What John A. Macdonald Thinks About the Removal of his Statue

Dear Victoria:
How you have changed since I was your MP, back in 1878 -82 -- you're all grown up now! Yet - not so much. Many wise, well-educated, hard-working folks lived here 140 years ago, in civilized homes full of books and art, some even had pianos brought all the way around the Cape. I'm sure there are some residents like that today -- literate, temperate, cosmopolitan. I recognize a few trees too, which were mere saplings back in my day. Their survival is miraculous, given the vast stretches of pavement one sees now.

That my statue survived as long as it did may also be surprising. Its removal in 2018 is not surprising, given the tenor of the times -- nor, for me, is it a matter of regret.

The bad time was not when my statue (from the Latin "stare": to stand) was stood-down; the bad time was when it was put up. I had to stand immobile, as cold stone, I who had once been flesh and blood. I was even called "fiery" in my time, full of heat and lust for life and for work. Making a nation out of widely scattered regions, gathering together an educated populace from folks of many backgrounds, harmonizing quarrelling political parties and meshing liberal with conservative -- that was not easy. Who knew that of all my sins and weaknesses, it would be the part about educating the populace that would bring hatred on my head in the 21st century? I came from the Scottish tradition that believed education, learning, scholarship and literacy were to be shared among all races. How could I have known it would somehow become wrong not to have left the aboriginals out? I still don't get it.

But as I say, it was not being removed that bothered me, it was being erected as lifeless rock in the first place. As Prime Minister, binding provinces together through a railway (British Columbia would be American Columbia had we not got that railway built) it was my job to "put out fires", not to become rock. After becoming, like everybody does, dead meat and crumbling bone I then had to become stone, and stand alone in the midst of the gawking crowd. Better to be granted the dignified anonymity of death. I like it best when people walking by on the street don't notice me, to tell you the truth.

We public figures never get to retire from the public gaze. As statues we must stand for decades while the curious (and the incurious) stream past us. Facial reactions change as people respond like puppets to the ideologies of each era. One year they're all taking your picture, and the next they only stop to glare. Some even scrawled scurrilous messages on my plaques. Thousands of other Canadian "Johns" and "Macdonalds" get to rest in peaceful privacy, not molested in sculptural form, and I confess to envying them. Being taken down as a statue gave me in a counterintuitive way something of a lift. Being stationary on a plinth in the first place was the come-down, for one who was once so alive.

My real monument is Canada, great nation which I and others molded together. I understand, Victoria, that Canada is well-thought of across the world these days, especially among the millions who live without such niceties as education, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. Being one of those who secured those blessings is monument enough for me. The standing legal statutes are my memorial. History itself is my memorial, however some folks may want to obfuscate history with ideology.

I've been in the actual "fuscus" (dark) these past many months -- in a dark storage-room owned by the Municipality of Victoria. But it's been a relief to lie down. Now please excuse me while I continue to rest in this moment of obscurity, for it may not last. I've heard that I still have admirers and they want me standing upright again. Others meanwhile are preparing a plaque of insults about me to accompany my resurrection. It all sounds very tribal and childish, so who knows how well-rested I may need to be in future?
Sincerely yours,
John A. Macdonald, PM

Don't Lose the Plot, Writers

"Plot" is one of those glorious Middle English words of unknown parentage, those guttural and simple single syllables that reverberate with meaning. A "plot" is both a piece of ground and the plan of a play or story. The word straddles matter and mind, physical and mental, earthy and human. Plot is essential in a story -- it's the ground of meaning. In traditional story-telling it's the piece we possess, or discern, of the wild landscape of ideas and meanings we live with.

The plot is what we enclose and cultivate in story-telling, and requires a traditional beginning, middle and end: development, action, revelation, conclusion (harvest). We have narrative minds and narration requires process. From that comes meaning -- food for thought. No overlord should tell us what to grow, what to think. We must not let ourselves be dictated to, and the ideas we grow in our plots must not be censored.

The garden plot is a simple metaphor, and it should be simple to keep diverse growth in our garden of thought. The "native plant only" ideology in gardening is akin to the identitarian one in speech and writing: a form of control, of policing, of failing to dig new compost into the soil. Students and young writers need one simple writing tip: resist narrow ideology with wide reading! Fertilize your plots.

Woe Is They: Pronouns in the Satirocene Age

Woe Is They

       To the ever-growing list of mental ailments the contemporary mind is heir to, we can add Pronominal Phobia. This disability means that those who selves-identify as non-binary fear non-plurality of pronouns, thinking the old-fashioned grammatical ones unsafe. It's hard to address these “two-spirit” persons however, for like Schrodinger's cat they might jump either way mid-communication, declining to be pinned down to any linguistic spot they feel you might be inequitably consigning them to.

        "Oh let myselves not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven," they might cry like King Lear.

       So good-hearted inclusionists, fearing to use the wrong pro-noun about anymany, will chase after whatever handy non-nouns they can invent in a desperate attempt to anti-name the world in pursuit of equity. We must do this because we can't expect any everymany who declines binary-ness to feel unsafe just because we want to be comprehensible.

       You can't ask non-binary persons themselves about this in case it triggers their Pronominal Phobia. That much is clear to everysome, for it depends on how a person feels themself. But why, to themself, does this they-ness feel safer? It's a mystery. Don't ask me (sic). We don't know – we only know that in the face of singularity, woe is us -- and woe is they. Speaking for ourself (all my me's) we feel safest therefore inside the shelter of silence – thou too?

Yes it IS my fault, thank you very much

"It's not your fault." That's what people say when they're trying to be nice, trying to be comforting. But that's not what they're being. If "it" isn't my fault, then whose is it? Who's in control? The Universe, or me?

I don't like the way The Universe keeps muscle-ing in on my business, trying to dominate (and forever changing its plans at the last minute). My faults are me. Take them away and you take my identity. Then what am I left with -- my virtues? Not much substance in that. Anyway, "virtue" is all the same, but faults are individual. So don't take mine, Universe. You think everything's about you. You've already got enough faults of your own -- whole earthquakes-worth of them, spread across billions of planets. So you don't need to take credit for mine.

I'm happy to take the blame for them. To let someone else take it is to cede control -- and if that was lost, it would be my fault. What's the use of being independent if you can't be independent from Everything? So when things go wrong it wasn't "it", it was me. I'm in charge. So dear friends, life coaches, therapists and whatever … please don't tell me whether something's my fault or not. Next thing I know you'll be telling me something wasn't my accomplishment. 😉

The Native Person's Ties to the Land: Green Childhood in a Green Birthplace

     

        He grew up in an era when kids roamed freely in residential neighbourhoods and parents were less watchful. He and his friends played in their large gardens and the woods close to their homes. They went out in all weather, sun-bathing or puddle-jumping as conditions dictated. In summer they picked blackberries, and the taste of the sweet juice bursting on the tongue was a memory they never lost, it spread deep into their unconscious like the stain of blackberry juice on clothing.

       They combed the local beaches and were accustomed from toddler-hood to cold salt water and sand between the toes. They dug clams and out on the reef collected oysters. They made friends with crows. They rode bikes to the tops of hills where they ate picnics while surveying the beloved landscape of their childhood spread out below, the roof-tops of houses hiding within the remnant oak forest and the air alive with birdsong.

       This outdoor life, these sensations, smells and sights bound them to land and climate and fed their spirits through the later challenges of adulthood, the highs and lows and whatever life brought them.
       Who were these children of this landscape where nature still survived in residential areas, and kids played on the land and not at computer terminals? They were grandchildren of immigrants to British Columbia from Great Britain and Europe, twentieth century kids who lived a green childhood, on intimate terms with the landscape. They were native to this land (meaning, born here) and native to nowhere else: this was their homeland. It had seeped into their spirits and personalities and by absorbing it they owned it, which is another way of saying that it owned them.

.

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.

The Satirocene Age

Recent Tales by Flora Jardine:
"Support Payments", 
http://www.short-humour.org.uk/10writersshowcase/supportpayments.htm 

"A Long Marriage", pifMagazine, No. 268, September 2019   https://www.pifmagazine.com/2019/09/a-long-marriage/

"Suicide Post", Island Writer, 17(1) 2019

"Tunnelling Down", Wandering Words: Anthology of West Coast Writing, 2018

**********************************************************************

The Satirocene Age (a.k.a. Today)

      Our era may have invented the term “fake news” but we didn't invent fakery. Rather, the Romans started it all when the Latin tongue produced the verb “facere”(to do or make), from which we get “manufactured”, “made”, and things made-up: fakes. We got this then, from classical forebears. It used to be called propaganda, which properly speaking is about propagation (more Latin) of a doctrine by a committee (originally a committee of Church cardinals).

     “Satire” means medley and comes from “sature” (more Latin ...), and as a literary form it mixes fact and folly for the exposure of the latter (usually in a humorous way). The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English points out that satire is most popular in eras of rampant thought control – meaning eras with language police who enforce ideological correctness as expressed in popular socio-political slogans. That sounds a lot like our own times, and for that reason we could call ours the “Satirocene Age”. Satire is becoming the dominant literary species. It lets us demonstrate our resistance to the thought police by tossing as many individualistic fire-cracker ideas into the mix as we can – ensuring that nobody gets burnt, of course (although if their bluster gets heated that can be entertaining).