Getting Over Name Disputes

We name things to take ownership of them. When we build or buy a house we may give it a name. Someone else decides on numbers but a name is bestowed by you, and may reflect hope, celebration or nostalgia.

As soon as you adopt a cat or dog you give it a name. Children of course are christened with care, and children themselves spontaneously name places to make them more real, more significant. In one neighbourhood there was “Jumping Cliff”, where kids jumped into piles of leaves, “Witch's Garden” on which a stooped old woman looked down from a window, and “Midnight Boat”, a boat-shaped rocky outcrop on which many imaginary journeys were taken. The naming habit isn't lost in adulthood: one couple (probably many) call the BC Ferry on which they met “the Love Boat”.

The trouble starts when public buildings or sites are named for historic figures, events, or places from which settlers arrived. Always, some group comes along wanting to re-name them. The purpose of re-naming is to take a place away from someone else. It's about possession.

We could avoid this by choosing nomenclature not from historic figures or episodes, but from names of non-human entities such as the plants and animals found in a place. We could raise the process of labelling above the level of human squabbling to the level of flora, fauna, geology and weather.

How about naming streets Raccoon Row, Wild Dog Way, or Storm Street? And if someone objects to “privileging” the English language, how about (instead of privileging another one) using a language no one now speaks, such as Latin and Greek? How about Ursus Alley (where bears used to roam), Mt. Quercus (where oaks still grow), Canis Court, or Fort Felix, standing where cougars still sometimes prowl? (In schools, a teachable moment about classical languages?)

We already name some places after natural features. Consider Trout Lake (in Burnaby), Sunset Boulevard (in California) and Oak Shade Lane, Oaklands School and Willows School in Victoria. Why not stick to that? Today's heroic historic figure will be tomorrow's villain – to someone. But a trout's a trout and a willow's a willow – and no one need stoop to childish nomenclature conflicts which amount to “he took it – I had it first”.

Naming schools, buildings, libraries, streets and towns after other species acknowledges that we disputatious humans are only one species among millions, and that the landscape belongs as much to the others as to us. By naming places for natural features rather than for human history, we recognize that nature (Earth) owns itself. In Earth-time, we are creatures of a moment. No ethnic group “owns” a place for we are all but tenants here, quickly passing through.

If schools were named for local wildlife and trees, especially endangered ones, the students could take ownership of campaigns to protect them. Think of all the science and art projects that could be built around it, if schools were named for intriguing plants and animals rather than for a person that someone, somewhere, will dislike.

Toppling Statues of Privileged White Guys -- Civic Bylaw is in the Works

VICTORIA CITY COUNCIL EXPECTED TO HAVE 

BYLAW IN PLACE THIS WINTER

In case we're to be cursed by a snowy white winter this year, Victoria is introducing a bylaw forbidding Frosty the Snowman figures in private yards and public parks. Families are asked to respect the multi-cultural sensitivities of their neighbourhood.

"Frosty is a snow-white icon of privilege. The sight of him triggers PTSD in some members of the community when they walk by," say councillors. "This symbol of oppression has no place in our parks and gardens."  

"And why is he always male?" ask #metoo supporters.

"And why does he get a scarf when our homeless population is experiencing coldness?" ask activists.

"And why, what with the CRD smoking ban, is he smoking a pipe?" ask health officials.

Pro-Council journalists ask and answer the classic journalists' questions:

Who?      White male

What?     Middle-class throw-back

When?    Colonial dark ages

Where?   Gardens of single family dwellings

"The detached house and garden harbour negative anti-social elements," declares Council. "Housing should be crowded, inclusive and multi-use."

A local university History prof agrees: "Frosty snow-statues are a dangerous symbol of privileged white-guy supremacy. Topple them!"

"With that top-hat, Frosty even looks like John A. Macdonald, whose statue was fortunately removed from public view outside City Hall to spare passers-by the obscenity of its presence," added the prof's colleague.

"If you build a Snow-White-Man and someone throws red paint on it, don't come to us with complaints," say Councillors. "We will begin with public education, but continued non-compliance with the Frosty Ban will result in fines."

Home-schooling Grandparents Create Educational Breakthrough

Literacy rates set to rise! TheNews interviews grandparents who home-school the kids while their parents are at work:

Experts predict improvement in literacy and factual knowledge among students who are outside school classrooms and learning at home with grandparents who were themselves educated when schools taught "the 3 R's". 

"We used to sit in rows as a matter of course," says one Grandma, "with desks at any spacing the teacher said they would be. We walked down hallways in lines, too. Not forming an unruly mob, shouting in each others' faces … I daresay there was a lot less spreading of germs back then."

"We used pens and paper and read books with pages that you turned," adds her teaching partner, Grandpa.

"We can't wait to tell our grandchildren that penmanship exists."

They are not alone; this new breed of grand-teachers is changing the face of Education. In what ways, exactly?

"We read books!" says one Granny who sits in a rocking chair reading aloud from ancient legends and modern poems. The kids at her feet sit mesmerized. "We memorize verse," she says. "What you memorize at age ten will be with you at age 80. I call it our EFL class (English as a First Language)."

"And we do arithmetic," says Grandad. "We count back coins for practice." (What are coins, asked one grandson?)

Another Grandad was once a naval engineer. "We re-enact great sea battles in the backyard," he says. "Even the pre-schoolers. We plot them on paper-boards."

"All hands on board-books!" says Granny.

And for these home-schoolers, it's all hands off cellphones, ipods, laptops. 

Another great-grand-step-parent favours Outdoor Ed. "I give the kids out-of-home-work," she elaborates. "I send them to local parks to bring back a feather, a deciduous leaf, a piece of lichen, an acorn. Next week we'll start an ant farm."

It's good for physical distancing, to be outdoors, one assumes.

"Yes," she says, "and we language-distance too, from words like 'misgendering', 'woke', 'identity' and 'marginalize'. 

(Here, safest is "no comment".)

"It's not only the plague of COVID we're getting away from."

Promises to be interesting, the educational "new normal". 

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(See also: How toys have changed: 

and: How Books Are Still Magic:

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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Municipal Munificence and Parks-Policy

In its munificence, the municipality gifts its citizens with things they don't want: dog-free beaches, wine-free parks, a ghostly gallery of spy cameras watching them perform their private lives.

Much rule-making seems to be about the perfidy of animals. A sleeping settler-cat on a front porch is deemed a threat to indigenous bird species. Take your Hound of the Basking-villains to the beach and he'll be accused of plotting mass-murder of gulls. The birds don't care about the dogs, but the humans are squawking.

They also squawk about garbage cans: raccoons and bears get into them. So ban the beasts, or at least spy on them with surveillance cameras. But wait … the cameras are showing a different bin-vasion: homeless tent-people rummaging and plundering.

Oh, well that's different ... don't ban the tent-slums. It's the bears who are homeless though: they preferred forest-food to garbage-can food but their forests were logged bit by bit as the suburbs spread and human housing took over. So they moved next door to us.

The parks sprinkled around suburbia are heavily monitored and planted with a forest of signs sporting red circles slashed with black lines: NO SMOKING, NO PARKING, NO CARS HERE, NO BALL-THROWING, NO DRINKING, NO FEEDING WILDLIFE, and above all: NO DOGS. And if you do smoke, there will be NO ASH TRAYS, although this doesn't mean less smoking, only more butts on the ground.

If you take a sip of wine at a picnic in these parks you could be fined, but if you buy, sell and inject hard drugs in a homelessness tent-encampment you'll be enabled, because you're vulnerable and disadvantaged. (If you're a kid playing in a park with tents, don't take your shoes off because you never know what will be lying on the ground.)

Eventually you keep right out of the park. If you drive a car you're committing mass murder via climate change, but you have no other way of getting to a different park or a beach where dogs are permitted and tents aren't -- it being hard to take a dog on a bike.

Some citizens ask whether we need all this surveillance and these prohibitions? The Municipal Council held a meeting about that and decided to form a committee whose minutes would be sent to a bigger committee who would report back to Council at a future meeting (or ten), after consulting municipal staff who would first commission a study and host an interactive meeting … 

So don't stay tuned. Just stay home -- if you're lucky enough to have a back yard. Feed birds and squirrels, throw a frisbee and watch comical raccoons knocking over your garbage can. Plant tall trees and big hedges to block out the neighbours' CCTV cameras. When you do slip off to the park for an occasional meet-up with friends, hide your wine in your yoga-class juice bottle. And if you smoke, bring your own ashtray. 

The Mask and the Crown of Life: a Brief Amusement

A funny thing happened on the way to the grave, and I couldn't keep a straight face, despite my destination. Of course no one really believes in the destination, and maybe that's the funniest thing of all.

Life is all play and we're all tricksters. We put on masks, try roles, tricking ourselves as well as each other -- Prosperos all, but not wanting to abjure our rough magic. We put on a mask, for instance, as magical protection against the "corona" (crown) of the pandemic virus that stalks us today. It's an act of faith, but certainly not faith in the government bodies and experts who told us to wear the mask, after telling us for months it would do no good. Oh well -- it can't hurt, we decide.

Funny things keep happening, in life, over the lifespan:
You spend the first half building your brain and the second half de-menting it (with substances, grief, wear-and-tear). But often old-age de-mentation is but a time of deeper wisdom (of "the best of brains, the worst of bodies").

When young we used to say we wanted to find ourselves, but today's young seem obsessed with finding shared identity, not self -- a programmed thing, not an individual thing. Bullying is often part of sports, and "anti-bullying" was briefly a movement. Now bullying's part of the rules of the game of censoring and de-platforming the wrong rights-movements. (Never trust a movement.)

Agatha Christie played a disappearing game at one point. Hide and seek. She left home and everyone ran around looking for her and coming up with theories about her fate -- and then she was back. Many people want to do an Agatha-disappearance, or at least to play-act one through dis-guise. Some people seem to have quite taken to hiding behind COVID masks, making a flag for the face covered with playful symbols. Shapes, colours, diagrams all mean something. At first we all felt awkward wearing a pandemic mask, but now we're beginning to feel naked without it.

That's one of the funny things: you disappear behind a mask, or you disappear into thin air like Agatha did, but then you resurrect. You are re-born. If you were born in the first place, that is. Some apparently weren't. If you were born in a place where earlier tribes lived before you, they say you weren't born in your natal place, but "settled" there. Where you came from is not explained, but you can only be native to the place where you were born. Maybe some of us are laughing on our way to grave because we won't be dying there, never having been born. We laugh at this thought, funny-humorous and also funny-strange.

We wear the crown of immortality then, and the double laughing/ weeping masks of theatre as we follow the muses through our comedy-drama -- never born, yet having the time of our life.

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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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