If anyone had any doubt that Naomi Klein has, in a few short years, become the high priestess of that amorphous entity known as “the Left,” they need only have shown up to Klein’s big homecoming party-cum-book launch at the Bloor United Church last Thursday. The capacity crowd of 1100 that packed the pews and spilled out into the aisles would have been the envy of any of the city’s top indie rock acts. And indeed, the Klein event had all the trappings of a concert—a flashy multimedia presentation, a hushed, adoring throng, even an endless lineup for autographs afterwards. She’s the rockstar of the anti-globalization set—have you seen any other political commentators on the cover of NOW Magazine lately?
Much has been made of the fact that Klein has, perhaps unwittingly, become the very sort of “brand” she wrote about in the book that made her famous, No Logo. Everyone wants a piece of the poster girl for the New Left, which means Klein is rarely at home in Toronto, instead travelling the globe giving speeches, making appearances, and somehow finding the time to write columns for the Globe and Mail and The Nation.
Some of those speeches and columns have found their way into a new book, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. Klein has quipped that the red pocket-sized tome looks like “No Logo had a small Maoist child,” but insists that the book is not a follow-up to No Logo, but rather a first-hand chronicle of the movement as she’s seen it over the last few heady years.
At the book launch, Klein spoke about the book’s theme of “fences and windows,” images she says kept recurring in her own work and observances. “Those who are on the inside are often well-protected…while those who are on the outside are ignored,” she said.
Fences and Windows makes good use of this premise, tying together the rag-tag collection of speeches and columns by outlining barriers both virtual (privatization) and physical (the fence the federal government erected to keep out protesters at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City last year), and exploring “windows of dissent” from Seattle to Genoa.
When the anti-corporate No Logo burst onto the scene just as the Battle in Seattle was taking place, Klein was abruptly thrust into the spotlight. Fences and Windows shows she has matured intellectually since then—the ideas presented in No Logo are now part of the public consciousness, and as such, Klein’s critiques here are more focused and nuanced. Klein has been criticized for being too simplistic, but it’s her very ability to present economic and political issues without jargon that has helped her reach millions.
Klein still tends to overstate things, but she certainly knows how to write a column—from the strong leads to excellent, full-circle endings. She has a way of encapsulating a thought in a pithy phrase: “The recasting of the WTO, and of global capitalism itself, as a tragically misunderstood poverty elimination program is the single most off-putting legacy of the Battle in Seattle. To hear the line coming out of Geneva, barrier-free trade is a giant philanthropic plan…” she writes in “Capitalism comes out of the closet.”
Fences and Windows is highly readable and full of such tiny gems, but as a collection could have benefited with some judicious editing. It’s wildly uneven, veering from brilliant long-form essays (“What’s next?”) to quick, what’s-the-point? dispatches (“Prague”) that were obviously “dashed off in hotel rooms,” as Klein puts it.
Fences and Windows may not be the sequel to No Logo—Klein and husband Avi Lewis are making a film about economically-scarred Argentina that they say will follow up many of the issues explored in the book—but without all of the latter’s footnotes and charts, it’s kind of like No Logo-lite. Perfect for shoving in your cargo pocket while picketing your neighbourhood Starbucks.
Photograph by Andrew Murillo
