During last week’s leader’s debate on the radio, John Cummin, the head of the BC Conservative Party, made a comment about the carbon tax being disproportionately burdensome on northerners and business. His argument, as best I could tell, was that the tax needed to be repealed because it was driving prices on goods in the north up, and making it expensive for businesses in the oil and gas sector to dig stuff out of the ground and make money. I say “as best I could tell,” because as you might have guessed, I was busy shouting at the radio while all this was going on. (I note that I am, in this respect, turning into my father — not my father when he was my age, mind you, but my father now. This is exactly as distressing as you think it is.)

Driving up the price of stuff is the whole point of the carbon tax. I know it wasn’t sold like that, and I know we all hate the idea of paying more in taxes, but this is the one good thing the BC Liberals have done for this province over the last three terms. The one bad spot is that they made it revenue neural, in theory returning all the money to taxpayers, so it doesn’t actually hurt anyone, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a carbon tax. It’s supposed to hurt! It’s supposed to get you to make different choices! And, as it turns out, there’s some evidence that it’s doing exactly that. One might also think that part of the reason we haven’t seen as dramatic a shift as expected is not because the tax doesn’t work, but because it’s currently too low — only the Green Party seems even remotely interested in taxing carbon at an appropriate rate. And they’re not going to form the government, so who cares what they think?

I understand the complaint that taxing carbon and building that cost into the price of goods in northern BC is annoying and probably unfair. But here’s the thing: living in northern BC is actually expensive on the basis of carbon emissions! It costs a lot, in dollars and time and CO2, to get stuff up there, and if we were going to design a province from the ground up on the basis of what made sense from an emissions control perspective, putting a bunch of people way up north is probably not a choice we’d make today. Incidentally, the carbon burden of northern Canada — the costs of shipping diesel fuel up north, the emissions from burning it — are a good argument to look at alternative sources of power and heat up north. Given the climate that leaves pretty much only one option, but good luck with that. If we’re going to get real about climate change people are going to have to get over their paranoia about nuclear power, and if you thought selling the carbon tax was a tough job… Maybe George Monbiot can help out.

Living up north carries costs. I get that for a lot of people it wasn’t an explicit choice — you were born there, your life is there, so you stay put — but it’s a choice nonetheless, and I’m all in favor of making the consequences of those choices as visible as possible, so people can make informed choices. It’s the same thing that happens when northern BC suddenly realizes it doesn’t really have a good strategy to deal with trauma, or any other kind of serious, acute medical problem. It’s not discriminatory, and it’s not by design, it’s just the way it works: providing that kind of service to that geographical area is incredibly difficult, and we as a province have judged it unfeasible. (From a clinical perspective even throwing money at this problem won’t help; it’s part of the reason why we don’t have an interventional cardiology program in Prince George — the numbers aren’t there to get the operators the volume they need to maintain competency, and that would also be true of any trauma program, which by its nature is interdisciplinary.)

It sounds like I’m kind of ragging on folks in northern BC (and northern Canada, more broadly). I’m not. I am, however, pointing out that our settlement patterns are sub-optimal from an environmental, financial, and health care provision standpoint, and I’m amazed that there are folks in this day and age who seem to feel as though this is somehow unfair.

I am hoping that the events of the past week or so have finally demonstrated exactly how unhinged elements of the conservative universe are. And one would hope beyond hope that Rush Limbaugh will finally, finally, finally be banished from polite society (and, one might also hope, impolite society as well). I’m not holding my breath, though; we’ve been down this road before, and I wouldn’t bet that in a month we’re not going to be referring to this as a new normal. If nothing else, I hope this episode helps to reinforce what people like Melissa McEwan have been saying for a long, long time — there’s a war on, the war is on women, and the wrong side is winning.

This matters to everybody. It’s not just about women’s health care, though that matters a great deal. It is, fundamentally, about the notion that we have no obligation towards each other, and that anyone who feels differently is a leach, a parasite, a drag on society, who must be denigrated at all costs and cast out as the evil degenerate she is. That this two-minutes-hate currently involves women is doubly offensive, but it does illustrate exactly how much misogyny is really out there, and how the functional control of women, and in particular the control of women’s reproductive health, is the real driving factor. Make no mistake, this isn’t about public health or insurance coverage requirements or anything of the sort: this is about ensuring the continuing subjugation of women. Consider, for the moment, that since this controversy is really about private insurance plans covering contraception, not tax dollars — it takes a willful disregard of the blatantly obvious facts (like, who is paying for this — to say nothing of the fucking biology involved here) to turn this into a public policy issue, but even if it was the willingness of the American right to casually refer to women who take hormonal contraceptives as sluts and whores is shocking. Do you not know any women at all? is what goes through my head; I’m guessing they do, but they don’t care, because they have no souls.

Jon Steward is typically excellent on this one (Canadian link, more practically useful American link) and you should watch the segment appropriately entitled “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Gross.” The nail, as it were, that Stewart hit:

I’m just saying to the people who are upset about their hard-earned tax money going to things they don’t like: welcome to the fucking club. Everyone pays for shit they don’t want to all the time. You know what? Reimburse me for the Iraq war and the oil subsidies, and guess what, then diaphragms are on me. No — prophylactics are on the house. (You should rent Goodfellas, I think you’ll like that scene.)

It’s called society. These fuckers are trying to undo all of it. Don’t let them.

“Is everybody happy? I’ll soon change that!”

• Globe and Mail: Truth, justice, and becoming un-American. “A series of tough new U.S. tax laws, designed to root out Americans hiding money offshore, is suddenly prompting many expatriates to consider the ultimate act of national repudiation – becoming un-American. In a move set for 2014, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service will require foreign financial institutions to identify all accounts held by Americans.” In Soviet Russia, state own you!
• David Sirota, Salon: The New Let Them Eat Cake. “10 shocking, illuminating moments that prove just how out of touch the powerful really are.”
• Julianne Hing, ColorLines: Raquel Nelson and the Aggressive Prosecution of Black Mothers. “After the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article raising alarm about the dangers of jaywalking, instead of, say, the dangers that poor urban design pose to transit-dependent families, the solicitor general decided to prosecute Nelson for endangering her children. Earlier this month an all-white jury of middle class folks who admitted they had limited experience taking public transportation in the area found Nelson guilty of second-degree vehicular manslaughter and reckless endangerment.”
• Fortune: What’s wrong with the airlines? “To say that the airports at San Francisco or Los Angeles are less squalid than Chicago is faint praise, for the difference is so slight that anyone passing hastily through would notice no real improvement. Almost all U.S. airports are utterly barren of things to do. The dirty little lunch counters are always choked with permanent sitters staring at their indigestible food; even a good cup of coffee is a thing unknown. The traveler consigned to hours of tedious waiting can only clear a spot on the floor and sit on his baggage and, while oversmoking, drearily contemplate his sins.” Guess the date on this article!
• And finally, I listened to this podcast while watching the fourth and fifth innings of this game, at the same time as I was working out at the gym. Which might represent the single most depressing combination of things I’ve ever had to do in my life.

I’ll be back with more depressing news later. Need to refill my Prozac and Jack Daniels.

When Matt Taibbi is on his game, he’s probably one of the best journalists working anywhere today. And, holy hell, is he ever on his game. The conclusion to what is an awesome article about the Tea Party:

The bad news is that the Tea Party’s political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day.

You must read this fabulous essay by Gabriel Winant at Salon:

The true, central catalyst of the war, which lent it its moral meaning — that is, slavery — was pushed out of mind. Even Northerners came to believe in the myth of the South’s noble, doomed “Lost Cause.” Human bondage, wrote former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was “in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Northerners proved willing enough to go along, and to transmute their past into an ennobling myth; there’s a reason that people in both regions, even now, try to deny what the war was about, or to say that slavery was going out on its own anyway, or that the Confederacy had black soldiers. “Gone With the Wind” and “Birth of a Nation,” which in one way or another dramatize this argument, were enormous national hits for just this reason as well. Reconciling white people meant writing out black people. White Americans looked at their black countrymen and said, in effect, “This is our story now, not yours.”

This is what’s just happened at the Mall. Nobody was in the wrong during the civil rights years; King was a happy saint in the American tradition, not a dangerous radical.

Winant goes on to connect this kind of historical revisionism to 9/11 and the manufactured controversy over the Park51 project. It’s a really interesting perspective — not something that would have immediately occurred to me independently. And I’m not entirely sure that he’s right (I am not informed enough about the history of the reconstruction and the social dynamics involved to be able to speak authoritatively on the subject). But in its broad strokes, his argument feels right, if only observationally: We don’t like to talk about the very real history of everyday discrimination and oppression that was a fact of life in that era — and we certainly don’t like to talk about the complicity of ordinary individuals in this whole sorry tale. What we will talk about are the most visible: those who had acts, and names, and deeds — like Bull Connor and James Earl Ray — that inexorably mark them as villains in the civil rights struggle, but we ignore the people who never got their names in the newspapers. They’re the approved bad guys. Everyone else just sort of fades away, and we can pretend — as Winant says — that the past was a time when everyone got along, and what we think of as the civil rights movement was simply an inevitability.

There’s a very interesting discussion about the way that 9/11 is being stripped of its significance, too: “The real meaning of the disaster on September 11 — the way violence begets violence and fanaticism begets fanaticism, the way geopolitical maneuvering makes victims of ordinary people — is all gone. In its place is the vacuous sanctimony that it the place is “hallowed,” but all that seems to mean is that it is not open to Muslims.” You would think that to properly venerate the victims of 9/11 (disclaimer: I am not one of them, nor do I have any real connection to the event beyond being shit-scared for a couple of weeks that year, which I don’t consider victimization at all, though apparently I’m coming to understand this may be a minority view), you might want to talk about these things — understand how geopolitics is played, how decisions made 20, 30, 40 years ago come back to haunt you, how the cycle of violence continues, unbroken to this day, and how this is a really shitty problem that isn’t going to get better anytime soon, unless we start making different choices for ourselves. The moral you’d think you’d want is that the people who were killed that day died so that we’d all have a better understanding of what this world is like, and so that we’d think hard about what we were doing, and thus choose to do something different.

But the morals we are actually taking away from 9/11 seem to be: that it’s important to blow up as many places in the Middle East as possible, that nothing bad ever happens from doing this sort of thing, that considering potential consequences when pondering an action is a sign of weakness, and that under no circumstances should anyone ever think that possibly there might have been a point to the whole thing. In short, we’re using 9/11 to reinforce ideas and beliefs that we held before the damned thing happened in the first place. It’s the whole epistemic closure thing all over again, just writ large. Based on this sort of logic, maybe what we need at Ground Zero is not a mosque, or a church, or anything else of the sort. We need a military base, preferably one with serious offensive power projection capabilities. Is Montana looking to get out of the missile silo business?

To be fair, everybody does this. It’s rare to encounter anyone who is willing to change their minds based on events or data, and thank goodness for those who are. If you thought that US foreign policy was too aggressive before 9/11, you probably saw the attacks as vindication for your views. If you thought the problem was that the Middle East hadn’t been turned into radioactive slag, well, the conclusions there are obvious too. But we aren’t even having this debate anymore — 9/11 Just Happened, and about the only thing that’s worth talking about anymore were the goddamned Muslims that carried it off. (Note, too, that we’re not even talking about the specific Muslims that did it! Everyone’s complicit!) And even that point got the volume turned down until a few months ago. So maybe it’s not surprising that we’re suddenly having this huge argument about the “mosque” “at” “Ground Zero”: we never finished having the argument we should have been having in the first place, and it feels kind of silly to pick it up now that there’s no point anymore. (The “blow shit up” side won the argument, we blew shit up, and uh, well, how’s that working out this week?)

We’ve just decided to not talk about it anymore. There’s an accepted narrative about what happened, and we’ve airbrushed out the gory details. Unfortunately, in doing so, we stripped the event of its power. This is understandable — nobody really wants to have to relive the emotions of that day — but it does mean we’ve lost something important about what went on back in September of 2001.

Hiroshima represents a great example of this in action. The museum there will work very hard to convince you that the nuclear bombing of the city was something that Just Happened, and I suppose to the victims it did. Although you’ll find some interesting discussion about how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were basically excuses to scare the Russians, you will not find any discussion at all about the savagery the Empire inflicted on its neighbors, the brutality of the War in the Pacific, and the very cold, very calculating decisions Truman and his advisers made in dropping the bomb. But any examination of the use of nuclear weapons needs to include that component; you simply can’t view their use in isolation. The point, however, is not to judge, to place blame, or to justify or defend the decision. Fred Clark, writing earlier this month, noted: “The least evil is still evil. The least monstrous is still monstrous. When, as will happen, you are yourself forced to choose between two bad things, then choose the lesser of the evils and choose it boldly. That will be the right choice and, if circumstances are truly as circumscribed as you believe them to be, that will be the right thing to do in that situation. But it still won’t be a good thing. It isn’t a good thing and cannot be made good.” You can’t score points off it, and shouldn’t try to. You just need to understand — so that maybe, just maybe, you can work towards a future where people don’t have to make the choice in the first place.

(I want to note two things, one relevant and one not: First, I’ve been reading a lot of Slacktivist and think everyone else should, too, because Mr. Clark has a brilliant writing style and a shockingly sharp mind. Second, Hiroshima might be an instructive example for 9/11, but for an entirely different reason — the idea of normality in the face of unspeakable horror and tragedy. Put another way, if — 50-some years later — teenagers can make out across from the Industrial Promotion Hall, in the face of something so symbolic, shouldn’t we be able to get past this other thing, too?)

Of course, the applicability of Hiroshima’s example to 9/11 isn’t perfect: there is actually an evil here, perpetrated by very specific people who had other options. The existence of that evil, however, should not blind us to the need to have the discussion about its origins in the first place. This wasn’t an ancient evil that some unsuspecting scientist let loose by accident — this was a man-made evil, and if we’re going to deal with it we need to understand it. I get this is not a popular sentiment, and I realize that The Talk is not going to happen anytime soon, if at all, and by mutual consent.

Here, too, Winant is perceptive. He ends his essay with a point that I suspect will be controversial, but isn’t really: “In the temples of Americana being built, the parts of our national past that don’t belong to the white, conservative population are being sacrificed.” He’s almost right; I’d say the correct construction is more along the lines of “in the temples of Americana being built today, the parts of the national past that don’t belong to the comfortable majority are being sacrificed.” It’s not exactly about race (except when it is); it’s more generalizable to the need of the comfortable to stay comfortable, and to never be challenged in their beliefs or confronted with unpleasant truths. You believe what you believe, and you’re never invited to consider the alternatives.

But then, as he says, this is nothing new.