Can You Own a Colour?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/indigenous-leaders-condemn-misappropriation-of-orange-shirt-day-by-protest-convoy-1.6349344

Yes, you can own a colour, if you live in Wokeville. "Orange" is taken. So keep away from it if you don't want to be charged with "misappropriation". It has been pre-appropriated for T-shirts commemorating Canada's residential school students. Of course, it's been taken many times before, throughout history.

This time however, oranges will no longer be sold in BC grocery stores. (That would be micro-aggression, explain produce managers.) Carrots, yams, and peppers of orange hue are similarly banned. "We take the responsibility of reconciliation seriously," shop-keepers assure customers, who are seen confusedly wandering the aisles in search of tomato sauce. 

And of course pink too has been seized. The anti-bullying cause owns pink.

Customers whose Covid masks are orange or pink are asked to leave the stores, being mis-appropriators. Some merely remove them and continue shopping. Security guards cluster in corners frantically whispering on cell phones: what to do? Which group to banish first -- the Covid-deniers, or the Wrong-Veg-eaters? 

Meanwhile, garden nurseries are hastily removing orange pyrocanthus, geraniums and red-hot-pokers from their shelves before any more get planted. White, blue, yellow and green are also taken for various causes. So let your lawn go brown. (But wait, no ... brown ..?) 

Zoom meetings are held across the land to debate the best way of "going forward" with correct ally-ship, and anyone with a spot of orange on an overlooked towel or curtain visible in the background of their Zoom screen is attacked on social media. A new branch of the Apology Olympics has begun. Competitive apologizers apologizing for protesting about the wrong things in wrong hues are being prodded into line by those now otherwise useless red-hot poker plants -- 

As for owning a colour though, orange had in fact been taken centuries ago, by Holland. They got it from France. Then they shared it with protestant Ireland. There have been Orange Revolutions everywhere in history, even Ontario (remember the Orange Wave?) What's with that colour? Must be that to the human eye orange is the brightest wave-length in the light spectrum. But after all that history it certainly doesn't seem like something to get into a possessive snit about now, just because it's in someone else's convoy.  

 

Fake News and Genuine Satire

 

Donald Trump (and his opponents) may have invented and popularized the term “fake news”, but they didn't invent fakery itself. Rather, the Romans started it all when Latin invented the verb “facere” -- to do or make -- from which we get “manufactured”, “made”, and things-made-up (fakes). We got fake news, then, from a venerable source: classical forebears. It used to be called propaganda.

Properly speaking, propaganda propagates a doctrine by a committee (originally, of Church cardinals).

“Satire” means medley (“sature” -- Latin again), and as a literary form it mixes fact and folly for the exposure of the latter, usually with humour. I'm not telling satirists anything they don't already know here; I'm celebrating a literary form and testifying for the Defence in the ongoing worldwide trial of satirists who seize their right to free speech.

The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English points out that satire is most popular in eras that like thought control – meaning eras which employ language police to enforce ideological correctness expressed in popular semi-literate political slogans. That sounds a lot like our times, and for that reason I call ours the “Satirocene Era”, when satire is a dominant literary species. It has to be, for it lets us demonstrate resistance to the thought police by tossing as many individualistic incendiary ideas into the mix as we can – ensuring that nobody gets burnt, of course (although if their bluster gets heated that can be entertaining). 

Satire is not fake-news; it's anti-fake news. It's ironic, not literal. Serious world-saving thought-controllers of course hate irony, recognizing it “correctly”, as their enemy.

FJ

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