2012: The Beginning of the End?

Another year, another doomsday prophecy. They pop up so often now we might as well print them alongside  holidays in the calendar. However, as fun and terror inducing as they can be, apocalyptic prophecies tend to vary wildly in severity and believability. Harold Camping banged his end of days gong more than once throughout 2011, managing to bilk a few sad, faithful dopes out of their life savings in the process, convinced that the rapture was upon us and eager to buy their spot in the blessed afterlife. The majority of us saw Camping's doomsday prophecy for what it was: a source of amusing Facebook status updates for most, and a con job for a faithful and utterly stupid few. 2012, though, sees the arrival of a doomsday prophecy we can sink our teeth into. There hasn't been one like this since Y2K, when we all partied like it was 1999, waiting to see if a niggling technical glitch would render life as we know it an irradiated memory, leaving us in a wasteland of spontaneously downed jet-liners cluttering up the scorched earth and sentient, rage-filled toasters hungry for our flesh. This time around, the annual prediction of doom isn't fucking about.

Welcome to 2012. According to the Mayan long count calendar, or at least according to a group of dubious "experts" on the Mayan long count calendar, the jig is up; the show is over, it's lights out for the earth. We've all got just shy of twelve months to get out there and live life to the fullest. Take all the drugs you've previously been afraid of. Have copious amounts of increasingly bizarre and unapologetically unprotected sex because all bets are off! Come 21st December, you are a dead human walking. A nebulous, opaque, poorly defined yet unstoppable threat is barrelling toward us from the cosmos. Do you really want to meet your ultimate demise never knowing the joys of a Caligulaesque orgy while tripping on a ridiculous cocktail of hallucinogens and heroin?

Of course, most of these predictions of imminent doom swirling around the Mayan long count calendar come from the sort of websites whose owners seem to think the progress of web design stopped sometime in 1997. In all reality the long count calendar was, much like our own yearly method of time keeping, intended to reset at the end of it's 5000 or so year lifespan -- a tracking of an entire age, rather than a single year. The only great cosmic event coming our way this year, in all likelihood, is the sun's alignment with the centre of the Milky Way, a galactic event that occurs every 26,000 years. So maybe bring a full box of condoms to all those super orgies you plan on attending, and leave the crystal meth at home.

Chances are we will wake up on 22nd December as we do every single day -- still existing. No rogue asteroid from the depths of space will have side swiped the planet. No blast of cosmic gamma rays will wash over us, turning us into withered mutants or super evolved telepaths, depending on whose take on the prophecy you're inclined to believe. Chances are we will wake up to the same sun in the sky with the same lives we led the day before, and we'll continue on.

Unless the powers that be right here on earth have something to say about it.

It didn't take long for the world's power brokers and manipulators to harsh our collective new year's eve buzz. While we were out drinking and cavorting, Barack Obama was in Hawaii pissing all over the Bill of Rights. In these first few days of  2012, Iran and the west have continued their game of metaphorical chicken, with the Mid East oil exporter threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, making veiled threats at US naval vessels in the area, all while the US, the UK, and the EU continue to make overtures of military action over Iran's nuclear weapons programmes, which western leaders assure us are very real, leaving me with an annoying sense of deja vu.

I feel like I've seen this movie before.

This latest round of international dick swinging by the likes of  Barack Obama, David Cameron, Mahmoud Ahmedinajad and Angela Merkel has caught the attention of China and Russia, two nations with a vested interest in Iran and the free flow of its oil, and two nations with more than enough might to stand up to any military aggression coming from the west toward their supplier. With each raised voice, each veiled threat, each rattled sabre, the possibility of World War Three breaking out becomes less and less unthinkable, and more a matter of predicting when it starts, rather than if. We can hope that our world leaders are sane enough not to let things get to the point of no return, but a quick glance back at the past year or so quickly tells us they can, have, and more than likely will again. These are strange days. Once again it seems we live in a time of monsters. The best we can hope for is that none of them just want to watch the world burn.

On second thought, maybe instantaneous and unavoidable death from space is the better option.

False Evidence Appearing Real

On the night of September 11^th, 2001, after an exhausting day watching the birth of the 21^st century live in my dank, cigarette-smoke filled living room, I was sat in my favourite local pub with a few friends. We were all getting drunk. At the table next to us, and the table next to them, sat people all in the same boat. They were also getting drunk. Every table and every stool at the bar contained a snapshot – an identical image repeated over and over again: bewildered, sometimes angry faces pouring a bit of liquid comfort down their throats, each talking about the same awful bloody tragedy, trying and failing to make some sense of it. From person to person the arguments varied wildly, the emotional responses swerved from hysteria to hatred. We didn’t agree on much, but we didn’t really have to right then and there. We needed to talk, to get drunk, and be together because we didn’t want to be alone

We didn’t want to be alone because we were terrified.

People in homes and bars and cafes all over the world were drowning in this same sense of fear and dread. Whether you were feeling it in Boston or Baghdad, or if you were watching Fox News or Al Jazeera, you felt it. You might have feared that your city was the next target. You might have feared that you would be crushed by the full might of the inevitable response. Whatever the individual cause for panic, it was cripplingly real and near impossible to overcome. We had all just watched several thousand people die in a heap of concrete, twisted metal, and a choking cloud of ash and dust. We witnessed people trapped on the top floors of two mammoth skyscrapers leap to their deaths; many of us watched it repeated over and over again in a grotesque loop broadcast across all channels. As much as we wanted to, we couldn’t look away. These horrible visions were burning into our retinas to a soundtrack of screaming New Yorkers running through the streets and news anchors repeatedly uttering names like Bid Laden, Hussein, and Al Qaeda. It was an unrelenting assault on the senses, with any hope of escape completely futile. Logic and reason were high tailing it out the door. The fear had taken hold, and it wasn’t about to let go anytime soon.

What followed after that day was a calculated pageant of fear and loathing, designed to convince the people of the west to keep quiet while the military industrial complex set about inventing wars as a means to epic profit and a tightening of their grip on individual rights. This is an old trick, though – one that fools us every time. 

The fear of communism directed the actions of the west for nearly fifty years. The scaremongering rhetoric that arose about the horrors of a red state was so masterfully orchestrated that to this day there is a certain sort of person still checking under his bed at night to make sure a “commie” isn’t lying in wait to steal his freedom and force him to wait in line for a roll of toilet paper. War is great business, and for decades the mere possibility of an impending fight for ideological survival led to fortunes being made through the manufacturing and sale of ever more terrifying weapons. The theory proves true over and over again. We are easily scared into submission.

For thousands of years fear has been used by Pharaohs and Presidents, Imams and Popes, CEOs and marketing gurus alike, as a means to control, to persuade, to make you do as you’re told. Many never stand a chance against its ability to cajole us so perfectly because from a very early age we are taught that failure to obey a higher authority will have damning consequences.

Before we have a say in the matter, most of us are taught that if you do not do as your god wants you face a never ending torrent of punishment and torture. Fearsome old men in grand costumes preach to us that these are the commands of our supreme father, a vague and faceless figure we cannot see or communicate with but through his human emissary. They assure us that he is everywhere and he wants you to follow his rules. The penance that awaits you for not living your life by the wishes of whichever creator you believe in are nightmarish and eternal -- and bloody frightening. The lesson starts early: Do as we say, or horrible consequences await you.

We move into adulthood carrying this deeply entrenched control switch with us, and the fears pile on, one on top of the other. Insecurities about your social standing become a constant presence as you are guided by a new minister: the marketer. Soon you come to believe that your status defines you, and your status is calculated by the things you own. You need a house bigger than the next guy's, a new car more expensive than the next guy's. Designer brand name clothing that immediately tells everyone how well you’re doing. The newest iPhone the nanosecond it becomes available. The biggest HD, 3D, LCD, flatscreen, plasma television monstrosity you can find, regardless of whether you can afford it. These things define you. They tell everyone else how much you have, and how important you are. Whether you need them or not is irrelevant. Enslave yourself in a sea of debt because if you don’t have these things, you have failed the game of life.

It is a dark and devilish business. Fear makes us consume.

There is profit to be made in keeping the public fearful. Few industries understand this idea – or have realized it so perfectly – as the war industry. This was the industry that kicked the use of fear as control into overdrive after 9/11. Hours of television reports told us that terrorists were everywhere, lurking in the shadows of every city and every town in the free world. Leaders took to podiums in Washington and London and scared the living daylights out of us. Strange and foreign invaders armed with dirty bombs, box cutters, anthrax and hatred were plotting against us. Thousands of terrorist cells were operating in hundreds of cities across the world, all with one common goal: To kill you and everyone you love.

Who wouldn’t be afraid of that?

This was the politics of fear firing on all cylinders, convincing us to make war in the Middle East against enemies old and new. The war against terror in Afghanistan led to the war on hazy nuclear threats in Iraq. Once again they sold the people fear, with murky photos of weapons facilities and suspect rumours about Nigerian uranium, and the people devoured it. In the end, completely disoriented by the constant doom surrounding us, we barely noticed as our rights were thoroughly trimmed down in the name of security. Peace through war. Love through hate. It was more than big brother could have asked for.

Today, in a year of revolution and ongoing civil disobedience, those who want to keep us afraid are telling us there is a new terror lying in wait: the dissenter. The radical is what you need to fear next. The occupier and the indignado are asking questions the elite don’t have answers for, and now they are back to the tried and true method of marginalization through fear. In London, the authorities have named the occupy movement a terrorist organization. Apparently filthy hippies sitting in public squares with no clear message are as dangerous to your way of life as Al Qaeda. In the mainstream media, the persistent message of the occupy movement is that of shiftless bums and violent drug addicts demanding handouts from the rich and successful. The camps are rife with the worst elements of society, people living on the dark fringes. Even the old red menace has reared its paranoid head.

The truth is occupy camps contain these elements of society, as does each community the world over. Drug addicts overdosing at occupy camps would have overdosed alone in some other dark part of the city. In many cases, being at the camps saved them from death. Those who live on the edge of the knife aren’t drug addicts, or mentally ill because they are at camps offering them hot food and some semblance of shelter for the night, they are at the camps providing these things because they are drug addicts, or suffering mental illness –- or both. Mainstream society left them behind a long time ago.

When we think it over for a moment, when logic and reason don’t high tail it out the door, when we don’t choose to fall for it, the fear mongering can be seen for what it is: dishonest manipulation.

The question is will we fall for it again, or not?

D'Hondt Let Me Down

Ever get the feeling you’re being followed?

I do, at this very moment. I have come to believe that the right wing is stalking me, hunting me down as if I were the last Javan Rhinoceros, eager to mount my head on its wall. It’s either that, or I’m a curse for progressive thinkers and revolutionaries. You’ll forgive me if I prefer to think I’m being chased.

When I left Toronto times were grim. The city was a few months in to what's best described as the end result of former Provincial Premier Mike Harris’ final “fuck you” to the city he so loathed. The Harris “Mega City” amalgamation of Toronto proper with its surrounding suburbs delivered the city into the hands of a mayor who hates cities, progressives, art, culture, even bicycles. Mayor Rob Ford was the Harris regime's inevitable parting gift to the downtown core. If you listened closely, you could almost hear Harris crying out “from hells heart, I stab at thee!”

Similarly, though no less baffling, shortly after I left the country the federal Tories led by Stephen Harper, finally fooled enough Canadians, or lulled enough to sleep, to win the majority government they had craved for so long. No longer confined by the restraints of a minority parliament, and with no need to pay lip service to the idea of bipartisan co-operation, Harper and his cabal could drive through any legislation it liked. These were dark days for my city, my country, and my home. While these weren’t the reasons I left, they certainly worked to reaffirm the decision to go off and explore the world around me. Now, just seven months later, that same black cloud, the darkness on the edge of town, has tracked me down in Spain.

The national elections on the 20^th of November delivered Spain into the hands of the Partido Popular, a party formed in the burning embers of the old Franco regime when it fell in the mid seventies. For some here in Barcelona, it brings back sinister memories. A Catalan friend of mine, angry over the results and no doubt fearful of what’s to come, sent a message stating “La oscuridad se cierne sobre nuestro pueblo.”

The darkness looms over our people.

The results, while disappointing for many, come as no surprise. Sit down for a chat in a café, or a bar with nearly anyone you meet here to discuss the nation’s political parties and you will learn one thing very quickly: They are two sides of the same coin, ultimately controlled by Santander, the largest bank in the Eurozone. In essence, there is no choice at all.

The outgoing and thoroughly embarrassed PSOE had long ago shown that they were progressive and socialist only so long as it was convenient to be. When the pressure was applied from “Merkozy”, Zapatero quickly played the obedient dog. What is coming from New Prime Minister Rajoy and his party is simply more of the same crippling austerity measures applied by Zapatero in order to appease the creditors, to appease Chancellor Merkel, and to appease President Sarkozy. The people of Spain have been living under and fighting these efforts to sell them into financial slavery for some time now. Swapping out one set of thieves and opressors for another doesn’t mean much to them.

Far from a victory for conservative ideals, these election results stand as a punishment of the former bosses for abandoning their own ideals and turning their backs on the people in the face of relentless pressure from Chancellor Merkel. There were more nullified votes, blanked votes, and outright abstentions than there were actual votes cast for Rajoy and the Partido Popular. More people in this country feel that there is no one they can trust to represent them. They no longer place faith in the democratic process because it no longer belongs to them. It has been taken over by the financiers, the corporatists, and the neutered politicians who serve them.

When asked to choose between the person who wants to punch you in the stomach and the person who wants to kick you in the face, the vast majority of us would opt for neither. The people of Spain were being asked to vote for austerity, or more austerity. Many made the only choice they could. They said no.

It was a strange day here in Barcelona -- election day. The streets were quiet. The tourists were there of course, they always are. They walked up and down Passeig de Gracia as they do every single day of the year. No sense of what was at stake. To them this was not a day of any particular importance, just another lovely day in sunny Spain.

The locals though, the vibrant and rare lifeblood of this city, the ones that make it hum, were taking sides in a conflict of ideologies. Those who believe in the system, the ones that feel it’s working just fine, went to the polls and cast their ballot for more austerity, more crippling service cuts –- more of the same. On the other side of the field stood those who see themselves as prisoners, and the election as nothing more than a changing of the guards. The jailers faces and the names on their placards may have changed, but their plans and schemes all come from the same cold and sinister warden.


Those who refused to vote made a hard choice. They will not give consent to forced financial servitude. They have opted to show those in charge that if you abandon your ideals, and your promise to the public, forcing the people to pay the price for your corruption and that of the money men who hold the purse strings, the people will take you to task, any way they can. This was the harsh lesson the inevitable losers learned on election day, and it is the lesson the default winners should take to heart. Sooner rather than later.

On Sunday, 20th November 2011, millions of Spanish citizens made it clear that they will not be complicit in the methodical dismantling of their democracy. If the politicians don't have the courage, or the conviction to stand up for the people, they are more than capable of making their time on the throne extremely uncomfortable -- and very brief.

"Te quiero, Barcelona..."

On the ground at 15-O Barcelona

Photos by Wendy Taylor

When my wife and I first decided to cross the Atlantic and start living a new sort of life, Barcelona was the only real choice. In our small apartment on Toronto's Queen Street West we would dream of sitting at street side cafes, sipping con leches and Americanos, smoking cigarettes, listening to Spanish guitar, and most importantly, working to live as opposed to living to work. Six months on, we have that new life we'd hoped for. What was unexpected, was to land in our new home just as a revolution was being born here in Spain, one that has now spread to the new world we left, and effortlessly destroyed the cynicism that had grown in me over the first 12 or so years of my adult life.

Just a month into our new lives here, it all boiled over. Citizens across Spain began taking to the streets, occupying the vast squares and public spaces in their city centres. They came to give manifestation to their outrage over what was being forced upon them by the controllers of global finance, by the money men who own the politicians that are elected to represent the people, but have long since lost interest in doing so. In Barcelona I watched as the Catalan Els Indignats joined with the Castellan Los Indignados across Spain, setting up camp in Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya, the grand square in the Catalonian capital city that connects the old barrios of Raval and Gotic with the 19^th century modern expansion known as Eixample. Here, amongst the constant flow of tourists and the bold as brass pigeons, they joined their countrymen in Madrid’s Puerta Del Sol, and countless other Indignados in cities all over Spain, to be the bright star, the big bang of what we are now calling the “Occupy” movement. 




Before AdBusters and Anonymous successfully forced the eyes of the world to turn to Wall Street, the world’s symbolic heart of elite finance and the capitalist dream, the Indignant ones here in Spain were drawing up the blueprint for them. Here in these little DIY barrios they crafted the unique ideas behind this growing shift in perspective. In Plaça Catalunya they built ramshackle kitchens, dormitories, a library, and a media centre to keep the world aware of what was happening. International media giants weren’t interested, but the people were. They followed the movement on Facebook, on Twitter, on Youtube. They voiced their support for Spain’s outraged, and only a few months later, took the cause to a stage that could not be ignored.

   

On October 15th hundreds of thousands of people, in a thousand cities across the world came out into their streets to occupy their cities, to support those in New York who took over Zucotti Park in mid September, and to take the next step in a global push for change that is not going away, despite the best efforts of our corporate media giants to ignore and mock them. Here in Barcelona, we went back to where it all began: Plaça Catalunya. 

Just before 5pm we arrived at the edge of the square, crossing the famous Passeig de Gracia, and wandering into the gathering crowd. Already a few thousand had arrived, so we decided to stroll through and take a look at the different faces coming together.

Mixed in among the “Perro Flautas”, youth who live with their dogs on the street and play music for a few euros here and there, that the authorities often blame for these uprisings, were old Senors and Senoras who had lived through the dark days of Franco. There were young families crippled by the crisis with their children in tow, and of course, many a Guy Fawkes mask grinning out at us. This is not some collection of disaffected youth that can be easily brushed aside as a rabble of lazy unemployed misfits, more intent on drinking Estrella’s and asking for handouts than doing an honest day's work. Standing alongside the young and the outraged are their grandmothers and grandfathers, their older brothers and sisters, new mothers and fathers struggling to feed their children. A friend who had joined us shortly after we arrived pointed out a sign, held up by an older woman which read “No tengo un perro, no tengo una flauta!” I have no dog, I have no flute! 

Right on time at 5pm, several massive columns of people converged on the square from three or four different directions. Within moments, what was a group of a few thousand swelled out of the square and onto the roads surrounding the Plaça . People began to move through the central square to join with the larger groups on the streets. Men and women carried long banners overhead, young girls with pierced lips and shaved heads walked side by side with white haired grandfathers. Tattooed, mohawked, and sometimes mulleted tough looking punks walked side by side with old matrons in their weekend best and mothers with little kids in their arms and on their shoulders. These were people of different generations, and of different walks of life, coming together in a fight to take their democracy back.

We watched as the crowd swelled all around us and soon, looking out in any direction, we saw only the indignant. The collection of faces, with cheers and raised hands, moved out onto Passeig de Gracia to begin their march, and then the music started. 

Dotted throughout the crowd were small groups of musicians wielding an assortment of drums and various other percussion instruments. As they began to play, people cheered, and took to dancing all around them. My wife and one of our friends joined in the dancing from our spot on the raised grass hill in front of one of the square’s two large fountains. This crowd was the very picture of peace and joy, with no interest in destruction or violence. They didn't need that. They were here together, and they were happy.

We all moved up along Passeig de Gracia, a great collection of faces and voices moving through our city. Songs of unity from the old days of dictatorship rang out in time with new slogans of indignation. It became clear once we had taken to walking that the drummers and dancers were there not only to entertain the crowd, they were there to keep things open and calm. The drum bands would stop and perform brilliant and elaborate pieces of music for the crowd around them, allowing the marchers to flow easily along the street. Two or three women would come out of the throng of protestors and dance frantically to the beat of the drums; One curious little blonde haired boy with an edgy looking mullet joined in as well, quickly becoming the star of the little show. Behind him his young mother, with an edgy looking mullet of her own, flashed a beautiful smile as she watched her son upstage the musicians for a moment.

As the last light of the evening sun faded behind Sagrat Cor church in the mountains, we passed under the watchful eye of Gaudi, Catalunya’s visionary architect, as we walked by his scaly roofed “Casa Battlo” and turned right onto Carrer d’Aragó. Here, on this one way street, the indignant descended upon the institutions that had failed them. There was no violence, but the banks and corporate strongholds that can be found on every corner of Aragó were plastered with anti-corporate posters, and the walls covered with clever slogans in Catalan and Castellano alike. It was here that I read a short slogan that gave perfect voice to the perspective shared by those across this country:

 "If you have a gun you can rob a bank, but if you have a bank, you can rob everyone..."

The message is concise, and it is clear. We are the victims of a grand theft, but these bankers, investors, speculators and corporate elites have stolen much more than just our money, they have stolen our democracy. They have hijacked our representation to make disgusting levels of profit. They have crafted a sick joke to play on all of us, and for far too long, we let them. They got so good at telling the joke that they believed it impossible for us to ever get the punch line. They do not want to believe that we can ever be anything other than blind.


Now, our eyes are opening. We are beginning to understand the joke that’s been played on us, by those that we are told to admire, revere, and fear. The rich, the powerful, the politicians with lined pockets. We are all starting to learn though, that they should be afraid of us, not us of them. 


As the happy revolutionaries turned off Aragó and on to Passeig de Sant Joan to make their way to the Arc de Triomphe, my friends and I left the march to have a drink and to talk. Underneath a clear, star filled black sky we sat and discussed what we had been a part of, and what this movement was turning into. As we did, one thing became clear to me: While New York and Occupy Wall Street has become the important face of this movement, Spain and Los Indignados remain it’s strong heart, pumping fresh blood through the veins of this new revolution, growing all across the world. 




To see more of Wendy's work, visit: http://wendytaylorphotography.blogspot.com/