[DM] "On the very unlikely Eurabianization of southern Europe"

I've a post up at Demography Matters commenting on predictions that southern Europe will become impoverished and transformed into a Eurabian annex. No, this isn't true.

[PHOTO] "Private Property: Please Drive Slowly"

"Private Property: Please Drive Slowly", a photo by randyfmcdonald on Flickr.

Another photo from the last snowy spell in April posted on this humid morning, this one showing a quiet street in Wychwood Park.

[BRIEF NOTE] "A little public nudity goes a long way at Pride and beyond"

Writing in the National Post, Dave Bidini authored a thoughtful article about Pride. At first, he writes, he was going to write an article critical of the excesses of Pride, specifically the festivity's more sexualized elements. But then, he changed his mind: this very open presentation, he argues, makes it possible for people who are themselves struggling to connect.

On numerous occasions, most recently at Pride-time last year, I've suggested that Pride can be best understood via Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, the temporary suspension of normative relationships and ethics in favour of the inversion of these norms and a new sort of egalitarianism, the sort of thing that paradoxically reinforces normative values on account of this very temporariness. I still think I'm half-right.

Where I think I went wrong was in my interpretation of what Pride meant. The very existence of Pride--its openness, its size--demonstrates that the normative values of society have changed. The inverse of this spectacle is not hiding out; the inverse of this exceptional spectacle, of this energy and celebration, is normality.

[A] friend wrote to tell me about her experiences at Pride, and how, without the outrageous media coverage, that kid in Brandon, Man., who is dealing with his or her sexuality, will never understand the joy and freedom exhibited, flesh or no flesh, during Pride week (I’m paraphrasing). So I changed my angle, reminding myself why I’d written my song in the first place: as a testament to the courage of “coming out,” to say nothing of the courage of heterosexuals to acknowledge and embrace that gesture.

The dildos and the beautiful men in leather shorts might still trouble me — wearing my long-standing pedigree as a white heterosexual male from the suburbs who didn’t meet my first gay person until I was 14 — but Pride is important because of its boldness, its volume, its pageantry. It’s hard to understand what it’s like on the other side of the fence, but the effort is worth saying what so many other close-minded people of my generation and cultural background won’t say: It makes us better, all of us.

Queer was written as a Prairie-rock anthem. Because the setting was a hockey game, I wanted to turn something traditional on its head. I thought that gay life and the national sport were two bedfellows that would never co-exist. But last Saturday, amid the rubber penises and fetish zippers, an appearance by one processionaire did more to crack through that heterosexual vestige than any lyric I might have written. It was Brian Burke, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ GM, walking in honour of his late son, Brendan, who, before his death, became one of the few openly gay members of the hockey heterocracy. His appearance was a strong, vital statement that supported something he’d said a few years ago: “I don’t know about any other team, but if a player is gay, he sure as hell is welcome to play for the Maple Leafs.” These words were strong, and Burke is as close to the male mainstream as any figure in the city. If he can change, perhaps all of us can change, too. Maybe, one day, being called a fag on the ice will be no worse than being called a cherry picker. Maybe they’ll feel comfortable enough on Church Street to one day march with their manager, too.

Before sending in my story, I received another message, from an old friend, on his birthday. He told me that when he first heard Queer, “I was 14, freaked out by my undeniable attraction to the boy in math class in my suburban Regina high school, and without much context for anything gay. It would be years before I would come out of the closet, but all through my teenage years I could go to that song and feel something very real from it. Some notion that there was understanding in the world, even if I was too scared to look for it at the time around me.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Rob Ford’s gravy train running on fumes"

The Toronto Star's urban affairs columnist Royson James comments on a recent study conducted by management film KPMG of Toronto's municipal government. Ford was elected in large part because of his promise to stop the "gravy train", to end excessive municipal spending. It turns out that the "gravy train" doesn't exist. To achieve massive savings, Ford wouldn't be trimming off excessive municipal weight; rather, he'd make Toronto anorexic.

It turns out that if Ford is going to find “savings” from the city’s water, garbage and transportation departments he will have to convince city council to keep the blue box out of apartments and condos, reduce snow clearing, cut the grass and sweep the streets less often, and end fluoridation of Toronto’s drinking water — all politically explosive issues.

For that — and a list of nickel-and-dime, nip-and-tuck manoeuvres — Toronto could potentially, possibly, save up to $10 million to $15 million in departments that spend $1 billion, one-third of which comes from taxes.

[. . . I]f this trend continues through reports on the other cluster of services — eight in all, continuing with economic development Tuesday — then the mayor has disappointed his followers who are bullish on a brutish wielding of the axe.

The consultants begin their report on the public works and infrastructure department with this: “The vast majority, 96 per cent . . . are core municipal services.”

Economic development reports are out Tuesday, and again, about 96 per cent is considered core, essential, mandatory. Do away with core services and you close down the city, in effect. Other departments will reflect a similar theme. The mayor and politicians won’t be able to run roughshod through departments, cutting indiscriminately. Citizens will notice the damage because there isn’t so much waste that Ford can save a couple billion dollars without cutting service.

The one thing about this that gives me hope is that these cuts will hit Toronto's domestic suburbs as much as its downtown. The suburbs are Ford's strongholds. If suburbanites suffer from his policies, maybe, just maybe, there's a chance that suburbanities will swing away from Ford's policies towards the ideals of New Urbanism personified (if imperfectly) by past mayor David Miller. Of course this depends on urbanists not adopting the rhetoric of snobs uninterested in dialogue, instead actually being open to the critiques and concerns of the suburbs.

[BRIEF NOTE] How Bon Cop, Bad Cop proves English Canadians don't care for bilingualism

Language Hat linked to a very interesting article in the online journal Reconstruction authored by Heather Macdougall, "Facing off: French and English in Bon Cop, Bad Cop". Bon Cop, Bad Cop, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this Canadian cultural product, is a 2006 "comedy-thriller buddy cop" film that gained particular fame for being bilingual, filmed with dialogue in both English and French. Yes, I liked it, light and fun as it was.

In her article, Macdougall notes that the film achieved success at least partly because of its reflection of the Canadian ideal of English/French bilingualism. There are also more than a few observations suggesting that the French language doesn't achieve the equality one might expect from this film's presentation of a bilingual ideal.

The issue of subtitling was dealt with in Canada by making available two versions: one print that subtitled the English dialogue in French, and a second that subtitled the French in English. Interestingly, no version was struck to include subtitles in both languages thereby allowing the film to be seen by monolinguals from both communities in the same theatre. (While it was not possible in theatrical screenings, the DVD version allows bilingual viewers to switch off the subtitles completely, but again there is no option to have both languages appear in the subtitles). Separate advertising materials were also prepared in the two official languages. Both theatrical trailers emphasized the linguistic subject matter of the film, although there is a notable difference in the approach of the two versions. The English trailer, which ran under the tagline “Shoot first, translate later,” contained scenes of David speaking French-accented English and only one, clearly facetious, line of subtitled French dialogue. It would be possible, then—and perhaps this was the goal of the trailer editors—for English audiences to assume that the film would be about French Canadians without actually being in French. By contrast, the French trailer contains an almost equal number of lines in French and English, and included the slightly more conciliatory tag line “Pour une fois, les deux solitudes vont se parler … peut-être”. The marketing strategy hints at a greater acceptance of bilingualism among the French-speaking population than among the Anglophone community; this difference between the two groups is also supported within the text of the film, albeit in a more nuanced way.

And:

[W]hen there is contact between speakers from the two language groups, it is assumed that English will dominate the conversation. The beginning of this scene, in fact, mirrors a previous scene in which the two detectives first meet; after each of them state their names, Martin greets David with a polite “Enchanté,” in response to which David turns to his Quebecois colleagues and jokes in a strong mock-English accent “An-chan-tay! On a tombé sur le gas qui peut par-lay le Fran-sezz!” The Quebecois officer then proceeds to converse with Martin in English.

The fact that Martin speaks fluent French is not revealed until the scene transcribed above, and this is in itself important: the audience and the characters are all supposed to be surprised that a police officer from Toronto would speak French. Martin has to explain his knowledge of French through both formal education and residency in a French milieu (significantly, however, in France rather than in Quebec). David’s bilingualism, by contrast, never needs to be explained. It appears to be a surprise to David’s boss, however, which is in keeping with the representation throughout the film of Quebeckers as monolingual (or near-monolingual) Francophones. The police chief, for example, clearly has only a modest productive ability in his second language (although his receptive ability is demonstrated by his accurate translations). In a later scene, David’s ex-wife Suzie asks Martin for dinner and he accepts; Suzie replies with an English “Fantastic,” which David immediately ridicules. Voicing her mockingly, he says, “Fantastic?! C’est quoi là, tout a coup t’es rendu bilingue?” He thereby indicates that his own bilingualism is something of an anomaly, and therefore it is strange that his special linguistic skills are not explained within the story in a similar fashion to Martin’s.

Finally, it is interesting that the only character in this scene who is completely unilingual is the one who in real life would most assuredly be bilingual: the chief of the Ontario Provincial Police. With a sizeable Francophone population and no nationalist language laws like those of Quebec, the Ontario police force would surely choose a chief who is able to communicate with all of his constituents. Yet, in the film, Brian MacDuff is completely ignorant of the French language. All of his dealings with the Sûreté depend on Capt LeBoeuf’s fractured English, and he is never heard to speak a word of French in the entire film. He apparently has no receptive knowledge of French either: when he suggests that David would “burn down the Empire State building and blow up Times Square” if he were sent to New York, David notes to Martin, “ça c’est un prejugé, ça!” MacDuff demands of Martin, “What did he say?” – a request that Martin dismisses with “Just ignore him.”

This all demonstrates a point I've made before on multiple occasions: notwithstanding official English/French bilingualism in Canada, the French language still has a lower status in Canada than English. This has been noted at the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, with the simple fact that 43.4% of Francophones speak English but only 9% of Anglophones are fluent in French, with 20% of those whose native language is neither English or French being bilingual. (Odd, that.) I noted the consequences of this in 2008 at Demography Matters, where I observed that the scale of language shift among Francophones to English outside of Québec, New Brunswick, and parts of eastern Ontario is such that Francophone minorities will disappear. Anglophones in Québec are facing no such existential crisis. Especially given how Francophones in Canada are outnumbered three-to-one by Anglophones, even if the French language continues to gain in status in its Canadian heartland, in a Canadian context it's still going to be disadvantaged.

Goiung back to Bon Cop, Bad Cop, definitive proof of this can be found in Wikipedia's observation about the film's box office success, more precisely about the ways in which it succeeded at the box office.

The film opened in Quebec on August 4, 2006 (and Canada-wide on August 18) and, as of December 17, 2006, had grossed $12,665,721 US$ ($12,578,327 CAD), making it one of the highest-grossing Canadian films of all time domestically. While the film has only generated only $1.3 million outside of Quebec, its success is significant given the difficulties that Canadian films normally face at the box office in English Canada.

The strength of American popular culture in English Canada is certainly a factor, but that doesn't explain everything. A fun film shot in Canada's two official languages reflecting English Canadians normative ideal just wasn't a film that English Canadian audiences cared about. In actual fact, Canada is not the bilingual country we might like to imagine; the actions of English Canadians proves this.

[DM] "On African immigration to Latin America"

I've a post up at Demography Matters commenting on an interesting new phenomenon, that of African immigration to Latin America (particularly Argentina, but also Brazil). The numbers are small, but they may yet grow.