Popular Education Toolkit - Jobology

Some years ago we developed a popular economics course. It's about 40 hours of activities over about ten sessions (of three hours each). And it barely scratches the surface of the topic. We developed a number of tools for that course including this one here which we call JOBOLOGY. I used it a couple of weeks ago in the popular education class i teach at the Faculty of Environmental Studies and i was once again amazed at how well it works to share information about the history of work across the generations. It's also a tool that can be used to begin a discussion of class - what people think it is, what a marxist notion of class is, where people feel they might fit in a class structure. I'm hoping to develop this tool further so that it can be used in the context of the theory of diverse economies that J.K. Gibson-Graham are working on and which includes conceptualizing class as something akin to a verb rather than the noun (or thing) it is characteristically seen to be (i.e. class is more dynamic than it is normally thought to be). Meanwhile, if you have a context for using this exercise, i highly recommend trying it out. You can use it as a simple discussion provoking tool or you could use it to guide a discussion about class and the history of the changing world of work. You can download activity descriptions here: MSWord or PDF.

Art that makes you want to do art!

Here's a couple of videos from Old Crow Medicine Show (whom i have Matt to thank for introducing me). While i have an expansive love of all music, i have a special place for the those types of music that catch the bittersweet of life: acadian fiddle, cajun zydeco, bluegrass and bagpipes. A cajun or bluegrass waltz can transport me. And a lament played on bagpipes will often bring tears to my eyes. The stuff of music legend, OCMS have gone from busking to the Grand Ole Opry. Their music makes me happy. And there's also that about it that inspires my own urge to create. It's one of the mysteries of art, whether painting, writing, music, theatre, that some works reach into your soul and light a fire (or perhaps fan flames already alight). And that fire is only satisfied when it pours out as your own art. I recall seeing an exhibit of Van Gogh's work at the Met in New York - It was the Van Gogh at Arles exhibit that my friend Carey brought me to as a birthday present. I'd seen pictures of Van Gogh's haystacks before but i had never imagined i could be so moved by the massive canvasses that confronted me. I was surprised by their size as well as by the subtleties of light that seemed miraculously caught in the the two dimensions of canvas and pigment. I recall returning home and filling two sketchbooks with stuff. OMCS's punky old-timey bluegrass does the same thing to me. I want to learn (and sometimes relearn) all these songs and i want to be in a bluegrass band. But, that being unlikely, i'll just sing to myself. And now i have the opportunity to learn these songs to sing to this new wee critter that is in our lives and who is teaching me that lullabies are a wonderfully effectgive technology. Who knew?

I'm feeling Churchillian about democracy these days

Check out www.voteforenvironment.com (see below for explanation).

Okay, Stephen Harper scares me. But it is less anything that he says that scares me than what appears absent, i.e. some humanity, a bit of doubt, perhaps. While U.S. vice-presidential Sarah Palin performs a blithe, arrogant and contemptuous certainty about her conservative values with a winking (vapid) vim and vigour, Harper performs a similar certainty about similar values but with a lack of emotional affect that makes me think Body Snatchers. And as i caught one of his campaign ads this afternoon in which he says we "need certainty" and not "risk" i remembered these words from Eduardo Galeano (from an interview he did in NACLA-Report on the Americas many years ago):

...I do not have a bad opinion of doubt. I think doubt has been a factor in the movement of history. I have grown to appreciate doubt more and more and, at the same time, to distrust those compañeros who only offer certainty. They seem too much like the wooden men which the Popul Vuh in Mayan mythology describes as one of the mistakes the gods made when they attempted to create man and didn't know how to construct him and finally they made him out of corn and he came out alright. But one of those attempts consisted of creating him out of wood.

The wooden man was just like a man except that no blood ran through his veins; he had no spirit or courage and didn't speak a word. I believe he had nothing to say because he had no courage and therefore was never discouraged. The proof that one has courage lies in the fact that one can be discouraged. And the proof that one can arrive at certainties that are truly capable of transforming reality lies in the ability to entertain fertile doubts before arriving at certainty; doubts that buzz around in one's head, one's conscience, one's heart, in the imagination, like tenacious flies. We need neither fear doubt nor discouragement: they are proof that our endeavors are human. And we are fortunate that these endeavors are human. Otherwise, these would be the endeavors of false men, men of wood, that is to say bureaucrats, dogmatic men, people who choose models over reality. Discouragement and doubt indicate that one sees reality as it really is.

Well, Harper is as much a poster-boy for the Popul Vuh's "wooden man" as i've ever seen. And this "certainty" he speaks of is as treacherous a disposition as i've seen in Canadian politics. And i think we could use some of this ancient Mayan wisdom about doubt and uncertainty. How else do we learn anything? H.G. Wells once said, "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." When i watched Harper in the debates this week (and Palin as well, for that matter) i felt that he was not a person open to learning anything new. And to hear him speak of his "certainty" makes me feel like "catastrophe" is not far off.

As for feeling Churchillian about all this: after the leaders debates this week i couldn't help but feel underwhelmed by the whole thing. While I'll vote NDP, i do not feel like they will avert the catastrophes that lie before us, nor the Greens who are just too neoliberal for me. And the Liberals are less-bad Tories. So as Churchill said in 1947:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

So, i received a forwarded e-mail from friends (thanks, Lorne) from Bob Bossin of Stringband fame in which he appeals for some strategic voting. And as i was listening to the news this evening i was thinking how bloody annoying our voting system is - that a party can form a government with as little as 30% of the populace voting for them. And if the Liberals, Greens and NDP split the vote and let the Tories ride up the middle to a majority, i will be very sad (and mad). So here's Bob's e-mail in which he recommends a website that is tracking ridings and predicting which are the ones most vulnerable to vote-splitting. You know, they could be right.

Dear Fellow Canadian:

This letter is blatantly political, but it is also personal. And urgent. I've been watching the federal election campaign with something bordering on despair. In all my 63 years, I have never known a government less in tune with my values than this one - and that is going some. By the polls, most of us feel kinda the same way. But we are divided among four parties, and that may allow Harper and his cronies to waltz back into power.

Skip to the next paragraph if you like, but I gotta get this 100-word rant off my chest: "In two years under Harper, Canada has become one of the worst heel-draggers on global warming. Our military has shifted from peace keeping to war making. Where we once welcomed war resistors, we now turn them away. In April, the Conservatives de-regulated and privatized food inspection, and we know what happened in August. They plan to do the same for the airline industry. Prisons, they say 'are for punishment.' And
for 14 year olds. They don't much like the arts and they don't get the internet. I could go on. If Harper wins his majority, I shudder to think how, well, American, Canada will become." End of rant.

What - as William Bendix used to say - a revolting development this is!

And yet, something is afoot. I don't know about you, but I have been receiving dozens of messages from friends and strangers talking about what amounts to do-it-yourself proportional representation. I can't say I've become optimistic, but I do believe there are two effective things we can do.

The first is to make our votes count. We may not have rep by prop (we are one of the world's most backwards democracies in this regard) but we can fake it. If I lived in Central Nova, I would vote for Elizabeth May in a heartbeat. But here in Nanaimo-Cowichan, to vote Green (or for that matter to vote Liberal), is, de facto, to vote Conservative. Lucky for me, our local MP, Jean Crowder, is good people, and anti-Harper through and through. I don't have to hold my nose when I vote. (I just have to roll my eyes at Jack's car-salesman style.) But if the best way to stop the Conservatives was to vote Liberal, this time I would. With glowing heart. (Registered trademark, 2010 Olympics, all rights reserved.)

Fortunately, voting strategically has just gotten a whole lot easier. There is now an amazing website, www.voteforenvironment.com, that is tracking every riding in the
country and making up-to-the-minute suggestions on how best to fight Harper. It is the coolest example of Canadian grassroots democracy since the Free Trade comic book.

So that is the first thing to do: check out www.voteforenvironment.com

And there is another thing just as important. This happens to be a time when our ability to communicate with one another has never been greater. To contact you with this message, I just had to overcome my reticence about doing it. (I'm Canadian, after all.) The rest, nowadays, is easy. If you do it too, if you contact your friends and colleagues, acquaintances and list-mates, and let them know what you are thinking, we could actually affect the results in some key ridings and, who knows, we might even affect more than that. It's worth a try.

bb

Bob Bossin - Old folksinger - Old folksinger's homepage: www.bossin.com

Whiner alert: who knew Harper was right?

I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see ... a bunch of people, you know, at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren't high enough when they know those subsidies have actually gone up -- I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people. Ordinary people understand we have to live within a budget.

Well, Alon Nashman, a Toronto-based actor, has added his two cents. And what a two cents they are.