“I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s hands…” — Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

I shouldn’t have to write about library cuts. And I definitely shouldn’t be able to do it by just linking to a column I wrote about library cuts four years ago. Yet here we are:

In many ways, library staff are frontline workers. “It’s a population service and so much more than getting a book,” says TPL board chair Kathy Gallagher Ross. “We’re talking about the gap between the rich and poor, and that gap is tied to information. I’m a nurse; it’s a primary prevention measure that we have created and nurtured the strongest library system in North America.”

It’s safe to say that threats (or perceived threats) of shuttered libraries recently issuing from the maw of RoDoFo (my favourite new term — of others’ creation — for Mayor Ford and Councillor Ford) were empty — empty in the sense by which a Trojan horse is empty. Which is to say, hollow.

In itself, a Trojan horse poses no danger; the danger is in letting it distract you. (The original got through the gates by appearing to be a glorious gift when it was actually a troop carrier; RoDoFoan giant horses, being generally shit-spattered and periodically on fire, get us running out of the gates with buckets. Same difference.)

The Fords likely never had any realistic intention of closing libraries. I have little doubt they would if they could. But by trundling it out as a possibility, they make more generalized cuts — staff, hours, community programming, circulation — feel less severe, like a concession. They may even potentially neutralize a certain amount of activism by making people see victory in “reducing” cuts to the ones that had been planned all along.

Well, alright. To be honest, I don’t know if they actually plan it that way(1). For all I know, blinkered prejudice and bumbling contempt just happen to have the same effect in the end as keenly enacted right-wing strategy(2). But it’s the effect that matters, and the effect is twofold: expand the boundaries of the possible for yourself, while limiting the same for your opponents.

You might say this is their application of the Overton Window. The term got a lot less supple after Glenn Beck used it as the title for his novel (while, somewhere, Irony poured itself a stiff drink from the dregs of the empty mickeys littering its warren), but the basic gesture is simple: publicize (apparently sincerely) an obviously extreme position sufficiently, and the previous extreme limit slowly comes to seem reasonable(3).

For anyone playing political science bingo, successful Overton Window-style manipulation of discourse around something like libraries can also set you up for for some good old-fashioned cultural hegemony– an idea developed by a Marxist (Antonio Gramsci) but probably most consistently applied by right wingers (take another shot, Irony). Briefly, the right-wing inversion is this: take away (or simply throttle(4)) the means by which people inform themselves, and they’re more likely to vote for you.

In a strange way, we may want to thank the Fords for providing this first of many clear examples of this at the same time they mobilize unprecedented community response at City Hall. They’ve also, early in their reign, given an opportunity to make the same point I made in that column the last time library cuts were in the air((5).

I couldn’t help wondering during this current round of cutbacks what would happen if the idea of a publicly funded collective repository of books, a “public library” if you will, were floated for the first time today.

If a flotilla of copyright lawyers didn’t scuttle it, the chortles of public budget chiefs would, and this symbol of Western civilization’s utopian project would be a dream of rebels and hackers.

The point now, as then, is that incremental cuts to libraries should be experienced as just as much of an attack as outright closures — or, rather, as a prelude. In politics, as in chess (or any other form of conflict), it’s all about tempo. And it’s always easier to let things erode than it is to build them back.

Endnotes

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(1) Though it’s important to remember that you don’t get to be Mayor Rich Guy without having hired some strategists along the way. One of Ford’s key advisors, Mark Towhey, has all but disappeared from the open web since the election, but a search still turns up references to some of his past adventures in thinking out loud.

(2) Oh snap?

(3) This is part of what I alluded to in The Long Game: there is no real political centre, just ground that’s constantly shifting toward whoever is currently stretching the window the hardest.

(4) I’m looking at you, the entirety of television news.

(5) When Miller floated cuts to libraries and other services, it was a strategy to undermine his opponents on Council — many of whom are now part of Ford’s somewhat tenuous majority — so that public pressure would be applied against the cuts (or, more specifically, so Council would approve new revenue sources).

“Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or… the demand for revelation rather than revolution.” — Saul Alinsky

The recent vote to remove the Jarvis bike lane was predictable, to say the least, and more of a symbolic victory for a cadre within government hell-bent on getting rid of government than a significant loss for cycling infrastructure(1).

More remarkable is how many people came out to City Hall to oppose the cut, many of whom had never been before. Even balanced against a political loss, this is a Good Thing.

I almost envy those getting both barrels of parliamentary WTF right to the face for their first time. It’s never quite the same after that. But I realize the potential for disillusionment is high — immediate reactions tended toward “FUCK FORD,” “FUCK COUNCIL,” “CRITICAL MASS ALL DAY EVERY DAY EVERYWHERE,” or reliable old “GRAHHHHGHGHHGHHR.”

The short version of this article is: Can’t blame you, won’t help. Good feelings can make bad strategy, and it’s strategy that’s needed.

So, I wrote this.

The best revenge is living well - then crushing them

Claims and disclaimers: I covered City Hall as a reporter for years, and make no claim on the sort of insight had by those who’ve worked directly within or upon government, just that of someone who tries to carefully observe them.

I’m writing only of strategy, not tactics. The scope is small; I’ve left out any critiques of the current system of government(2).

And I’d never suggest that decisions won or lost in government are more (or less) important than extra-political work in our lives and communities. Political victories only exist because of the way we live in our communities, and none should be sought except to clear ourselves more space to do so.

The bike lanes that got everyone so cranked up are legal creations, but also manifestations, in the form of political will, of choices and actions we make and take each day as individuals and communities. Lanes make it easier to be on the streets, but the possibility of lanes began in people’s choice to be on the streets anyway, and support each other in doing the same.

For now, we’re concerned with what happens when we reach the point of actually walking in to “the clamshell” of City Council..

Parliamentary democracy (artist's rendering)

Procedural vertigo

What happens first is usually a kind of procedural vertigo. The mass of business being conducted is given rough shape by a process and language that often seem about as functional and attractive as a meat dress. The best way to pick up the rhythm is to watch a few meetings (broadcast online by local cable when they happen), following along at the Meeting Monitor. Pick an item or two that interest you so you don’t get lost and bored. Or if you’re there in person, there will be a few poor souls who speak enough Council to get by. Look for the bleeding eyes.

Already there are two important things to note: one is that even at this basic level, involvement with city government is a time commitment, making it inaccessible to all but a minority with the privilege of free time.

The other is that Council meetings are just the tip of a political iceberg. This visibility makes them most people’s first interaction with City politics, but also more useful as a guide for future action than places for immediate intervention.

With that said…

BULLET POINTS!

• Nearly everything that ends up before Council got there through a committee.

  This is actually where policy work gets done, over weeks and sometimes months, and where you can still make deputations on proposals. Council votes proposals into policy; committees decide what Council votes on(3). Ideas both courageous and cowardly can be spiked, or condemned to a slow death of neglect through endless referral. There is no official process for proposals coming from the public. For that, you have to get a Councillor — and maybe some staff — interested.

• The Mayor of Toronto has relatively little power, and only one vote on Council.

  All other influence wielded by Mayors is wielded indirectly: horse-trading, the ability to make life difficult (or not) for Councillors or bureaucrats, the ability to appoint and remove the Chairs of Committees and Council’s Speaker, and the ability to promote ideas through heightened access to news media.

  About that last one: for a Mayor like Ford, elected on a negative campaign and (so far) secure in his electoral base as long as he hammers away at “elites” like cyclists, janitors, and babies, news media are most useful in neutralizing opponents’ bases. Both a skilled Mayor and effective activists will act on the same rule:

• All victories in Council are awarded by Councillors.

  Ford’s strategists have been good at (or lucky in) exploiting the corporate press’ reluctance to empower us with understanding of how government actually works — scary headlines about the next program the Mayor’s decided to kill do two things: make people think it’s a fait accompli, and, sometimes, rev up pointless campaigns to pressure the Mayor, who, by the time things are making their way to Council, is the hardest of the “hard” votes(4) (more on that shortly).

• Start counting votes. There are 45 of them on Council.

  The Mayor, as mentioned, has 1. Items win with 50%+1 of total votes — they lose on a tie. Not every item is of concern to every Councillor, and sometimes a Councillor will abstain by leaving the chamber.

  How is a given Councillor likely to vote on a particular item? Do some research in to their political past. See if there are other people or groups doing the same. Or just contact the Councillor’s office and find out.

• Identify the swing and soft votes. Make courage politically desirable. You might say I buried my lede, because this, basically, is the game.

  On any given item, most votes will be “hard” (unlikely to change). There will usually be one or two “soft” votes (they know how they’re voting, but you have reason to believe they could be swayed). There will also be swing votes — Councillors still open to new information (or, more likely, to being courted, or to political pressure).Your obstacle is that the swingers and softies often have things to gain from the Mayor, or from electorate in their ward leery of progressive(5) change. Toronto Mayors, through means including those already mentioned, can reward or extort loyalty.

LEARNING IS FUN! EXTORTION, TOO!

Here’s the point in the math textbook where there’d be a coloured box with a cheeky subtitle containing some concrete example so you can apply all the boring information to your amazing life.

Something you likely didn’t hear about the bike battle is that Ford’s people threatened to remove a straightforward proposal from the agenda. It was a small, uncontroversial project nonetheless important to a community represented by an unnamed swing-vote Councillor. The removal threatened this Councillor’s relations with their community. Quelle surprise - the Councillor “voted with the Mayor” on the bike plan report, the item was released, and approved.

Just so we’re clear: this was extortion. Accordingly, it’s an awkward position; either choice (get the community item dealt with but encourage governance by mafia threat; stand up for ethical process but sell out a community group) would have been arguably principled.

But the result is clear: another supposedly “centrist” Councillor failed to break rank with the overall policy goals of a decidedly right-wing Mayor, who keeps getting the lesson that extortion works. And the thing about the centre? It’s relative. Doesn’t actually exist. Gets defined by whoever’s pulling the hardest.

Council-watcher Cityslikr noticed another threat of the same kind levelled at Josh Colle. So, we know it happened at least twice. Like raw tofu, those apparently bland Council agendas actually soak up all sorts of pungent realpolitik when properly stir-fried. Learn how to read them.

And remember what I said a few paragraphs up: “swingers and softies have things to gain from the Mayor, or from electorate in their ward leery of change.” Councillors need to get re-elected. You need to make them feel they have more to lose from voters than the Mayor - that those voters are a bloc able to influence elections.

That brings us to two last, and maybe most crucial, points.

• Activism is always ultimately intended for other regular people, not politicians(6).

Being right isn’t enough. No exceptions.

If there isn’t a general will supporting your community’s desires such that the relevant Councillor fears for their job, it doesn’t matter what you want. How do you build community will? Again, that’s for another article, probably written by other people, but the short answer is: Slowly. Beyond that the answer comes from the community itself. But as far as I can tell, it always begins the same way, the way I found out about the Mayor’s threatening swing voters: being out in the community, listening and talking — in that order.

• Being strategic on issues that affect you directly means taking an interest in issues that don’t. It also means not “giving the Mayor a chance to do the right thing” on an “issue-to-issue basis.”

  This is an ironclad strategic truism. It’s also an ethical imperative. Let’s start with ethics.

  Gotta be honest: it’s disappointing to see the difference in public outcry between a single bike lane and the sell-off of public housing, the pressure-tactic of offering buyouts to 50,000 city staff, and the refusal to hire at no cost two Public Health nurses.

  These are not separate issues, happening independently. They are all ideological choices made by an ideological administration pursuing an ideological agenda. And they are, unlike the issue of one bike lane, a direct threat to people’s well-being, and more likely to impact members of marginalized and racialized communities — the same communities, remember, less likely to be able to engage with city government. Oh, and, also the communities most likely to be situated in wards most likely to vote Ford. Do we have to look at those maps again?

  Here’s the overlap with strategy: if you rely on reactive politics, pushing back on single issues only as they arise and only when they affect you, you’ll always be overtaken by a power that actually has just one target — city government as a tax-collecting equalizing force — which it slices up in to manageable tasks.

None of us until all of us

Making them manageable makes them appear unrelated (and vice versa) — because isolated issues don’t mobilize wide resistance. Remember that the Mayor’s power comes from Council, and any one issue’s constituency will be a disparate political force, spread out across wards. Alone, cyclists are less able to apply pressure to their Councillor, even if they have significant numbers city-wide. But, joined with local people in social housing, housing advocates, public health activists, public sector workers, and others, a political constituency with considerable localized force becomes possible.

But what brings them together? Well, more troubling than the loss of the Jarvis lane — essentially a lame eleventh-hour offering from Miller — was the Ford team’s naked contempt for community consultation, public health, fact-based decision-making, and the range of living conditions in Toronto. This contempt is present as well in his approach to all the other services I listed. Here, we have a general principle — the right to be heard — that links to a personified grievance — a Mayor hostile to community voices — that links in turn to numerous concrete causes. As a basis for organizing this also makes it harder to turn communities against each other.

And, to the extent that those threats to services also threaten people’s ability to live their lives in relative stability, it threatens their ability to engage with and build an understanding of politics. This keeps them neutralized as an inertial force, which is to the Mayor’s advantage.

Remember that Ford got less than half of votes for Mayor, and support from less than 20% of the population. He doesn’t need a majority to support him, only a majority that won’t actively oppose him.

But, luckily, the same is true for community activists.

Go.

Further reading:

Rules For Radicals, by Saul Alinksy. Alinksy is considered the founder of modern North American community organizing. As I read him, he had the courage to define “community” as something that was inherently opposed to centralized power. This was his manual.

Local Motion, various authors. The final volume in Coach House Books’ uTOpia series contains a collection of journalistic essays exploring how things get changed (or not) at Toronto City Hall. Full disclosure: I wrote one of them.

fordfortoronto.mattelliott.ca. Matt Elliott has been doing some deep and accessibly-presented analysis of City Council business. I’m not endorsing all his conclusions, just suggesting it’s worth your while to keep up with what he’s doing.

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges. Think you’re one of the goodguys? Read this then think again.

Endnotes

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(1)Email outraged disagreement to “mike” at this web address

(2)”Political life must be taken as you find it.” - Benjamin Disraeli

(3)Things can be put directly before Council through motions, but unless they’re simple and straightforward, they’re more often than not referred to committee.

(4)The time to reach out to Mayors, if at all, is well in advance of committee proposals and Council debates. Sometimes they just won’t be on your side (Ford seems especially inflexible). Almost always best to focus on where your pressure is best applied across the sytem to secure political victory or mitigate loss.

(5)For the record, I hate this term.

(6)Or corporations, wizards, etc. ]]> http://linebreaks.com/?feed=rss2&p=243 http://linebreaks.com/?p=239 http://linebreaks.com/?p=239#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 04:51:06 +0000 Mike http://linebreaks.com/?p=239 Hillside! Thrilled to be returning to the spoken word stage at Hillside Festival in July.

Except, halfhearted efforts to the contrary, there is no official narrative. There’s a shifting pseudo-narrative, told and re-told by many voices in a pidgin of what reporters saw, what reporters understood, and what we’ve managed to hear and understand ourselves from friends and strangers or our own failed-Jenga-tower of memories.

It averages out to something like this: last June, the G20, who travel the world creating jobs, came to town, bringing with them a particularly impressive fence. But, the Protesters of Toronto (a proud but inscrutable people, with a rich history stretching back as far as 1999, when they emigrated here from Seattle), having a religious aversion to fences, planned precisely two days of protests, and no more. As is their way. Because of the fence.

Hidden, unknown, among these gentle savages lay the Black Bloc. The Bloc, who hate our freedom, and our windows, emerged from the protest, went on a rampage of bloodless violence against Business Owners, and briefly burned down Toronto. Fives—even tens—of attackers overwhelmed the security forces of numerous cities and jurisdictions, none of whom had any prior experience with large protests.

The link? You’re reading it right now. In case you missed them, I also wrote a couple of pieces on police politics and theatrics for OpenFile.