McGill Tribune

After eight months of negotiations, the McGill administration has ceded to the core demands of AGSEM, the union representing McGill University’s teaching assistants. The result is a new three-year contract for TAs that includes an annual salary raise of 1.2 per cent, an added pay rise of three per cent for TA work done during the holiday period, and mandatory pre-semester TA training. The settlement puts to bed the possibility of TAs going on strike this spring.

This agreement is welcome news. Earlier this yesr, the Tribune supported AGSEM’s demands because we believed the proposals to be beneficial to the McGill community as a whole: a training program is a good way to improve the confidence and calibre of our TAs; a pay raise, especially higher holiday pay, will incentivise more rigorous marking and more thorough feedback for students. Furthermore, during a year in which the MUNACA strike has already put heavy burdens on faculty and students alike, the prospect of a TA strike in addition would be as difficult for students and staff to stomach as curdled eggnog.

The administration therefore deserves applause for accepting most of AGSEM’s demands, regardless of whether or not their motives were fuelled by a pragmatic aim to strengthen their hand in the MUNACA negotiations. If the administration’s Christmas present to AGSEM was given not just in the holiday spirit, but with an overture of realpolitik, then AGSEM members owe MUNACA a big thank you.

Yet the signing of a contract is not a guarantee of optimum teaching and fair working conditions. The Tribune is concerned with the fact that in certain large courses, there are too many students for too few TAs. The Tribune hopes that in response to higher hourly rates, the administration does not cut the number of TAs hired, but rather looks to find ways of increasing the hours TAs are allowed to work. TAs are a vital part of the McGill educational experience, their help is invaluable, and it is important that the administration recognise this.

Furthermore, we are keen to stress that the opportunities for incoming graduate students to become TAs ought to be more clearly stated. Currently, the system is one which, due to the timing of applications and position offers, only advertises TA positions to graduate students who are already enrolled. This is a needless restriction of the TA talent pool, something that can and should be addressed by adusting the sequence of the academic calendar. 

This is the first time in AGSEM’s history where TAs have received a pay rise without recourse to striking. In the future, we hope to see this moment not as an anomaly, but as the setting of a precedent.

I’ve always thought the generic soft-pop music played in department stores and supermarkets works fairly well to calm shoppers.  It lulls you into a peaceful state, and is never catchy enough to excite you.  But on Black Friday, in America, it’s useless.  Stores might as well blast Metallica or angsty-screamo-punk to accompany what amounts to frantic looting, albeit with paying involved.  To call the Black Friday shopping frenzy simply consumerism doesn’t come close to doing it justice.  With this in mind let’s walk through the chaos (and sometimes violence) of this post-Thanksgiving “holiday.”  

Black Friday falls on the day after American Thanksgiving.  Department stores and small retailers alike drop prices like hotcakes to kick off the Christmas shopping season.  Since many people don’t work on the days around Thanksgiving (except those in retail positions), the phenomenon is bolstered by the sheer unbeatable volume of shopping bodies.  Mobs of deal-seekers line up for blocks in the wee hours of the morning outside of Macy’s, Filene’s, Target, Sears, and especially Wal-Mart, then flood the gleaming aisles, arms outstretched to snatch the nearest perfume or socks.

The day’s nomenclature refers to the unrivaled period of profit retailers experience in the month-long run up to Christmas, which makes their accounting books turn from red to black.  On the surface, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a nationwide shopping spree.  Any economist looking at the American recession right now would say that people need to spend in order for the economy to grow.  But the day has become glorified, turned into a blind activity about objects, not the people on the other end of gifts.

In 2008, nearly 2,000 people clamored at the doors of a New York Wal-Mart in the early hours of the morning.  Before it was to open at 5:00 am, eager shoppers couldn’t restrain themselves and broke through the doors.  An employee, attempting to reason with the onslaught, was caught underfoot and killed.  Every year some record of assault surfaces, and firearms are often involved.  These incidents are isolated, but are indicative of Black Friday: when the goods are up for grabs, the American shopper cannot be stopped.

Black Friday should make us think about our definition of “holiday.”  The month between the end of November and January 1st is marked with celebration in the U.S.  Thanksgiving, Channukah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, and New Years keep families gathered around tables, laughing, eating, and drinking.  Yet only on Black Friday do hundreds of thousands of people wake up before dawn and congregate to engage in a common pursuit—it’s a mass participation event regularly reserved for a holiday.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on the day.  In a different light, Black Friday shows us the need to both give and receive; to interact reciprocally with those around us, be they friends, family, or complete strangers.  In this way, its timing is perfect.  While Thanksgiving is about gratitude, the shift toward presents and giving is evident as December rolls on.

At any rate, if there’s a message you should take from these ramblings, it’s to go home and watch or read How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  And if you find yourself in a florescent aisle of the Bay in the coming months, despairing and frantic, remember the Grinch and his heart two sizes too small, who realized the best gifts don’t come from the mall.

McGill Tribune

“Happy Holidays!” Well, “bah, humbug” to you, too. Yes, that’s right: the politically correct platitude, “Happy Holidays” rides in the same sleigh as cranky old Ebenezer Scrooge. And just like Dickens’s notorious misanthrope, “Happy Holidays” stifles the unbridled kindness that the season brings, turning the once popular phrase, “Merry Christmas” into the unlikely ghost of Christmas-past. We believe that everyone has much to gain from a resurrection of this ghost through wishing each other a “Merry Christmas” once more.

“Merry Christmas” is as crucial to Christmas as the Star of David is to the nativity story. The Three Kings relied upon that star as they braved the cold desert night in search of Nazareth. Imagine how disappointed they would have felt if that star had suddenly disappeared. That is how we feel about the disappearance of “Merry Christmas” at the hands of overzealous cultural sensitivity. The egg has left our eggnog; the tinsel has been torn from our trees. A tradition evoking the childhood nostalgia of gingerbread, carols and snow angels has begun to lose its way like Santa without Rudolf’s red nose.

Leaving aside hyperbolic overtures about the commercial cult and religious symbolism of Christmas, we believe that “Merry Christmas” communicates something that “Happy Holidays” is unable to do. The former gestures unconditional goodwill, while the latter blandly and unsuccessfully attempts to appease cultural sensitivity.

Christmas asks us to overcome self-involvement and be kind to others. Scrooge, perhaps the most self-involved and egotistical character imaginable, is compelled at Christmas-time to think of someone other than himself. The power of the Christmas story lies in giving to others and acting on compassion, charity, decency, kindness, and (yes, we’ll say it) love. Christmas is about showing appreciation for those who are important to you. “Merry Christmas” is the articulation of this time of year and this feeling.

And what does “Happy Holidays” articulate? Linguistically, holiday derives from “holy day”—surely not what the ideologues of the political correctness doctrine were hoping for. Socially, holidays are understood to be vacations. Nobody really does anything during the holidays. Perhaps you go skiing or perhaps you slob on the couch watching re-runs of Friends and eating far too much Ben & Jerry’s. A holiday, however, is certainly not characteristically a moment of community and coming together. In fact, we would tend to think of a happy holiday as a self-indulgence—the polar opposite to the philosophy of Christmas.

The Christmas spirit does not have to be a Christian one; it does not even have to be a religious one. It transcends theology and focuses our attention on the value of personal relationships, a feature of life always in need of improvement. Christmas is not about presents; it is not about tinsel, gingerbread or snow angels. Christmas is about shared moments, from a father teaching his daughter to make a snow angel to soldiers taking a break from trench warfare to play some soccer together, and—dare we suggest—to administrators bringing hot chocolate to MUNACA strikers outside in the snow. 

So this year, we will wish you a “Merry Christmas” because it means more than “Happy Holidays,” and because it is part of who we are. If you decide to reply with “bah, humbug,” then fair enough. And if in October you wish us a “Happy Diwali,” then “Happy Diwali to you, too.” Let’s embrace the best of our cultures, not side-step them.

Richard Martyn-Hemphill is an exchange student from the University of Edinburgh. 

Marco Garofalo is a 

McGill Law student.

These past few years have been a time of tumult for most journalistic organizations. Various forms of modern media, such as the Internet and cable television, they have challenged the dominance of print and network television, and have also challenged the orthodoxy of whether “the news” should express an opinion. The ratings successes of Fox News and conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, to speak nothing of the Internet, have led to much soul searching among both journalists and political observers about the role of objectivity, and where the line can be crossed (if at all).

Mainstream, non-ideological journalism has struggled to respond to this seismic shift. In the realm of cable news, CNN has for years lagged behind Fox News and MSNBC in primetime ratings, a gap many observers attribute to their insistence on a centrist journalistic outlook. Meanwhile, public distrust of the media in the US is now at a record high, with 48 per cent of respondents to a recent Gallup poll agreeing with the classic lament of “liberal bias” and a much smaller 15 per seeing the media as “too conservative.” The fact that this many people perceive the media as biased is not necessarily condemning in and of itself—the results also showed that self-described liberals and conservatives were more likely to believe the media is biased against their own viewpoint. However, conservative complaints of media bias have been around so long as to become almost a trite and perfunctory complaint of right wing partisans, only true in particularly rare and egregious cases. 

Rather, it’s the left wing’s claims of conservative bias in the media that are more interesting; not because they are actually true overall, but because the intellectual framework which underpins much of this left wing critique, the idea of “false balance” or “equivalence,” is both more complex and revolves around a clear and easily observable phenomenon in journalism. The basic idea behind the charge of “false equivalence” is that there are cases in which journalists make direct comparisons to “things that have significant differences in degree or in kind,” in the words of the left-wing media pressure group Media Matters. The basic result of this, in the words of FAIR, another left wing media pressure group, is that “coverage that insists on a false even-handedness, while pretending to expose political mendacity, actually gives cover for it by neutralizing criticism with the ‘they all do it’ defence.” This sort of unintended falsehood is often seen as the result of an eagerness to present an “objective” account of events.

This supposed “false equivalence” can be seen as an offshoot or logical result of what the noted NYU journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen refers to as “he said, she said” reporting. Reporters are given easily verifiable, competing truth claims about an issue, but the actual “truth” of these claims is left for the reader or viewer to decide. The problems with this sort of reporting are obvious; the viewer or listener probably does not have the time to research any aspect of a major news story at the primary source level, hence the journalist’s existence in the first place. Second, when this does happen, those who game the political system are given an unintended cover by way of their more objectionable actions being equated with far less objectionable ones.

However, the danger in journalists making a conscious effort to avoid this equivalence is that they may end up “adjudicating” truth claims in situations where—from an impartial perspective—the facts are more ambiguous or are subject to legitimate interpretation—for example, when ending a tax deduction is referred to by political opponents as a “tax increase.” In a case like that, to actually declare one turn of phrase manipulative or wrong would be to effectively take a side in the larger argument, something that non-ideological journalism rightly shies away from. That said, the frequent existence of “false balance” in news coverage, especially in the political realm, is a bigger problem than the potential overreach that could occur were journalists given freer rein to actually sort out facts from spin.

I started writing Pinata Diplomacy three and a half years ago in the McGill Daily. I had included in my columnist application a few clips from high school, where I used my position as opinion editor of the student paper to complain about the many hypocrisies of my suburban New Jersey town. The Daily apparently saw some promise in me, overlooked the terrible writing, and figured I’d follow the party line.

Of course, that didn’t happen. Eventually, I realized that those whose ranks I’d come to McGill wanting to join—the politically radical, the stylistically hip, the caustic and coolly subversive—were even more given to cliquishness, herd mentality, and what Marx called “commodity fetishism” than everything I’d left behind in New Jersey. It became difficult to overlook the fact that anyone who claims to object to the current power structure seems to write, speak, live, buy, and dress in a very particular way—a whole way of comporting oneself according to vague principles handed down from on high. The politics are ultimately of secondary concern, and I’ve never much liked the idea of uniforms.

Kurt Vonnegut, my first literary love, once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” But I think he had it wrong. We’re never exactly what we pretend to be. We always slightly miss the mark. We’re always perceived differently than we want to be perceived, and we become something else. All pretensions to be anything are immediately frustrated.

What have I pretended to be? How have I fallen short?

In second year I was invited to move to the Tribune, which for obvious reasons made more sense for me. One week I picked up the paper and saw that all three columnists, myself included, had written about something that was just really pissing him or her off. It was apparently the default way to write an opinion piece, a lazy tool that often says more about the writer than the target of the attack. I realized that was a serious problem with my own writing in particular, a crutch I’d been relying on all too often.

It wasn’t so easy to stop.

Another thing I learned from Kurt Vonnegut is that there’s no excuse for trying to be a writer unless you’re going to be useful to society. That’s the fundamental goal and burden—being useful.

No matter how many times I tried to tone down my pieces about campus issues, I could never see much use in expressing something like the following—something like the truth: “I have a few problems with these energetic, pretentious activist-types, but on the whole I agree with them: their principles are right; the administration does seem pretty distant and evil; the YouTube videos of police crackdowns at McGill (and around the world) are seriously disturbing; the only reason I’m not out there occupying the principal’s office  myself is because all my life I’ve been pretty fortunate and by now I have a lot to lose.” Even if that’s closer to the truth of my own opinions than anything else, on this campus it’s just not useful stuff. 

The young Karl Marx once wrote a letter calling “for a ruthless criticism of everything existing,” in order to increase awareness and to extinguish all reliance on dogmas, including those with whose ends he agreed. The result would be a “self-purification,” without which no progress could be made at all. 

It’s easy to hold a certain worldview, and it’s just as easy to object to another worldview. The more challenging, and rewarding, exercise is to critique one way of looking at things from inside itself.

Following that model, I’ve tried to be make useful and intelligent, if hyper-critical, contributions to the campus debate.  Despite some excesses (and who among us doesn’t have excesses), I send out this final column somewhat placidly, compared to previous ones, content with the sense that I’ve at least done that much. I move forward now, beyond McGill, with more nuanced ideas of politics and of writing.

Thank you for reading.

Holidays are a great time of year to practice your fake smile and insincere thank-you note writing skills. They’re also a great time to buy useless junk for people you don’t really know all that well and to receive a bunch of useless junk from other people you don’t really know all that well. 

Holidays, and Christmas in particular, come with some seriously crazed consumerism. I will be the first to admit that crazed consumerism is boatloads of fun; it can be wildly entertaining to buy stuff for other people that you would never buy for yourself. And it’s always satisfying to get loved ones something they really wanted. That’s holiday gift giving at its best. 

However, not all gift exchanges are so satisfying. Many are really quite pointless and result in money spent on something that will stay in the box until you donate it to the Salvation Army because you never could figure out what its intended purpose was in the first place. Either that, or you sneakily regift it at the next birthday or wedding shower. 

Christmas is a time of year when we are told to think about others and share what we have. However, if you apply this blanket attitude of selflessness to everyone, and tell them that you are having a selfless Christmas, you will miss out on the good presents. Thus I propose a win-win solution. A little Mother Theresa and a little crazed consumer all rolled into one. 

Everyone should narrow their gift-giving circle down to just the people they really, really care for. That way, you won’t need to buy ten random gadgets for people you don’t really know all that well and you won’t end up with a bunch of stuff you’ll never use but will feel really guilty about never using all year long. Furthermore, if everyone reduces the number of people for whom they buy gifts, they can make the gifts they actually do buy a lot more thoughtful. Crazed consumerism is great, but if we just streamlined it a little bit, it could be so much better. 

I don’t want to give up presents, but there are some instances when it may be for the best. For example, I would prefer not to own ten calendars. I don’t even use a paper calendar. I also don’t need twelve boxes of chocolates. Seven would surely suffice. 

This type of gift-giving seems to be based on obligation rather than a true desire to give the people we care about something they would love. These situations would benefit from a little Mother Theresa attitude. For all those to whom we feel obligated to give a gift and therefore end up buying something useless, like an expensive key chain, we should just make a donation in their name. This way, the obligation list still gets their Christmas presents, you don’t have to spend several hours at Best Buy or the calendar booth in the mall, and you look like a really great person.

In return, you can suggest donations to all of the people that buy you gifts out of obligation. Then, rest assured that you really are a great person while continuing to give and receive great gifts to a select few. And then we will achieve world peace, obviously.