This Saturday, celebrated author and activist Naomi Klein appeared at War Memorial Hall for a reading and talk as part of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. In June, in a direct response to Donald Trump’s election, Klein published her fifth book, No is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.
“I had a greater sense of urgency than with any of my other books,” said Klein, on the rapidity with which she released No is Not Enough following the election. “It was coming from a place of fear. I felt like I couldn’t waste a minute. I wanted the book to come out before an external shock [distracted us from Trump],” said Klein.
The afternoon began with a blessing and song of welcome from Jan Sherman, a local Anishinaabe storyteller representing Canada’s First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples. Journalist Tanya Talaga of the Toronto Star then introduced Naomi Klein who read, in what was apparently a last-minute decision, not from her new book, but from an essay published on The Intercept that day, “Season of Smoke.”
Klein and Talaga then engaged in a ranging, congenial discussion of Klein’s new book and her experience at the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline on Standing Rock Sioux reservation, among other things. Klein and Talaga are old friends, having worked at the U of T student newspaper The Varsity back in the day, and it showed.
While Klein and Talaga’s conversation stayed friendly and subdued, the Q & A that followed got pretty weird. One questioner asked whether Klein thought the many natural disasters of recent months have been part of a U.S. military operation targeting Cuba. To paraphrase Klein’s answer: No, definitely not, not even a little bit.And, in a memorable moment, a member of Fossil Free Guelph asked Klein how to beat the University administration’s bureaucratic jiujitsu — while U of G President Franco Vaccarino sat in the front row. Klein gave a diplomatic answer, sidestepping the question while offering anecdotes from her own student activist days by way of encouragement.
While Klein can be forgiven for declining to deride the University hosting her talk, and Talaga can be forgiven for tossing her old friend some soft questions, the civil tone of the event should serve as a reminder: No is not enough — and neither is attending a talk at War Memorial Hall. The real work is yet to be done.
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Naomi Klein on Trump and “Winning the World We Need”
Trump is not a Martian
Shock, said Klein, has been one of the most common responses to Trump’s election. But the groundwork for his victory was laid long before he took to the podium to announce his candidacy.
Trump is not an alien. “He’s us,” said Klein, pointing to the rise of brand marketing (which she previously criticized in her 2000 book No Logo) at which Trump excels. Trump “is a master of these various genres [of] fake reality,” said Klein, including political melodrama.
No is not enough
Throughout Klein’s talk, certain motifs highlighted the urgency of humanity’s situation: the wreckage left in the wake of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma, the smoke billowing from wildfires across North America, and the Great Barrier Reef, slowly bleaching in warming seas. Klein shared a recent experience seeing the giant sequoias of the west coast narrowly escape incineration. “The wonders of the world are disappearing on our watch,” Klein said.
Talaga put it bluntly: “How cooked are we?”
Klein’s response was hopeful, but she stressed that it’s not enough to sit around and worry. “We have to get off spectator mode. We have to get off virtual mode. We have to get face to face. We have to get into rooms full of people.”
There is hope
The talk was not without a vision of how things might change. One such vision came in a discussion of the Leap Manifesto Klein helped to write, and another came when Klein described a moment at the Standing Rock protests when a delegation of veterans arrived to apologize to and stand in solidarity with Indigenous protestors. “It was a ceremony of deep apology: ‘I’m sorry,’ accompanied by change and an act of repair.”
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The Ontarion had the chance to ask one question of Naomi Klein. We wanted to ask something students might find useful. (Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for clarity and length.)
Will Wellington: One of the things that really scares me about the current situation is the sense that the way the media and our social lives work these days combines with our brain chemistry to make it inevitable that we would turn to sensationalism. What do you think that students can do on a day-to-day, habitual level to steel themselves against shock politics?
Naomi Klein: I don’t think it’s just a question for young people. I think many of us who didn’t grow up with these technologies have become addicted to them late in life, including me.
I [fight] it with other technologies. I use Freedom — this is the only product I do product plugs for. It’s a little thing you can get to block the internet on your computer and phone.
I think you have to put yourself on a media diet. You have to to free yourself from the non-stop-ness of it.
I don’t have Twitter on my phone. I don’t have any social media on my phone. When I’m writing and trying to do work, I put on Freedom so that I can think. Everybody needs breaks from constant input.
But I’m really struck actually by the fact that it is young people who are showing the most appetite for the less celebrity-driven, more substantive politics. It was millenials who powered Bernie Sanders’ campaign. It was millenials who powered Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral upset in the U.K. And in both of these cases the appeal of these figures is that they are not celebrity-branded, focus-grouped-to-death political figures and are trusted because of it.
There’s something interesting going on in your generation that I’m sure you understand better than me.
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Photo by Megan Sullivan.