(Small Town) Politics As Usual

Objects in mirror are more close-minded than they appear.

A couple of months ago the City of Toronto proudly announced that we're now the fourth most populous city in North America, sitting behind Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles. Chicago was formerly in fourth, but I'm guessing the Windy City's prodigious murder rate bumped it down the list. There was the usual amount of civic chest-thumping over this news (any opportunity to one-up an American city can't pass by unnoticed), but I'm a bit surprised that the city's councillors and political commentators didn't hang out black crepe upon hearing about Hogtown's rise in the ranks. You see, Toronto is indeed a behemoth, but it's one with the brain and soul of a small, querulous village. We're the Whiny City. This quality has been very much on display in the last few months as the city has dealt simultaneously with three big issues: expansion of Toronto Island's Billy Bishop Airport, finding new revenues to pay for badly needed mass transit, and the question of whether the city should allow the province to put a casino in the city. The discussion on all three topics has revealed Toronto's small-minded, pettifogging, schoolmarmish view of urban life.

Let's begin with the airport, which has been there since 1939. Porter Airlines has been running passenger flights from the airport since 2006, and Air Canada was running flights for years prior to that. Porter now wants to lengthen the runway by 168 metres to allow for the use of regional jets. At present, Porter is restricted to using turboprop planes with a much shorter range than jets would offer. For those of you not from Toronto, Billy Bishop Airport is a downtown, waterfront airport, and planes landing at it do so against a backdrop of the city's office blocks and condo towers. The opponents of the proposed expansion object to the increased number of flights and the noise of jets. Porter says that the jets are no noisier than the current turboprops. It's clear that the NIMBY factor is key to this debate. What this also speaks to is the fear and distaste some Torontonians have for a big city being like, well, a big city. A city is supposed to be dense, active and noisy; that's what you get when you cram a few million people together in a small space, and those people are going to need/want all kinds of services that don't involve the hushed sound of a chai latte being made. Getting fretful over jets vs. turboprops shows a King Canute-like inability to realize that change is inevitable. If Toronto is going to keep growing like topsy (believe me, downtown T.O. is building upwards like a frosty version of Dubai), things like airports, the bones and muscles of a city, have to grow as well. And do we really want more traffic going back and forth from downtown to Pearson airport? It's also annoying that the anti-jet forces are speaking for an affluent demographic that shows little interest in noise issues elsewhere in the city; lots of Torontonians live adjacent to 400-series highways that are noisy 24/7, but  I don't hear anyone protesting on their behalf. And what might be most important about airport expansion is that it would create more blue collar jobs, something that the city's been losing for years now.

A couple of days ago city council voted down a package of tax and user-fee initiatives that would have raised part of the $2bn per year needed to pay for a laundry list of mass transit construction. This isn't a great surprise. The city is led by Mayor Rob Ford (my piece on him is here), a man so cartoonish it's entirely possible he's actually a hologram created by Hanna-Barbera. He's aided and abetted by a pack of right-wing councillors, all of whom who see taxes as a biblical plague. This cabal of dunces is challenged by any issue more complex than dog licencing, so imagine how they recoil in fear from dealing with Toronto's massive public transit problem. What was interesting about the proposals that were voted down is that there were no fees to be directed at businesses. The Toronto business community has been behind the push for more public transit, frequently citing the costs to the city's (and the province's) economy due to the gridlock on Toronto's roads and highways. Not surprisingly, no one in the business community, or in politics, has suggested that businesses pick up some or most of this $2bn cost, despite the fact that business derives a direct economic benefit from workers and trucks getting to where they're supposed to be on time. So city council, showing the intestinal fortitude of a flock of sheep downwind of a wolf, have fled from the issue, hoping that the province will manage to make the politically difficult decisions.

Finally, we get to the proposed casino for downtown Toronto. Casino operators from the U.S. are lined up to build a casino in Toronto, the province wants one in the city, but the left and centre of council are strongly, even bitterly, opposed to it. For once, and I hope the only time, I'm on the same side as Ford on this issue. The upside to a casino (according to its promoters) is that the city will receive a $100m per year fee for hosting it, in addition to thousands of full- and part-time jobs. I take both benefits with a grain of salt, but it's clear the city's coffers will benefit from a casino. The anti-casino forces sole objection, it seems, is a moral one: gambling isn't respectable, it's tawdry, and it creates problem gamblers who fall into debt and despair. This moral argument simply doesn't hold water. Alcohol produces as many or more problems, but no one's suggesting Prohibition should be brought back. Not every Torontonian defines a good time as a bike ride along the waterfront trail, followed by a stop at St. Lawrence Market to buy some artisanal cheese, and then home in time to watch Downton Abbey. Some Torontonians (quite a few, actually) like to get noisy and crazy and throw their money around of a Saturday night. Unfortunately for these sybaritic folk, a large number of people on city council don't feel this is a proper or respectable way for Torontonians to enjoy themselves. How nice that our Big Brothers and Sisters are looking out for us. This political distaste for gambling seems even more ludicrous when you consider that Toronto gamblers can already go to slots at Woodbine racetrack in Toronto or drive themselves to five major and minor casinos within 150km of the city. And for those citizens who've had to pawn their cars to pay off gambling debts, fleets of buses await to provide nearly free trips to these casinos. Whatever social ills are caused by casinos are already present in T.O., and it's hard to believe that a new casino will do anything other than cut down on vehicular traffic to outlying casinos. And even if Toronto city council does end up voting against a casino, it's a lock that the casino will then be built just over Toronto's borders in Markham, Vaughan or Mississauga. This means Toronto will get all the theoretical problems associated with gambling, but none of the economic benefits.The case against a Toronto casino isn't logical unless you make it part of a drive to eliminate all forms of gambling, including lotteries, but no one would dare suggest that. The anti-casino forces can talk social ills all they want, but at the end of the day they end up sounding like puritanical scolds.

The handling of these three issues shows that Toronto is still struggling with the concept of what a city is. Toronto politicians of every stripe seem trapped in the idea that a city is what happens when a village goes horribly wrong. It's a very North American view of cities. In Europe, cities have always been seen as the seat of culture, government and everything that's noble and brilliant. The country, on the other hand, is viewed as a wasteland of uncultured people following boring rustic pursuits. In North America that viewpoint has, historically speaking, been reversed. Whenever a politician's on the campaign trail and says he's delighted to be "here in the heartland" of Canada/America, you can be damn sure he's not standing in Times Square or anywhere on Yonge St. He will, however, be within spitting distance of a cow. European cities have long recognized that a city is made up of sometimes disparate elements that have to rub along together. Just think of red light districts such as the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, De Wallen in Amsterdam, or Soho in London; places like these would never be tolerated in North America, but Europeans sensibly realize that cities can't be built and ruled exclusively to please the tastes and morals of the bourgeoisie. And, yes, lots of European cities have downtown casinos that haven't done anything to dim the lustre of places like London, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm and Venice, to name a very few. Toronto desperately, fervently, wishes to be regarded as a "world-class" city, but until it sheds its small town agoraphobia it's just going to be another self-loathing North America city.

Book Review: The Private Sector (1971) by Joseph Hone

It sometimes seems those parts of the Internet not taken up with porn or cat videos consist of people breathlessly telling the world about the best film/TV show/beach/bagel "you've never heard of." Well now it's my turn, and my nominee in the category of spy fiction writer is Joseph Hone. How unknown is he? Amazon shows only a few of his books for sale, and even the Toronto Public Library (where I work) has only two titles, and we're a library system that's sclerotic with dusty old genre fiction. And how good is Hone? So good I'm calling an audible and kicking him out of the spy fiction field; there's no need to ghettoize him in a genre, he's simply one of he best writers I've come across, genre or otherwise, in a good long while.

The Private Sector is set in Egypt in 1957 and '67. The 1957 section revolves around the recruitment of Peter Marlow, a dual citizen of Ireland and Britain working in Cairo as a teacher, into the British Intelligence Service. The '67 section follows Marlow as he returns to Cairo to investigate whether a fellow agent is defecting. I'm not going to attempt a plot synopsis because to properly describe the twists and turns would require flow charts, venn diagrams, and possibly a PowerPoint presentation. Just take my word for it that the plot is everything you want in espionage fiction: full of double agents, double-crosses, and double whiskies served in hotel bars to shifty-eyed men trying hard not to look like they're there to spy on shifty-eyed men down at the other end of the bar.

What's most remarkable about this novel is the beauty and intelligence of Hone's prose. His descriptions of Egypt and Cairo, his ruthless and incisive portraits of even the most minor characters, and his masterful handling of his theme of a British Empire in its final decline, it all takes your breath away. Here's a couple of examples, among many, of Hone's sharp writing:

"...or perhaps it was the rather sinister attraction Arab countries can have for people with  an authoritarian view who have somehow not managed  to express that aspect of their personality adequately at home. Egypt had reconciled Cherry to the mild tyranny of his nature."

And...

"Giant pitch-black Nubian waiters in blues and golds, like coloured pictures from a child's Bible, padded aloofly round their table, pouring out whiskies and dumping ice from great silver bowls, strangers to this tribal feast."

Another reason I don't want to stick Hone in the spy fiction ghetto is that the first third of this novel is pure literary fiction. This section of the novel describes Marlow's early days in Egypt and the beginnings of his relationship with Bridget, whom he eventually marries. This part of the book can be read as a brilliant novella about the human flotsam and jetsam left behind by the rapidly receding British Empire. The Egypt Marlow sees in '57 is a curious, pathetic, and droll world of Brit expats gone to seed and middle-class Egyptians anxiously aping the rituals and tastes of their former masters, wittily symbolized by a boy at Marlow's school who always sets his watch to GMT, two hours behind Egypt. It's in this part of the novel that you realize that Hone shouldn't be compared to people like Ambler or Le Carre, but to writers like Patrick |Hamilton and Olivia Manning, two authors who took a ferociously forensic approach to their characters and the social environment they moved in. I was particularly reminded of Manning, whose sextet of novels about an English couple in World War Two (The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy) shares with Hone's book the theme of the British Empire slowly leaving the playing field of history. Both writers do a superb job of describing the melancholy and bitterness of people caught up in this transition.

When it comes to the espionage aspects, Hone is bracingly cynical. None of the spies on view are idealistic or committed, and their masters are seemingly equally free of ideology. Marlow quickly learns that empire building (or breaking) is a kind of game in which the score is kept but there are never any winners. This games aspect of spying is cleverly underlined by several sequences involving badminton, croquet and tennis, and several mentions of different kinds of playing fields. Marlow is essentially tricked into becoming a spy, and Hone shows us that the other spies playing the game do so because it satisfies a psychological itch or indulges a fantasy.

Hone is still alive and writing, and a couple of years ago he wrote an autobiography called Wicked Little Joe that's supposed to be pretty damn good. Finally, credit where credit is due: I was tipped off to Hone by a piece on author Jeremy Duns' blog. The link to his article is here.

Masters of Atlantis (1983) by Charles Portis

If Masters of Atlantis isn't the Great American Novel, it's surely the Great American Comic Novel. Say the words "great novel" and one instantly thinks of a work of fiction that tackles important moral questions, significant social issues, and moments of historic import; the sort of book one imagines was written by someone with a brow constantly furrowed in thought, living in a room with a single window facing a brick wall, and who only took brief breaks from the Underwood  in order to light unfiltered Camels, all the better to furrow his or her brow even more. But does a nation's great novel have to adopt a stern and forbidding mien? By my own definition a great national novel should be one that you could hand to an extraterrestrial and say, "Here's the one book that tells you all about the essential character of the people whose nation you've just landed in/enslaved/vaporized." And by that criteria Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis (author of True Grit) is, for me, the Great American Novel. And I like to imagine it was written in the summer on a porch shaded by wisteria vines, the author stopping occasionally for a snack of iced tea and red velvet cake.

From the outside looking in, America's personality dial is permanently set to 11 with citizens who are charming, maddening, innocent, foolish, xenophobic, gullible, optimistic, crafty, adventurous, bigoted, energetic, and ignorant, not forgetting all the go-getters, do-gooders and flim-flam men. This crazy quilt of emotions and characters is brilliantly portrayed in Masters, woven into a story that revolves around what might be the core of the American character: belief. More on this later.

The novel opens at the end of World War One with young Lamar Jimmerson, an American soldier, being sold the Codex Pappus, a bundle of papers that's supposed to represent the collected wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis. And from that beginning, Jimmerson, who has an unshakable belief in his Atlantean lore, more or less accidentally founds a cult called Gnomonism with himself at its head. His title is the "Master." The cult's popularity waxes and wanes, reaching its zenith in the 1930s, and ending in that most American of dwellings, a double-wide trailer home. The plot, like so many of the characters in the book, is almost rudderless, but this is far from being a fault, it's simply reflecting the rootless, peripatetic side of American life.

Along the way Jimmerson is aided and hindered by a cavalcade of American archetypes and eccentrics. The most notable of the bunch is Austin Popper and his sidekick Squanto, a talking blue jay. Popper is the distillate that would result from boiling down Elmer Gantry, Bob Hope and Foghorn Leghorn. Jimmerson is a kindly fool whose affability and credulity blinds him to the charlatans and nitwits who are pulled into Gnomonism's weak gravitational field. The female characters, it should be noted, are the only ones who seem to be possessed with an ounce of common sense.

Portis' comic style is best described as deadpan; he tells tall tales in the plainest possible way, and that matter-of-factness, his attention to the niggling details of eccentricity, produces some sublime humor. Portis' comedy is never shouty or jokey; it's like a low frequency vibration that turns solids into liquids, or in this case, turns some of the more self-important aspects of the American character into comic gold. And like the very best comic writers (P.G. Wodehouse springs to mind) you can flip to almost any page of the book and find something delightful:

"Through a friend at the big Chicago marketing firm of Targeted Sales, Inc., he got his hands on a mailing list titled Odd Birds of Illinois and Indiana, which, by no means exhaustive, contained the names of some seven hundred men who ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear, kept rooms that were filled with rocks or old newspapers. In short, independent thinkers who might be more receptive to the Atlantean lore than the general run of men."

And..

     "You think you can treat me this way because I'm poor and have to go to night law school."
     "All law schools should be conducted at night."

And...

"He boiled some eggs, a long business at this altitude, and made coffee with the same water. He ate two eggs and left two for Cezar. On one he idly scrawled, Help. Captive. Gypsy caravan."

If there's one grand, unifying theme to the novel it's Portis' identification of the fact that Americans are the most enthusiastic believers on the planet. Their nation was founded, in part, by people looking to follow religious beliefs that Europeans viewed as dangerous or eccentric, and ever since then the US has lead the world in the production of cults and crazes, everything from Mormonism to Scientology to birthers. It's a nation that sometimes seems to be filled with people who think that with just the right formula or mantra or revelation or algorithm, the final, absolute, one-size-fits-all Truth will be revealed to the chosen. And no other country could produce so many social clubs like the Shriners, Moose Lodge, Optimists, and Rotarians, just to name a few. It would seem that if you took three random Americans and locked them in a room, after an hour they would emerge with a new religion, conspiracy theory or service club. Possibly all three. But what Americans believe in most of all is America; it's a cult and a religion, and if you don't believe me just take note of how omnipresent the American flag is in the American landscape. The US is awash in representations of Old Glory, and in that regard it's unique among democracies. Flag worship is the litmus test for any totalitarian state, but in the US of A the common citizens have turned the Stars and Stripes into a red, white and blue Shroud of Turin.

I've read Masters several times, and what motivated me to do this review is The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film. It's a pretty poor effort (my review) about the leader of a Scientology-like cult. It's really the photographic negative, unfunny version of Masters of Atlantis, but it made me wish someone, preferably the Coen brothers, would take a crack at filming Portis' novel. But until that happens, and you want to experience a fictional look at America's obsession with cults, stick to Portis.

Film Review: Drum (1976)

Django Unchained, which I reviewed back in January, is a bad film. Drum, which I caught on Netflix last night, is also a bad film. Both films are about slavery in the Old South but in some significant ways Django stands out as much the worse film. Drum has no pretensions to being anything other than a middling budget exploitation picture. The story revolves around slavery, but what's on sale here are copious amounts of violence and female nudity. The title character, played by boxer Ken Norton with a woodenness that sends splinters shooting off the screen, is a slave raised in a New Orleans whorehouse. His mother Mariana, who is white, owns the bordello, but has never told Drum that he's her son. Drum thinks his mother is Mariana's faithful maid. Drum catches the attention of DeMarigny, a Frenchman who's, well, let's just say he's a triple-coated villain, a man so low he stole his French accent from Pepe Le Pew. DeMarigny wants to use Drum as a fighter against other slaves, but Drum is a reluctant scrapper. After a variety of brawls and murders, Drum must flee New Orleans. Mariana sells him to Hammond, a slave owner who has a plantation on which he does nothing but breed slaves. More nudity and violence ensues, climaxing with a slave rebellion that leaves almost everyone, white and black, dead. Roll credits.

As mentioned, Drum is an exploitation picture and on that basis it earns a blue ribbon. There's nary a scene that doesn't feature sex, violence or nudity. What's rather amazing is that the script manages to pull in all the exploitation elements without interrupting the narrative flow. Everything about Drum is lurid and over-the-top, but the script is a solid, logical piece of writing. The scriptwriter also earns points for the dialogue, which is pulpy to the max and not afraid to sound ridiculous. Some credit also has to go to the cast. Pros like Warren Oates, John Colicos Yaphet Kotto and Royal Dano tackle their lurid characters with gusto and almost manage to compensate for "actors" like Ken Norton. Lastly, the film deserves credit for an ending that adheres to reality (the blacks are wiped out) and also allows for some ambiguity. Hammond (Warren Oates) is in most respects a thorough villain, but a brief scene earlier in the film involving the beating of a slave shows us that a part of him (a very small part) is conflicted about treating humans as chattel. In the last scene in the film Hammond chooses to let Drum escape rather than gun him down as he would have every reason to do as white slave owner. It's a surprising ending for what's otherwise a pretty conventional film.

The strengths, relatively speaking, of Drum do a good job of highlighting even further the deficiencies of Django Unchaned. Tarantino's script is a mess: uneven in tone, overlong, and stuffed with gratuitous scenes and dialogue. Drum's script isn't going to win any awards, but it's model of efficient storytelling, and when the word "nigger" is used it's done in a natural, honest way. When Tarantino writes "nigger" in his scripts I always get the feeling he does it to prove how naughty he is. An odd thing about Tarantino is that as much as he's a devotee of genre/exploitation pictures, he's also a prude. Quentin is happy to show people being riddled with bullets or saying "nigger" with every breath, but nudity? sex? God forbid! Miscegenation was the primal fear and fantasy of Southern society, but it doesn't exist for Tarantino. The ending of Django stands in stark contrast to that of Drum. In Tarantino's wish-fulfillment fantasy world (see Inglourious Basterds for further evidence) the black hero rides off into the sunset with his white enemies all slain, his girl by his side, and a horse that can dance. Drum runs off into the night with nothing but a look of terror on his face. No prizes for guessing which film is more historically accurate.

I'm not going to say that Drum is a good film, but for the demographic it was intended for it succeeds brilliantly. And if it reminds you in any way of Django Unchained that's because Tarantino seems to have stolen been heavily influenced by elements of Drum. And for optimum viewing pleasure both films should be seen at a drive-in accompanied by your favourite legal/illegal stimulant.

Book Review: Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Elizabeth Bennet.

Yes, it's taken me this long to get around to reading Austen. I tried once or twice many, many years ago, and I'm pretty sure I bailed on those attempts on the basis that nothing great or interesting could be written about a group of women obsessed with finding husbands. I don't think I've made such a rash literary misjudgment in my life. I'm not going to launch into a full-blown synopsis and analysis of Pride and Prejudice, because God knows there's more than enough of those to go around, but I will throw in my two cents worth on what struck me most forcefully about the novel.

First off, I don't think I've ever read a novel that manages to be equally superb in terms of  plotting, prose and characterization. Pride and Prejudice has many moving parts, changes of direction, and plots and counter-plots. Purely on the basis of storytelling this is an amazing achievement, but to then add in so many beautifully realized, iconic characters described in witty, playful prose is nothing short of miraculous. I can think of a variety of novelists who've mastered two out of three of these qualities, but all three? It's a very short list.

The other thing that struck me was that Pride and Prejudice has some of the characteristics of espionage fiction. Let me explain. A great deal of the story revolves around what could be called intelligence work or spycraft. Elizabeth Bennet is constantly trying to ascertain the motives, actions and goals of, well, just about everyone, including people in her own family. And to accomplish this she debriefs and interrogates people, analyzes intelligence reports (letters), tries to see through disinformation campaigns, and works to uncover double agents like Caroline Bingley. Elizabeth's role as a Regency Geroge Smiley gives the novel the same narrative drive as a spy thriller. It's as though Darcy is a Great Power and a variety of individuals are working feverishly to make him an ally or turn him into an enemy of another individual. Here's a couple of passages that give a taste of Elizabeth's role as a spymaster:

"After wandering along the lane for two hours, giving way to every variety of thought; re-considering events, determining probabilities..."

"...and my dear aunt, if you do not tell me in an honourable manner, I shall certainly be reduced to tricks and strategems to find out."

And indeed she does strategize and determine probabilities, so much so at times that part of the pleasure of the novel is watching, as it were, the wheels turning in Elizabeth's head as she plans her next move or tries the to see through the "fog of war" and gauge what the opposition is up to. Now if only the novel had ended with this postscript: Elizabeth Bennet Will Return In...

Film Review: Fraulein Doktor (1969)

In the 1960s and '70s there were two kinds of B-movies in Europe. The most common kind were just like B-movies elsewhere: low-budget, unambitious, and full of cheap thrills. The other kind were films made as co-productions in Yugoslavia. The benefits of shooting in Yugoslavia were that local crews were cheaper, the country's varied terrain could double as Africa or even Norway, and, most importantly, the Yugoslavian Army was very obliging in allowing its men and equipment to be used in big battle scenes. And that's why films like Kelly's Heroes, Taras Bulba, The Long Ships and Genghis Khan ended up there; if your budget was limited but you wanted some spectacle in your film, Yugoslavia was the only choice.

Fraulein Doktor is one of the better made-in-Yugoslavia films from that era. The lead actors are all British, the key behind-the-camera people are Italian, and the hundreds of extras are, of course, the Yugoslavian Army. These Tower of Babel film productions usually exhibit all sorts of glitches, usually involving badly-dubbed local actors and production values (excluding battle scenes) that are a bit thrift shop. Fraulein Doktor is surprisingly well-made from start to finish. Set during WW I, the title character is a German Mata Hari-type spy played by the ravishing Suzy Kendall. The plot is more episodic than it should be, with the film starting with Doktor sneaking into England to arrange the assassination of Lord Kitchener. One of her fellow spies is caught and is turned by British intelligence. There follows a lengthy flashback in which we see Doktor steal a French poison gas formula by seducing the female scientist who invented it. Doktor then moves on to a scheme to steal the plans for the allied defensive positions on the eve of General Ludendorff's big offensive late in the war. Hot on her trail is Kenneth More as the head of British Intelligence and James Booth as the traitorous German spy. The ever-suave Nigel Green plays More's opposite number in German Intelligence.

What makes this film a cut above others from that era is a first-rate cast, a plot that handles the espionage elements with originality and intelligence, and, most importantly, an amazing final sequence that shows a gas attack on the French and British trenches. It's a truly hellish and original sequence, with German troops and their cavalry horses covered in protective suits to guard against a new gas (the one stolen by Doktor) that kills on contact with the skin. Fraulein Doktor didn't do very well at the time, which is probably due to a combination of a very downbeat ending and a heroine who is a German patriot. I don't think it's available as a DVD, but Netflix is currently showing it.

Coming Soon To A Country Near You: Cruel Britannia

In one of Paul Theroux's travel books (sorry, I can't remember which) he said that some countries seem perpetually stuck in their own unique time lines: Turkey, for example, always seems twenty years behind the times; the U.S. is always in the here and now; and Britain and Japan are perpetually one week ahead of everyone else. There wasn't anything scientific in Theroux's analysis, just the feeling that in the case of Britain and Japan, the next big things in culture and technology always seem to be coming from those two countries. There's a kernel of truth in this, which is distressing news for the rest of the world if you've paid attention to British politics in the last couple of years.

In Britain, class warfare is the new black, and fashion-conscious right-wing governments and political parties around the world will be taking notice and adjusting their wardrobes accordingly. Britain's coaliton government, led by the Conservatives under David Cameron, has been aggressively pursuing a fiscal austerity agenda, and their most recent budget put the boots to the millions in the U.K. receiving various kinds of social welfare payments, everything from disability benefits to housing allowances, not to mention opening the NHS to privatization. In sum, the working poor, the unemployed and the disabled are being forced to pay for the follies of Britain's banking sector, a tax system that seems to have been designed by and for Russian oligarchs, and a military that still thinks it's guarding an empire. So Cameron's government has been passing out a lot of economic poison pills to what used to be called the working class (when there was work), but what, one wonders, have they done to put a positive spin on this program of impoverishment? Simple: justify it by tacitly claiming that the people being harmed are scum anyway, so what's the problem? They deserve it.

This past week in England a verdict of guilty was brought down against the Philpotts, a loathsome couple who burned down their own house in a bizarre scheme to emerge as heroes after they rescued their six children. All the children died in the fire. The front page of the Daily Mail is the end product of a campaign by right-wing media outlets and politicians to portray people receiving any kind of social assistance as "scroungers", "parasites" and "feral". These people don't "have" children, they, according to the Daily Mail, "breed." Taking his cue from the tabloids, George Osborne, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, wasted no time in inferring that the Philpotts' crimes were somehow a result of social welfare spending. What we have here is no less than class warfare, albeit a war that is completely one-sided. Britain's right-wing papers are to the Conservatives what Fox News is to the Republicans in the U.S., and on behalf of the Conservatives they have been waging a propaganda war against the working class, furiously stoking resentment and fear amongst the middle class, and turning the working poor against those living on the "dole."

Papers like the Sun, Daily Mail and the Telegraph  accomplish this by acting as a media form of Predator drone, keeping a lidless eye focused on Britain's have-nots. Should any member of the underclasses engage in some kind of benefits fraud or enjoy a glitzy "lifestyle" thanks to social welfare payments, the papers authorize a launch of hyper-intensive press coverage that mocks and demonizes both the individual and the welfare state that has supposedly created this monstrous person. The gaudy Philpott case has encouraged the right-wing press and their Conservative pilot fish to come out into the open with their cynical strategy of scapegoating and punishing the underclass in order to enrich the classes above.

This kind of open class warfare hasn't yet made the jump to North America. In the U.S., politicians like to pretend there's no class system, and any attempt to vilify the mostly African-American underclasses runs the risk of being viewed as undiluted racism. What happens instead is that Fox News and the like spend most of their time attacking/smearing those advocating or defending what are perceived as left-wing causes. Here in Canada, the federal Conservative government is waging a relentless propaganda campaign (paid for by the taxpayer) that extolls the benefits of Conservative rule. In their eyes, the underclass is anyone who opposes oil sands development. This is not to say that playing the class warfare card won't happen in either country. Rightists throughout the world increasingly sing from the same hymn book, so if a winning right-wing formula emerges in one part of the world, it's sure to be copied in another.

The interesting question is why the class warfare card is being played now in Britain. The simple answer is that this is the natural next step in the capitalist counter-revolution that began with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In the decades after WW II most Western governments enacted wide-ranging social welfare policies and looked upon unions with favour, or at least tolerance. The main reason for this, especially in Europe, was fear of communism. Thatcher put an end to all that. Capitalism, flying under the banners of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was determined to roll back the economic order to a state that pre-dated WW I. Using terms like globalization, rationalization, healthy competition, and meritocracy, rightists presented this counter-revolution as an exercise in scientific, logical management of the world economy. That myth dissolved in the international financial crisis of 2007-08. What to do next? In Britain, it seems the answer is to take the PR filters off and have at the underclasses with all the vitriol the tabloid press can muster. And who can blame them? The upper classes have been searching for a new blood sport ever since the ban on fox hunting in 2002. Tally ho, and see you on the barricades!