(Poem) Eastside Requiem

Source: The Tyee

look into my eyes and

see the lost horizon

step across the line, your world to mine

and you'll wizen

under fading streetlights

winter chills and night frights

somewhere east of where you ceased to care

where the earth blights

and you don't shed a tear

while my friends disappear

without warning

one more dark winter's eve

one more lost life to grieve

in the morning

another daughter of the eastside

nothing but someone else's problem

yes you knew the story

knew we were the quarry

knew he was bad news, yet you would choose

to ignore me

in this urban blister

every stolen sister

had a tale to tell, she cried and fell

you dismissed her

who was she, you don't care

she was used, disrepaired

and foresaken

but the faces and names

and the loved ones remain

ere to waken

daughters standing in procession

one day to stand in vindication

(Vancouver, 2007)

This week the children of three women who were murdered by Robert Pickton filed lawsuits against the police and the serial killer, marking the first such cases involving women Pickton was convicted of killing. This brings the total number of cases filed since May in relation to the Pickton slayings to nine, alleging the RCMP failed to properly investigate their disappearances.

The families and loved ones of these missing women continue to fight for justice, even as this crime has now faded from public consciousness. This unspeakable crime against the city of Vancouver's most vulnerable and downtrodden residents, and the apathy that surrounded their plight until the horrible reality of the situation was revealed to all, must never be forgotten.

I wrote this poem over six years ago. The fact that any news story on this and similar stories involving murdered women on the fringes of society are either shut down to comments altogether or have close to half the comments blocked due to offensive content tells me that the bigger fight against the prevailing social attitudes that abetted this atrocity is far from over.

Yes, Actually We Do Live In A 'Rape Culture'

If I were in a position to nominate somebody for Time Magazine Man of the Year for 2012, my number one choice would be Todd Akin. Thanks in no small part to the Missouri senate candidate's extraordinarily stupid and offensive remarks about 'legitimate rape' on St. Louis television in August, the rampant sexism and misogyny that has long pervaded the US Republican Party was suddenly catapulted to the forefront of the election and resulted in the greatest gender divide in any US presidential election in history - and an unprecedented wave of victorious female candidates

The Akin remarks, as well as a number of similarly off-colour comments, also brought the issue of rape to the forefront of the election, and by proxy to the general online conversation. The phrase 'legitimate rape' has over the past few months become a byword for misogyny, and served as a lightning rod for debate about the so-called 'rape culture' within American society. Not surprisingly, the resurgence of this much-maligned second-wave feminist concept has incurred an angry backlash from those who asserts that while Neanderthals like Akin are clearly rape apologists, characterizing North American society as a whole as a 'rape culture' is a dangerous overstatement.

One blog post in particular caught my eye, one by a blogger who goes by the handle Bigot Vanquisher. (Love the name, by the way!) A relative newcomer to the blogosphere from what I can tell, Bigot Vanquisher is clearly the sort of angry atheist shit-disturber that I'm sure I would normally get along with famously out in the intertubes. Nevertheless, her post (I'm assuming she's a she) on American 'Rape Culture' raised a number of points that I felt needed addressing, as I feel they misconstrue the term and ultimately understate the severity of the misogynist virus within our society. Ms. Vanquisher, if you're reading this post, I more than welcome a rebuttal.

Ms. Vanquisher claims that those who characterize the United States as having a 'rape culture' do so on the following grounds:

1. Women are taught not to get raped instead of men being taught not to rape;
2. Women are objectified and oppressed in our society;
3. Rape victims are more often than not blamed for their own rape instead of the rapist being blamed.

She then goes on to refute these assertions on the grounds that the vast majority of men do not commit acts of rape and that violence is a problem that affects both sexes (and indeed men are more likely to fall victim to physical violence than women), and furthermore than men are also judged on the basis of their appearance - and that women do indeed participate in their own objectification by wearing revealing clothing. While it's not clear to me what all of this has to do with concept of the rape culture, the main point of her post appears to be that 'rape culture' is an unfair blanket characterization of a society wherein the vast majority of men are not rapists.

C'mon, it's all in the spirit of fun, isn't it?

There are two inherent problems with this line of reasoning. The first is while it's all fine and good for Ms. Vanquisher to assert that "the average male does not rape, nor has a desire to," the statistics out there paint a darker picture of the 'stronger sex'. Numbers cited by Roger Williams University in Rhode Island indicate that one out of four American women is sexually assaulted at some point in her life (a fairly commonly cited statistic). Regardless of how accurate this is, that's still a hell of lot of women, however you cut it. The American Medical Association also states that two to four million women are abused every year. That means if you're an American woman, you have a greater than one in 50 chance of being raped on any given year. The RWU numbers also show that fewer than 20 percent of instances of sexual assault are reported to the police, so these figures are invariably lowballed.

What about then men then? The RWU study showed that one in 12 male university students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape (and again these are men who admit to it). While one out of 12 is by no means 'most', it's still a worryingly high number. If it transpired that eight percent of the population had committed armed robbery, you'd consider that a crime wave. Likewise if you were to find out that eight percent of the elected officials in your region had admitted to accepting bribes, you'd probably call that endemic corruption.

Clearly there's a lot of rape going on and vast majority of it is being committed by men against women, and the sheer numbers reveal that this is no the work of a small but dedicated assortment of creepy back-alley perverts in dirty raincoats. But even this is somewhat beside the point when it comes to discussing the concept of 'rape culture', and here Ms. Vanquisher commits the logical fallacy of confounding 'institutionalize oppression' with the very separate issue of individual men oppressing individual women. This defence is the typical knee-jerk reaction that one gets from men who object to the idea of a patriarchy along the lines of "Well, I'm not like that!"

Unfortunately, even if it's true that a significant majority of men don't condone or apologize for sexual assault in any way (although I myself have my doubts), the fact would remain that we live in a culture that makes all manner of excuses for male behaviour while shaming women who publicly assert their own sexuality. Pornographers and religious demagogues are united in their obsession with female purity (the line between Barely Legal and the 'purity ball' phenomenon is a narrow one indeed) and their contempt for female sexual autonomy. From Sleeping Beauty to today's torture-porn films and hideously misogynistic fashion shoots, the passive helpless female as rape-fodder is an undeniable presence within our culture's psychological landscape.

A gold-plated Infiniti outside a jewelry store in Nanjing, China

Still not convinced that this constitutes a 'rape culture'? Let me give you the following analogy. Let's say you have a hypothetical country someplace wherein eight percent of public officials admit that they either are or have been on the take. From that one can be pretty much assured that a) the actual number of corrupt officials is significantly higher, and b) an even larger number are probably aware of the corruption and either turning a blind eye to it or otherwise remain silent, either out of fear or a sense of hopelessness about the situation. By any standard this would constitute a 'culture of corruption' worthy of a Transparency International dossier.

The analogy of political corruption with rape is, I believe, a telling one. As with rape, nobody in any country no matter how dysfunctional needs to be told that accepting bribes for political favours or rifling the national treasury is a bad and unethical thing to do, and yet somehow it happens. A lot. However, it happens decidedly less in settings where you have transparent democratic institutions, a culture of egalitarianism and a relatively even distribution of wealth. It is significantly less common in countries where whistle-blowers are afforded legal protection and public opinion more often than not sides with the whistle-blower rather than the officials in question.

Corruption is also much less common in societies where it's considered distasteful for public officials and other members of the elite to flaunt their wealth in public as opposed to authoritarian countries like China, Russia and many African countries where high office and high society are virtually synonymous. This is not to say that all wealthy officials in these countries have achieved their wealth through illegal means, but in such milieus defined by opulence and luxury in which officials are seen as getting a free pass, it's fertile breeding ground for bribery and graft.

Hildur Lilliendahl Viggósdóttir, culture warrior

Now apply this analogy to a social setting in which a certain group of people (men) are programmed from birth to define themselves on the basis of their penises and their sexual prowess and where rape is, while not approved of, often explained away as a natural byproduct of male sexual frustration, and you have a rape culture. And when you have an online culture where sexually brutalized women are standard fare not just on porn sites but on 'edgy' fashion sites - and yet women like Icelandic feminist blogger Hildur Lilliendahl Viggósdóttir are banned from Facebook for re-posting misogynist content and calling men out on their misogyny, it's not exactly sending an anti-rape culture message.

Another point that Bigot Vanquisher makes in her post is that it's folly to describe countries like the United States having a rape culture where there are countries in the Middle East and elsewhere where the war on women isn't even remotely disguised and women literally fear for their lives when they walk out the door - and often behind closed doors as well. Again I think the analogy of political corruption is helpful. It's patently obvious that the 'rape culture' as it exists in North America pales in comparison to that in, say, South Africa, where a recent survey revealed that a shocking one out of four men admit to having raped a woman and nearly half of that total admit to more than one rape. However, the existence of different magnitudes of rape culture does not mean that we don't have problems here. The fact that Thailand is more transparent than, say, Cameroon doesn't mean that Thailand doesn't have serious corruption issues that need to be addressed.

Rape culture is a highly complex phenomenon, one that is informed by numerous other social conditions - racism, nationalism, classism, homophobia, religious indoctrination and so on. Volumes could be written on this stuff, and indeed volumes have. But the main problem I have with Ms. Vanquisher's post is the same problem I have with a great many right wingers, which is a refusal or an inability to fathom the concept of institutionalized oppression as a concept entirely separate from individual volition. Denying the existence of a rape culture on the basis that "none of the guys I know have raped a woman" is akin to denying the harmfulness of smoking on the basis that "my grandfather smoked all his life and he lived to the age of 96." Not very helpful.

What could possibly be rape-enabling about this?

Yes, individuals can do a lot, but if you're serious about combating something as massive as rape culture it takes a lot of work. Men in our culture are conditioned to not speak out against sexist behaviour while women who publicly assert a feminist stance are frequently admonished as man-haters. Many men I've spoken to have confided that confronting sexism and misogyny within the context of our prevailing "bros before hoes" guy culture means opening yourself up to ridicule - or worse. And feminist bloggers have become well accustomed to the vilest of online threats wherein the abusers can enjoy the cloak of anonymity. We all know this - and yet somehow we convince ourselves that it's an inevitable reality of life and that there's nothing we can do about it.

So in closing, yes, we do have a 'rape culture' in our supposedly advanced society. No, it's not nearly as bad as it is in, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Afghanistan, but saying that your society is "less sexist than Afghanistan" is not exactly a glowing endorsement. The fact that eight percent of any given group of men admit to 'helping themselves' to women's bodies against their will while being aided and abetted by major strands of our culture still constitutes a big problem in my book. Furthermore, telling women that they "have it good in our society" is nothing but a further silencing tactic whose ultimate aim is putting women in their place and shutting them down when they complain about their objectification by men.

Rape culture is an inflammatory term - but in my experience you need to be at least a bit inflammatory to get a difficult message across. Rape culture, like corruption, is a social condition rooted in a deep-seeded sense of entitlement. And until men the world over stop defining themselves by their penile prowess and viewing women's bodies as public goods, women from Calgary to Kinshasa will - to varying degrees - continue to feel less than safe in their company.

And in the meantime, would Time Magazine please please PLEASE choose Todd Akin as Man of the Year for 2012! I mean c'mon, Hitler's received the nod before. That and it would send a pretty powerful message.

Tyrants, Terrorists and the PR Firms Who Love Them

What do Adolf Hitler, Bashar al-Assad, Teodoro Obiang, Saddam Hussein, Mobutu Sese Seko and Hizbullah have in common? Apart of course from their murderous rap sheets, they all at one point or another have enlisted the services of public relations firms based in western countries.

In previous posts, I've alluded to the PR profession's very own PR problem. Public relations professionals are more often than not portrayed in films and on TV as gleefully amoral reprobates along the lines of Nick Naylor in the 2005 black comedy Thank You For Smoking and Washington 'spin doctor' Stanley Motss, played so memorably by Robert De Niro in the 1997 film Wag The Dog. Either that or they're portrayed as self-centred opportunists like Eli Gold in The Good Wife or Samantha Jones in Sex and the City or as tortured would-be altruists like fictional White House Communications Director Tony Ziegler in The West Wing.

Why the bad reputation? As with most bad reputations, it's a relatively small group of individuals who end up painting their entire community in a negative light. In the case of public relations, there indeed are practitioners who advocate on behalf of less-than-salubrious causes. And in the most extreme cases, there are indeed well-heeled PR firms in the UK, the US and elsewhere whose client lists have included the world's most appalling human rights abusers.

The dream PR client?

The role of western PR firms in propping up murderous regimes was recently highlighted in the aftermath of the suppressed anti-government revolt in the Kingdom of Bahrain, the wealthy but deeply repressive island nation in the Persian Gulf. Not long after protests broke out in the capital of Manama, it was revealed that the Bahraini government had enlisted the services of reputation management experts from Washington, DC PR firms Qorvis Communications and the Potomac Square Group, as well as the London-based Pelham Bell Pottinger.

While Bahraini forces were imprisoning and torturing protestors, these firms helped the regime denounce its most prominent critics as extremists and fifth-columnists for the Iranian regime through ominously titled divisions like Qorvis' Geo-Political Solutions branch. This campaign included fake tweeting, fake blogging (known as 'flogging') and other forms of online manipulation aimed squarely at activists like Maryam al-Khawaja, the current acting head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights who continues to receive death threats while her father remains in captivity following the revolt.

Regrettably, the Bahrain case is far from unusual. The Monitor Group, a British PR firm with 29 worldwide offices, ran a PR campaign on behalf of the Qaddafi regime in Libya between 2006 and 2008 to the tune of about $3 million. In addition to helping prop up the Bahraini dictatorship, Qorvis was also for a time being paid some $60,000 a month by the repressive and obscenely corrupt regime of Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea, while its colleagues at the Washington Group were in the pay of now deposed Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Of course, the relationship between PR firms and despotic regimes is nothing new. American PR pioneer Ivy Ledbetter Lee, considered by many as the father of modern public relations, is today largely remembered for his relations with the Nazi regime through the controversial German chemical industry conglomerate IG Farben. Meanwhile, his one-time rival Edward Bernays - also considered by many as the 'father of PR' - helped engineer the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 on behalf of his blue-chip client United Fruit.

All this begs the question: are there any cases in which taking on a dictatorial regime as a PR client is morally fathomable? David Wynne Morgan, the chairman and CEO of Pelham Bell Pottinger (one of the firms linked to the Bahraini regime), argues that there are good reasons to take such clients on. In an RT interview, Morgan alleges that "A country frequently will modify its actions and its policies in order to achieve perhaps what is the greater ambition of having better relations with the people they're seeking to influence, so it's a balance." All fine and good in theory, David, but I have yet to see any compelling evidence of this, least of all in Manama.

It goes without saying, of course, that the vast majority of people in the PR profession will never have anything directly to do with propping up dictatorships, terrorist organizations or other clients with prodigious body counts. But even the best-intentioned communications professionals can find themselves in thorny ethical territory. In my previous capacity as a copy editor and translator for a Tokyo translation company, I was on more than once obliged to do work for Japan's largest cigarette manufacturer, Japan Tobacco. Should I have refused to do it? Perhaps I should have, but at the time I feared it would have jeopardized my job if I did, so I did what I was asked to do.

I like to think of myself as a morally and ethically principled human being. And as a public relations practitioner, I like to think I know where my line is as regards ethically indefensible work. As much as I enjoyed Thank You For Smoking, I would never, for example, knowingly and willingly go to work for the tobacco industry. Nor would I do the same for any other industries I personally find objectionable, such as firearms, genetically modified foods or the diet industry. I have mixed feelings about oil and gas (and not just because I live in Alberta). It's a problematic industry but a necessary one, and certain companies are far more laudable in their practices than others.

While I indeed find it horrifying that there are PR professionals like me out there working to burnish the reputations of the world's most vicious and corrupt regimes, I stop short of condemning individuals within said firms. I have yet to meet anybody in the profession who is motivated solely by money and a desire of edgy and exciting clients along the lines of Muammar Qaddafi, but it's easy to see how a person in the field could end up in a situation with a firm where it would be very difficult to extricate themselves from such a situation. Establishing a firm ethical stance early, finding employers whose values align with your own and remaining alert to ethically compromising situations is probably the only answer.

Meanwhile, I will continue to savour in the guilty pleasure of movies and TV shows about nefarious, morally pliant PR people. Because they're fun.

PHONY 2012: 9 Reasons Not To Support This Manipulative Meme-Du-Jour

By the time you read this post you with no doubt have already seen the latest viral video phenomenon, KONY 2012. In case you've missed it, the video is part of a human rights campaign gone that has ratcheted up millions of YouTube hits, trended like wildfire over Twitter and has drawn thousands to to its Facebook page

The subject of Jason Russell's now-viral film is Joseph Kony, the notorious Ugandan warlord and leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Established in 1986, the LRA has carried out a violent bush war in the northern part of the country with the stated aim of overthrowing the government and establishing a theocratic state centred on the Ten Commandments.

That Kony is a reprehensible figure is not in any doubt. Since the start of this armed conflict, the LRA is accused of abducting some 66,000 children to serve as child soldiers (or sexual slaves) and has displaced over 2,000,000 people in northern Uganda as well as in neighbouring South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Since 2005, Kony has been indicted with no less than 12 counts of crimes against humanity, including murder, enslavement, sexual enslavement, and rape, with a further 21 charges of war crimes include murder, cruel treatment of civilians, intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population, pillaging, inducing rape, and forced enlisting of children into the rebel ranks.

Yes, there's no doubt that Kony is a bad man. Nevertheless, this viral campaign, which pledged to bring this wanted war criminal to justice by the end of this year, is a deeply problematic affair. Admittedly, I was taken in for about the first ten minutes, although I found the transparent manipulativeness of it to be grating from the start. But by the end, I was deeply suspicious of this campaign and did some further digging. The following riposte on the always irreverent blog Jezebel offers a less than flattering perspective on the tactics of the campaign's mother organization, Invisible Children. Here, however, I will focus on the cause in question.

My sister, Valerie, is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University in Illinois who specialized in post-conflict resolution and reconciliation in Africa - in places ranging from Uganda to Sierra Leone to South Africa. As something of an expert on the LRA conflict, she kindly filled me in on the conflict, which, admittedly, I knew very little about 24 hours ago.

I'm not going to get into how transparently manipulative the filmmaker's promise to his young son that he would capture Kony by the end of the year is, or, for that matter, the fact that Rush Limbaugh went on record defending the LRA last year when Obama committed 100 special forces troops to the region to help the Ugandan army pursue Kony and his thugs. But here here are a nine facts to consider before you leap onto this online bandwagon:

1) There's nothing 'new' or 'invisible' about this conflict. Joseph Kony has been at or near the top of the International Criminal Court's most wanted list for the better part of a decade, and anyone with any knowledge of African political affairs of the last two decades is already well aware of him.

2) The footage of Kony and the LRA used in this video is extremely dated, mostly at least a decade old.

3) The internally displaced people (IDP) situation in northern Uganda has been essentially over since the Ugandan military pushed the LRA out of the country and into the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo and CAR. Kony himself is believed to be in the CAR currently, not in Uganda.

4) As Valerie eloquently put it, awareness is not the problem. The problem is FINDING him. And to suggest that an arbitrary date such as the end of 2012 is feasible for tracking down and capturing this fugitive is absolutely ludicrous. It took the US military nearly a decade to find Osama bin Laden following the US overthrow of the Taliban. It took even longer for the Serbian special police to capture Ratko Mladić, the former Bosnian Serb commander and the infamous 'Butcher of Srebenica', in a country far smaller than either of the places where Joseph Kony is likely hiding.

On that note, it is worth noting that Uganda's military, a far more professional and well equipped outfit than it was in the 1980s, has been searching for Kony for years, and that Uganda's northern neighbours (South Sudan, the DRC and the CAR) are among the world's most dysfunctional and lawless countries, making finding Kony at least as daunting a task as finding Osama in the anarchic mountainous region spanning the Afghan-Pakistan border was.

5) Contrary to what this video suggests, Kony and the LRA pose no existential threat to the people of Uganda at present. The LRA has been expelled from the country and Uganda is today one of the more stable and economically prosperous countries in the region. Granted, Uganda does have lingering human rights issues, not the least of which being President Museveni's constitutional tinkerings and repression against political opponents, but as we've seen in Russia lately, this is hardly a strictly African problem. The picture painted of Uganda as a lawless basket case of a country was accurate 30 years ago when the country was still recovering from the murderous regime of Idi Amin, but it's in no way reflective of the current state of affairs there.

6) The video is completely black and white and makes no mention of the Ugandan army's own atrocities, both within its own borders and in its neighbouring countries. A Human Rights Watch report from 2005 noted that "The Ugandan armed forces have failed to prosecute or otherwise meaningfully discipline soldiers and their officers responsible for abuses in the north." This, if anything, is the untold story of the LRA conflict - not Kony's atrocities.

7) The video states that Kony and his forces have no ideology other than his own desire to consolidate power. In fact, the conflict has deep roots in ethnic strife. Kony's own Acholi people briefly enjoyed a privileged position in Uganda under the rule of President Tito Okello, and the conflict began following his ouster by current president Yoweri Museveni. As such, the LRA enjoyed early support from Kony's fellow Acholi, a long marginalized ethnic minority in Uganda.

8) Perhaps most troublingly, the video seems to call for US military intervention in Uganda to locate and capture Joseph Kony. Given how successful such intervention has been in Afghanistan and Iraq, do we really think this is a good course of action in what has been a chronically unstable part of the world for decades? Moreover, so many of the problems that have bedevilled this region have resulted from foreign armed incursions across borders, not the least of which being the enduring tragedy of the eastern DRC, where soldiers from neighbouring countries have taken rape as a weapon of war to previously unheard of levels.

In fact, President Obama did commit US troops to the region to assist the Ugandan army in tracking down Kony in this ever-restive region. But as we saw in Afghanistan, no number of troops in a region like this guarantees quick results in hunting down wanted fugitives - especially when they have friends and influence among cross-border co-ethnics.

9) There are other conflicts in the world that strike me as more immediate than this one. Joseph Kony is an exiled and marginalized figure with little remaining influence. Why is Mr. Russell not, instead, campaigning for the capture and indictment of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad? Why is he not focusing his attention on tyrants such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang or even Museveni himself, whose most recent 'election' was marred by charges of voter intimidation and violence? I'm only asking.

In sum, this viral campaign strikes me of having all the hallmarks of 'slacktivism' - wherein an international cause celebre is embraced in a brief frenzy of online activity, which is all-too-quickly abandoned. Pursuing war criminals is a wholly admirable goal, but one that takes incredible longstanding resolve. The late Simon Wiesenthal devoted a lifetime to hunting down Holocaust perpetrators, and the organization he founded is still in hot pursuit of the remaining Nazi war criminals believed to still be alive. Bringing Joseph Kony to justice is no less of an undertaking.

In the meantime, if you want to help people who have suffered human rights abuses, get involved with Amnesty International. Or volunteer at your local refugee centre. The Mennonite Centre for Newcomers here in Edmonton is always looking for volunteers. And helping out refugees here in Canada does indeed pay off. The latest issue of Alberta Views featured a very uplifting story about former refugees from South Sudan who came to Alberta - only to eventually return to their native country following its declaration of independence in May 2011, bringing with them the skills and expertise that this painfully poor and vulnerable young country will need in order to survive and grow its economy.

There are so many better ways of helping further the cause of human rights than to support temporary online crazes. Far be it for me to pooh-pooh people's wholly laudable disgust vis-a-vis despicable figures like Joseph Kony and their desire to do good. I just wish people would be a little more questioning of what they see online - and do their homework.