Blackface, Black Swans and Plato's Cave- Trying to Explain Canadian Politics- Opinion
Plato knows branding ,born in 429 BC, he created a one name brand that carries on to this day. Imitation is greatest form of flattery as artists and creators like Madonna ,Prince, and name recognition brands like Trump, Trudeau and Ford have quantifiable and electable impact on culture. Plato knows politics, he is considered the founder of Western political philosophy.
Let's try this, take the power away from political strategist's when it comes to historic events like ,Blackface , dual citizenship (?), CV embellishment,old and deleted Facebook by candidates wives or kids (knocked out a mayors candidate in Winnipeg a few years ago). How does a person get access to a deleted post? In the NFL it would be and unsportsmanlike like conduct penalty, the officials would conference and penalize with loss of down or yardage. Suspension is pretty rare. Let's go with a charitable donation fine to food bank like a carbon offset and shut down the political dirty tricks games during the last weeks of an election. We are Canadians, we can defeat our conditioning with education and not fear of the future.
The 2019 Federal Election seemed pretty strange, as the campaign started it looked a bit like a poodle show complete with puddles with all the leaders correctly prancing and cantering about for voters. The spectacle was so enthralling that no one seemed to notice the ones holding the leashes running beside the pretty dogs.
Just what do strategists do anyway, apparently they hold leashes. (sarcasm, serious sarcasm and an exercise in intellectual independence,my apologies I was raised in the unsupervised and free range parenting era the 1950's, also lived an unsupervised job as new photographer for 37 years. Free thinking is a thing for me,spelling not so much ) Followers rule correctly. The goal of course is to get elected ,promise anything and just say anything to get elected.
The costs become irrelevant in a world where paying it back is two or three election cycles in the future, and voters are on the same payment plan in their real life debt. Promise anything for the same reason.
At one point in the election a party was accused of being led around by some big company in the East, another beholding to some big unions and another other to big companies in the West. The Green Party apparently takes it's orders from Mother Nature. The People's Party doesn't seem to have any people at all and the last doesn't even want to be there in the first place. The usual election fare. It was as if the people holding the leashes were invisible and the voters just held their noses.
It is a battle between those who know the price of everything but not the value, and those who know the value but not the price. I know the leash carriers can hear you but the same game plan emerges in every election and voters are oblivious ,30% don't even vote.
The poodle show would turn into a dog fight by the last desperate weekend as every problem in Canada and now the world has found a solution.
For sure an optimist would think with all the future promises made there would be no need for a future election.
Then something really strange happened. When the “black face/brown” face photos of Justin Trudeau turned up I began to wonder. When I was in high school I watched the Vietnam War going on everyday on TV, the peace protesters were in Washington and spreading across the United States. Then the Pentagon Papers came out revealing the trust the American people had in the in those leading the war had been broken. This was a profound moment of disappointment. The leaders were not truthful with the public about the prospects for victory and the war was now known to be un-winnable. People believed in what their elected representatives said and they were shown to not be telling the truth about the Ten Thousand Day War. A untruthful leadership was a Black Swan moment for young Americans and for me. A Black Swan moment is one that was unanticipated, because it was considered not possible but also it has far reaching consequences according to Wikipedia.
We have learned in 2016 strategists and surrogates will say anything to support the parties that hired them. So the reaction was predictable by the two big parties. The story and picture ran around the world. Then, third party leader Jagmeet Singh separated himself by stepped up with refreshing candor. There is hope for the process.
There were those who tried to find a pattern with Trudeau's black face. Blackface on a school canoe trip sounds like hazing to me, who carries black makeup on a canoe trip. I digress.
It was the reaction of some that got me wondering. The story was so strange it had to be political “Dirty Tricks.”Apparently not as the photo leak-er was found and interviewed. Another strange thing was that the story originated in Time Magazine. Very strange, it was almost if Canada's most progressive media could not be trusted with the story. There an explanation for that too, it might look nefarious but it was not. But, that was my first thought too. Good on Canada's media to fallow the story with such enthusiasm. The photo did exist during the last past Stop Harper election where media pulled a CNN and lost their heads.
( I was my high school yearbook photographer and I shot a picture of a student in blackface during the production of a musical play back in the 1970's.)
The media initially could not decide on the colour of the face and brown face seemed to be negotiable considering the incendiary nature of what the blackface means in past stories coming from the US. It looked to me at first that another pass was given to Trudeau. Skeptical me. But, it turns out a survey of world newspapers was using the term “brown face” and it cause Canadian media to pause. A second photo verified the degree of blackness.
I had to think that voters were let down in the same way as many were by the Pentagon Papers. Young voter especially saw themselves in Trudeau, but like the Pentagon Papers a life lesson would be learned. Funny thing in small sample streeters there were those who were visibly let down and crestfallen would also say, that there was no other party to vote for. This could only be described as a Black Swan moment,but when confronted with the Black Swan the reaction was equally puzzling. In the end the photo was just another bump in the election road as politics as usual would emerge in the last week.
I read something recently that might explain Canadian Politics. Politics is as old as the ages and so is branding. Plato's Cave Allegory is said to be “the effect of education and the lack of it in our nature.”
The cave is a theoretical place were prisoners (the public) were kept their entire lives facing only a blank wall. Today the wall could be computer or mobile device screens or a TV screen.
Shadows of objects where flashed in front of them from the light produced from a fire. (news media) Names were given to the shadow shapes, these shapes were the only reality the viewers saw.
So with this context, imagine one political party being represented by the shadow of a heart, another by an ax, and the third a light bulb. The love party is the emotion projected by a heart, the cutback party as “bad” by the ax and “good ideas” but un-electable party by the light bulb. There are two parties in Canada have been historically branded to their detriment. What would have happened if the shadow of the Heart Party was that of a child, the Ax party was the image of a parent. It is very subjective to the whim of the shadow keeper.
For generations in my experience Canadian political parties seemed to be seen only by their reflection in Canadian media. A very small media at that time. The phrase “tax and spend” party was only used once in my unscientific survey and it came in the context as a surprise aside. The ax, cutback party would be characterized continually.
As a child growing up, the cutback party was always characterized as bad,the Heart party, tax and spend was always good. I am taking about as far back as John Diefenbaker, Robert Standfield and Joe Clark. We also see the term's “Left and Right.” The problem with the two sides analogy is the science. Interestingly,the body also has essential left and a right pieces ,Left and right hands but also in lungs, kidneys, eyes all part of a balance system for survival. There is also only one heart but the brain has two halves,left and right sides. Canadian politics maybe so dysfunctional because it is using only half a brain,and the media and public have bought into the half brained leadership model. That is the science view of it but the political view is very different.
Politics seem to never really be done differently. Voters become cynical or indifferent.
Instead of left and right the big thinkers hopefully will begin to see things as Up and Down.
Media would claim a “hidden agenda” when it appeared the a “ax” party might win.
The “Stop Harper” election was a signal about unhealthy aspects of political reporting. Strategic voting was a buzzword to offer options and support the narrative to a public conditioned to Plato's shadow politics.
The reality is that most Canadians would live within their means, if they could. The additional taxes beyond income tax to PST/GST to the most unfair bracket creep taxes, a new carbon tax (even though the price of gas is 70% tax)plus fees from frontage fees and added education taxes is putting people in the credit limit range on multiple credit cards. The “hidden agenda” is really a reality check on spending, a pruning back. Governments need to mind the store just like people. Social programs may have to put governments in the position to just give away money in the next age of AI. This is also a reality as high pay jobs and jobs in general will begin to disappear. There is a false floor of wealth transfer is not being valued, and more than one generation of youth has been on their parents couch already and it wasn't their fault.
The sad reality is that parties need to find ways to get money to people caught in the cross hairs of change. The shadow puppet shows a need more thoughtful implementation. Defense ( big ticket ships and planes) and Climate Change are big expensive projects that have been kicked down the road. Governing is a broad stoke exercise but the end of the road is nigh.
The last time the government lost control of deficits began with 21% interest on homes, mass defaults of house mortgages, a .61 cent dollar, so much inflation that the first Trudeau had to limit wage growth to 5% in the next year and 6% in the next. Most people outside of government haven't seen a 5% increase in 30 years. Good luck to the kids.
Thankfully political parties and media are beginning to see the problems of their conditioning. The party leaders and voters should not be the prisoners of party strategists or their fuzzy puppets. The prospects for a Trump like upheaval are in play otherwise.
Aristotle wrote when the prisoners were released into the daylight they would able to perceive the true reality and not the reflection of it. The problem comes as the prisoners cannot escape their conditioning from being inside the cave. They are bond by what they learned through their senses. When encountering the reality of the sun, that reality is incomprehensible.
In 2019 the reporting of the election was completely fair as far as I could see. This was refreshing considering how the last election went. In the final stages it was determined that a minority government would result. Canada has been well served by minority government. And then the shadows appeared regarding coalition governments of the Heart party and the Light bulb party. I have never heard of the coalition option in Canada ever, the shadows are still strong.
Canada's election apparatus gets five stars out of five in ignoring the shapes and sticking to the proper order of their mandate. The government also costed platforms. Very good. The CBC was also outstanding and it looked pretty hard for one reporter, the Blackface was a Black Swan event and shook a lot of peoples conditioning to their core but like other supposed transgression the Heart party shook it off and voters gave a big fat “meh!.” A ruling party draws a lot of criticism over four years and people push back over many things, pipelines and housing ,who knows how much blackface cost the PM, in the end over 1 million voters changed their vote.
Plato was not wrong.
Let's try this, take the power away from political strategist's when it comes to historic events like ,Blackface , dual citizenship (?), old and deleted Facebook by candidates wives or kids (knocked out a mayors candidate in Winnipeg a few years ago). How does a person get access to a deleted post? In the NFL it would be and unsportsmanlike like conduct penalty, the officials would conference and penalize with loss of down or yardage. Suspension is pretty rare. Let's go with a charitable donation fine, like a carbon offset to food bank and shut down the political dirty tricks games during the last weeks of an election. We are Canadian we can defeat our conditioning with education and not fear of the future. Opinion by Ken Gigliotti Oct 2019
Topic: Blackface, Black Swans and Plato's Cave-Trying to Explain Canadian Politics (Read 958 times)