Part I.
Somewhere in South Western China … recently:

My ganma (god mother), two friends and I set out on a mission to buy chicken(s).   We being closer to the top side of the surrounding hills and the purveyors of the chickens being down slope quite a way, this started as do all great adventures in the middle kingdom, with a longish walk toward where I knew not precisely and whereat something, or a lot of something I’ve never seen the like of before, was bound to happen. 

I wasn’t born on a farm or raised on one either, but I’m no idiot.  I understood we were on a quest for the kind of freshness only found in places like this …

… and that it would most certainly entail the purchase of live chicken(s).  Just how such a thing would transpire exactly, the transacting of it all, not to mention the – well – dispatching of it all – none of that was at all clear to me as yet, but prior experience led me to expect the details would be riveting and uncommonly photogenic.  I was not wrong.

We were on foot at a fairly lazy pace for the better part of an hour, though it might have only been half that long.  The passage of time always has an elastic quality on such days and in such places; the acquisition of chickens was THE goal of the day, to be met before lunch. 

A walk in the greener parts of rural China never fails to entrance me.  It is all so lush, both the cultivated and the wild.  My pictures never succeed in fully rendering the quiet magnificence of the people on their land, but I keep trying...

You may think you’ve got quite a green thumb.  Within the realm of your friends and neighbours, you may very well be quite justified in such self proclaimed accomplishment.  I’m here to tell you – you’ve got nothing on China.  Vast stretches of the China I’ve seen so far are extremely hilly or mountainous, one’s choice of terminology here depending on at what point one reckons a hill has surpassed hill-dom or a mountain should be deemed too small to rightly be called a mountain.  Whichever, the topography which I am feebly attempting to give words to is no less relentlessly steep for all that reckoning, and this fact has never stopped anyone from planting the heck out of it with all manner of gorgeous things to eat. 

Observant readers will have long since noted the prevalence of corn …

Let me also point out that roads, highways and other such intrusions of modern human infrastructure are welcome enough in their place, but wherever they leave off, something will be planted.  In many places, one might easily reach out the window from a not too quickly passing car and pick a bean or two, though I think that would be a bit rude and properly frowned upon.

There are no fences that I ever saw.  I suppose that the people thereabouts long ago determined just where their corn patch ends and someone else’s begins, so what need for fences?  Robert Frost would surely have admired a great many walls in China as their purposes seem mostly to be of a more neighbourly or practical bent, like keeping the rain off of the supper table.  Even then, three is often considered more than enough to do the job.  One lonely wall may set a person musing about whose it was and what became of its comrades, so neatly severed, long since – or yesterday – carted off stone by stone, now nowhere to be seen …

We made our descent, leisurely, and occasionally met with a section of the switchback highway that meanders back and forth from way down below on upwards to some great peak I never quite got to.

Perhaps by now, readers less taken with my wordy and somewhat digressive way of telling a story are wondering when I’ll get around to the chickens again – exhibit A: 

This strident example of the sort we were after was not a candidate for that morning’s selection as it turns out – clearly, it was a lucky day for her.  After a bit of hello-ing, smiling and offers of tobacco and sunflower seeds from our hosts, mama headed off around a corner with the lady of the house to survey the day’s offerings, meanwhile I busied myself getting to know everyone else. 

In case it isn’t obvious, I fall madly in love with many of the folks I meet in China and these lovely people were no exception – gracious as all get-out and not the least bit bothered about the laowai (foreigner) with the camera. 

Initially, the youngsters thought it was a lot more fun to dodge my efforts rather than let me catch them with the lens …

… that is until I’d seduced them with the instant review function.

They were more than a little delighted with seeing themselves and their elders looking back at them from the tiny screen.  The youngest soon shifted rather effortlessly from this:

… to this:

… to this!

You’ll be wanting to hear more about the chickens, no doubt.  The procedure quickly revealed itself.  After mama had had a good look and decided on four worthy of her intentions, they were rather unceremoniously fetched up by their wings and brought for a weigh-in …

This was accompanied by no small amount of dark humour which the chickens would have utterly failed to appreciate had they understood it.  There may be a great blessing granted in the possession of a modest bird brain, especially if one is destined to be soup.

Step one: a quietly ominous looking, well used cleaver is brought to cut a bit of cloth into strips – this to bind their feet for the weighing, and so it begins.

Any escape to a life of bug hunting thus vanquished, the ‘condemned’ as I began to think of them, were assessed one by one with first decimal place precision.  A sense of the jig being up did appear to take hold in one who made a futile break for it. 

With the others, resignation had apparently set in.

At this stage, a lucky cluck might be found wanting and exchanged for one with a bit more heft, as it went with us.  Note to chickens – consider how a kernel or two fewer may prolong your days; in this company, in this place, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal. 

Step two: jiangjia (to bargain).  The whole business from beginning to end was very much a family affair.  

Everyone had an ear or an eye on the proceedings, but as far as I could tell, it was herself who bargained with mama directly.  Once they had arrived at a price, mama presented it to the men of the house – this much for those three and so much for the other – who, finding no fault with it, nodded their assent.

Having settled the matter to everyone’s satisfaction, business-like demeanours took up with the fog.

Yaode, yaode!.. Ming nian jian, ha?… Hao!… Man zou, ha? Man zou…
(Excellent!  See you next year, eh? For sure! Go easy, eh? Go easy…) …

p.s. (… as of this posting, about 11 days since the events recounted here, two of those chickens yet live!  This story is not over – check back for part II… )

robinmackinnon.com/archives/wal©mart-polemic – #comments !  

ni hao gou gou!  ni qu zai nar?

… breakfast in Beijing …

… and early morning traffic.

Noodles, noodles – hen duo de mian tiao!

 qi jiu ba / 798 …

How much is that doggy in the window?

 Any number of people are waiting to pounce with criticism of you no matter what you do or don’t say about either this or that or both.  That happens to be one of the prisms of reality that we must all deal with by some means or other.   We may, as individuals in a world of others including/excluding ourselves, be more or less bothered by this fact.  To some extent, we will inevitably be persuaded to shift our position this way or that way at one time or another according to those winds that may buffet us with this or that suboptimal result.  

We may limit ourselves for fear of losing our job, not getting a job, going to jail or losing our head.  We may, in less dire circumstances, hold our tongues for fear of causing offense, injury or revenge fantasies to arise in others within our social/socio-economic sphere, and this is undeniably the wisest course of action in many personal situations.  Nevertheless, it may also be the case that if we stifle what otherwise is best said aloud, for fear of whatever cringing denial and back-lashing may arise in the face of the naked facts, we cut out our tongues to spite the truth.

Some of us cannot bear even to speak certain truths aloud, alone, in front of a mirror.  Some of us are mired in it all, tired of it all, lost in a feedback loop of dread.  Where is this going?

You may be one of those people who wants a lot of plastic/polyethylene/polyester shit, and you want it cheap.  Maybe you don’t ‘want’ it.  Maybe you dream mahogany and jade dreams but all you’ve got coin for is plastic.  I know where you’re coming from.  I’ve been to the dollar store.  I’ve also been to China.

I bought a lot of stickers of Canadian flags and hearts and such and took them back to China.  One of the girls I gave the stickers to told me she wants to grow up and be the CEO of transnational corporations.  I’m not sure what to say to her about this aspiration.  What do you say to a child who says they want to join a gang, sell crack, and work their way to the top of the pyramid scheme?  

 "Wal Mart is China’s seventh largest export market. It bought $18 billion in goods from China in 2005 and $22 billion in 2006. More than 12 percent of China’s exports to the United States end up at Wal Mart stores and trade with retailers accounts for 1 percent of China’s GNP."

I guess my young friend has already got a pretty good idea about which side her bread will be buttered on, eh?

‘s own audit of 12,500 factories in 2004 found 9,900 violations of working conditions serious enough to suspend a factory or put it on notice – despite advance notice of factory inspections.

 is publicly charged with human right’s violations in at least 25 countries (China chief among them), worldwide.

is the largest private employer in the US.

 is a cancer – the full bore appetite of amerikan kapitalist kulture unleashed on the bloated bellies of consumers and desperate workers alike.

"David Kelley is a philosopher with The Atlas Society, formerly The Objectivist Institute.  He rebukes the anti-capitalist point of view and said it is incorrect to accuse Wal-Mart of earning high profit margins "at the expense of others."

"Workers are there voluntarily … They’re not serfs," he said. "Their alternatives might not be great, but there is nothing in the nature of life that guarantees you’re going to have a job that offers everything."

Kelley said customers have choices either to go buy a bar of soap at the local Wal-Mart or go to a mom and pop store and pay a few cents more. Most of the time, they choose Wal-Mart.

"Consumers are voting with their feet," he said. "If you complain about that, you’re complaining about freedom."

Mr. Kelley has a point which is difficult for me to concede given that he apparently is a – mouthpiece for the raving nonsense now famously known as ‘objectivism’/whipping boy for Ayn Rand’s ghostly ego, but that’s a polemic for another day.  

In this much he is correct: wAl©MaRt can’t sell what the people won’t buy, after all.  

Human society needs an enema, and that’s a mighty dangerous procedure if you’ve got your head stuck in your arse. 

…irony is not lost on some people.  People have to live on it, make thin soup of it, choke on it for decades or centuries.  They know the taste of it everywhere they go on their own land.  Myself, I cannot escape it either. A lot of people with skin like mine have very strange ideas about when history began and to whom the world belongs.  I don’t understand them – neither the people nor their ideas – even if I look just like they do.  They speak as though the words coming out of their mouths are clean; meanwhile, they cannot get any further from the truth than where they are.  Such a place does not exist.

Oh Canada.

Our home and native land.

Irony is not lost on some people.

Alanis Obamsawin’s documentary, INCIDENT AT RESTIGOUCHE, is an essential source of irony, recounting events in Listuguj – Gespe’g, Mi’gmaq territory, in June of 1981.  This kind of irony wakes the dead.

The trouble seems to be much rooted in the fact that this region of Mi’gmaq territory is more popularly known as South-Eastern Quebec, la belle province, Canada.  Back in ’81, Quebec’s Minister of Fisheries under Premier René Lévesque was one serenely ironic master of logic-manipulation by the name of Lucien Lessard.   On June ninth of that year Lessard ordered the Mi’gmaq of Restigouche (now Listuguj) to remove their nets from fishing waters acknowledged as their territory under treaty in 1752.  Lessard would go on to assert by fantastical circumlocution that he was only acting as a conservationist, although the sovereign right to fish under sudden edict accounted for less than 0.5% of total commercial fishing quotas in the region. 

Within 48 hours, an armed and belligerent force of 400 Quebec provincial police and fisheries wardens descended to enforce Lessard’s order on the population of roughly 1500, raiding the reserve to find and shred about half a dozen nets left in the water.  First Nations groups from across the country arose in solidarity; barricades were built.   A second police raid on the reserve and on the water made plain the face of dominant cultural policy in Canada.  Native people were criminalized, yet again, for defending their sovereignty over land in accordance with "peace and friendship" treaties which never ceded their inalienable right to live on that land by their own means.

In the film, Lessard is confronted by his own epic contribution to the annals of IrOnY, and Obamsawin is razor sharp.   His proclaimed intentions to ‘negotiate’ in a meeting with the band council at Restigouche fell somewhat below par  when Obamsawin reminded him of an exchange between himself and the Chief who explained how difficult it was for native people to understand that the Quebec people can fight so hard to declare their sovereignty from Canada all the while failing in every way to acknowledge the sovereignty of First Nations people in Quebec.

Lessard replied, "You can’t have sovereignty, because to have sovereignty one must have one’s own culture, language and land."

Where have you heard this kind of shite lately, eh… ?

Shite seems to envelop the world by means of whirlpool action – round and round and round we go.

 GET MORE history/IrOnY: here.

Something beyond irony, something bloody and obliterating has been going on which colonizers and their servants the world over refuse to see.  I encourage those who think Israel is ‘just defending itself’ to look at things as they really are.

There are certainly those who believe that the modern Jewish state of Israel is the will of G-d. Some of these people (a violent minority) are illegal settlers in the Occupied territories who shoot at lit windows in Palestinian homes at night, harass, assault and terrorize Palestinian people daily, incessantly, with impunity.  Most illegal settlers in the Occupied territories are simply greedy, as all grassroots colonizers are.

If they can hold ‘their’ ground for ten years, any unpaid portion of the very cheap loans the government gave them to bulldoze/buy/build on stolen land will be forgiven.  Hey – that sounds just like how the West was won!  A land without a people for a people without a land …

There are also many courageous Jewish people all over the world who say “not in my name!” and pour out their hearts in the cause of peace for all peoples.

If you are a North American of predominantly European origin, it is highly likely that you are the descendant of (generations of) people who felt quite justified in their support for a militarized, socially and culturally entrenched occupation of these territories and genocide against the indigenous peoples who were already living here.  Their reasons certainly varied.  Some were building a ‘New Jerusalem’, egged on by the voices in their heads.  Many others were victims of desperate circumstances in Europe and seeking a better life in the ‘new world’; nonetheless, the fact that this ‘better life’ included the extermination of indigenous peoples seems to have had little or no effect on their individual and collective aims and strategies.

The colonial project in North America was one of redeeming the land by declaring ownership of it.  In Canada, indigenous peoples were either murdered or contained on reservations and bound as property of the state under the Indian Act; the people referred to under the act as Indians were (continue to be) described by immigrants to North America as [violent, subhuman, dirty, child-like, heathen, savage, etc…] Following centuries of resistance, those who had survived the tens of millions of Indigenous peoples slaughtered by colonial adventure found themselves subject to phase 2 of the operation to erase them from the world.  By the 19th century, the process of social, economic and cultural quarantine of First Nations, Inuit and Metis people was augmented to include the kidnapping, abuse and violent ‘reeducation’ of their children.  The Indian Residential School system in Canada, which was an essential part of both a physical and cultural genocide and the destruction of First Nations communities, was founded on the philosophy of […killing the Indian to save the child.]. Canada’s Residential school system closed it’s last door in Saskatchewan, 1996.

Sing it with me: “O’ Canada … our home and native land …”.

Presumably, since our Prime Sinister Harper so recently stood up in the Canadian House of Commons Ill Repute and made his terribly moving apology to First Nations people on behalf of Canada/Canadians, I no longer have to break my neck proving to anyone that the colonial processes which resulted in the foundation of this country were highly criminal against the sovereign peoples already living on this land and revolved around a systematic, long-term policy of genocide toward them … do I?

Quoting directly from Mr. Harper’s “apology” on June 11, 2008: “There is no place in Canada for the attitudes that inspired the Indian Residential Schools system to ever prevail again.”

Apparently, he didn’t really mean it.

His silence burns like white phosphorous – all the way to the bone.

If you are prepared for intellectual honesty at least, what is going on between Israel and the indigenous inhabitants of the lands Israel has stolen / continues to occupy looks quite different from what you can read in most newspapers or see on most television networks.

The nature of *our existence as modern states *(Britain, France, Holland, the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Israel, etc…) is deeply rooted in our denial and defense of the racism driving our societies and our willingness to perceive peoples indigenous to the lands we covet as less entitled to peace and freedom than ourselves – disposable, subhuman.  Insisting that it is our right to continue in this way  is the talk of war criminals.
History IS repeating itself.

On my way out the door yesterday afternoon, cbc reported that the Israeli “defense” forces were marching into Gaza.  A couple of days ago it was reported that the airforce had “run out of things to bomb” and was revisiting previous targets.  A Norwegian doctor at a hospital in Gaza has reported that “they bombed a fruit market” – is that some kind of improvisation? Gaza or Guernica?

I made fast friends with a very fine fellow named Jeffrey, and we walked and talked our way south-easterly to catch up with a great column of people coming up Yonge Street from Dundas Square …

When cbc reports that “more than a thousand protesters” came out to denounce Israeli state terrorism, are they deliberately misrepresenting the facts or … are they just unable to estimate any number bigger than that?

Several thousand peaceful people (estimates in the crowd ranged from 5-6 thousand…) arrived at Bloor and Avenue road and occupied the intersection … all kinds of people, all colours and all ages, young families, students, grandparents, pipers and labour unionists.

…pipers?

Yes, Bagpipers.

Most governments say and do nothing, lift not one finger to assist or speak up on behalf of the people of Gaza (indeed – all of the people of the Occupied territories) terrorized by the state of Israel for 60 years.  Even worse, other governments including Canada applaud in public when Israel blockades Gaza in order to starve the people into submission; nevertheless – tens of thousands millions of people in the streets all over the world will not be silent.

If governments will neither speak nor act in defense of the Palestinians who live in the most densely populated prison/concentration camp on earth denied dignity, basic sewage, sufficient food, medicine, fuel, employment, etc, etc…, then, one may be driven to wonder:  What is it you would have a million and a half people who are penned and treated like rats DO for your ease and convenience?

Should the Palestinian people simply lay down and starve to death instead?

If you had been born in Gaza in 1967 and were still living there today – how might your perspective on all this be altered ?

I am not the first person to suggest that THE GRAND OFFENSIVE is one in a long line of GRAND experiments being conducted on the bodies and minds of the people of GAZA, one much more intensely focused and concentrated than various related experiments that are being performed on the people of Israel, not to mention everyone, everywhere else.

Long, grinding decades of displacement, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, degradation, collective punishment, deadly grim living conditions, impoverishment, bombing and bulldozing of homes, schools, hospitals and olive groves, imprisonment, countless beatings and killings are all instruments of pressure to be applied to *the subjects of the experiment. When carefully stage-managed, such constant pressures provoke uprising among the subjects that can be quite easily converted into justification for anything the experimenters decide to do next.  Dismissing initial conditions whenever promoting current conduct, strategies and outcomes is a vital component of this particular methodology.  Self-righteous indignation rains down, shattering the bodies of men, women and children in Gaza.

This time the sidewalk in front of the consulate was reserved …  not long after we arrived en masse they disappeared inside the building.

As Jeffrey pointed out, “All roads lead to … [Rome the US consulate]” … so we went south, to keep the blood moving in January air, to connect all the dots, in spite of the cold and the relentless darkness.

“FROM IRAQ TO PALESTINE …!”

“… OCCUPATION IS A CRIME!”

Stand up and be counted.

Before I continue, may I remind you that the people of Gaza have been illegally occupied by the state of Israel since 1967 – denied peace, economy, energy, food, medicine, (etc!). Babies have been born, grown, terrorized, imprisoned, beaten, bombed and murdered in Gaza for over forty years.  This is a wide open human wound.  Please don’t look away; look closer.

U.S. funded Israeli military forces took to the air over Gaza again today while I spent my afternoon with a big crowd of lovely people with a purpose.

This was interesting … “…THEY are TAUGHT TO KILL.”.  Who isn’t these days? It is important to point out that this is the only evidence I could find in my photo journal of the tiny gaggle of pro-killing-children-in-defense-of-Israel (a.k.a. COUNTER) protesters.

Let me put this another way: if you can’t have your beloved state of Israel without turning millions of people into refugees (on their own land) and/or displacing / bombing / starving / torturing / murdering them, indiscriminately, beyond disproportionately, then you should consider that it isn’t worth having, such as it is. (Canadians – take note: think about the Indian Act … now think again.)

We were gathered in front of the Israeli consulate, 180 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada… For whatever reason, the crowd I had joined kept growing while the one across the street remained a small, angry, static clot/mob which suddenly exited stage west – cold feet?  The ever increasing crowd of supporters of the people of Gaza suddenly overflowed their banks, occupying both sides of the street.  It was a beautiful, subtle, colourful bit of human poetry…

One gentleman I spoke to told me that as far as he knows, the consulate is on the seventh floor – he told me that the building’s elevators don’t stop on the seventh floor without special prearrangement.

We marched south, to the U.S. consulate …

I had met a precious young woman called Dua.  Her name means ‘prayer’ in Arabic.  We handed out leaflets together, moved with the crowd, smiled, discussed the mystery of hate and the miracle of love.  She sang to me. Go with God, Dua.  Peace be upon you and your family and everyone you love.

I fell in love with this guy instantly.  How could you not?!

He, possibly inspired by recent events at a press conference which needs no link, inspired others …

My toes have never been so warm on the concrete in December…

“Thank you, sweetheart.”
Ma’ salaam.