Random cultural history notes.

I 

I ought to be a sucker for a general interest magazine entirely focused on Canadian issues, personalities, culture, and politics. But in the past, I never really managed to get interested in The Walrus, even when I subscribed. If I looked at an issue, the impression I got was often a publication most interested in content it could get cheaply  -- often long windy opinion pieces by lazy writers based on minimal amounts of real journalism (i,e., research, interviewing, digging).  

Lately, I'm interested.  Here's a reason why:  Eight Experts on What You Are Not Being Told About the Iran War. Quick, timely, well-informed, Canadian perspectives, assembled very quickly by the Walrus staff and delivered digitally within days of the war's start. As analysis, it's a hell of a lot better than what you would find trudging through the New York Times. And with Canadian perspective.

I do subscribe to The Walrus again, but my attention was drawn to this particular item by Wesley Wark's Substack, another very well informed, very timely, and very Canadian perspective on security matters.  

II

It was cheering to see news stories of many thousands of Nova Scotians rallying in Halifax to protest the deep cuts in cultural funding the provincial government led by Tim Houston is pushing through.

Have we got the dumbest crew of provincial governments in history right now?  B.C. where they are reneging of adhering to the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (and ending the biannual time change), to Alberta ('nuff said), to Ontario (ditto) and on to Nova Scotia, where cutting one's way to prosperity seems always to be in fashion.  And let's not even talk about the collapsing health care system, a provincial responsibility where premiers always blame Ottawa. Few of them seem to act as if provincial governments were actually important.  (Okay, is Manitoba something of an exception at the moment?)

The Nova Scotia protests actually concern big cuts in social service cuts, tourism, and other fields as well as to the cultural sector, But I was impressed to see the lead in building public opposition being taken by the cultural community, which is being hammered by the Houston cuts in a way that almost suggests some personal animus against the arts. 

We need something similar in Ottawa, perhaps, where the Carney government seems to believe kneecapping Canadian cultural programs and institutions is somehow going to defend us against the American onslaught against our nationality.    

Does Victoria Goldiee have some history for you? The spread of AI journalism

The Local, a Toronto-area version of those online newspapers offering coverage that rivals or extends what the more established media have, ran an story recently about the articles now being offered to it -- many of which turn out to be AI creations using fake or borrowed interviews, invented material, and authors who may or may not be real people and may be submitting "Toronto" stories from a base that could be anywhere in the world. Suddenly an editor has to spend a lot more time deciding not just if the story is of interest but if the author and his/her material really exist. As The Local's editor writes:

I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where “health and money collide,” flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.

In the health/money story he got back, most of the quotations, even from real experts, had been faked, even in stories the "author" had successfully placed in some major international publications.

My own pre-ChatGPT mind screams out, why would anyone bother? Do they know what Canadian magazines pay? 

But if people are making up news and current affairs stories, the potential for AI-created historical writing, both in trade and academic publications, must be immense.  What a world!

Local history in architecture; and big men to fear

Art of Bartoletti: mermaid on seahorse confronts mollusc

Dave Leblanc, who writes the Globe and Mail's "Architourist" column, has an entertaining piece on strange statues that decorated the forefront of some apartment buildings in an otherwise not very artsy corner of Toronto  -- the work of a little-known sculptor named Alfi Bartoletti.  

What I really liked is the abundant credit Leblanc gives to the Etobicoke Historical Society and its volunteer members Neil Park and Denise Harris, who guided and informed his search for the sculptures and the sculptor. Leblanc concludes the account of his visit: 

And, as I open my car door to leave, I remind myself that local historical societies do amazing work, and they are deserving of our support.

Well said, Architourist. Put "historical society" in the search box at top left of this blog and you can see a few occasions when I have had similar thoughts. Nice to see the idea making its way in the national media. 

Speaking of the Globe, I've been reading Big Men Fear Me, Mark Bourrie's biography of George McCullagh, who in the 1930s bought up the papers that would become The Globe and Mail.  I had not realized how bizarre the paper's origins are. McCullagh was an unstable high-school dropout who made a fortune in a very brief career as an investment broker. (Where are the customers' yachts? as they say.)  In his short career as proprietor of the newspaper, McCullagh made it the vehicle for a lot of crazy causes and ideas. 

Imagine today, if some rich crank took over an important social media news site! Somehow the Globe survived to become the respectably gray thing we know today. 

The author of Big Men Fear Me at times seems to share his subject's odd views about "the Left" ("It's likely she wasn't a Communist, but she did like some of their ideas, like old age pensions and unemployment insurance."), but he provides a lively read on a subject worth attention.  McCullagh was new to me -- though I can see good reasons why he fell into the obscurity Bourrie laments.

History of the RCMP

Maclean's, "Canada's newsmagazine," has shared the decline in visibility and influence experienced by Time and Newsweek and similar publications around the world.  It's now mostly a digital publication.  But it's worth saying that Maclean's weekly online issue often offers solid journalism and commentary, making it almost unique in Canada for longform inquiries about matters not quite as topical as the day's headline.

Case in point: two recent Maclean's articles that excoriate the way the RCMP in Nova Scotia handled the mass killings at Portapique.  One is by veteran journalist and RCMP critic Paul Palango, the other by commentator Stephen Maher.  I have not seen anything to match these in the daily press or CBC News, though The Guardian is now on the story. 

Palango:

My experience, if it has taught me anything, is the RCMP is adept at pulling at heartstrings during and immediately after an event, like they have over the past two weeks. We are told that there will be a time and place to discuss these issues, but that time never really comes. By then, it’s all old news and time to move on, they will say.
Even now, without all the details in, it has become clear to me that the Nova Scotia massacre encapsulated all that has been and continues to be wrong with the current structure, ethos and performance of the RCMP.

Who years back coined the phrase "the world's only souvenir police force" to describe the RCMP?  (Daniel Francis, maybe?) Palango would likely agree:

The RCMP prides itself in being a national police force, but it’s not really a national police force, like say in France. It’s actually a federal police force that rents itself out to the provinces and territories outside Ontario and Quebec. Even then, the only urban areas it polices are Moncton, N.B., and the suburbs of Vancouver—and even there, it’s about to lose its local detachment in Surrey.
The fatal conceit of the Mounties is that every Mountie can do any job, policing is policing. There is no magic. [....]

However, working on organized crime and counter terrorism is akin to the difference between cricket and baseball. Both have bats and balls, but they are fundamentally different games.

Update, same day: Francis sets the record straight:

I’d love to take credit for the souvenir police force – which I used in National Dreams – but it was coined by my pal Stephen Osborne, founder of Geist magazine, in his essay “Pile of Bones” in Geist July/Aug 1994

Why Canadian journalism is so boring

Some years ago the organization called PWAC, the Periodical Writers of Canada, changed its name to the Professional Writers of Canada. PWAC still had members, and they still needed advocacy and services.  It was just that few of them wrote for periodicals anymore. There were barely any periodical left, and the Canadian ones that survived paid such trivial fees that it was hardly worth any professional's time. Most of PWAC's members did technical writing, or manuals, or speechwriting, or other specialty work. (The decline of payment for periodical writing is acute in Canada, but it's a global phenomena. Judith Timson lamenting the recent murder of international freelance journalist Kim Wall, who was apparently killed by a source she was profiling, notes in passing that Wall's typical fee might have been $350.)

The Walrus, more or less Canada's leading general-interest magazine these days, has just published a review of Kathleen Winter's new novel, Lost in September, which is either about James Wolfe or about some modern characters obsessed with him. But the point is not Winter's novel, the point is what this review it has published says about consequences of the vanishing of the professional periodical writer in Canada.

The reviewer starts by emphasizing her ignorance of James Wolfe and his doings, and goes on to demonstrate an equivalent lack of knowledge of the Canadian historical novel. Nationally and internationally known works by Margaret Atwood, Douglas Glover, Wayne Johnston, Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, Audrey Thomas, Jane Urquhart, Guy Vanderhaege, Moyez Vassangi, Richard Wagamese, and many more have made the novel reflecting on Canadian history one of the major genres of Canadian fiction. Even complaints -- Russell Smith's come to mind -- about the fictional community's over-reliance on the historical novel in recent decades give evidence of its centrality.

But this reviewer doesn't engage with Canadian literature any more than with Canadian history. She declares that "Canadians aren't convinced that we are exceptional. We aren't romantics. We don't have many capital H heroes." She speculates only jealously or greed would start anyone working on a novel in which James Wolfe or anyone else connected to Canada would figure. After all, case closed,  "Canadian history is boring.  It just doesn't live in the way the histories of other countries do."

There's the Walrus problem.  Since we don't support professional periodical writers and critics any more, it has to rely on what it can get from writers like this one, described as a "Los Angeles based critic and journalist."  And journalists who don't know anything about Canadian history and Canadian literature -- and given the prevailing rates, cannot afford to acquire any knowledge -- end up regurgitating for us the most boring trope of Canadian journalism, the endlessly recycled one we read and hear in every periodical and newpaper and radio program ever:  "We don't know anything about Canadian history, and we don't need to, even to write about it, because, hey, it's boring anyway."

Read it and snore.  And carry on.

History of Canadian journalists, Al Jazeera, and Qatar

What's this new Middle East confrontation, the one between Qatar and most of the other Arab and Sunni states of the region?

Tony Burman, the Toronto Star foreign affairs correspondent and former CBC broadcast honcho, argued the other day it's a campaign to silence Al Jazeera. Burman is not exactly an outsider here; he's a former managing director of the English service of Al Jazeera, the pioneering radio and television network supported by the rulers of Qutar.

It is particularly the English language service of Al Jazeera, the part Burman worked for, that has given the network its reputation in the west for impartial and penetrating journalism on Middle Eastern and world affairs. So to western readers, the confrontation with Qatar, when defined as an attack on Al Jazeera, seems above all an attack on a free press and an information culture.

But I've been reading The Marriott Cell, Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy's terrific and very readable book (with fellow Canadian Carol Shaban) about his imprisonment in Egypt and how he was eventually freed with the support of a lot of journalists, a lot of Canadians, and Amal Clooney. Fahmy ran Al Jazeera English in Cairo, and was jailed and abused by the al-Sisi military government of Egypt and its courts on charges his network was actually a front for propaganda in favour of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

Fahmy is vehement and persuasive about how his Al Jazeera English was doing fair and objective journalism in the wake of the military coup that removed President Morsi and the Brotherhood from power in Egypt. But he does not say the same about the rest of Al Jazeera. He makes clear, in fact, that he believes what really got him into trouble was the way the Arabic-language services of An-Jazeera appropriated his English-language journalism and turned it into Arabic-language Muslim Brotherhood propaganda that it broadcast into Egypt.

That is why Fahmy, now free and in Canada, is suing Al-Jazeera for the way its actions endangered his life and freedom -- and his journalistic reputation for impartiality-- as one of its employees.

This backstory, brought out in The Marriott Cell -- for those of us who don't follow every detail of Middle-Eastern broadcasting politics -- does not in any way excuse the military government of Egypt for its arrest and abusive treatment of Fahmy and many other journalists (and many opponents of its regime as well!) But it did help explain to me -- rather better than Tony Burman's column does -- why the Sunni autocrats threatened by the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood are displeased by Qatar and its broadcasting network. Fahmy's book suggests Al-Jazeera, apart from the English service, is hardly the model of journalist objectivity it has come to be thought of in parts of the world community.

Burman acknowledges that Al-Jazeera gave voice to opposition forces like the Muslim Brotherhood, but generally portrays it as "the voice of the voiceless":

In a region where censorship was the accepted norm, Al Jazeera challenged the establishment elites and, for the first time, brought a wide diversity of perspectives into Arab living rooms. This included radical and Islamist voices, as well as viewpoints from Israel.

Fahmy, who suffered for Al-Jazeera's actions, makes at least some of the network's actions seem a good deal less admirable. I picked up The Marriott Cell in Vancouver recently, and it kept me engrossed all through the flight back to Toronto.