Eye Weekly Good News/Bad News

FIRST, THE BAD NEWS

• Planet Kensington, the punk-perfect Kensington Market bar, has closed.

• In response to outrage from religious groups and The Globe and Mail, Telus Mobility has stopped offering softcore porn downloads to cellphones, despite an Eye Weekly editorial last week urging them to carry on with the program.

• The Ontario government's Family Responsibility Office launched a website to shame deadbeat parents by publicly humiliating them this week, despite being repeatedly cited by the auditor-general for “lackadaisical” and “error-prone” record keeping.

• A convicted murderer was freed in Toronto last week 11 years into his life sentence because his trial judge “showed discourtesy and sarcasm” during his trial.

THEN THIS MUST BE THE GOOD NEWS??????

Editorial Digest
Language politics

On Feb. 26, a New York City Council sub-committee joined a number of other US jurisdictions in proposing a symbolic ban on the use of the word “nigger” and its variant “nigga.” Queens councilman Leroy G. Comrie Jr. told The New York Times that, following Michael Richards' rant last November, he was disgusted by black teenagers in his neighbourhood using the word, and their apparent ignorance of its meaning.

“There is a swelling population of black youth that use this word as if it is a term of endearment,” insisted a New Jersey city councilwoman. But as Charles Taylor pointed out on Salon.com in 2002, it has been used by African-Americans as a term of light derision, and sometimes endearment, since at least the 1970s, and “it took Richard Pryor to make public the shared secret of the word's use among blacks.”

The debate in the African-American community between those who believe the word is being reclaimed and those who insist that any use further damages black self-esteem is far from closed. The “N-word” (as it is often written, as though using the word even to condemn its use will poison an argument with racist baggage) will forever be linked to a legacy of oppression, and society may yet decide that it should never again be spoken. But legislation won't settle that debate, nor will it solve problems such as the higher-than-average rates of poverty and incarceration that plague oppressed minorities in North America. Banning the terminology won't change the attitudes of racist whites or even defang them – any word can cut like a broadsword if it's spoken with enough hate – and it could just make them harder to recognize. In the meantime, a ban would stifle free speech, provide an increasingly corporate hip-hop culture some much-needed outlaw credibility and, at the very least, encourage black youth to come up with newer, more offensive slang that their parents just don't understand.

Negative works

Word that Stephen Harper and his purser Jim Flaherty blew off this week's Toronto City Summit convention on the future of Canadian cities came as no surprise. Bluff arrogance is, to reference Derek Zoolander, the “Blue Steel” in Harper's arsenal of political poses.

Lately, however, even we've been taken aback at how clumsily the PM has tried to step up his game by unfairly smearing the Liberals. It's not fun anymore.

With renewed cockiness – perhaps fired up by the realization that he has, in Stéphane Dion, a weaker nerdlinger to beat up on – Harper has transformed from alpha-square to bona fide bully. Step one of this journey was the launch of sleazy Conservative attack ads against Dion in Quebec that insinuated wrongdoing on Dion's part in the sponsorship scandal and played up the perception that the Liberals had their hands dirtied in the income trust scandal (though they were vindicated by the RCMP).

The Great Instigator last week set off what was arguably the most dramatic floor show the Commons has ever seen when he insinuated, with a hitherto-unseen flourish of sleaze, that the Liberals were poised to block the renewal of controversial anti-terror measures because they were out to shield MP Navdeep Bains' father-in-law from an investigation into Sikh extremism.

The problem is, it's working. Recent polls show Harper and his Conservatives pulling way ahead while, in at least one, Dion has fallen to third place among leadership preferences. Dion himself shares the blame for his so-far weak leadership – is he playing possum or something? – but we had hoped that Canadians, who so often blast Americans for their nasty, negative politics, would not reward such transparently sleazeball tactics.

Nuclear diplomacy

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proven repeatedly that he's not a leader to admire – when, for instance, he calls for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” or hosts the world's largest conference of Holocaust deniers. The Canadian government lists his regime as one of the 13 worst abusers of human rights in the world. But when last week he said that if the United States wanted Iran to halt its nuclear program, it should lead by example, he kind of had a point. “It's no problem,” the Associated Press quoted him saying. “But justice demands that those who want to hold talks with us shut down their nuclear fuel cycle program, too.”

He could have gone further. The US holds the world's largest – by far – stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, yet it insists on the right to make pre-emptive war with any other country that tries to amass its own arsenal. It does nothing to disarm its friends in the nuclear nations club – Britain, France, Israel – but paints Iran as a rogue nation for attempting to join that club. (Although, as North Korea has recently shown, any cukoo can get treated like a grown-up if it shows it does have nukes.)

The principle at work in the US policy is that “might makes right”: they have enough weaponry to eliminate other countries from the map, and they will defend their dominance pre-emptively if necessary. Such is the way of imperial diplomacy, and it has ever been thus. What makes the US case odd is that its citizens and allies want to insist that that principle is fair. Ahmadinejad has rightly pointed out that it is not. And that is a diplomatic circle the US needs to square.