My job is to try and trap the spirit of things in the scratches of pen on paper, in the pulling of notes out of metal. These become songs, and the songs become fuel. They can be fuel for romance, for protest, for spiritual discovery, or for complacency. That’s where you all come in. You decide how a song will be heard and felt. I’m filled with gratitude that so many of you have let my songs touch you. To all of you who have done me the honour of listening to what I have to say, thank you. I love my job, I can’t wait to see what I’m gonna do next. I love you.
An irony lost on few industry people at the time was that, even as I was being inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, my new songs were receiving very little airplay in Canada. As Craig MacInnis wrote in the March 4, 2001, Ottawa Citizen,
If there is an off-key note to Bruce Cockburn’s induction into the Juno Hall of Fame, it is that it comes at a time when his new music is no longer being played on Canadian radio. Sure, you might hear one of his “golden oldies” like “Wondering Where the Lions Are” or “The Coldest Night of the Year” on one of the classic-rock stations. But a new song, like, say, his gorgeous 1999 duet with Margo Timmins on the old Fats Domino standard, “Blueberry Hill,” fails to fit into Canada’s ever-narrowing radio formats. “Very rarely do you hear a Bruce Cockburn song on the radio in Canada, yet he’s probably making the best music of his life,” says [Larry] LeBlanc [Canadian editor of Billboard magazine]. “You hear him on CBC, and that’s it.” The irony is that Cockburn—a performer who never left Canada, a performer who continues to champion Canadian causes in his music—has been embraced by American radio even as Canada’s stations have written him off. The Triple-A format (Adult Album Alternative) that exists in the large U.S. markets, but not in Canada, provides Cockburn with an important commercial outlet for his music in centres like Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, Seattle and New York. “I live in Nashville six months of the year and I hear Bruce on the radio down there all the time,” says [Colin] Linden.
In the same article MacInnis was kind enough to report, “The Who’s Pete Townshend, in a surprisingly smart discourse on Canadian music, once raved to me about Cockburn’s ‘lethal intelligence’ on the guitar. Bono is another longtime admirer, as is David Crosby of CSN&Y, as was the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia.”
In the face of such praise, a Hall of Fame induction, and a fall from Canadian airwaves, it might be easy to kick back with a bottle of Caol Ila, recycle the old sounds, and call it good. But there’s a sort of death in that approach, though many performers do choose it (or perhaps it chooses them). This is not a path I will limp down no matter how old I get. Why would I want to sound the same? Life is never the same. Sameness itself might be viewed as a form of death. In fact, because I believe in a higher realm, in a God that travels with us before, during, and after this mortal life, I would add that even actual death doesn’t necessarily excuse a ceasing of all forward progress. As I told the writer, “Everything in life is about growth. Growth is a continuing process that I personally believe doesn’t stop when we die. Death is a major graduation point as I see it. That’ll be the big one. The Juno Hall of Fame may suggest death in an oblique sort of way, but it just isn’t the same thing.”
While I deeply appreciate the Hall of Fame induction, an honour I hold dearer came from the nation itself. On May 1, 2002, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson officiated over an advancement of my status in the Order of Canada from “Member” (which I received in 1983) to “Officer.” (Joni Mitchell was upgraded to “Officer” on the same day.) The Order of Canada is a manifestation of the nation’s historical ties with Britain and its traditions. Some feel that having the throne of England hold the hind end of the nominal head of the Canadian state is anachronistic, and we should let it go. I don’t feel strongly about it one way or the other, but I think it’s healthy to have an image, or perhaps a symbol, that Canadians can rally around rather than investing some “mere mortal” with the larger-than-life qualities often identified with nationhood. In Canada you won’t hear, “Our prime minister, right or wrong!”
According to the governor general’s website, “[T]he Order of Canada is the centrepiece of Canada’s honours system and recognizes a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation.” The Order of Canada’s motto, desiderantes meliorem patriam (“they desire a better country”), is taken from Hebrews 11:16: “But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.”
It might seem ironic that I would value a government-issued honour more than others. I have nothing against government . . . as long as it does what I think is right and it leaves me alone! Government can and should be a great thing. It’s the corruption, greed, and hubris of individuals in government who are bought and sold for private gain that is so destructive. I remain surprised and chagrined to witness the ongoing elevation to leadership of people so obviously willing to be bought.
Nonetheless, while I have taken issue, sometimes vociferously, with the government’s policies and actions through the years, I know very well how fortunate I am to be Canadian, to hold citizenship in a nation that still generally respects the rule of law as it pertains to protecting the rights of most people at home and abroad. It is a nation that has generally refrained from wielding its great wealth in a militaristic fashion. It’s a nation that has embraced, or at least accepted, the critical work of people like Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire and Tommy Douglas, the premier of Saskatchewan who in effect gave us universal health care. So while there’s plenty in Ottawa to do and to fix—such as halting the vicious assaults on the country’s vital ecosystems, honouring aboriginal rights, and aiding a growing class of poor and underprivileged residents who are suffering from cuts to social services—things could be much worse, as they are in far too many places. There are times when I feel quite proud of my country.
It says something very positive about Canada that someone like me could receive one of the country’s highest civilian honours and be placed on a postage stamp, which occurred in 2011. Not only in song but in numerous public statements I have been highly critical of certain Canadians as well as other world leaders and systems. Yet I have not been shunned or stifled (or worse) by the government, as could have occurred in a lot of other places.
One month after receiving my Order of Canada promotion, in June 2002, I took my medal into political battle and joined demonstrations aimed at the annual G8 summit meeting, held that year in Canada. The G8—or “Group of Eight”—is an elite clique of leaders from the world’s wealthiest nations (Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, the United States, the European Commission, and, for the first time in 2002, Russia) who meet in secret to forge agreements for the movement of goods, capital, and human beings, a system of world domination that I called out in my 1980 song “Grim Travellers.” Not much had changed since 1980 except that their agenda had become further entrenched, marked by a rise in social and environmental destruction resulting from these sordid geopolitical alliances.
The 2002 G8 attendees included President Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, who was just eight months away from his infamous and foul-smelling emission before the United Nations about Iraq’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction,” greasing the path toward another war. It was an opulent two-day affair held in Kananaskis, Alberta, some thirty miles southeast of Banff, in the Rockies. The government of Canada spent $300 million on security, which was far less than the reported $1 billion spent the previous year in Genoa, Italy, where some three hundred thousand protesters, in the fine Italian tradition, turned out for violent clashes against the world’s most powerful gatekeepers.
Security may have been cheaper in Canada than in Genoa because no one was allowed anywhere near the summit. All land and air approaches to the gathering were blocked by police and troops for a four-mile radius. A defensive roof was provided by F-18 jet fighters. Military helicop
ters swarmed the rafters. Rumour had it that ground troops were patrolling the bush around the conference site under shoot-to-kill orders. Protesters were allowed to gather in Calgary, an hour away, and they were peaceful, primarily because the forces of “law and order” were peaceful. Plenty of extra police were brought in from all over the country, but instead of riot cops with shields, batons, and shotguns, street protests were met by Calgary’s bicycle patrol officers. There was no herding of people, except to keep the anarchist crowd away from Starbucks. Even then, the would-be assault was fended off by a phalanx of cops in bike helmets holding their cycles in front of them as shields. Many were smiling. No suppression, no riot cops, no riot.
The one major problem with our protest was highlighted when a reporter said to me, “If you guys have another one this dull, we are not going to cover it anymore.” Maybe it would be more exciting for reporters if they actually investigated the G8 countries’ contributions to famine, loss of water rights, proliferation of slums and sweatshops, child labour, death squads, torture, aerial bombardment, climate change, and one of the greatest extinction events in planetary history. But the media need not have worried. Subsequent meetings of the G8 and its less exclusive spin-off, the G20, have been met with enough spectacular repression to get any William Randolph Hearst wannabe licking his lips.
As a flexing of political muscle, the G8 protest of 2002 had little effect—one protest is never going to change the course of events—but as a voice that continues to be aired, it will make itself heard over time. That voice must be kept alive even if it’s swallowed in the din of indifference or the dungeons of state-imposed silence, and even if reporters, who can be numb to all but the tenor of an action flick, can’t hear it. The people do hear it, and as they hear it they speak it, and the voice grows louder and can’t be ignored, at least as long as politicians depend on public approval for their jobs.
Protest leaders asked me to join a June 21, 2002, press conference in Ottawa on behalf of groups gathering for the upcoming Calgary “countersummit.” A great darkness was about to fall, as America’s King of the Fools was setting the stage for an imperial assault and occupation of Iraq. Eighteen months after I made this speech, and nine months after the American invasion of Mesopotamia, I would witness His Highness’s work in Baghdad, then considered one of the most dangerous places in the world. To the assembled media people, I offered the following:
I’m here as a concerned citizen to lend my support to what I believe is a vital exercise of the democratic right of dissent. The silencing of dissent by various means—the attempted elimination of one whole side of the globalization debate—is a worrisome sign of worse to come. I’ve done a fair amount of travelling in “developing” countries, much of it related to the work of various charitable organizations. I’ve seen what the kind of top-down “aid” advocated by the G8 has done to people. It doesn’t look like development to me. The current fashion in the corridors of power, of reducing everything to the terms of the marketplace, is heartbreaking for the poor of the world, for those of us committed to seeking something like justice in human affairs, for those of us concerned about the environment that gives us life—and for those of us who grew up in a Canada where freedom was a cherished value, where a government which was accountable provided some of the necessities of life for those in need. When a nation’s government hands over the reins of all its functions to the private sector, what’s left for it to run except the army and the police? I worry that the Canada I learned to love growing up will not be what my grandchildren, if I have them, are going to encounter. There are other ways of doing things, and we must encourage our leaders to find those ways and pursue them. Otherwise we can look forward to a Moebius strip of more inequity, more anger, more violence, more erosion of our civil liberties in the name of security, more anger, more violence. The G8 leaders are facilitating the degradation of my country and my planet. I have to protest this! Globalization as currently understood is, to me, an evil thing, but that’s not to suggest that all global connections are bad. There’s so much we can all share to our mutual benefit. One important thing I learned in the early eighties, hanging with dissidents in Pinochet’s Chile, where dissent really meant risking your life, is that when you resist evil you are in fact celebrating life, and it’s okay to have a good time.
23
From time to time, acerbically and without warning, Sally would write someone out of her life. She would tire of some aspect of a friend, or of the relationship she had with them. Some switch in her head would flip, and the bewildered friend would be bluntly informed that there would be no more relations between them. This tendency created some awkward moments for me, as I had also become friends with some of these people.
In due course, in the spring of 2003, my number came up. I arrived at Sally’s place, having driven down from Montreal, to be informed that as far as she was concerned our relationship was over. I had not seen it coming, but I had observed the phenomenon enough times that I wasn’t really surprised. By this time I had been through enough of these episodes that I was starting to grow calluses. Really? Another failed relationship. Another twist in the road. I felt hard done by, but I wasn’t expecting fairness anyway.
I left with a feeling more bleak than tearful. There was lots to miss in Vermont, not the least of which was the degree of warmth that had grown between the boy Carson and me, but there was a new horizon beckoning to be floundered toward.
In 1995, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. On May 12, 1996, viewers of the American news program 60 Minutes heard a rare demonstration of candour on the part of a sitting U.S. official when Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, described the country’s foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East. Interviewer Lesley Stahl asked her, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” (It’s actually five times the total death count of Hiroshima.)
Albright did not refute the number. Instead she said, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”
We think the price is worth it. Half a million children dead as punishment for the actions of yet another despot formerly empowered by the very government that employed Albright. And this was just 1995; sanctions would remain in place for another eight years, to be followed by a massive U.S. bombing campaign and occupation.
In her 2003 memoir, Albright claimed that the 60 Minutes segment “amounted to Iraqi propaganda. . . . Nothing matters more than the lives of innocent people. I had fallen into a trap and said something that I simply did not mean.”
Whatever the truth of that assertion, her government meant it, because everyone in Washington was quite aware that sanctions were killing one hundred thousand children every year, but there was no effort on the part of the United States to relieve Iraqi suffering. Indeed, the United States and Great Britain consistently opposed any effort by the U.N. Security Council to lift the sanctions, even after the brief but devastating U.S.-led war against Iraq (“Desert Storm”) effectively crippled that country in 1991. So the sanctions remained in place until after the next war against Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003, under the made-for-TV catchphrase “shock and awe.” In under two months the United States flew one hundred thousand sorties and dropped nearly ninety thousand tons of bombs on a virtually defenseless Iraq.
For me, it was more like shock and disgust. What perturbed Albright was not that she misspoke, but that she spoke truth without meaning to—a glaring bureaucratic gaffe. But she needn’t have worried. Excellent reporting by 60 Minutes notwithstanding, mainstream media had her back. Virtually no other news outlet cited the interview after it aired. The U.S. media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting concluded, “The inference that Albright
and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale—a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one’s political ends—does not seem to be one that can be made in U.S. mass media.” Less than one year later, President Bill Clinton picked Albright to be his secretary of state, the first woman ever to hold the office.
We’ll never know the exact death toll because the U.S. invasion destroyed the Iraqi government’s capacity to keep its own tally, and the U.S. government apparently wasn’t interested in knowing real numbers. (“We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, famously said.) After three years of war, a 2006 Lancet survey put the number of Iraqi dead at 654,965. The following year the London-based polling company Opinion Research Business determined that 1,220,580 Iraqis had died due to the war. And the killing hasn’t stopped. At this writing, sectarian violence in Iraq is vastly worse than when I visited nine months after the war began, with the partitioning of the country seeming likely. Yet in a certain sense the exact number of dead is not as important as the understanding that the U.S. government, hiding behind the imbecilic edicts of a half-wit Texas oilman, believed the Iraqi death toll was “worth it” to secure petroleum reserves.
Tell the universe what you’ve done
Out in the desert with your smoking gun
Looks like you’ve been having too much fun
Tell the universe what you’ve done
Tell the universe what you took
While the heavens trembled and the mountains shook
All those lives not worth a second look
Tell the universe what you took
Rumours of Glory Page 48