A one-day stand -- Visiting the Museum of the De-platformed

The phrase "one night stand" originally referred to a one-night engagement by a performer at an entertainment venue. 

On another time-scale, fame seems to last but a single "day". The heyday of someone famous can vanish in a flash to be replaced by infamy when attitudes change --when different "influencers" do the influencing.

Distinguished people whose busts once stood in museums, or their statues in squares, are suddenly "cancelled". For them a city needs a new type of history museum that highlights the vanishing past: the Museum of the De-platformed.

Everyday Ghosts: A Tale for Halloween

Ghosts are restless spirits of people repressed or banished from history. Historical figures banished in one way will reappear somewhere else, haunting the places they used to flourish in when alive. Somehow they seem to redress retroactive cancelling. The more we censor the past the more we need ghosts, for re-balancing.

It's not only historic personalities but historic social habits that erupt again in our thoughts, haunting us like secret underground unconscious desires -- products of taboos.

On the morning of Halloween, at the laundromat I smelled cigarette smoke. I swear it was there, a ghostly odorous emanation, even though no one was smoking and the walls were plastered with “No Smoking” signs. The diagrams on these signs made the images of wasted lungs look like skeletons: very Halloween-ish, very appropriate for hallows-evening! The night before All Saints Day, night when the non-saintly ones get out and express themselves.

More ghostly things happened to me that day: at the cash machine outside the bank I put my card in ... and it disappeared. Some evil force stole it and left a creepy message: “insufficient funds”.

This meant less cash with which to buy Halloween candy for the trick-or-treaters. I knew I'd have bad luck at the store and sure enough, a black cat crossed my path. A free one! Just walking along! We rarely see a free cat since the “lock up your cat” lobby forced everyone to keep them indoors – for the sake of birds. The spooky crows in the trees overhead seemed real enough. They cawed raucously, jeering at the black cat, who vanished down a dank alley. These crows had spent the summer killing baby robins, for which cats got blamed – a criminality of crows they were, black against a darkening sky. They soon flew off, evaporating like shadowy wisps ...

Some people say ghosts are mere imaginings, products of our need to hang on to things we've lost, things like history and the habits that used to be robust choices in our personal lives ... let letting our cats go out. This seems to suggest that ghosts are “real”, and that whatever we ban comes back to haunt us.

In my town, the City Council decided it was wise to ban the statue of Canada's first Prime Minister because some aboriginal people didn't like walking past it. His statue's gone now, but Mr. Macdonald isn't: I saw a shadowy top-hatted frock-coated figure on Government Street the other night, flitting round a corner under the moon as the clock chimed midnight.

He'll stick around. History has a way of not going quietly.

  

                                            

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Systemic Erase-ism and Hate Speech Against the Dead

 In Canadian law hate speech against the living is a crime, so why is it acceptable to express hatred for the dead, in speech and writings? 

The minute you die, your obituary can legally be riddled with hateful innuendo, if not outright condemnation. Your obitus (death, in Latin), if you're from a white colonial background, is an occasion for legal abuse and character assassination. So be "obitu-wary", if you've ever stuck your neck out for a traditional cause: yesterday's hero is today's "racist", "eugenicist" or trans-phobic. 

The name of a former hero might be erased from schools, government buildings, theatres, streets and parks, by people who feel "triggered" or "hurt" by this person's existence. If that's not an expression of hate, what is it?

Take, in Victoria BC, the names on schools built in the early 20th century, such as Frank Hobbs, Margaret Jenkins, Elizabeth Buckley and Edward Milne. Probably most people in the third decade of the 21st century don't know who these figures were, but that won't stop their names being systemically erased from schools and streets. (They were educators, councillors, and humanitarians who had emigrated from England, Scotland and Wales respectively.)

The outgoing Council of Victoria BC has de-platformed Canada's first Prime Minister: Sir John A. Macdonald has been exiled-in-effigy, his statue shipped in a box right out of town because a group of aboriginals decided to hate him.

Name-blanking is one of history's time-honoured ways of hating figures who have fallen from fickle grace, and this Systemic Erase-ism is reaching epidemic proportions in Canada. Even the very plants in our gardens and the birds in our skies are threatened with scientific re-classification, if named after "colonial" specimen collectors. (The AUDUBAN movement?)

We do have to wonder why it's slander to hate-speak about the living but not the dead, who can no longer defend themselves. It's up to the fair-minded historian without a tribal identity-agenda to do it for them. And it's up to the ordinary citizen to resist the knee-jerk Systemic Erase-ism which is meant to re-arrange the past.

Combatting Systemic Erase-ism

How can the past be future-proofed, if Systemic Erase-ism blanks it out for current and future generations? Erase-ism doesn't see history as a series of events that have happened, but as an assault on the sensibilities of some people in the present. It re-shapes history as parable ("fictitious narrative or allegory") in defense of dominant attitudes of the present. Once it becomes a creature of ideological opinion-shaping, History as a subject is no longer a scholarly discipline but a branch of identity politics. 

The problem is not only that new parables are written to suit contemporary tastes (every generation does that), but that actual historical evidence in the form of documents, memorial sites, graves, archaeological remains, architecture, letters and memoirs are being erased and destroyed.

In every generation, knowledge of the past must survive depredations of the present. If we (the present) suppress parts of our past story considered discriminatory or "unsafe" for some (e.g. "privileged, dominant, colonialist, white, elitist, etc. ...), what will we be leaving descendants and future scholars? The future, where scholarship is concerned, will be blank.

How is this erase-ism accomplished? With displays of diversity-equity. This takes forms we have become used to: statue destruction, vandalism of buildings, removal of inconvenient documents from public archives and libraries, name changes of cities, streets, schools and universities.

This process is common when one regime or zeitgeist replaces another. It can change names and streetscapes, but not the actual facts of what happened in the past, because the past cannot unhappen. It can be unknown however, to an ignorant populace. This is engineered ignorance.

Removing statues of early explorers, politicians, inventors and philanthropists in Canada doesn't remove the fact of their having been nation-shapers. Changing the name of Ryerson University (for example) to Toronto Metropolitan University, doesn't change the fact that Egerton Ryerson the person had enormous effect on Canadian literacy, education, journalism and free speech. It can only erase public knowledge of the fact.

In the past, churches and polite taste muzzled certain expressions of speech, but speech was loosened up during the 20th century -- only to be re-muzzled today. Today we suppress not profanity but ideas that others say make them feel marginalized. 

Now, scholars with a different take on history than the ideologically correct one are banned from campuses (exactly the arena where they would be speaking, in an open society). It only needs someone to call their theories "hate" for them to be sent the way of statues: de-platformed. 

Next, editors of mainstream media accept submissions only from "disadvantaged" groups. Festivals, conferences and theatres only receive funding if they demonstrate the right kind of "diversity" (i.e. non-diversity). We live in paradoxical times. 

Thought can be erased before it even finds expression -- through self-censorship.  This is about freedom of speech, debate and analysis among citizens, academics, writers, bureaucrats and officials. Only if we preserve open expression can the past and present be held proof against future erase-ism.

“If we lose our freedom, it will not be because of invasion from without, but erosion from within; not because of autocratic dictators looking to do bad, but parochial bureaucrats seeking to do good.”
                     — Alan Borovoy, Canadian Civil Liberties Association

Project Amnesia

Welcome to Trigger Town 

-- but enter at your own risk. You may see a sign, place-name or something colonial that offends, like a statue, library, court house or legislative building. We're doing our best to get rid of them. History is trouble. A noxious weed. Best to re-write it. 

Should the name “Victoria, BC” survive? It commemorates a Victorian monarch, which triggers PTSD for some. Arguably, native Victorians should have their birth certificates changed. (“Place of Birth: FORMER-Victoria”, like "Former-Yugoslavia) The Province is demanding the federal government come up with COVID funding for this (since history too is a nasty virus.)

Trigger Town will eradicate street names so people don't get a shock every time they read Douglas, Tolmie, Blanshard and Finlayson. Few know anything about the character, achievements, education and dedication of these people (history hasn't actually been taught all that much), but they've got to be disappeared.

Since it's safer to forget than understand History, the education system has launched Project Amnesia, to help students come to proper conclusions (i.e., forget about) the values and accomplishments of "settlers" who had put too much emphasis on things like parliamentary democracy, habeas corpus, education and mass literacy. In the school setting, enquiry is dangerous but group-think is safe, less likely to trigger curiosity or independent ideas. Ideas offend. Best to ban them, inclusively.

The more John A. Macdonald gets knocked down the more newly-famous he becomes

In the fame-game, the more your statue gets pulled down the more important you must have been, and the more famous you become again -- as a de-platformed statue.

Historic figures were given statue-status ("standing") because contemporaries or descendants wanted to com-memorate ("remember together") their heroes.

You'd think remembering together would be something any group would be free to do, in a free society. We're also free to forget, but paradoxically the more publicity the statue-destruction causes, the less forgotten a historic figure will be. John A. Macdonald has more in the Victoria BC news this week than he has for years -- given the scarcity of History classes in today's schools.

Indeed, if a statue hasn't been pushed over or had paint thrown on it, the person it represented, were s/he alive to know it, might feel quite rejected. Enemies confer significance; only the most banal non-doer never made any. There's something to be said though for anonymity, and probably more than a few of the commemorated wish they'd never become so famous. (see John A. Macdonald's imagined reaction to his statue-removal here: https://satiroceneage.blogspot.com/2020/02/what-john-macdonald-thinks-about.html )

Some of those newly reviled by ideologues would probably be happy to Rest In Peace  (obscurity) but they're paradoxically being revived. When they lower your memorial stone they raise your profile. Maybe the long-forgotten deceased are guffawing in their graves. Others might think, like the poet Alexander Pope:

Blest, who can unconcernedly find

Hours, day and years slide soft away

In health of body, peace of mind,

Quiet by day

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

Thus unlamented let me die;

Steal from the world, and not a stone

Tell where I lay

We could think of statue-tackle sport this way:

Manufacturing new consent,

new ideologies have their say,

other figures from the past today

are the ones raised high, to stand (to "stare")

from an unaccustomed height

These icons make a gaudy sight

but don't take them for granite,

they too will stand on feet of clay

and topple like last year's heroes,

media darlings and falling starlets ...

The new leading men are placed on sand

as shifty as the ground of Ozymand

                 (NOT by Alexander Pope)

SBJ

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