HAPPY BIRTHDAY CANADA! Are you being wished many happy returns?

Today we celebrate the birth of Canada. Usually a birthday isn't considered a day for hurling insults, it's usually reserved for compliments and good wishes -- but not for Canada on July 1st 2020.

On early morning radio detractors start the day by explaining why they don't celebrate Canada's birthday, and others, who do, apologizing for it. (How Canadian can you get? Maybe that IS the celebration.)

One commentator says Canada is "racist", another that it's "colonialist", which seems to amount to the same thing in current social justice-speak. It's interesting to deconstruct the word "colonial" however: a colony is but a collection of people who live, work and share resources for mutual support in what may be a hostile environment. (Even ants and beavers do it.) The Canadian climate and wilderness was certainly hostile for the first farmers, traders, communicators, town-builders, arts-creators and social service providers who settled here. 

"Social services" meant orphanages, hospices, food charities and such as provided by women from backgrounds where "care and share" philosophies were valued (Quaker, evangelical, communitarian, convent-based or whatever). The "communicators" used written words and felt it was worth setting up schools to teach young people to read and write them. 

Gradually these early settlers joined up their colonies up into a nation (note for those who don't read history: we haven't been a colony for quite some time) in which prosperity and voting rights were eventually made available to everyone, constitutional equality and freedom of conscience were protected, and all without a single bloody national Revolution. Tolerance, accommodation, learning to adjust to irrational or resentful criticisms of other citizens were part of the colonial equipment -- and still are. 

So Happy Birthday Canada, and congratulations for being born! No wonder millions of immigrants from all over the world clamour still to settle within your boundaries.

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More for the Satirocene Age -- Black & White

Black and White

Only Taoism uses black and white imagery properly, because it knows they're intermingled. One leads to the other, opposites giving birth to each other.

This is not the same as everything being a muddle. “Culture wars”, identitarianism and ideological politics are muddle. What is the place for instance of gender politics vis-a-vis trans rights? Why is it okay for men to “appropriate” femaleness by dressing in drag, but not okay for white people to use black-face for stage makeup in theatre? Is it playing the roles that's bad, or adopting the visible signifiers? Can only trans-men use drag, or can anyone? Back in the 19^th century when women like Georges Sand dressed in men's attire, some people said it proved they were evil, possessed by the devil -- sort of like when someone uses black-face in theatre today. Does the same apply to Japanese theatre which employs white face-paint? Or is that allowed because it's “ethnic”?

Definitions of “ethnic” seem muddled too. Usually, in coffee-shop disputes, “ethnic” means non-white, which tacitly places white people in the role of the gold standard against which other groups are measured. To anyone easily muddled this seems like reinforcing privilege. Reverse-prioritizing. If anyone gets things wrong it's whites who must apologize, because they speak from dominance --which gives them dominance. Theirs is the noblesse oblige of lavish apology-bestowal. Is this equity then? 

Of course some white people have higher (meaning lower) status than others in the ethnic hierarchy: in Canada recent white immigrants from unpleasant, war-torn or poverty-stricken nations need not apologize as much as “colonial” immigrants who came from places with democracy and rule of law – the very things with which these settlers made modern Canada what it is today. And what is it today? Some international grading systems call it the Number One best place to live – albeit perhaps a bit muddled about the difference between black and white.