Be Proactive!

Well, a new school year has begun, it's the perfect time for a fresh start.  It's a great time to spend money too and all the stores encourage us to buy: new clothes, new school material, new appliances, new electronic goods, new makeup, new apartments!

The new school year is also a time where many of us take stock of ourselves, of our appearances, of our habits and of our insecureties:  we believe in self-improvement.  Advertisers prey on this desire for perfection and even though we are more media-savvy than previous generations, we are still willing to buy a piece of fantasy in order to boost our self-esteem. 

Let's take a look at an ad for a product I'm sure you've all seen heavily marketed on tv.  What are people really buying when they order this product?

There's a world outside your window

For my last blog post for this course I wanted to write about Christmas but when we started talking about hair last week I thought I might want to write about that too.  Amazingly, I have found the perfect intersection of the two subjects!

You all must know my all-time favorite Christmas song Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid.  But are you familiar with the context in which it was written?

It is 1984.  Internet does not exist yet.  Although CDs are becoming popular, most teenagers still buy vinyl records of their favorite bands and those who are really fanatic about their records protect the record covers in plastic sleeves and arrange them on shelves in alphabetical order.  Sony is king and all youth walk around with Sony Walkmans and earphones stuck to their ears.  Producing and taping customized cassettes is a popular past time.  In basements everywhere, adolescents are discovering Atari and playing Pac Man, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong.

On the international front, the Berlin wall still separates East and West and Tiananmen Square is 5 years away.  The term genocide is mostly applied to WWII and Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia are horrors that cannot  be imagined.  No one has heard of CNN, RDS, or other 24-hour news channels.  In Ethiopia, famine threatens to decimate the population.

The images from Ethiopia were shocking and, in evolution of the role of the media in ending the Vietnam War in the 70s, the mass media had a large role to play in influencing public opinion on the fmaine issue.  In England, Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats decided to mobilize his musician colleagues to create a song and dedicate all proceeds to ending the famine.  In a flury of urgency, the song was written and recorded within a week and released just in time for Christmas.

I love this song and this video.  Although there are elements that merit criticism--the naive,Western-centric, imperialist view of Africa, the conflating of Ethiopia into "Africa" and the claim that it`s "where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow"--it still represents a turning point for me who was 15 at the time.  The line "there`s a world outside your window" sums it up and it represents the beginning of my awareness of international issues that continues to this day.

Watch the video at least twice.  First, savour the complicated, edgy, choppy, gel and hairspray overloaded, dyed, shaved and bobbed  80s hairstyles!  My own hair look was definitely of the times: a choppy style, long in the front, dyed blond with lots of Sun-In, hairsprayed and underneath the long hair on the right side, a shaved strip that followed the contours of my ear from front to back. Can you spot Sting, George Michael, Phil Collins, Boy George, Simon Lebon and Bono?  I love how all of the members of Band Aid look like they just got out of bed!  So far from our plastic artificial world in which we live.

Then, enjoy the video for the message, delivered by all of that extraordinary artistic talent.  I still get shivers when I hear it for the first time of the season every December.

Merry Christmas gang and all the best for 2011!



Bonhomme Carnaval, our new anti-hero

Dear Maclean's,

Imagine my shock when I woke up on Monday morning and heard of the scandalous controversy that has shaken all of Québec:  Québec is the most corrupt province in Canada! My first thought was not without a hint of sarcasm:  Thanks for the enlightenment Maclean's , I really need you to tell me how corrupt our politicians are.  Of course  politicians are corrupt, that is the nature of politics: where there is money at stake, corruption is sure to follow.  Nevertheless, you seem to assert that there is something in the the very nature of being Québecois that leads to corruption.  Isn't that a bit like affirming that because of this negative article,  Maclean's is a racist, xenophobic magazine?

In the end, it doesn't really interest me who deserves the title of Canada's most corrupt province.  All of them can win the gold medal in this category.  What fascinates me however, is your appropriation of a beloved symbol of the heartwarming joie de vivre of our wintery province in order to shock, outrage and therefore sell more magazines.  Is your intention to inform or is it to make a profit through sensational Quebec-bashing?



Notwithstanding the simplistic analysis evident in the  two articles that  just attempt to validate the condescending perception of the the Rest of Canada in relation to Québec, your cover attacks the integrity of our national folklore:  the Bonhomme Carnaval, symbol of our bonne humeur, our warmth, our difference.  You portray our lovable mascot as a bandit, an diabolical bad guy making off with the goods.

Can this be a new chapter in the never-ending epic of the battle between the forces of good and evil?  Between the pure and the corrupted, the hero and the villain?  Alas, one  question remains, who is whom in this story?