A rchive Date
[ 03-10-2018 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/july-news-1.4767281
Enjoying the gift of nothing, for a few moments in July
You realize in the summer how much of conventional news is irrelevant nonsense, or trash for voyeurs
Neil Macdonald · CBC News · Posted: Jul 31, 2018 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: July 31
July is the best month. I spent some of it in Italy this year, with nothing to do but sit with my e-reader under a tree, shaded from the Mediterranean heat. (I hate paper books, I've decided in retrospect. They're awkward and hard to read when you're lying on your side in bed, and they sit around like lumps for years after you've finished them, taking up space and disintegrating and making dust. I finally stopped pretending I'll ever read mine again and threw most of them away.)
In July, you can enjoy nothing. By which I mean nothing is a thing to enjoy. I can't help wondering whether retirement is going to be a bore, or seem like one long July.
In July, you have time to realize how it feels even more quiet when cicadas are filling the background with their uproar. If that sounds precious, maybe it is, but it seemed remarkable when I noticed it.
You don't need a sweater on a July night. Or even shoes. Food tastes better. You understand human beings were meant to live in warm climates.
Pornographie des sentiments
You also realize in July how much of the conventional news stream is irrelevant nonsense, or trash for voyeurs: pornographie des sentiments, to quote an Italian friend with whom I can only communicate in French.
She was talking about Facebook (which, like Twitter, I've decided is a time suck and have abandoned), but her point does apply more broadly, given the extent to which conventional and unconventional news websites, desperate to survive in a pitiless marketplace, now ape social media.
Perhaps it just becomes more obvious in July, though.
In July, institutions the media depend on to provide the tonnage necessary to fill pages and newscasts tend to shut down, and it becomes obvious how much "news" - I use scare quotes because the word is one of the most elastic, undefined terms in the English language - is institutional, supplied by legislatures and their committees, the courts, schools and universities, think tanks and so on. In their absence, the level of populist material rises accordingly.
There are more listicles, some of them weirder than normal. (TripAdvisor informed me that among the world's top travel experiences, as voted by members, are the super-saver tour of Auschwitz and the Wieliczka Salt Mine, and a visit by train to Dachau.)
And culture-war issues get more coverage than ever.
Topping that category, of course, is anything to do with America's leader. Normally, coverage of U.S. President Donald Trump is like an untethered garden hose, spraying in all directions. In summer, it becomes a wide-open 10-inch pipe, at least in North America. (Europeans do a much better job of ignoring him than we do). The stories that follow his Twitter blasts, generally framed in outrage, as though his puerile boorishness should still be a surprise to anyone, are particularly tiresome.
Not that all Trump news is porn; how he uses the power Americans have given him is important to understand. It was instructive watching NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg crawl and fawn earlier this month as Trump treated him like a pet raccoon during a news conference.
Obviously, Stoltenberg wants to keep his job and thought kissing up to the biggest bill-payer was the ticket. But his panting obsequiousness was startling. I suppose it's unrealistic, but wouldn't it have been wonderful if he'd had the bottle to tell Trump that if NATO is so useless, perhaps the United States should withdraw, and that the other member countries would probably get along fine all by themselves? That it might even be a relief not to be dragged into, say, invading a country based on a colossal lie, wiping out a few hundred thousand lives and fuelling the creation of ISIS in the process?
The hypocrisy jubilee Trump has convened on trade bears following, too, even in July, if only because of the damage it threatens to everyone's bank account.
The Canadian government's handling of the issue has been clever. Its low-key tone has actually amplified Trump's ugly combination of lies and ignorance, annoying the Canadian public thoroughly enough to obliterate memories of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's mawkish costume tour of India, and maybe even enough to win him re-election next year.
The Canadian media have sensed that mood and joined right in. Trudeau's foreign minister was taken at face value when she declared Trump's tariffs on Canadian aluminium and steel to be "protectionism, pure and simple," as though our dairy and poultry supply management system isn't. Or the iron wall Canada has erected against cross-border e-commerce. Trump is right to single those things out as unfair trade barriers, but he's such a boob, and his own policies are so blatantly jingoistic, that the issue of trade has become seriously muddled by patriotic emotion.
I confess I feel it. It's satisfying to not have spent a dime of my vacation money in the U.S., a country where I thoroughly enjoyed living for 12 years, and it shouldn't be.
Anyway, it's still July, at least for one more day. I can still sit in my backyard until twilight, and then eat my supper outside. The TV can stay off. There are still books to get through. (Read The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner. It's brilliant.)
I'll need a sweater in a little while, but not yet.
Neil Macdonald is an opinion columnist for CBC News, based in Ottawa. Prior to that he was the CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years, and before that he spent five years reporting from the Middle East. He also had a previous career in newspapers, and speaks English and French fluently, and some Arabic.
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