Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Fighting power in the age of YouTube

A year and a half ago, at 21, she was the talk of the town. Now she’s blown town.

Last Saturday, Brigette DePape — the puckish Senate page who rocked Stephen Harper’s world with a strategically displayed sign she had tucked into the skirt of her uniform under her blazer — moved out of the city where her fame was born. She left for her new home in British Columbia. Except for a house party with close friends, and a brief email to yours truly, Brigette’s 5:30 PM flight to Vancouver passed without notice.

Her departure from Ottawa was the opposite of her arrival on the national media scene. It was June 3, 2011, and the Speech from the Throne was kicking off the new parliamentary session. Who can forget the image on the TV screens?

There was Brigette (she now gets top billing over Bardot on Google), holding her red sign reading “Stop Harper”, getting the bum’s rush on the arm of a burly sergeant-at-arms. Even Jenni Byrne, who can hold more Tory Kool-Aid than your average city water reservoir, must have had a full heart clot of fleeting sympathy.

The enduring story regarding the page that roared has yet to be understood or truly evaluated. But when it is, surely part of the discussion will be how political activism has evolved since the days of the civil rights marches, love-ins and other quaint acts of social exhibitionism caught on those grainy old newsreels.

Protesters have faced the police lines in Quebec, in Toronto, in the Middle East. As John Lennon put it when he still graced the planet, that cop was going to hit you right in the head. The challenge then was to get yourself together and face down the guys in riot gear. Now it’s about feeding YouTube an irresistible bonbon. The hit these days is almost always in the media.

The Internet petition, the pre-meditated media event and the YouTube clip have largely replaced that sea-of-humanity, water-hose and police-dog universe. Brigette became momentarily famous for public defiance smack in the heart of the system’s hoary inner sanctum. It was so phenomenal that the world — not just Canadians — took notice.

TV reporters accustomed to making something out of nothing for the evening news — in this case, a dead ceremony in a moribund institution — suddenly had a real story. Someone wasn’t buying in to the mumbo jumbo. Somebody thought Canada was going to hell in a handbasket and Stephen Harper was carrying it.

Worse, that somebody looked like your neighbour’s 14 year-old daughter. Michael Moore took note of an act that could have come straight out of one of his movies — the individual chesting up to the corporate top-dog, the lone act of confrontation that says we’re all equal and the office doesn’t sanctify the man. Brigette and her demographic live by a Burkean principle: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” In Brigette’s world, the bicycle is not the equal of the Bentley — it is its superior.

There was, of course, a flip side to Brigette’s existential act. She united the curmudgeonly old white guys in a heartbeat, for the national mantra in these parts is peace, order, and good government. Where young people saw one of their own saying what a lot of them thought — but were too apathetic, hopeless, or disengaged to actually say themselves — older viewers saw nothing but a disgraceful, impious troublemaker. Bifocals can only fix so much.

This past summer, another formidable individual, PhD student Diane Orihel, offered her version of Brigette’s sign. In her efforts to save the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) and its one-of-a kind whole-lake, freshwater research, she had scientists carry a coffin through the streets of Ottawa to the steps of Parliament. The Death of Evidence Rally, it was called. Although hundreds of people took part in the funeral procession, it was not a traditional mass rally but the gathering of a heroic, but well defined interest group: scientists.

Orihel’s Parthian shot in her 5-month long campaign against the dark shuttering of yet another bearer of independent information, the ELA, is now a superb short film on (you guessed it) YouTube. This unsung hero resigned her post with the ELA yesterday and is now hard at work trying to put together a life that came unglued with her goal of saving scientific integrity from the foul backwaters of private ownership of data. It is hard to predict what her enduring legacy will be or what price she will pay for her altruism.

The burning question is this: Can the anonymous armies of the Internet, throbbing with staged media forays and excellent YouTube clips, defeat the Praetorian Guard which keeps closing around the powers-that-be with the finely honed weapons of sophistry and spin? In the case of Brigette’s media strike in the Senate, hers was the Pearl Harbour of protests — unexpected, deadly and full of consequence.

Even the political opposition, including the late Jack Layton, was uptight. But then it was gone. Then Orihel was gone. No one knows if their work will wake the sleeping giant of the youth vote. No one knows if it will put people back into voting booths.

One of the superstars of the new media is Justin Trudeau. His fate and Brigette’s and Diane’s are inextricably linked, as he made clear to me in a booth at an Ottawa restaurant yesterday.

“Six months ago, I was happy with my decision to not seek the leadership. I actually felt a kind of relief. But then I realized everything was on the line — the values of our country. I want to bring Canada back to those values and I know young people are counting on me to do it. If we don’t, the country will be lost.”

There is no doubt that when humanity masses together and protests with their bodies, mountains get moved. Most recently, Quebec students changed history in the teeming streets of that province. Everyone remembers the protests over the war in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands are marching in Europe against austerity cuts. And in Tahrir Square the masses are back for democracy, rifle butts and all.

Taking to the Internet is another matter. The verdict is not yet in on whether it can move mountains too. But Harper is keenly aware of the possibilities. He knows that the calm sea of national indifference — waters he patrols very well with his game-of-inches politics — can be undone if the wind begins to blow in the social media.

That’s why Vic Toews uttered that nonsense about siding with the Tories or with the child pornographers on the issue of Internet regulation. That’s why the Tories watch the Internet so carefully and are trying to use their power to get third-party content off the web, as was so stunningly documented in iPolitics this week by my colleague Elizabeth Thompson. They fear the medium where Justin Trudeau is royalty and they are the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Perhaps the two will meet in the pristine valleys and waterways of British Columbia. Did Brigette pick her new home with a purpose?

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris

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