Local Matters:
A Defence of Dooney's Cafe
and Other Non-Globalized Places,
People, and Ideas
By Brian Fawcett
New Star Books, 224 pages, $20
Local Matters is a collection of occasional essays by one of our more intellectually engaged, and often engaging, authors. Brian Fawcett has earned critical praise and wide respect for structurally challenging, deeply felt investigations into life as it's lived here and abroad. Cambodia, Gender Wars and Virtual Clearcut, his most recent titles, have met with responses from quizzical wonder to claims of outright brilliance. The position he's chosen to occupy as a polemicist is inarguably necessary to any society that values its psychic health: an original thinker determined not to be swayed by dominant ideologies.
The opening essay, Specificity, serves as key to the book's thesis, laying out in broad strokes, and by example, the general proposition that a Westerner's last redoubt against globalism's "assault on the perimeters of individual consciousness" may be a willfully heightened curiosity toward "people and things that are specific and original," mixed with what the author and Stan Persky, in his introduction, call "a cosmopolitan intelligence." The specific and original is what Fawcett proves to be strong on. Sketching in a few pages what amounts to the living heart of the neighbourhood he happens to reside in: the small businesses, the waves of immigration, the people next door, architecture, zoning laws, even the lives of the local pet populations. His prose is crisp, unsentimental, often humorous, and expansive throughout. Everything about his reportorial eye says he's actually looked closely at, and admired, what's there.
Moments of unease occur when these essays attempt the generalizing leap toward their professed "cosmopolitan intelligence." This opening piece turns on the reception, at his home, of a flyer distributed by local animal-welfare activists calling for changes in legislation, etc. etc., which Fawcett seems to interpret as an affront to his and his cat's way of life: "They [busybodies]want to ban everything they even suspect could impinge on their safety and their privacy, and they want to supervise everything and everyone else that might cross the perimeters they've set up." Regardless of whether we, as readers, might know individuals who fit this description, the use of the collective pronoun "they" in this, and subsequent, condemnations raises the question: Wherever went the author's commitment to the specific?
Again, later on, in The Purpose of Paranoia, Fawcett summarily dismisses (with an unmistakable tone of derisive laughter) those tens of thousands of people from all over the world who demonstrated, and risked their lives, at G8 summits, as "a few thousand twenty-something North Americans and Western Europeans and their woolly-sweater-and-Birkenstock-wearing elders, many of whom look and act like Noam Chomsky . . ." Granted, anyone is welcome to offer a reasoned critique of social protest in contemporary political life (and Fawcett does elsewhere), but this sort of open mockery smacks of misanthropy and crankier-than-thou attention-seeking. Perhaps those hoards of unruly dissenters should have consulted Fawcett's cosmopolitan intelligence before wasting everyone's time clogging traffic and inhaling valuable mace.
These tonal improprieties, however annoying, don't, in the end, get in the way of Fawcett's consistent ability to think through thorny issues. We can write them off as the baggage of a contrarian's contrarian and still enjoy the best pieces in the collection. Marshall McLuhan Twenty Years Later is an impassioned reassessment of a flawed but still valuable thinker, and reveals some of this author's intellectual taproots. Why Writers Write is a successful stomp through well-trod ground; clear-headed, caustic, openly pragmatic, it tosses cold water in the face of much of today's Zen-sounding on-a-mission-from- God personal journeys. How I Got a New American Education offers a balanced and vivid portrait of a specific frame in the cultural development of the west coast in the late 1960s and early '70s.
It's when Fawcett turns his considerable intellect toward laying bare the blind machinations and self-perpetuating appetites of globalization that we see him at his most lucid, and the calm, deliberating sweep of his rhetoric scores full points, as in Exile: "The only universal value being practised as the twenty-first century begins is one that no sensible individual would walk across a street to defend: that the right of post-national corporations to profits circumscribes all other rights. The cathartic aggression of the ethnic and preferential tribes our collective exile is driving us into to lessen our sense of alienation remains subservient to that right."
It was a happy accident that I found myself reading Local Matters concurrently with Don DeLillo's short masterpiece of abstracted capital and circumscribed realities, Cosmopolis. It underlined what I found most persuasive in Fawcett's essays: that the nightmare of market-driven heterogeneity is certainly afoot and warrants our paranoia. But also, what I felt compelled to argue with: an insistent pessimism regarding the worth and practicality of a viable print culture as we move into the future.
Ultimately, I believe, this is what Brian Fawcett is after. He would undoubtedly be chagrined to find too many of us agreeing with him too often, yet ignoring his most salient points would be to further endanger participatory democracy, and effectively relinquish our titles as thinking, political animals.
Contributing reviewer Ken Babstock is author of two collections of poems, Mean and Days into Flatspin and poetry editor at House of Anansi Press.