Thursday, September 16, 2010

"Toronto Elites"...

...would make a great name for a new hockey team in that city. But sadly it is the term used by the asshole Baird and his ilk to describe Jack and Mike's (funny, I thought he was a Harvard Elite) plans to uphold the long gun registry.

This term bugs me this morning. I don't know why the opposition parties don't retake that term from the Cons and throw against them. The way Baird et al deploy that rhetoric against the educated suggests they'd desire everyone in the country to leave school at grade 6 lest they risk becoming an 'elite' of some fashion. Someone ought to ask the Cons if they're planning to encourage kids not to finish school and strive for mediocrity and ignorance. I wonder if they're planning anti-scholarships in order to support of the most ignorant and phobic of the early leavers as the try to feed themselves on minimum wage or less?

Granted, the Cons are messaging to supporters of a party who seem to need to have the word "illiterate" defined for them, but good god, no one in the right mind wants to be that way. I've worked with, interviewed and have friends amongst the under-educated. These are people who didn't do well in school, often not for lack of brains but because they weren't coming from particularly stable or encouraging backgrounds that are normally conducive to success in education. Some just don't fit in conventional schools and the education system discards them. Time goes by and their literacy skills and lack of education become humiliations they hide and instead they get by on the basics. In some, blustering accusatory ignorance becomes a good mask. Redressing these deficiencies later in life, even when given the opportunity as I've witnessed, is often a thought terrifying to the point of debilitation. Would they wish the same fate for their children? Very doubtful, me thinks.

The Cons fork a slick tongue when they both praise people who rise above the limitations of their class and context by "by their bootstraps" and become the "elite" yet now also praise and encourage those who don't to remain in their present station.

Still, you have to hand it to them, they seem to have found a way to instill a revolutionary zeal in many of the lumpenproletariat. Except instead of a society rooted in an equal distribution of wealth and collective ownership of the means and modes of production, the Cons wish to build an anti-society of the ignorant to support their own pet collection of lunatic militarist, evangelical, corporatist, misogynist, authoritarian fetishes.

1 comment:

Edstock said...

Just wondering, if Stevie hadn't prorogued Parliament, he would have had this passed, already?