Mohamud Siad Togane’s 2009 New Year Letter
My dear friends:
We Somalis have been too long in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots clean!
We have been down so long it looks like up to us!
Whenever I catch myself playing dead
in bed
in the slough of despond
in self-pity
in the poor-mees
Whenever I despair
the Good Lord reminds me
that Hope never made me ashamed
that the personal name of the devil is
Iblis:
The Despairer who causes others to despair
Then I come to myself
Then I arise
Then I take up my bed
Then I walk and go to my God
who knows our Somali sorrows
It is love
it is labour
it is laughter
it is the Spirit of the Lord that quickens me
I hold with James Joyce
who prayed
"Lord, heap miseries upon us
yet entwine our arts with laughters low!"
We Somalis are still laughing to keep from crying
After all
It is we Somalis who say
Just because you gonna die you don't have to sob & slobber all over yourself!
This morning as I was labouring
on this pastiche
on Abdullahi Yusuf's parting shot
on Abdullahi Yusuf's (alias Ina Yay: Son of the Jackal) Swan Song
Son of the Jackal’s Swan Song
(After Frank Sinatra)
And now, the end is behind me in Baiyhabo
And now I am in Puntland pondering my next boondoggle
And so I faced the final clannish curtain
My friend
I will say it clear
I will state my clannish case of which I am certain
I have lived a life that is full of foolish clannish crap
I have travelled each and every clannish highway
Riding each and every Abgal Ass
And more, much more than this
I did it
My way
My Meles Mahad Majerten Darod way
Regrets, Ive had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
I did what no Darod daredevil dared do
And saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted clannish course
Each careful clannish step along the byway
But more, much more than this
I did it
My way
My Meles Mahad Majerten Darod way
Yes, there were times, I am sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all, when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out at their fugly funny ill-jeh faces
I faced down
Each and every Hutu Hawiye Whore
Each and every addled Idoar
And I stood tall
And did it
My way
My Meles Mahad Majerten Darod way
I have loved Ina Aff Irid Yambo
I have laughed and cried
I have had
My clannish comedown
My clannish comeuppance
My share of losing
And now
As tears subside
I find it all so amusing
To think I did all that gaff to my silly Somali nation
And may I say - not in a shy way,
No, oh no not me,
I did it
My way
My Meles Mahad Majerten Darod way
For what is a man, what has he got?
If not his Moxie Macavety Mahad Majerten Mien Meow, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels like the Abject Abgal Ass
The record shows I took their Bantu pitiless blows -
And did it
My way
My Meles Mahad Majerten Dirty Darod way!
Usurping Democracy
Michael Reinhart
‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’
Charles Darwin
Recently, our prime minister called an election because he claimed that parliament was ‘dysfunctional’. In the case of this particular prime minister, this could reasonably have been translated as ‘I can’t do what I want without having to consult other Canadians’ or ‘I don’t like or understand the term minority government’.
Our prime minister knew, being the adept tactician that he seems to be, that he’d be wise to hold the election just before the American election because like many of us he intuited that change was afoot; that ‘democracy was coming to the USA’, to borrow a phrase from Canadian poet Leonard Cohen.
He shrewdly surmised that Barack Obama would replace the current neo-totalitarian regime of George Bush, and unlike his predecessor would incidentally do it democratically.
So Mr. Harper had to take his stab at a majority government before Mr. Obama could officially be declared the winner because he knew that public opinion and sentiment would change in North America as well as in most of the rest of the world toward the intellectual, intuitive and philosophical wasteland that was/is neo-conservatism. He knew that neo-conservative ideology, a proven anti-democratic school of thoughtlessness, would be overshadowed or out-gunned. That it risked being replaced by the promise of intelligence, humanity, democracy and hope if Mr. Obama were to take office in the States.
Kudos to our prime minister for his tactical gift. Too bad it’s been developed at the expense and paucity of any other gifts or talents deemed necessary to lead a democratic government. Having spent several hundreds of millions of Canadian taxpayers’ money, our prime minister was returned to power, (after a Conservative barrage of mean-spirited propaganda and fear mongering reminiscent of the Republicans) with a minority government.
His party received approximately only 38% of the votes cast. In light of the fact that a mere 59% of eligible voters voted, his party (and not Harper personally) did not actually receive 38% of the support of Canadian voters but rather only 38% of the 59% who bothered to cast votes. By my rough calculations this equals about 22% of popular support from Canadians in general. This percentage is further diminished if we consider adolescents, children and landed immigrants who don’t have a right to vote but who are essentially no less Canadian than the rest of us.
He ended up with substantially less than a quarter of any actual support from all Canadians. For most politicians, or sentient human beings generally, this might have been interpreted as a sign that a measure of humility was in order. Humility (not ‘humiliation’ as it was perhaps interpreted) that might have engendered a spirit of democracy and inclusion in one’s style of governance.
Our prime minister, from all indications taken from his actions recently, did not respect the will of the people. Nor does he have one iota of respect for his colleagues and peers in government, many of whom have much more experience and accrued wisdom. Instead, he exhibited a visceral sense of resentment and vengefulness by striking out at those he deemed responsible for his failure to gain the mandate to do what he pleases with our country. Essentially, he went after the opposition parties, organized workers and women by trying to pass bills that effectively punished them all. And he attempted to do it by portraying it, albeit poorly, as something in our best interests. This action also attempted, though fatuously, to camouflage the extreme paucity of ideas or solutions for dealing with the current problems with the economy.
I can assume that only those content with ignorance could possibly have bought his government’s puerile and disingenuous explanations and retractions that were subsequently offered up when he’d been caught in the act. One is left to wonder how many times this man will have to be outed as a delinquent before he feels the least embarrassed or he gets his pompous rear end kicked out of government.
Part II / The Audacity of Dopes
The fact of the matter is, and it isn’t something particular to Canada by any means, Harper was voted in on the basis of having said virtually nothing of substance but having said it in a tone that evoked in many the stereotype of a strong leader. In short, the Bushian ‘huffing and puffing with no substance to speak of’. His financial update was virtually the same. Our interpretation of strength seems to have gradually become similar to a dog’s passive and fearful reaction to the loud, authoritarian and often bullying tone of the master even though the actual words mean nothing to our canine ears or brains.
One would have thought/hoped this syndrome had become an anachronism in light of our having endured eight years of bullying and ignorance in the form of George Bush and company. It is curious in light of the USA and much of the world having embraced the civil, sane and intelligent alternative offered by the election of Mr. Obama.
Yet while much of the world has already embraced the ‘audacity of hope’, our minority prime minister continues to embrace or cling to the audacity of aggression, bullying and misrepresentation. He exhibits an unambiguous disrespect for parliament, democracy and hence the majority of the people of Canada.
The most striking aspect of all of this is that despite the glaring breaches of civility, of accepted parliamentary traditions and laws, this autocratic behaviour goes on. The will of the majority of Canadians as duly represented in parliament is being disregarded. This unprecedented usurping of our democracy by these self-interested idealogues continues.
Enough Canadians were enticed by the loud rhetoric to allow these neo-conservatives a minority government. This same minority deems itself fit to govern as if a majority, having evaded a non-confidence vote by questionable means. Not only were these events somehow possible, but this dynamic may well continue into the near future if we remain complacent.
As long as it does continue, a good deal of responsibility falls squarely upon us. We will have failed ourselves and our country as we’ve always known it. It has already become unrecognizable to me since this government took power two years ago. And I find that fact simultaneously saddening and maddening.
In a broader sense, it seems to me that we (western society, humanity) are in the process of abandoning civilization, and with it civility, for something that is allegedly more authentic; base human nature. Or as I’ve referred to it for many years ‘inhuman nature’ since what defines us as human in the context of all creatures is our capacity to consciously recognize our inherent ‘common’ or ‘collective’ vulnerability. This realization seems to have resulted in our communal attempts, for millennia, to develop ‘civilization’. Ostensibly, this was a common sense attempt to preclude our own extinction, essentially at the hands of wild beasts, the elements, and more importantly, ourselves.
We’ve taken this celebration of the erroneously more authentic base human nature to extremes in western culture. Witness reality television, violent video games, tabloid talk shows, competitive idol shows, loud-mouthed athletic icons on steroids, extreme fighting, greedy commodities speculators and dishonest politicians celebrated or respected for nothing more than having gotten away with it.
It is the gradual acceptance of this baseness, I think, that allowed Harper to casually demonize our Québécois brothers and sisters, to elevate his xenophobia to pseudo-rhetoric and make it seem so ordinary. This, from the mouth of a prime minister no less, elected to serve all Canadians. And some, who would laud giving free reign to one’s dark side as a liberation of sorts, will no doubt continue to have the audacity to claim that ‘at least it’s more honest’.
We no longer hear the meaning for the volume at which the rhetoric, mendacity or sheer inanity is delivered. We compete unabashedly and revel at our opponents being crushed, cowered or humiliated.
To make matters worse, we concern ourselves more with one’s image than we do with one’s humanity, ideas or creativity. We continue arbitrarily to deconstruct our ancestry and all that they struggled to construct over millennia. And we do this generally for lack of imagination and rarely with something better to replace it with. We have the nerve to call it democracy or progress.
We slowly usher in what used to be considered fascism out of laziness and apathy. We have come to define all human success, all achievement, all of society in terms of winners and losers. And in so doing, we have forfeited the concept or ideal of humanity or civilization.
Far beyond our able talent for deceiving ourselves, we misidentify all of this as some sort of post-modernist re-invention. In the process, we all end up as losers, this latter commonality being perhaps one of the only faint vestiges of democracy.
Wherein one contemporary philosophy, to the south of us, begins to embrace the audacity of hope, we in Canada this week have settled for the audacity of ignorance; of willfulness, selfishness, fear and smallness. Must we, even now, continue to define ourselves by being different from our neighbours down south, even if it means appearing to be devolving?
For many of the last eight years, especially after the re-election of George Bush for a second term, many of my American friends expressed shame or embarrassment at their predicament. None had voted for him and all of them are good people of conscience. I found it paradoxical that these were the people to feel shame at what someone else was doing. I better understand it now.
I feel quite angry with our government’s actions and I’m not alone. Yet I am tending toward shame at being a Canadian because this country is becoming something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. The government’s actions reflect badly on me, and on all Canadians whether we’re complicit or not.
As a man and as a human being I feel shame at the erosion of civility and active intelligence in western society that enables the political maliciousness and deceit we’ve witnessed lately. And perhaps we should all get over this contemporary surfeit of self-esteem and get a bit familiar with shame, because until enough of us are sufficiently ashamed to be fed up, those who should be ashamed, those who have merited shame through their smallness and ignorance, will be calling the shots and running amok with our democracy. They will have made off with the truth not only of what it was to be Canadian, but the truth of what it is to be civilized, creative and free.
