Shaken And Stirred

Monday, the 23^rd, was brilliant, the first real spring day since the season was officially declared open a month ago. The snow and ice were gone and there wasn’t the merest whiff of windstorms or any other similar unpleasantness. The joy and excitement were palpable. Spring had finally sprung, and it was time to look forward to the next few months with anticipation to the weather that Toronto knows how to deliver. On that day, there was even the added bonus of St George’s, a day that is named for a person I know well.

         The only slightly discordant thing in this lovely tableau was that I had to attend at an out-patient clinic in a hospital called the Sunnybrook. It was a longer wait too, than I had anticipated, but that in no way disconcerted me. And while waiting my turn, I glanced occasionally at the flat screen TV mounted several metres away at ceiling level. As is usually the case in hospital waiting areas, the sound was turned off but then, from about 2 pm the hospital PA system scratched into life and began to make announcements at irregular intervals, “Code This” and “Code That”, identifying locations in the hospital where some critical event was taking place, and requesting relevant personnel to report. Meantime, the soundless flat screen began to unpeel a story that was occurring at a location in the city and which involved a white van. The screen was too far away for me to fully comprehend the pictures or read the chyron that was running along the bottom of the screen. “Chyron” is a word that I learnt recently prior to which, the only word I knew for the info-graphic along the bottom of a TV screen was “crawler”. But whatever it is called it was too indistinct for me to know what was really going on. No sound, no readable chyron. Meanwhile, the hospital PA repeated its crackling from time to time, requesting urgent attendance of staff somewhere in which the words “Emergency Room” featured. Nothing to be concerned about. After all, this was a hospital.

         It was not until after my business at Sunnybrook was over and I was back home and turned on the radio that I began to put together the TV footage and chyron on the one hand and the hospital PA soundtrack on the other, and get some appreciation of what had been going on: Sunnybrook, one of the main trauma centres in Toronto had been receiving casualties from the street scene that had been unfolding on TV at Jane and Yonge Streets, a dozen or so blocks north of where we live .

         And of course, by that time all the media were full of the story of how a young man, subsequently identified as Alec Menasian had apparently deliberately driven a hire van into pedestrians who were going about their business enjoying the lovely spring day I mentioned earlier.

We have no idea why Menasian did what he did, but a Toronto police officer, identified as Constable Ken Lam , made sure of the opportunity to interrogate Menasian by arresting him alive.

         Toronto has been shaken to the core by this event, reminding us that “Toronto The Good” is as vulnerable as any other modern world city. But the thing is, Toronto’s soul has also been stirred too, to reveal its essential decency that will never be extinguished.

Tell Fren Tru

The Mathematics of Hate

For the past six weeks, Sierra Leone has been gripped in a bitter election campaign in which a plethora of parties have been vying for a place in the sun. Nothing remarkable about that. After all, elections are the hallmark of democracy. However, a few election cycles ago, one might have been more hopeful about the proceedings and the apparent diversity of punters. Surely, that’s good, with all the hopefuls, telling us how they intended to make life better for us. But even then, there was something of an edge to the rhetoric that was saying obliquely “vote for me, or else”. As it turned out, the outcome was peaceful, and we were all able to settle back, once again, into the same-old, same-old state of bad governance. The constitutional order was preserved, and the atmosphere of dodgy law and order maintained.

         Now to the present. Today, each one of us has been transformed into a messaging machine over which we ourselves have little personal control. It is a system that not only receives messages, but one that can also broadcast back, frequently at a higher decibel, to a wider circle of what the puppet-masters call “friends”. Messaging has now become similar to chain reactions, governed by the processes that mathematicians call “force amplification”, through the re-messaging system for as many times as there are recipients, whether by Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Instagram, YouTube or whatever. And so, without realising it, we are played for the suckers that we are by corporate interests that have only one objective: increasing the bottom line. Their modus operandi is to encourage and even force us to “Like” and “Share” whatever message lands on our device. Every time we “like” and “share” we expand the reach of those money-making corporations. At the same time, we, the consumers, buy more and more stuff. A win-win for the corporate interests. Fair enough. There is nothing wrong with making the kind of money they make, despite the huge gap between them and the rest of us. It is a gap that cannot be ignored however, because, we the 99%, are put at an even greater disadvantage as we lay bare our innermost selves by our choices in “likes” and “shares”: It is as if we stand naked at the market square shouting, “come and get me”. And get us they do. They exploit our weaknesses by routing to us more of the kind of stuff that we “like” to “share”, including toxic messages that we, again, forcefully amplify in the manner mentioned earlier. To be victimized in this way we need not be literate or even minimally lettered. Information can be in written or spoken words, pictographs, cartoons or videos. All that is required of us is to look down and/or listen and then hit the share symbol and the message, benign or toxic, hate speech or fake news, wings its way to the next recipient in an ever-widening circle.

So, here we are, two weeks after the Sierra Leone general election, inching towards the uncertainties of a face-off between the two main presidential candidates. Each side claims actual or potential election malpractice by the other side, one of the North and the other of the South. It is a geographical divide that provides respectable cover for the underlying dystopian fissure in the society, namely our inability to think outside the box of tribe, the sin that is not usually named in polite company, but which lies at the bottom of all that ails us.

But of policies? Not a squeak. The social media are far too busy stirring the tribe pot to concern itself about the basic issues of governance that will turn the country from backward to “developing”.

And this is just the surface. We have no idea what else might be going on in the social media empires when they allow our data to be made accessible to those who would directly influence us to vote in a particular way. It was not much of a surprise, to me at least, that the likes of Cambridge Analytica had been involved in the voting processes that delivered Brexit and the White House to Donald Trump. But what has been shocking is that CA’s Canadian partner, Aggregate IQ, received money to influence the last Nigeria presidential election.  

How many miles between Nigeria and Sierra Leone?

Tell Fren Tru

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Minding The Language II

I am conflicted somewhat by Donald Trump’s recent designation of countries in Africa as “shit hole” countries. But before I get to that, I want to try to unpick possible definitions of what a shit hole country might be.

What could the president have been thinking when he said what he is alleged to have said? Was he thinking about a country’s sanitation arrangements within the home or of facilities installed in a shed-like annex in the yard, or of other types, less elaborate in design nearby or afar?

Or was the president referring to countries that he disapproves of on the basis of anatomical considerations. If he was thinking anatomy, he should know that that way of categorizing nations will not wash. It is too general. The standard model of humanity comes equipped with the aperture in all instances. Everybody has one, so the use of that parameter is not distinctive enough to enable one to classify a nation as a shit hole country. In short, no one country, by this characterisation, is more of a shit hole than the next. That approach won’t work, Mr Trump. So, it is more likely that the etymology of the president’s word choice arises from the technical aspects of managing the products issuing from the anatomical end zone I mentioned earlier.

The transfer of product from the one category of hole to the other has been a challenge since the dawn of civilization, and the way this troublesome matter is handled in every country remains fraught. At its most elemental, holes dug specifically for the purpose are to be found in every country on every continent in their various iterations. Perhaps it is differences in the waste management procedures that the president was thinking about when he made his comment using language that is not generally acceptable in polite society. Interestingly, I find that my grammar-checking software is not comfortable with the phrase in question and coyly substitutes “shit whole” for the one I type. Makes no sense of course but, given time it may yet come to accept Mr Trump’s use of language.

But here’s the thing: The current President of the United States has single-handedly lowered the quality of public discourse to a level that, to quote the man himself, is “unpresidented”. So here we are, in 2018, holding our nose and repeating his utterances everywhere, by word of mouth, in print, on the radio and on TV, even in staid organizations such as the BBC. And this is not the only term that the man, with his vast presidential reach, has made usable in what used to be called mixed company. Remember, he is the one that describes the way in which he captures women - by grabbing them by their nether regions. And then, recently, we are made to wonder what climate phenomenon “Stormy Daniels” represents; but, thanks to Google, one is quickly informed that this has nothing at all to do with the weather outlook.

Why am I conflicted then? Describing a country as Mr Trump did, is rude, crude, undiplomatic and vicious and ultimately does not serve America’s interests. It is deeply offensive to people in Africa and from Africa. There are so many things that are good on the continent that anyone, even the dullest dotard, can see that the continent has the potential to be a real powerhouse not only on home turf, but right across the world as well. Africans in the diaspora, in America for example, are among the brightest lights in industry and the universities .  And most of the fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa. So, if we combine the potential of its brainpower with its current economic vigour, the continent could rapidly progress to boom, creating more employment for its young people and reduce, if not completely eliminate the need for them to embark on perilous journeys to far off places where they waste their lives in some employment ghetto and are never are able to shine and flourish. That is, provided they have not died before getting to their desired destination

            But then, the peoples of the African continent have a blanket woven in oppression, corruption, deprivation and denial of opportunity held over them by their own leaders, who by any metric, can only be described as “shitty”. All their protestations to the contrary are hollow and merely self-serving.

            Let us seize the opportunity to drum them out of office whenever they give us the chance.

Tell Fren Tru

Minding Your Language

Putting a few words together is never easy. Even at the best of times and in the best hands words come only with difficulty. Stringing them together to express a thought coherently sometimes feels like herding cats.

But we do not live in the best times; and things are not even normal. Just by the mere act of thinking an idea puts one on a collision course with the thought-control police. And actually verbalizing a thought openly could well expose one to the charge of purveying “Fake News”, a term beloved of the current leader of the Free World.

Thus, anyone playing with words or trying to use them, in these near-dystopian times also plays with fire. This applies not just to the amateur but, as well, to the professional who makes a living using words as an everyday commodity, contributing to or putting together a newspaper or magazine, whether print or digital. The living that such an individual makes depends on how much credibility their organization has. People who buy or “consume” the product do so with the confidence that they are getting a genuine article, the real deal. If the product is wanting or faulty, it loses value and likely, market share as well, just as any other commodity or service would in the marketplace. Definitely “not good”, as Mr Trump would say. Consequently, our conscientious dealer in words has to be sure that their source is impeccable and that any of their ideas or opinions are well-founded. Even so, the accusation of “fake news” can be quite destructive and difficult to shake, descending into a question of “he said, she said”...

Fair enough, you might be prepared to concede and then roll up your sleeves and join the rough and tumble in the market place of ideas. But it seems the rules have changed even more profoundly. In recent days and indeed, as we speak, we hear that the Trump administration has signalled prohibition on the use of certain words. To communicate with, not only his highness the President, but with his courtiers too, certain words are to be avoided. We hear, for example, that, to speak to authority, the CDC is having to mind its p’s and q’s and avoid certain words in order to maintain ideological purity. Now, the CDC, the Centres for Disease Control of America is one of that nation’s most venerable institutions. It is a department of the US government that has, over many years sought to find ways and means of controlling the spread of diseases in the country. And, as would be obvious to anyone, controlling disease in one country also means that spread to the rest of the world is curbed. This is critically important work that benefits all. The CDC tackles other diseases and conditions as well: if it afflicts humanity, they are there to reduce the potential impact. They collect the data; they study the human condition, from fetus to the grave, and their findings provide the evidence that is needed to make policy and guide decisions about best practice in prevention and control.

To get their message to us, the general public, and to those who provide the money for their work, the CDC have to use plain language, the kind of language that we all can understand; like “evidence”, “science-based”, “fetus”, “diversity”, “entitlement”, etc. But now, we hear, they have to avoid using words such as these for fear of annoying someone in authority. I should say though, that I myself have not seen the original story of this new word-avoidance strategy, reportedly published by the The Washington Post, newspaper. Rather paradoxical. The Post’s paywall bars me from reading their story, a move that introduces another layer of irony into a landscape that is already riddled with ironies. True, there are no free lunches and The Post is not obliged to hand me a freebie, even though it’s almost Christmas and though they are making a point about impediments to information flow, about which they and we are supposed to care.

But hey, this is the season of goodwill to all men (and women too) and I, for one, will not stint words in wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a 2018 that is free of pestilence and other distempers.

Tell Fren Tru