Thought for Food

December 8, 2008

I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s. The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center.

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and leftist hero, whose reporting from Iraq served as inspiration for an unfortunate movie called War, Inc. // The New Yorker

I dig this quote because I had a similar reaction — that video still creeps me out a bit.

I found the account of Ms Klein’s childhood fascinating. Her grandparents and parents were Communists, capital C. After her father was drafted during the Vietnam War, he and her mother ‘ran away’ to Canada. Her mother was a film-makers (subsidized by the state — god bless our neighbors to the north!) and both were activists who “dragged” Naomi to demonstrations. The Klein children, Naomi especially, were attracted by the materialist society that their parents shunned. (“I can’t tell you a time when I didn’t simultaneously know that I really liked Disney movies and that Walt Disney was a bastard,” her brother recalls.) As a teenager, Naomi hated the way her mother dressed (“long skirts, schlumpy clothes,” in her mother’s words), and gave the whole family “covert makeovers” in her imagination.

But then came her awakening:

Soon after she graduated from high school, two catastrophic events erased her animus toward her parents and their politics. First, her mother had a severe stroke that initially left her quadriplegic. Naomi quit her job and spent most of the six months that Bonnie was in the hospital at her side. Then, during her first semester at the University of Toronto, a gunman killed fourteen women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, declaring, “I hate feminists.” She decided to call herself a feminist from then on.

Naomi is, to this day, ever-polished. For a speech in Toronto, she wore:

dark jeans tucked into tall brown boots, a crisp white shirt, and a long black blazer. She was dressed for a fox hunt. She looked terrific.

I can’t tell you how much I relate. Although my Dad wasn’t capital C and in fact was a member of the Petit-bourgeois by the time I was born, our childhoods were similar. I was hosed down by the fire department with my Dad at demonstrations. I complained mightily. Another demonstration?? When I was a teenager, I bought into late ’90s bling culture, hard. But ultimately, I absorbed their leftist politics, their values based on social justice, and their dedication to making the world a better place. But I won’t be caught dead in some of the things they wear. Fox hunt all the way, darling.

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