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OS DARCIE SMITH

Canadian Waste and Illicit Dissent -Oct. 5th Shew at 3rd PHOT

October, 19 2011° Over the Edge

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It seems a significant segment of our society harbours
considerable contempt for a man making the transition to
a creative career in writing or any other art. He’s asked
why he is “puttering around”, “doing nothing” or “moping
around in” in his apartment all day. He may receive mock-
ing questions about his occupational status at public events
like literary readings.

During the 1930’s in Canada, single men without recog-
nized jobs were collected into unemployment relief camps,
or work camps, in remote rural locations where they did
forestry and construction work for twenty cents per day.
They were discouraged from reading.

At least the traditions of parliamentary democracy sur-
vived in this country. In Germany, the Nazis, in power
after Jan. 30, 1933, established the Reichsarbeitsdienst,
or national work service, which it was strongly suggested
unemployed men should join. Those who declined were
considered “work-shy”, arrested and sent to concentration
camps, which, in the early 1930s, were more like hard-
labour camps and not yet the death camps they became
after the outbreak of war in 1939. A Toronto scholar told
me during my visit to that city in August 2010 that storm
troopers would go out and arrest any single man suspected
of not having a recognizable job. Writers who were not
Nazi party members or loyal followers were under special
suspicion. A cartoon in a newspaper published in a Berlin
newspaper in the early 1930’s just before the Nazi take-
over shows a bespectacled writer cowering in the corner
of his living room, biting his fingernails, as storm troopers
rifle through his books and papers carelessly, looking for
suspected subversive material, unconcerned about damage
to priceless volumes. The caption of the photo is “Schrift-
steller, ist er?” (So he’s a writer, is he?”).

I don’t know if the people here who resent independent
writers as “not really working” would want to advocate
going this far. Maybe they suspect the writer is living on
Employment Insurance or welfare, and possibly that is
what fuels their sareasm and resentment. They can’t im-
agine he might be living on savings or an earned pension.
Canada has an excellent tradition of parliamentary democ-
racy, and we needn’t fear people with such sentiments will
obtain arbitrary power.

Still, the cultural atmosphere since the early 1980’s
has been increasingly hostile to the idea of anyone having
enough free time to be creative. And, in the June 2010 issue
of The Progressive, the linguist and political commenta-
tor Noam Chomsky pointed out that in the mid-1920’s the
Weimar Republic was the freest country in the world, the
pinnacle of Western civilization. In 1927 the Nazi Party
was a splinter party of easily dismissed cranks. Just six
years later, after the Great Depression hit and unemploy-
ment reached record levels, the Nazis were in power and
Germany was on its way to becoming the exact opposite of
a democracy with a sophisticated culture.

The phenomenon of regimes sending unpopular people
like dissident writers into labour camps is not restricted
to the far right. From the late 1920’s the Soviets had their
forced labour camps. The Maoist regime in China encour-
aged a Cultural Revolution of Red Guards who forced
intellectuals into the remote countryside to work in the
fields. While it is good to learn more about the state of the
agricultural economy and not look down on farmers, the
Red Guards’ motives were revenge and resentment against

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people of accomplishment whom they considered more
fortunate than they were.

The people in Northern B.C. who resent independent
writers also derive their views, whether they are conscious
of the fact or not, from Calvinistic and Puritan traditions
in Scotland’s and England’s past. The early twentieth-
century German sociologist Max Weber noted that, with
the ascendancy of Oliver Cromwell and his forces in mid-
seventeenth-century England, the Puritan work ethic be-
came dominant in English culture. Artistic spontaneity in
‘Merrye Olde England’, Weber said, died away like blooms
after a hard frost. For two centuries afterwards there were
few English painters or musicians who achieved inter-
national acclaim.

One fortunate side effect of Calvinism, Weber acknow-
ledges, was an efficient, generally trustworthy civil ser-
vice and general civic honesty. In the past thirty years,
however, with one economic crisis after the other arising
from questionable schemes, this advantage from being in
a Calvinistic culture has been lost. We have seen the U.S.
Savings and Loan collapse and scandal of the late 1980s,
the Enron schemes of the early part of last decade, and
the major fraud by key Wall Street banks and investment
houses that led to the Great Recession of 2008-09. Billions
and now trillions of dollars have been funneled from tax-
payers and ordinary savers to these financial institutions
and to government programs designed to shore up these
shady organizations. Whatever was left of Calvinist pro-
bity has been lost.

Our social betters are leading us down a very dark
path. The Tar Sands project in Alberta is set to quintuple in
size as we desecrate our environment to send our resources
to shore up an overseas totalitarian dictatorship. A person
can get nightmares from watching the 2006 documentary
by photographer Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Land-
scapes, which shows a completely degraded landscapes of
slag heaps and contaminated waters in Mainland China,
Bangladesh and other developing countries where hapless
people scramble for long hours looking for the slightest
salvageable scrap of anything possibly useful. Eventu-
ally, under authoritarian globalization, all natural beauty
on every continent will be ground down into grey mounds
and poisonous pools or, at the very least, significantly and
permanently scarred.

Although North American workers -- after 30 years of
the weakening of unions and of labour standards in gener-
al, and the return of a ubiquitous long-hours culture — work
longer hours, have longer work weeks and work more days
per year than most developed industrial countries, even
very hard-working Japan. Yet establishment commentators
and mainstream economists call for yet more workaholism
among young people trying to establish families. In addi-
tion, these opinion leaders even want to abolish leisure at
the end of life as they advocate moving the age of retire-
ment to 67, 69 or even 75 (as one University of Toronto
business professor recommended in the Globe and Mail
last November). The American sociologist Benjamin Kline
Hunnicutt warns we are entering a world of “Work With-
out End”.

Recent cuts to grants for the arts have an implicit mes-
sage. To paraphrase Orwell, the powers that be want to
push a man’s nose down into the grindstone — FOREVER.

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