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. 

Too much radio silence. Let’s just say …

…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.