Challenging Gen X’s memory
Review of "Dangerous Memory" by Charlie Angus.
Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed
Charlie Angus
House of Anansi Press, 2024.
The “decade of greed” in the subtitle of Charlie Angus’s memoir refers to the 1980s. For Generation Xers like me, that era brings memories of music, outlandish fashion and youthful energy. Angus, recognizing the fleeting joy of nostalgic indulgence, remembers the 1980s differently.
A new economic way of thinking emerged then: putting profit ahead of people and encouraging governments to step back while markets took over – ideas promoted by Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan. Angus traces today’s crises of growing inequality, unaffordable housing, environmental damage and permanent war to decisions in that decade. The “great lies of the era” shaped the past forty years.
Yet this book does more than recall bad policies or lost opportunities, as seen in the title. Dangerous Memory is a phrase from German theologian Johann Baptist Metz who advocated remembering history from the point of view of those who suffer injustice and oppression. Such remembrance challenges the narrative of oppressors and thus contains the seeds of hope for redemptive change.
Ethics by ordinary people
Much of this book’s power comes from Angus’s life. Dangerous memory shaped him as a young punk musician, as an activist working with the poor and advocating for nuclear disarmament, and later as a long-serving Member of Parliament for Timmins-James Bay. We meet the idealistic young man who forms the band L’Etranger with his friend Andrew Cash, and witness newly married Angus (with his wife, writer Brit Griffin) opening a Catholic Worker house in Toronto to offer shelter and support to unhoused people. These personal stories bring the book’s political and social concerns to life.
Like John Olthuis’s memoir, On Dismantling Settler Colonialism, Angus’s memoir shows ordinary people responding to an ethical call early in life and remaining faithful to it over many decades. Lasting change does not begin with power or prestige, but with the attention, courage and perseverance that sustains communal grassroots organizing efforts.
This book, while hopeful, is also a lament. Angus does not look away from suffering in the world, nor from the failure of powerful institutions, including the church, to confront injustice. Raised Roman Catholic, he is especially honest about the church’s history of abuse and silence, failing to stand with history’s crucified, writing: “This, to me, is the greatest scandal and tragedy. Faith should be the source of dangerous memories providing comfort, healing and resistance. It can offer hope when hope seems impossible to imagine. It reminds us of . . . a greater duty to those who would otherwise feel defeated and demoralized. It tells us that the world can still produce miracles.”
Angus is clear-eyed about the damage of these past forty years, “the era when we pissed it all away.” Yet he refuses despair. By remembering truthfully, and dangerously, we may yet sustain a “wise hope” in the possibility of a more just and faithful, indeed redeemed, future.
