my union went on strike, and I went with it. The strike touches on a core purpose of this blog, which I started several years ago for a graduate seminar on public intellectuals in Canada. That purpose is to reflect on publics and the public interest. I'm not a political scientist, so I have not researched different conceptions of the public interest, but for me it is basically synonymous with the common good. It is a democratic and egalitarian concept that helps to rationalize benefits for large numbers of people: societal benefits. It is related to rights, like the right to organize, bargain together, and withhold labour.
     In the case of this nascent strike, the administration at Memorial University remains committed to clawing back pension benefits. The proposal is to leave benefits as they are for existing faculty members but to reduce them for new members in the future. In recent communications, the administration has given a rationale: other unions have been persuaded to accept the structural inequality that the proposal would create, so we should too. 
     The rationale implies that we should be fair to other unions and accept the same worsening conditions that they now face. Another way to look at it is that we would be introducing new iniquities into our own union. Perhaps the administration even hopes for that outcome, because the union's solidarity would be undermined—actually, further undermined, because it already has different classes of employees, such as tenured and tenure-track members who enjoy benefits that are not shared with contractual members. 
     The administration has another rationale: we're a publicly funded university in a province that is defunding the university seemingly on the assumption that we cannot afford it, given our public debt, which skyrocketed as the budget for the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric power station ballooned out of control. The competing assumption, or contention, is that the university is an economic powerhouse and creator of knowledge and cultural products; as a site of critique, it can also help our society to avoid mistakes that will entail unsustainably huge long-term costs, such as continuing to invest in fossil fuels.
     I prefer the competing assumption, but I still have difficulty in campaigning for higher salaries, even when recent inflation has dramatically decreased my buying power, and even when the delay in getting a new contract (ours having expired in 2020) means years of no improvements in working conditions. But why should our working conditions improve? We're fat cats, right?
     I do have a squarely middle-class income; I'm not poor, but I probably cannot afford a house big enough for my growing family, certainly not without a lot of help from the extended family. Many professors earn far more than me, especially in other departments and faculties such as Business, Medicine, and Engineering. And the building that houses my office, the Arts and Administration Building, has a multitude of large holes in the walls, covered up many years ago with plastic and fabric tape; bathroom facilities with constantly out-of-service toilets, broken stalls, missing tile, and holes in the ceiling; and drinking fountains that are either out of service or suspected of providing water with too much lead in it. Granted, these are matters of capital and infrastructure, not salaries and benefits, but they are signs of where the money is going on campus, and where it is not. (Cross the highway away from Arts and toward Core Science and Engineering, and it seems clear.) Bringing visiting professors and job candidates to campus is embarrassing when the facilities are in such disrepair. I do not need to be "above" the middle class; I'm not asking for a palace, but I'm a self-respecting person who wants to feel good about not only my work but also my workplace.
     When employees go on strike, it is not only because of a contract, but because of the environmental conditions that suggest that the management of the university, including the government that funds it, is either ineffective or unconcerned for equal treatment. The president of the university gets a base salary of $450,000 plus bonuses, and has continued the trend of expanding the "upper" administration with other well-paid positions, and yet they have not succeeded (yet, anyway) in advocating convincingly for us.
     When will it happen? Today on the picket line we were joking with the old union call-and-response: "What do we want?" "A fair deal!" "When do we want it?" "Three years ago when our contract was up!"
     I acknowledge the logistical challenges of an administration that has to bargain with multiple unions while watching and waiting for the results of bargaining in other parts of the public sector. Nevertheless, I can also deduce that there is a financial incentive to delaying new contracts, especially when inflation is rising not only for employees but also for the university as a whole. In this context, my willingness to make sacrifices for the university would get a significant boost from timely and responsive administrative efforts to renew contracts.
     Cynically, I suspect that the administration's schedule is now driven primarily by the math. It's a cost-benefit analysis. The university's finances improve as long as it doesn't have to pay professors, but eventually it will have to refund a lot of tuition. Another factor is the administration's interest in drawing out the strike to empty the union's coffers so that we will not be able to afford to strike again in four (or six or eight) years if bargaining goes badly for us. 
     Maybe one of my colleagues has found the information to do this analysis, but I doubt it, because the university also has an opacity problem. We want a definition of "collegial governance" in our contract that would improve our sousveillance of budgeting, hiring, and other procedures. We think that a strongly supported mandate of collegial governance would help to convince the government to include a faculty member and a student on the Board of Regents, thereby increasing transparency. As the only university in Canada that has no such representation on its Board, Memorial University is at risk of corruption.
     Corruption can be reduced through equally shared power, which would also lead to more equitable distribution of resources. The administration would gain so much good will from the union if it immediately dropped its demand to claw back pension benefits and made progress on collegial governance and (which I haven't yet mentioned) the "conversion language" that would turn some of the contractual positions into tenure-track positions. We know the world is not a fair place, but we think that universities can be models of fairer, safer, more sustainable places. That's what I voted for, though I'd prefer to be in class and at work.
​

     Yesterday, my union went on strike, and I went with it. The strike touches on a core purpose of this blog, which I started several years ago for a graduate seminar on public intellectuals in Canada. That purpose is to reflect on publics and the public interest. I'm not a political scientist, so I have not researched different conceptions of the public interest, but for me it is basically synonymous with the common good. It is a democratic and egalitarian concept that helps to rationalize benefits for large numbers of people: societal benefits. It is related to rights, like the right to organize, bargain together, and withhold labour.
     In the case of this nascent strike, the administration at Memorial University remains committed to clawing back pension benefits. The proposal is to leave benefits as they are for existing faculty members but to reduce them for new members in the future. In recent communications, the administration has given a rationale: other unions have been persuaded to accept the structural inequality that the proposal would create, so we should too. 
     The rationale implies that we should be fair to other unions and accept the same worsening conditions that they now face. Another way to look at it is that we would be introducing new iniquities into our own union. Perhaps the administration even hopes for that outcome, because the union's solidarity would be undermined—actually, further undermined, because it already has different classes of employees, such as tenured and tenure-track members who enjoy benefits that are not shared with contractual members. 
     The administration has another rationale: we're a publicly funded university in a province that is defunding the university seemingly on the assumption that we cannot afford it, given our public debt, which skyrocketed as the budget for the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric power station ballooned out of control. The competing assumption, or contention, is that the university is an economic powerhouse and creator of knowledge and cultural products; as a site of critique, it can also help our society to avoid mistakes that will entail unsustainably huge long-term costs, such as continuing to invest in fossil fuels.
     I prefer the competing assumption, but I still have difficulty in campaigning for higher salaries, even when recent inflation has dramatically decreased my buying power, and even when the delay in getting a new contract (ours having expired in 2020) means years of no improvements in working conditions. But why should our working conditions improve? We're fat cats, right?
     I do have a squarely middle-class income; I'm not poor, but I probably cannot afford a house big enough for my growing family, certainly not without a lot of help from the extended family. Many professors earn far more than me, especially in other departments and faculties such as Business, Medicine, and Engineering. And the building that houses my office, the Arts and Administration Building, has a multitude of large holes in the walls, covered up many years ago with plastic and fabric tape; bathroom facilities with constantly out-of-service toilets, broken stalls, missing tile, and holes in the ceiling; and drinking fountains that are either out of service or suspected of providing water with too much lead in it. Granted, these are matters of capital and infrastructure, not salaries and benefits, but they are signs of where the money is going on campus, and where it is not. (Cross the highway away from Arts and toward Core Science and Engineering, and it seems clear.) Bringing visiting professors and job candidates to campus is embarrassing when the facilities are in such disrepair. I do not need to be "above" the middle class; I'm not asking for a palace, but I'm a self-respecting person who wants to feel good about not only my work but also my workplace.
     When employees go on strike, it is not only because of a contract, but because of the environmental conditions that suggest that the management of the university, including the government that funds it, is either ineffective or unconcerned for equal treatment. The president of the university gets a base salary of $450,000 plus bonuses, and has continued the trend of expanding the "upper" administration with other well-paid positions, and yet they have not succeeded (yet, anyway) in advocating convincingly for us.
     When will it happen? Today on the picket line we were joking with the old union call-and-response: "What do we want?" "A fair deal!" "When do we want it?" "Three years ago when our contract was up!"
     I acknowledge the logistical challenges of an administration that has to bargain with multiple unions while watching and waiting for the results of bargaining in other parts of the public sector. Nevertheless, I can also deduce that there is a financial incentive to delaying new contracts, especially when inflation is rising not only for employees but also for the university as a whole. In this context, my willingness to make sacrifices for the university would get a significant boost from timely and responsive administrative efforts to renew contracts.
     Cynically, I suspect that the administration's schedule is now driven primarily by the math. It's a cost-benefit analysis. The university's finances improve as long as it doesn't have to pay professors, but eventually it will have to refund a lot of tuition. Another factor is the administration's interest in drawing out the strike to empty the union's coffers so that we will not be able to afford to strike again in four (or six or eight) years if bargaining goes badly for us. 
     Maybe one of my colleagues has found the information to do this analysis, but I doubt it, because the university also has an opacity problem. We want a definition of "collegial governance" in our contract that would improve our sousveillance of budgeting, hiring, and other procedures. We think that a strongly supported mandate of collegial governance would help to convince the government to include a faculty member and a student on the Board of Regents, thereby increasing transparency. As the only university in Canada that has no such representation on its Board, Memorial University is at risk of corruption.
     Corruption can be reduced through equally shared power, which would also lead to more equitable distribution of resources. The administration would gain so much good will from the union if it immediately dropped its demand to claw back pension benefits and made progress on collegial governance and (which I haven't yet mentioned) the "conversion language" that would turn some of the contractual positions into tenure-track positions. We know the world is not a fair place, but we think that universities can be models of fairer, safer, more sustainable places. That's what I voted for, though I'd prefer to be in class and at work.

     Yesterday I finished reading an old Canadian novel in which a rapist abducts a woman who gives birth to a baby who later becomes a feral child, or infant, when the mother is murdered. Today, June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court in the United States overturned Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 law that recognized women’s right to control their own bodies and reproductive systems. The striking parallel lit the proverbial fire under me and brought me back here to my blog.
     Raised in the French (Canadian) Roman Catholic tradition, I understand one of the core reasons that the pro-life movement campaigned for half a century against Roe vs. Wade. I do believe that at some point in gestation a fetus is alive—the point that is called viability—and that we should protect life when we can. But, at least until that point, the fetus is inseparable from the mother and can be considered a part of the mother, and for this reason the mother should have the right to decide what happens to her own body and its parts. I don't take this view lightly; I don't feel settled on a position, but this is where I'm at now.
     (I also believe that there is more than a little hypocrisy involved, because in much of the world not all lives are valued equally—not only human lives but also the many companion species and non-human animals who have at least a degree of personhood in many human families and cultures. So to insist on the rights of the unborn child in America seems disingenuous if the provocative case can be made that many Americans don’t value life, given their tolerance of mass shootings and pandemic death rates—and death penalties. But I digress….)
     In the novel I finished yesterday, John Richardson’s Westbrook the Outlaw, or, The Avenging Wolf: An American Border Tale (1851), a young woman named Emily falls in love with her tutor, who abdicates his religious role as a lay brother to marry her. (Richardson is much better known for his 1832 novel Wacousta.) The evil Westbrook, jealous, murders him and carries Emily away to his cabin in the woods, where he sexually assaults her repeatedly over the course of many months. Skipping ahead rapidly, the novel reveals that she is pregnant. The readers are led to believe that the father of the child is Emily’s husband, but it seems just as likely that the rapist is the father.  
     When a sergeant in the British army (it’s before 1867 in Canada) brings a troop to rescue her when Westbrook is out, Westbrook shoots her from a distance, and she dies too. Little do the soldiers realize that she had given birth, but they later track Westbrook to another lair where he has abandoned the baby, who—as readers learn in the final pages—is being raised by a wolf. In the end, the wolf kills Westbrook but is also killed in the struggle, and the baby is left without human or canine parental figures (unless one of the soldiers later steps up; more likely, the child would be raised in a religious orphanage, which history has shown to be a questionably safe space). It’s a bleak conclusion, one that implies that an unwanted child (unwanted by Westbrook, at least) will struggle to survive in the world. As much as I wish we all had guardian wolves and that we could see and respect relationships between humans and other animals, I don’t think that’s what Richardson was trying to suggest.
     In the context of Roe vs. Wade, the novel reminded me that, ten or fifteen years ago, I read a book on the societal influence of economics--Freakonomics (2005)—that proposed that Roe vs. Wade was partly responsible for lowering the crime rate in the 1990s and early 2000s. In theory—and it was a wild theory but one that seemed to have some merit—unwanted children are more likely to become criminals, and if they are never born then there’s one less factor in crime. The theory seems to overemphasize correlation (and Wikipedia surveys various more specific-to-stats problems in its entry on the book), but, still, I expect that there will be consequences in about a generation when unwanted children brought into an uncaring world are old enough to act of their own accord. I can only hope that they are nurtured and supported so that they have the advantages that planned families often enjoy.
     One of the only rays of sunshine in the last chapter of Westbrook the Outlaw is that the American captain of the troop that he had joined is relieved that such a terrible man was not American. (Those dastardly Canadians—or almost-Canadians!) Considering that the novel is set during the War of 1812 between the Americans and the not-yet-Canadian Britons, Richardson is taking a remarkably amicable position. He had recently moved to New York, hoping that America would give him a late-life boost to his literary career, but Westbrook the Outlaw, his final novel, didn't help at all. Stylistically, Westbrook the Outlaw is a terrible book by today’s standards, with torturous syntax, uneven timing, flat characters, and a scarcely believable plot without a compensatory fantasy.
     In fact, a genre such as fantasy—but specifically the Western—was the reason I read the book. With my own new book, The American Western in Canadian Literature nearly ready for the printing press, I came across the title Westbrook the Outlaw and its subtitle about the American Border Tale. I blanched, thinking that I had missed an early Canadian Western (at least one) in my survey of the genre. Luckily for me, I think that Richardson’s choice of title was misleading and that his book is less a Western and more a tragic romance (truly occupied, as it is, by a doomed love story). One might even say that it’s partly a rape fantasy, given the problematic, extended descriptions of Emily’s highly sexualized body. 
     But it’s probably not a Western even in the looser terms of the middle of the nineteenth century when the genre was not fully defined. It doesn’t really have a cowboy or sheriff (or Mountie), though it has an outlaw and a soldier; it barely has “Indians,” and it barely has wilderness or a frontier (and is set in what is now southern Ontario, not really far enough west). Natural justice (the wolf) rather than frontier justice wins the day. It’s not a war novel either.
     Nevertheless, finding Westbrook the Outlaw was a reckoning: a reminder that I will probably have made some mistakes in my book. I hope they are few. I hope the critics in my own country are merciful. And I hope that any American readers can treat me with Richardson’s friendliness to them, even as I read the American news and wonder where our neighbours and their country will be in twenty years. 

Works Cited

• Dias, Elizabeth. “The Arrow in America’s Heart.” The New York Times, 31 May 2022.
• Duffy, Dennis. “John Richardson.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 10 April 2008. 
• Freakonomics. Wikipedia, 27 March 2022.
• Levitt, Steven and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. William Morrow, 2005.

​How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. "Westbrook the Outlaw and Roe vs. Wade." Publicly Interested, 24 June 2022, www.publiclyinterested.ca.

    Yesterday on Twitter, my friend and colleague Jeremy Citrome was shamed for having published a review (so far only on a listserv) that criticized a book for having almost entirely ignored his own highly related research. His book, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), came out more than a decade before Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). In the day since Orlemanski went public on Twitter with her response to Citrome and The Medieval Review, her friends and colleagues in academia have joined her on social media to impugn his credibility. They have raised the stakes of the review by interpreting Citrome's claim of their books' "uncomfortably close parallels" (in his final paragraph) as an allegation of plagiarism.
    To me, one of the most "uncomfortable" situations here is the situation of these professors and the cultural capital that they can leverage from their respective sites of power. Orlemanski is an Associate Professor in the English Department of the University of Chicago, a position of significant privilege and prestige. Citrome is a contractual faculty member in the Department of English at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland, almost by definition a marginal position. Orlemanski's cursory acknowledgement of Citrome's book can be interpreted as a choice, conscious or unconscious, to make the smallest possible investment in an object that has little cultural capital, notwithstanding the good reputation of Palgrave Macmillan, his publisher. Orlemanski's politics seem to be above reproach; she stated on Twitter that she sympathized with the "largely junior and under-supported" (1 Dec. 2021) staff at the journal that published Citrome's review, but even that statement can seem to be a condescension and a deflection squarely into the hands of the person with the least power in the equation. 
    Two assistant professors, Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Jamie L. Jones, chimed in on Twitter with a reassurance of "solidarity" (1 Dec. 2021) with Orlemanski. As professors without tenure (yet), they actually have reason to be in solidarity with Citrome instead, because his precariousness in the academy is far more real than Orlemanski's. Citrome's review will probably not harm Orlemanski's career, but a judgment against a contractual faculty member in the court of public opinion could harm one's chances of contract renewal. Rather than wait to publish a rebuttal in the journal and possibly create a productive dialogue with Citrome himself, Orlemanski appears to be counting on social networks to cast stones. The Fordham University professor Jordan Alexander Stein's response to Orlemanski on Twitter—that Citrome is being "a shitty colleague" (1 Dec. 2021)—is simply mean, however witty he thought he was being. It's also simply ad hominem, which isn't a flaw of Citrome's own review. Even if you read it as primarily a charge of plagiarism, which it is not, the issue it raises is mainly in the publication and not the person. 
    Nevertheless, Orlemanski's colleague at Chicago, John Muse, spoke up on Twitter to call Citrome's review "maddeningly solipsistic" (1 Dec. 2021). Why should it not be, if indeed the framework for understanding this dynamic is a negotiation for cultural capital? In fact, I don't think the review is especially solipsistic. It devotes eight paragraphs exclusively to Orlemanski's book compared to four that consider her book in the context of his own, a ratio of 2:1. That's not solipsism. Solipsism is writing an entire book and giving barely a footnote to the pre-existing book with the most overlap. Citrome's review is rather generous; he calls Orlemanski's explanations "brilliant," "touching," and "positive." His review does not accuse Orlemanski of plagiarism, though that is predictably how the Twitterverse reframed the dispute. Leaping to similar conclusions, Stephanie DeGooyer assumes that Citrome was "volunteering to 'review' books" (1 Dec. 2021), but in fact the journal asked him to review it because of his expertise in the subject matter—expertise that is nuanced and authoritative, as the review itself suggests to me as a non-expert. 
    A few years ago, I published an essay that I later shared with a respected senior colleague at a more prestigious university who heard me mention it at a conference. Recently, that same senior colleague published an essay on many of the same keywords, if not exactly the same substance, and awarded my essay a single insubstantial footnote. I felt snubbed. When I see how Citrome is being publicly treated for his review, I can understand a little of how he might feel: much worse. Orlemanski's friends and colleagues are standing together behind a class line, making personal attacks in public to protect one of their own from legitimate scrutiny of her work. That's the shame.

Works Cited

• Citrome, Jeremy. Review of Symptomatic Subjects by Julie Orlemanski. The Medieval Review listserv, 1 Dec. 2021.
• @julieorlemanski. "#medievaltwitter This morning The Medieval Review (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr…) published, and emailed to hundreds of colleagues, a review that falsely insinuated that I had plagiarized the reviewer's work. My response, which I have asked TMR to publish and circulate [...]" Twitter, 1 Dec. 2021.

How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. "Solidarity and Solipsism." Publicly Interested, 2 Dec. 2021, www.publiclyinterested.ca.

An almost identical version of this post was sent to the editors of The Star Phoenix today, which is why this post is in the "open letters" category, among others. In the process of re-reading, I noticed that many of my recent posts have involved the environment in some way, so I've added "environment" as a category. 

     The opinion piece by retired TC Energy executive Dennis McConaghy (Star Phoenix, 2 Dec. 2020, p. A8, and here at the Calgary Herald) appears to misunderstand the concept behind Bill C-12 and its stated goal of achieving “net-zero emissions” by the year 2050. Quite possibly it is less a misunderstanding and more an example of industrial misinformation meant to hamper the efforts to deal with climate change until a less responsive government is elected.
     McConaghy implies that “net-zero” means, as he puts it, the “elimination of fossil fuels.” Elimination means “the complete removal or destruction of something,” according to my dictionary. That is not what “net-zero emissions” means. “Net” is an adjective that means what is “remaining after the deduction… or other contributions.” “Gross” means the “total” or the “complete” amount. The federal government’s plan is not to reach “gross-zero emissions.” 
     The plan is to factor in offsets to the burning of fossil fuels, such as the planting of trees, which act as carbon sinks and sequester carbon in forests and, quite often, building materials. No one seriously expects energy-intensive jet airplanes, transport trucks, and construction or farming equipment to work without the raw power of fossil fuels immediately, though that might eventually happen. 
     Instead, the idea is to limit fossil-fuel use to the essentials, and shift less-essential uses to greener energy. Most of us drive cars or small trucks that can easily be switched to electricity, and we can generate that electricity with solar-power installations, wind power, geothermal energy, even the more hotly debated nuclear energy. Near oceans, wave power is in development too. 
     People everywhere and in all walks of life, young and old, liberal and conservative, are more and more concerned about climate change. Even energy companies such as Shell are hoping for net-zero by 2050.
     The title of McConaghy’s piece demands “justification for [the] PM’s net-zero plan,” as if it were not obvious to anyone reading and watching credible news these days. The justification is climate change or, if you prefer, climate crisis and climate emergency. What McConaghy actually questions, as the piece later makes clear, is the legitimacy of the plan, because he thinks that a net-zero plan should be accepted “only… after a federal election” serving as a “referendum.” 
     Demanding a referendum is a stalling tactic. Many Canadians are ready for a dramatic shift in energy. That’s one reason why we didn’t elect a government that had no plan for the environment. McConaghy’s piece is potentially deceptive, with the potential result of delaying a shift that must be taken seriously now, not after another federal government gets another term of doing too little.

Works Cited

• McConaghy, Dennis. "Where is the justification for Trudeau's plan to achieve net-zero emissions?" The Calgary Herald, 28 Nov. 2020.
• Shell Global. Shell’s ambition to be a net-zero emissions energy business.

How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. "'Net-Zero Emissions' and Industrial Misinformation." Publicly Interested, 2 Dec. 2020, www.publiclyinterested.weebly.com.

     I was hoping for an opportune moment to write more about the environment and economy of this island of Newfoundland, but just like with my last post we are—yes, yet again—in a State of Emergency. So I want to address one problem related to the SOE caused by the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 pandemic. The problem is how we treat other animals, and one solution is to change what we eat.
     Mark Gollom, writing for the CBC, cites public health experts who are concerned that future pandemics will be caused again by human exploitation of animals through wildlife markets (a.k.a., wet markets) in China and elsewhere. The theory about the current pandemic is that the novel coronavirus spread between species at such a market, eventually to humans. The markets are deservedly criticized by animal-rights activists such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Although factory farms are a more regulated method for bringing animal products to market, they too are a risk because of instances of unsanitary conditions and overcrowding of non-human animals that come into contact with humans.
     Partly in response, Derek Beres at Big Think entertains the idea that one solution to the problem is vegetarianism and veganism. Beres adds: "I'm wary of recent vegan arguments that humans were not designed to eat meat. You can't rewrite history—humans are humans thanks in part to our consumption of meat, as thinkers such as Daniel Lieberman and Richard Wrangham have pointed out. We can—and should—argue about the future, but let us at least understand where we come from."
     I agree in principle about what to argue, but I would shift the emphasis. Even if humans became humans at the top of the food chain as a result of traditionally hunting and then traditionally farming other animals (a premise that seems insufficient for defining "humans"), we now have the knowledge, resources, and products to enable most people in most parts of developed countries to eat very well without meat. It might not be compatible with traditional Indigenous practises in the Far North, for example, where agriculture is almost impossible, but it is possible throughout most of the world. We can make a choice.
     Incidentally, it would drastically improve our environments, too. Damian Carrington in The Guardian explains: "Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet. The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife." Even if most of us ate meat half as often, the benefits would be huge.
     I have a French gourmet vegetarian cookbook from the 1970s (the decade of my birth) that shows that some of us have been thinking about this informed decision for a while now (relative to my age, at least). The choice is about treating other animals ethically, and this means not killing them or destroying their habitats when we have alternatives. Rather than produce "byproducts" such as viral pandemics, we can reduce sickness and death of humans and of other animals, while still eating well.  
     Now that is food for thought!

Works Cited
​

• Beres, Derek. "Why Factory Farms Are a "Perfect Storm" for Disease Pandemics." Big Think, 31 Mar. 2020.
• Carrington, Damian. "Avoiding Meat and Dairy Is ‘Single Biggest Way’ to Reduce Your Impact on Earth." The Guardian, 31 May 2018.
• Gollum, Mark. "'Worse' Pandemic on Horizon Unless World Deals with Wildlife Markets." CBC News, 27 Mar. 2020, 
• PETA. "PETA Covers Myths and Facts About Meat and the Coronavirus." PETA.com, 17 Mar. 2020. 

How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. "Meat Eating and the Coronavirus and COVID-19 Pandemic." Publicly Interested, 14 Apr. 2020, www.publiclyinterested.weebly.com.

Update 3/2/2020: I have been thinking for a while about missing part of the point in this entry, and today some news helped me to expand my thinking a little. As reported by the CBC, the news was of another mass-mediated attack on Greta Thunberg, this time in the form of a sexually suggestive and aggressive decal from an "energy services company" in Alberta called X-Site Energy Services, a name now loaded with innuendo in the context of the decal's use of sexual imagery.
     
     Here where I live we are in an official State of Emergency because of the biggest single-day blizzard in recorded history. (Another update: In fact, even though it is now weeks after the storm, we have had another, milder one that closed the university again today, March 2nd—a seemingly necessary condition of this blog!) The city has been remarkably quiet, with no traffic allowed while the snow plowing is under way, and with snow banks of two to three meters, even up to four, dampening sound. The power grid also failed for thousands of residents, in some cases for more than a day.
     If you have been out and about, with your senses heightened by the quiet and the dark, you will smell woodsmoke. Traditional wood-burning stoves and wood- or even coal-burning fireplaces are still legal here. They definitely seem to be more in use these days. Many of us probably even feel nostalgic when we experience this combination of these scents and the snow, but this feeling is a problem for at least a couple of reasons.
     Partly because of burning fuel in our own homes rather than in power stations, my province of Newfoundland and Labrador has the worst energy efficiency of all the provinces. When most of our energy is generated by burning fossil fuels, as it is here so far, it contributes to climate change and climate crisis.
     We made a big effort to reduce our fossil-fuel consumption across the power grid by constructing a large hydroelectricity station at Muskrat Falls, but it is widely regarded as a major failure of politics, management, economics, engineering, and ethics. We are likely to become more dependent on oil than ever—at least according to the president of the offshore oil regulator, our former premier Roger Grimes.  
     Grimes sees oil and gas as the future, whereas anyone calling them “fossil fuels” is implying the opposite. And he has concluded that, because they are the future, he needs to convince his allies to work to change the minds of the young people who will be in charge in the future. Naming the teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg as a risk, Grimes said recently, “Unless the message has been tempered and developed and moderated and everybody understands there can be balance [between fossil fuels and greener energy], then there's a real fear of losing the battle to it [environmental activism].” As a teacher, I would prefer a less warlike and propagandistic approach to educating younger people. (See my previous post, “The Classroom as Prison Cell with Armed Guards.”) It's not a "battle" but a different kind of challenge. 
     The problem with the generation gap that Grimes sees here is that it assumes that young people and older people have inseparably different interests that have to be harmonized, when in fact the climate crisis caused largely by fossil fuels is an existential threat to all demographics (not equally but more so for poor people in northern and coastal regions). His statement has other problems, too, such as the assumption that the extractive industries are seeking “moderation” or “balance,” when they are seeking to remain dominant. The fact is that greener energy is a small fraction of energy production and consumption in Canada and industrialized countries in the world. A lack of balance is hardly the fault of green energy producers or environmental activists, especially when the extractive industries get somewhere between $7.7 and $15 billion in subsidies. Since 1990, the rate of burning fossil fuels has increased four times more quickly than the rise in greener energy, so we won’t achieve balance unless fossil fuel usage drops dramatically while greener energy surges.
     Thunberg does not seem like a radical to me. She is responding to a near-consensus among scientists around the world whose thousands of studies have been condensed into reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Thunberg said after meeting our prime minister, Justin Trudeau, that her “message to all the politicians around the world is the same: just listen and act on the current, best available united science.” This appeal to climate science is entirely respectable. Her appeal, and that of the great many activists and concerned citizens who support her and her work, is a gesture that demonstrates how young people can learn to evaluate information and make informed decisions about their future and their future adulthood. It is deeply ironic that Thunberg's elders are infantilizing her.
     (Update: Most troubling is how the X-Site corporation has also sexualized her, implying a child-pornographic gaze. The story from CBC News in Edmonton describes the X-Site decal as "a black-and-white drawing of a female figure's bare back with hands pulling on her braided pigtails," pigtails being a feature of Thunberg's style. To be more obvious, the decal also seems to include Thunberg's name as if it were a "tramp stamp." I would add that the point of view of the decal is that of the same person who has hands on her braids, implying that someone is having sex with her, possibly violently. Intended or not, one interpretation of the decal is that the company, with its own sexually "exciting" name, is promoting sexual aggression against Thunberg. This interpretation speaks volumes about the limited recourses of an industry that has strong anti-intellectual elements, given its downplaying, deferral, or denial of climate-change science, and that has difficulty imagining its own future relevance.)
     Grimes joins the American president Donald Trump and others in patronizing, condescending to, or insulting Thunberg—in Trump's case, as if name-calling is an argument or explanation. (It is not. It's bullying.) At the Davos economic summit, Thunberg presented counter-arguments to Trump that belie the notion that young people will grow up to fix the future, in the future, with imaginary or nascent technologies. One of the major flaws in this reasoning is that it exempts members of the current establishment of responsibility for a crisis that they have perpetuated. Grimes and Trump style themselves as guardians of the good old days before scientists and young people hurt business by noisily reframing the narratives about how we (but not all of us) came to enjoy prosperity. 
​     The nostalgia here is what Svetlana Boym, in her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia, calls “restorative nostalgia.” It means that we use the feeling to inspire us to try to recreate or regenerate certain conditions of our happiness, like relying on oil and gas for cheap energy and plastics, even if they are problematic—even if they are threatening for our future. Not to imply that there is no such thing as emotional intelligence, but the feeling overrides our thinking. That’s what Grimes and Trump are doing by hearkening back to the yesteryears of industrial growth and glory.
     Although I have a practical solution for one of our local energy efficiency problems that I will try to write about soon in my next entry on this blog, I also have my own message for young people. I won’t tell them not to listen to their elders, but I will say that they should listen to elders who have mainly the future at heart, not the past, unless the past is treated with much more critical reflection.

Works Cited

• Bird, Lindsay. "N.L. Lags Behind Canada in Energy Efficiency, But There's a Silver Lining to the Stats." CBC News, 25 Nov. 2019. 
• Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.
• CBC Edmonton. "Alberta Energy Services Company To 'Correct Our Mistake' Over Explicit Greta Thunberg Decal." CBC News, 2 Mar. 2020.
• Canadian Press. "Ottawa Sending Help to Newfoundland Following Historic Snowstorm." CTV News.com, 18 Jan. 2020.
• Harris, Kathleen. "Greta Thunberg Meets Trudeau, Tells Him He's Not Doing Enough To Fight Climate Change." CBC News, 27 Sept. 2019.
• Gatehouse, Jonathan. "Pipeline Politics: Why $1.6B in Aid for Oil and Gas Industry Is Awkward for Canada." CBC News, 18 Dec. 2018.
• Nakamura, David and John Wagner. "Trump Mocks 16-Year Old Greta Thunberg a Day after She Is Named Time's Person of the Year." The Washington Post.com, 12 Dec. 2019.
• McKenzie-Sutter, Holly. "Inquiry into Muskrat Falls Megaproject 'Boondoggle' To Begin in Labrador." The Globe and Mail.com, 16 Sept. 2018.
• Saxifrage, Barry. "Fossil Fuel Burning Leaps to New Record, Crushing Clean Energy and Climate Efforts." Canada's National Observer, 31 July 2019. 
• Tobin, Stephanie. "Oil Industry at Risk of 'Losing the Battle' to Climate Change Activists, Warns Roger Grimes." CBC News, 25 Oct. 2019.

How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. "Greta Thunberg's Young Intellectual Appeal to Climate Science." Publicly Interested, 22 Jan. 2020, www.publiclyinterested.weebly.com.

    Language matters more than anything other than bodily experience in how we understand the world. As someone a little too grammarian at times, I have to admit that language changes, even for the better, and along with it our understanding. We’re starting to accept, after years of seeing the term “climate crisis” in environmental literature, that it’s a more accurate term than the more neutral “climate change.” And we might even be on the verge of a change of political climate too, where recognizing the climate crisis is happening at the same time as recognizing the ongoing crisis of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
    A couple of weeks ago, the historic report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls started to generate story after story in the news, mainly in response to the report’s claim that Canada is responsible for genocide against Indigenous peoples. It’s this language, “genocide,” that I’ve been thinking about as a professor of English lately. But I’ll avoid the usual etymology of “geno” and “cide” and skip right to the debate.
    Some argue that genocide is unique—uniquely the worst human behaviour, the murder of great numbers in a short time—and so the use of the term needs to be carefully controlled. Former general Romeo Dallaire, who served the United Nations during the genocide in Rwanda, and the respected Liberal politician Irwin Cotler, who has in mind the Holocaust, are both reluctant to expand the use of the word. After all, Indigenous peoples in Canada were not systematically and rapidly murdered in the millions. Conservative leader Andrew Sheer agreed, calling the situation of Indigenous peoples in Canada “its own thing.” 
    I agree too that the genocides of Rwanda and the Holocaust are special—absolutely horrific and desperately to be avoided and stopped whenever possible. But genocide is related to murder, and, on a smaller scale, we already seem comfortable in using the word “murder” to describe various acts. Although Wikipedia informs me that manslaughter is not technically murder, it is a willingness to harm someone that unintentionally becomes fatal, so it is a homicide. More strictly, Canada separates murder into second-degree murder (where the intent was to kill and developed rapidly in the heat of the moment) and first-degree murder (where the murder was planned in cold blood). We also regularly use the term “mass murder” to describe first-degree murders of many people at once. So, why can’t we use the word “genocide” with the same nuance as with “murder,” simply by qualifying it by degree?
    In the case of the Indigenous peoples in North America, the colonists and their imperial governments have enacted genocide all along the spectrum. The Indian Wars in the United States were at times wars of eradication, and various massacres and other deadly tactics were perpetrated to kill large numbers of people. 
    Newfoundland’s Beothuk people were driven to starvation and were sometimes murdered by colonists, its last surviving person, Shawnadithit, dying in 1829 in St. John’s—though Mi’kmaq oral tradition and some scientific studies suggest that the Beothuk might have integrated into other Indigenous societies from the mainland. But the fact is that there is no self-identifying Beothuk community left anywhere, as a direct result of two centuries of colonization (at the time) and the attendant desire for land and resources. That seems to be genocide.
    Sometimes, the idea of “killing” was symbolic, but it was hardly any better. The doctrine of “killing the Indian in the child,” which is sometimes attributed to Canadian residential-school planner Duncan Campbell Scott but may have started as a phrase from an American military officer, is a doctrine of destroying a cultural identity. And, in fact, some criteria of genocide according to the United Nations are dependent not only on one’s body but also on one’s cultural identity.
    According to the UN’s definition, Canada did cause genocide. Although the first two are so general that they need more details of intention and scope, here are the UN’s criteria as reported recently, with examples from Canadian history: 

• Killing members of the group: Anyone remotely familiar with narratives of colonization and western expansion will know that this happened, especially in the United States; in Canada the North-West Mounted Police were formed as a paramilitary force that killed many Indigenous people during the battles in the 1870s and 1880s. More on topic, remember the Beothuk.
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: This too is so obvious and could apply beyond situations of genocide, but in terms of “serious bodily harm” we have the example of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, who was publicly advocating a starvation-until-submission policy toward Indigenous people. The clearest example of the “mental harm” of colonization, the trauma, is the intergenerational problems including the epidemic of suicide in some Indigenous communities. The Guardian reports that “Across the country, suicide and self-inflicted injury is the leading cause of death for First Nations people below the age of 44. Studies show young indigenous males are 10 times more likely to kill themselves than their non-indigenous male counterparts, while young indigenous females are 21 times more likely than young non-indigenous females.” 
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Although there are many examples, the one closest to me as someone from the West who is studying the genre of the Western is the near extermination of the buffalo in and around the 1870s. The buffalo were the major resource of the Indigenous peoples of the plains, and colonists shot buffalo to dispossess the people. The buffalo are also a major cultural symbol of these people. Destroying them would be, as a crude analogy, like destroying flags and crucifixes. 
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Different provinces of Canada forcibly sterilized Indigenous women, especially from the eugenics era in the 1920s and 1930s to the 1970s.
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Canada’s residential school system and the Sixties Scoop both accomplished these transfers, which were intended to protect Indigenous people by the "logic" of assimilating them and thereby destroying their cultural identity. (It's not like the 20th century lacked imagination; there are better ideas such as community-based justice, as seen in sentencing circles, which can be more ethical and effective.) 

But the effects were more than symbolic. In residential schools, at least 7,000 children, and probably many more, died prematurely. And then there was the Sixties Scoop, a related policy of using social workers to separate Indigenous children from their parents or guardians because of the harm being done to the children. However well-intentioned you think these social workers and schoolteachers were, these policies were a huge blind spot, because they masked the colonial ideology of killing the Indian in the child—of destroying a cultural identity. 
    If the end result of such a system is such despair that Indigenous youth don’t even want to live, as suggested by the disproportionately high rate of suicide in Indigenous communities, then the UN’s definition applies yet again. At the very least, it can be qualified as a cultural genocide, with the effects of a “real” genocide.
    What we have to understand here is that, for many people, culture is life.
    And we have a lot to learn from them about this fact—and, maybe not coincidentally, about stopping the climate crisis too.

Works Cited

• Barrera, Jorge. “Canada aimed to 'destroy Indigenous people': The MMIWG inquiry's case for genocide.” CBC News, 3 June 2019. 
• Breen, Kerri. “Andrew Scheer rejects use of ‘genocide’ in reference to Indigenous women, girls.” Global News, 9 June 2019.
• Dyer, Evan. “What does it mean to call Canada's treatment of Indigenous women a 'genocide'?” CBC News, 5 June 2019.
• Gill, Jordan. “'This is genocide': N.B. Mi'kmaq scholar says Canada failed to act on MMIWG.” CBC News, 3 June 2019.
• Hopper, Tristin. “Here is what Sir John A. Macdonald did to Indigenous people.” The National Post, 28 August 2018.
• Kennedy, Mark. “'Simply a savage': How the residential schools came to be.” The Ottawa Citizen, 22 May 2015.
• Labby, Bryan. “Is climate change actually a 'climate crisis'? Some think so.” CBC News, 10 June 2019.
• “Murder (Canadian law).” Wikipedia, 29 May 2019.
• Phippen, J. Weston. “'Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone'.” The Atlantic, 13 May 2016.
• Randhawa, Selena. “'Our society is broken': what can stop Canada's First Nations suicide epidemic?.” The Guardian, 30 August 2017.
• Reclaiming Power and Place. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls: Supplementary Report: Genocide. 3 June 2019.
• Sniderman, Andrew Stobo. “The man wrongly attributed with uttering ‘kill the Indian in the child’.” Maclean’s, 8 November 2013.
• Story, George M. “Shawnadithit.” 7 February 2006. The Canadian Encyclopedia, 23 January 2019.
• Stote, Karen. “Sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 17 April 2019.
• Tuck, James A. “Beothuk.” 6 February 2006. The Canadian Encyclopedia, 22 January 2019. 

How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. "The Word 'Genocide' in Canada." Publicly Interested, 18 June 2019, www.publiclyinterested.weebly.com.

     A brief history of concepts of self-deception would have to include concepts such as false consciousness, bad faith, and cognitive dissonance, but if these sound too complicated, try bullshit. What worries me is that bullshitting has gone viral, in a sense—becoming an diarrheal epidemic that can’t be stopped by any political wall, such as the walls around the right or the left. I’m worried that the bullshit is seeping through. I’m worried about what social work professor Brené Brown calls “the bullshit-incivility cycle,” like when someone spouts total nonsense and, exasperated, we respond with anger if we respond at all. 
     An alternative that I’ve been discussing lately comes from the poet and novelist Sina Queyras, who once wrote, “I don’t argue any more, I just take up space.” If the right/wrong structure of an argument or debate isn’t appropriate, then you might be able to avoid the argument—not to be evasive but to create a positive alternative.
     (I worry sometimes that a blog is an attention-seeker that "take[s] up space" in the sense of squeezing out other voices that should be listened to more than mine is, but this "space" on the internet is theoretically infinite, and I know from the analytics of my modest site traffic that I'm not, at present, at risk of stealing a spotlight.) 
     Queyras goes on to criticize an us/them binary, and elsewhere Brown criticizes an all guns/no guns binary, and so I have to admit that I’ve started with a binary, right and left, an idea of something divided by a wall—but it’s not how I’ll conclude. I think bullshit damages binaries but has a dangerously totalizing effect nonetheless.
     Jeet Heer’s most recent article in The New Republic turns attention back to the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s 2005 book, On Bullshit, which Heer uses to understand the American president Donald Trump and the destabilization of truth. 
     (Brown has been reading Frankfurt’s book, too, which has become an unexpected touchstone for understanding the Trump era. I bought On Bullshit for my dad on his 60th birthday in the year it came out, and we were thinking of the American president George W. Bush, whose misunderstandings seem so quaint now. Heer reports that the fact-checkers at PolitiFact calculate that 70% of Trump’s assertions are false, mostly false, or total “pants on fire” lies.) 
     I am more interested in thinking about bullshit in the context of the #MeToo and #IBelieve movement, one that has supported women in the difficult work of making an allegation of sexual harassment or assault against men in powerful positions. This work is difficult partly because, in the legal system, very few of the accused men are convicted despite the likelihood and widespread belief that they have committed the alleged act; and because, in the court of public opinion, the backlash has included death threats and public ridicule amounting sometimes to defamation. 
     Leaning to the right of the false binary that I set up earlier, we have pundit Christie Blatchford cautioning against the over-extension of #MeToo and #IBelieve, though I can’t see how we could  (except in rare cases) do too much to resist sexism and patriarchy when both seem so clear and present and problematic. With customary snark directed at bleeding-heart liberals, Blatchford writes: “one of the guiding principles of #MeToo and #IBelieve is that every person who makes such an allegation is a noble truth-teller, and that what matters most is how the self-proclaimed victim feels.” The language here is absolutist: “every person,” “what matters most.” In reality, the nuance “matters” too, but here the language implies or idealizes a simple distinction between truth and falsehood: a binary.
     Leaning left, writer Erika Thorkelson objects to Margaret Atwood’s support for the accused (if I may borrow the legal term even though the case is not a criminal one), and she criticizes Atwood’s insistence in using her reputation to shape the discourse around #MeToo: “Really listening requires… you to soften and let go of the fear, the urge to argue, and the instinct to control the narrative. It takes a comfort with silence and a willingness to accept that your turn to talk may never come, that what’s happening might not be about you at all.” In other words, some people have to shut up (Margaret Atwood). But those other words are my words, possibly in the voice of Blatchford, not one I really want to imitate, and Thorkelson's desire for better listeners is one that I share deeply; it's an ideal of teaching and learning.
     Still, these examples from the loosely defined right and left share a lack of faith in people with different opinions. Blatchford implies that the “noble truth-teller” may well be a liar, and Thorkelson suggests that others have no “turn,” no valid opinion, no credibility— really, no reason to be believed. 
     And so, we believe what we want. The Economist, hardly a neutral magazine, nevertheless respects a difference between fact and fiction here: "In 1986 Ronald Reagan insisted that his administration did not trade weapons for hostages with Iran, before having to admit a few months later that: ‘My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.’”
     Reagan wasn't bullshitting; he was admitting to a lie but spinning it as a moral lie, a lie told for the right reasons, the reasons in his "heart." Because I’ve been studying the genre of the Western, and because Reagan was “the Cowboy President” (having acted in so many Westerns before he went into politics), I’ve been thinking of how we normally think of the Western as a politically conservative genre, and how the usual plot of a Western culminates in a moment of cathartic violence when the hero makes a snap judgment—supposedly a moment of moral clarity—to confirm that the bad guy is so bad that he should die.
     Reagan might have won over some Democrats with his admission about Iran, but Heer claims that “Trump’s bullshitting is integral to his success in fomenting tribalism and polarization." I agree, and I would add that Trump’s twittering is encouraging this “polarization.” I’ve read suggestions that social media today have a conservative bias because short forms such as the tweet encourage snap judgments and discourage reflection.
     What if, if we’re all so confident that no one can be right, and if we’re all willing to make the snap judgment and the quick draw of moral assessment, then we’re all on the right? 
     Although bullshit has, in a way, damaged the binary of right and left, along with the binary of truth and falsehood, in another way it hypes up the binary or wall more and more. Shouting down others, for example, can foment radicalism while, as journalist Neil Macdonald pointed out yesterday, generating celebrity for reprehensible people and their ideas.
     But the way we often talk or shout means in theory that the wall between left and right doesn’t even exist; it’s simply snap judgment after snap judgment, because it’s easier and less exhausting, less driving toward burn-out. The challenge we have to meet when dealing with bullshit or a political opponent is always going to be patience (but also determined work), even if it is not fair to ask for patience from people who deserve justice now and 150+ years ago.
     Blatchford refers to “the current super-heated temperature of the culture.” Indeed, I want to yell—at least half ironically—like Señor Mister Love Daddy in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing: “Y’all take a chill. You need to cool that shit out”!
     There are lots of good reasons to scream, but being the hot shit isn't one of them.

Works Cited

• Blatchford, Christie. "Anonymous Letter Shows #MeToo Has Spread to Ranks of Ordinary Workplaces Too." National Post, 1 Feb. 2018.
• Brown, Brené. "How To Speak Truth to Bullshit." Lenny, 19 Sept. 2017.
• Do the Right Thing. Directed by Spike Lee, 1989. 
• Heer, Jeet. "Worse than a Liar." New Republic, 15 Mar. 2018.
• Macdonald, Neil. "Censorship Is Patronizing." CBC News, 20 Mar. 2018.
• Queyras, Sina. "Sexism in Poetry?" LemonHound, 5 Nov. 2007.
• Thorkelson, Erika. "Margaret Atwood's Books Taught Me To Listen to Women—Now She Needs To Learn the Same Thing." Electric Lit., 18 Jan. 2018.
• "Yes, I'd Lie to You." The Economist, 10 Sept. 2016.

How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. "Bullshit, Belief, and Binaries." Publicly Interested, 21 Mar. 2018, www.publiclyinterested.weebly.com.