QUESTION: How bad is crime in Canada?
“Half of Toronto’s population now consists of those born outside of Canada; notably, the city’s crime rate has dropped by 50 percent since 1991, and is significantly lower than that of the country as a whole.”[1]
QUESTION: Given that newspapers offer "scarelines" instead of "headlines", are newscasts also to blame for our “culture of fear”?
“... between 1990 and 1998, when the nation’s murder rate [U.S.A.] declined by 20 percent, the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased 600 percent (not counting stories about O.J. Simpson).”[2]
“... people who watch a lot of TV are more likely than others to believe their neighbourhood are unsafe, to assume that crime rates are rising, and to overestimate their own odds of becoming a victim. They also buy more locks, alarms, and – you guessed it – guns, in hopes of protecting themselves.”[3]
According to George Gerbner, Dean-emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, “They [people who watch a lot of TV] may accept and even welcome repressive measures such as more jails, capital punishment, harsher sentences – measures that have never reduced crime but never fail to get votes – if that promises to relieve their anxieties. That is the deeper dilemma of violence-laden television.”[4]
“In the nation’s largest cities, murder accounted for only.2 percent of all crimes, and in the suburbs of those cities, murder accounted for just .01 percent. Yet not only are murder stories a staple of the coverage in those cities, accounting for 36 percent of the crimes reported on the TV news, the newscasts warned suburban viewers that crime was moving to their areas.[5]
QUESTION: What is the relationship between broadcasting competition and the “culture of fear”?
“Crime stories are a cost-effective way to capture an audience. The more vulnerable the viewing public is made to feel, the more essential the role of the local newscaster as a neighbour who ‘sounds the alarm for collective defense.’”[6]
QUESTION: If the Harper Government hacks away at public funding for the CBC, will that mean we have even more crime stories in the news, more public anxieties and less public reasoning (even though actual crime continues to decrease) ... and more jails again?
QUESTIONS : Does not the increase in the number of jails, punishments and “crime bills“ represent an increase in the violence of the State? Is this not comparable to the violence of the State during the G20 Summit in Toronto?
“In its most elementary and at the same time indomitable form, the violence of the State is the violence of a penal character.”[7]
QUESTION: Have we as a society returned to nineteenth-century, Darwinian notions of “survival of the fittest”?
“War is and must remain for us a cataclysm, the outbreak of chaos, the return, in the external relations between States, to the struggle for life.”[8]
QUESTION: Since 9/11 do we have repeated ‘failures of the sovereign’ as Michael Ignatieff recently suggested in a Globe and Mail article?[9]
We have seen the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and now War in Libya. In all of these instances men (and women) surrendered themselves to a leader, a sovereign. We have also seen gross incompetence, but they were not failures of the sovereign; rather, we see how violent the sovereign can get, especially when aided by public intellectuals.
QUESTION (and another corrective to Michael Ignatieff): Is Texas Governor and Tea Party presidential hopeful Rick Perry, who wants to see “Washington irrelevant,” not a Marxist dictator of the proletariat who actually wants the “withering away of the State”?
QUESTION: As an Economist, Mr. Harper’s training is supra-national in perspective (economics is considered a human science): Does Mr. Harper really have Canada’s interests at heart? Is Mr. Harper a prime minister without a country?
ANSWER: Look to Mr. Harper’s Australian ghost writers (sending our lads to war), and a rotten case of indigestion.
ANSWER: Look to the newly-minted “Royal” Canadian Forces. Is the Queen not head of many Commonwealth Countries?
ANSWER: Look to the “Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement” (CETA), where negotiations are held outside of the purview of the public. Does not democracy involve open discussion, Mr Harper?
ANSWER: Look to British prime minister David Cameron addressing Canada’s Parliament, fresh from the war in Libya – the only coalition leader ever to be honoured by Stephen Harper.
QUESTION: What is Canada’s problem?
ANSWER: “...the central problem of politics is freedom: whether the State founds freedom by means of its rationality, or whether freedom limits the passions of power through its resistance.”[10]
QUESTION: How are Canadians best able to express freedom and resistance to excessive “State” power?
ANSWER: “I am free in so far as I am political.”[11]
[1] Rachel Giese, “Arrival of the Fittest: Canada’s crime rate is dropping as immigration increases. Is there a connection?” The Walrus, Vol. 8, No. 5 (June 2011), p. 30.
[2] Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. xxix..
[3] Glassner, Culture of Fear, pp. 44,45
[4] Glassner, Culture of Fear, p. 45
[5] Glassner, Culture of Fear, p. 230
[6] Glassner, Culture of Fear, pp. 230,231.
[7] Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, tr. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 234.
[8] Ricoeur, History and Truth, 243. Emphasis added.
[9] Michael Ignatieff, “The Wrong Lessons,” The Globe and Mail, Focus Section, Saturday September 10, 2011, pp.1,2.
[10] Ricoeur, History and Truth, p. 270. Emphasis added.
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