The Politics of Dismay

Two very troubling episodes this week…listening to the debates over the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project, and the discovery of the video of U.S. soldiers urinating on the corpses of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.  Even though these are unrelated events, I cannot help but draw comparisons in terms of how dominant culture approaches the world. It degrades it.

Regarding the pipeline, industry and business are using the same rhetoric of assurance they have always used when they want public support for development and job creation.  In addition to the economic argument, they’ll minimize risk by saying it is unlikely that there will be a catastrophic environmental disaster.  I actually heard one interviewee on CBC Radio say the odds of such a disaster were 1 incident every 15,000 years!  What a ridiculous statement.  We haven’t been drilling or shipping oil for that long.  That is just a stupid way of framing the issue.  How many serious accidents have there been since companies started drilling and shipping crude oil?  Too many to tolerate.  Do the corporations – like BP – ever get shut down because of the environmental damage they have caused?  No, they just get fined, and the fines, in their cost-benefit analyses, are cheaper than safer practices or encouraging tighter regulation.  I am also alarmed yet unsurprised by the way that opponents to the project are being dismissed as “radicals.”  Fifty First Nations Groups, ordinary citizens, and Robert Redford – radicals?

The military incident exploding in the media instantly had authority figures, such as Hillary Clinton going into damage-control mode.  Of course the episode is being labelled “deplorable” and “unacceptable,” because it absolutely is.  However, it is not an anomaly.  We’ve seen this type of behaviour before (Abu Ghraib).  Isn’t it better characterized as a symptom of a world in which people are assassinated without due legal process (Osama Bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi)?  A world which tolerates – even encourages – people to party in the streets and celebrate when they learn of an execution, even torture?  Is it really that far of a leap to urinating on corpses?  There is something much deeper that is wrong within Neo-liberalism, and we need to take a serious look at what we are becoming.  Both the environment and human beings are being pissed upon.