"Surviving" Christmas

    'Tis the season when magazines publish articles on how to "survive". At Christmas you won't, say the articles, come upon any midnights clear, you'll stumble into pitfalls social, emotional, financial, and political. Unfortunately the magazines seem to be right. To save your sanity, they recommend, make lists of guests and gifts. Make a to-buy list, to-bake list, political-topics-to-avoid list.

    At gatherings so many matters are triggering that you need a "Taboo Topics List". And you'd best check it twice. The taboo topics used to be sex, politics and religion; now they're identity, cultural appropriation and anything described as "systemic". As for variant behaviours, they're best ignored, like those of the cousin with so many allergies she's allergic to her own allergies and will claim to be allergic to your live fir tree. 

    Then there are acquaintances who refuse to call Christmas "Christmas", and only recognize a seasonal indigenous-inclusive non-binary non-colonial anti-privilege diversity-fest (not on any account a Mass for the birth of Christ).

    Then there's the guest who brings variant meat -- peppered grasshopper and fried slugs -- for the potluck. And the one who brings tattooed friends of variant gender who you can't greet because you fear to get their pronouns wrong. Some genders seem to change during the party itself.

    There are students who show up after their last university class in variant subjects you've never heard of, like Queering the Undead, and Acquiring Expert Venture Cognitions, and Critical Skills for Online Identity Management. 

    Why?? you ask.

    "They're pre-requisites for The Zombie in Woke Culture." 

    "I thought the whole point of Zombies was to be un-woke?" 

    "You mean un-AWAKE" 

    Quite.

    "These courses go toward a PhD in Fashion and Body Modification." 

    "Oh. Of course university teaching's so different now."

    "We don't have 'teaching', we have Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy."

    "Huh. And do you have jobs in the end?"

    "I have one already, as Exit Manager for Spaces Shoplifters and Non-vaccinated People Sneak Into."

    Ah. A bouncer. I almost wished I had one at my Christmas potluck. I guess one could bounce everyone out by saying someone had just "tested positive" for a variant of concern (concerning what, one needn't specify). That would clear the room. Except of course for the COVID-deniers. 

    Does the University teach a course in How To Be a Successful Hermit?

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A Concrete Discussion

-- Hello Sidewalk.

-- Hello Road.

-- We gotta stop meeting like this. 

-- But how else can we, stuck and immobilized as we are?

-- Quite. So, how are you?

-- Oh ... you know, still winding along.

-- Heard anything from below lately?

-- Yes! I heard from Soil. 

-- Soil is still down there?!

-- Yes, and it's hosting a worm-fest.

-- No! How?

-- After such a long summer drought the worms dug deep, even under concrete where it's dark and damp.

-- Clever!

-- Oh yeah … it's ancient knowledge, Road.

-- Of an ancient species. 

-- And now that the rains have come the worms are squirming across the hard surfaces. Very hazardous.

-- They'll get stepped on. Maybe they're not so smart …

-- Oh they are, Road, it's just they didn't evolve for the sudden new curse of concrete -- which is us -- they evolved for the ancient geology of soil.

-- So we're the enemy, really.

-- Yes. It's hard. 

-- WE are hard. Yet I'm cracking up.

-- Me too! It's liberating, isn't it?

-- And in the cracks, weeds appear! Green stuff, with tiny flowers on top. So life's not all ugly and hard, even we can be a bit softened and decorated, Sidewalk.

-- Yes, it's a relief, and you know what? A child was skipping along me one day, and as she hopped over a big crack she said the crack was my smile!

-- Smart kid.

-- Ancient knowledge …

   

The Pandemic of Logo-phobia

Is logo-phobia yet another new mental illness? Fearing, perhaps, to offend "persons of colour", are we becoming persons of colourless speech?

We fear words themselves -- pronouns, obviously -- but why are we anti-noun? We hate them so much we turn them into verbs -- always "efforting" and "expensing", "authoring" and "evidencing" -- even though misuse of the suffix "ing" does not a verb make. 

And who knew how malevolent a lowly preposition could be? Ask someone "where are you from?" and you could be labelled a right-wing anti-immigrant bigot. A polite conversational enquiry is attacked by the Language Police.

Remember when parents advised kids to "ask others about themselves, don't just talk about yourself"? Who knows what's polite now -- what's proper etiquette? "Etiquette" comes from the French word for "ticket". No one knows what our ticket out of Language Jail might be; no wonder we fear words. They're unexploded bombs: choose the wrong one and you can be blasted right off your platform.

In fear of the Language Police we call everybody persons-experiencing-things, rather than persons being things, i.e. noun-things with names, like "addict" for instance, rather than a person-experiencing-addiction. A shop-lifter, presumably, is a person-experiencing-kleptomania (and may be called a person-experiencing-marginalization-and-underprivilege, by persons-acting-diverse-and-inclusive).

 

So am I un-empathetically linking language with moral responsibility? Yup. (Sorry.) So avoiding clear language means avoiding moral responsibility? (A non-correct question if ever there was one. Our apologies.) 

Nothing's your fault if your pronoun is "they/them" -- it's theirs. Maybe avoiding being the Subject and hiding behind Object-hood is a survival strategy, but this refusal to let the ball of responsibility and fluency land in your court is causing certain others to experience depression -- and mystification. Why do we fear words, and fear meaning what words mean? Do we fear giving offense, or are we simply persons-experiencing-mass-censorship?

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Where's the Statute for the Protection of the Status of Statues?

The fashion of the moment is to fall all over ourselves de-historicizing our surroundings, which means making statues fall all over themselves as we knock them down for being colonialist. 

Is it time to make a law (statute) that stands up for the status of statues? These words derive from the Latin verb "stare" -- to stand. Is it time to stand up for History and the memorialization of significant historical figures? Their significance arose because they embody the signs of their times, and if we don't keep track of past times we will certainly lose our way in present times, as we are doing: getting lost in willed-amnesia. 

The past can be erased from collective memory but it can't be erased: it lives on in the present. It made the present and made us what we are. That's pretty immemorial.

By "re-claiming our history", groups often mean obscuring the past and adopting an alternative identitarian narrative -- projecting backwards a story which is actually about the present. The most clear view of history is in the stories of individual lives. From biographies and memoirs we learn about an era. Some people don't read biography however, and for them a statue with a plaque may be the only window on the past. Let's not close it. If you don't like the story on the plaque, don't stand there staring, just amble on by.

We can stand-down our nation-builders, but we can't dam the stream of their influence. We can topple from their platforms Macdonald and Ryerson, Duncan Campbell Scott, Susanna Moodie and L.M. Montgomery, Tom Tomson, Emily Carr and Nellie McClung ... but we can't take currents out of a river that has already flowed. 

Here stand a couple of colonials (PAINTER/writer Emily Carr and POET/administrator Duncan Campbell Scott):

JustJests

Hear their spirits alive and chatting in the night, in the short story "Gardens of History" (see Shifting Landscapes, an Anthology, VIAPA, 2021)

"Why do they hate us, Dunc?"

"Search me, Em. The future is a foreign country."

"In what kind of future do people stop studying

 the past and start 'curating' it?"

"I don't know. Why don't you go paint a mountain? I'm reading."

Miniature Worlds and Imagining Mind -- a mental health response to pandemic restrictions

Were you one of those millions of urban dwellers worldwide condemned to life in a box in a tower block, during the pandemic? Presumably millions in Europe -- Austria for a start -- still are. Did you resort to devices like this:

"Humans are designed by evolution for society, talk, interaction, for watching and mimicking others, criticizing, cajoling, encouraging, comforting in turn. Screen-life is no substitute; screen life is fake life. Depression stalks us now, tracking some folks down to their suicidal lairs. Or up to lethal tower block heights. How many, gazing out the tiny window, dream of jumping?

       “Only go out for essentials” say the health officials. Here's what's essential: fresh air, movement, sunshine, night skies and the smell of leaves. Zooming is not essential, Google News is not essential. These are distractions, traps and diversions and in the end, corrosive.
       On the table in the sitting room squashed up against the bedroom of my box, I have built a miniature world. There's a castle, and a farm, a farmhouse and some trees made of twigs gleaned from the municipal park across town. A family – dream characters – lives in the farmhouse. A queen lives in the castle, as do her ladies-in-waiting, and lots of knights, her visitors of the night. In my night-visiting dreams I imagine their dramas unfolding, and the farm animals stirring, the owls watching, the earth of the miniature-landscape seething with microscopic life.

       When the world shrinks we must make an inner world grow, the one we may reveal in miniature displays and the imagining mind. This is resilience … "

(See the whole article, "The Box and the Bubble", by Flora Jardine, at: 

https://pagespineficshowcase.com

Is Literacy "Cultural Genocide"? How Do We Reconcile With Censorship?

How Did Literacy Come to be "Cultural Genocide"?

We need without fear to to ask questions about Canadian residential schools and "cultural genocide". Those who established the schools intended two things: to educate aboriginal people by imparting literacy and academic knowledge, and to draw aboriginals into the mainstream as employed non-dependent members of society. Would this change them? Undoubtedly. (Education is supposed to change people.) Was that "genocide"? That buzzword hadn't been invented when native schools were set up, and wouldn't have been understood. Education was education, and boarding school a common institution.

Does that mean nothing bad ever happened in them? No strict discipline, no separation from families? No, it doesn't mean that. Pedagogical theory was not what it is today, and the churches who ran many of the schools had additional agenda of their own, which now seem questionable. 

Presumably some pupils did learn to read, however. Did they learn math, and something of the world -- its history, its geography? Undoubtedly. Was that bad, from an inclusion-and-equity point of view? Presumably universal education has social value? Or do we really now think general literacy is "cultural genocide"?

Reason suggests that perpetuating an underclass of unemployable illiterates excluded from schooling would have been a lot more like cultural genocide than was establishing places where academic skills were learned.

Maybe they were under-funded and some staff were under-qualified: that we can picture. Can we not also picture that dedicated well-qualified individuals also joined residential school staffs because they had a teaching ideal of their own? A personal career goal, a desire to contribute?

 

There used to be abundant writings (histories, diaries, correspondence) describing students' positive memories of residential school -- but you won't find them now. They've been excised from the record and from library shelves; they don't fit present ideology. Censorship is no sin in present political ideology; in fact it's becoming a national pastime. Why?

Is it fair that teachers who were caring and gifted at their jobs should be lumped in with those who were the opposite? That is what we do through hysterical outbursts every time anyone suggests there might have been principled educators who went to remote lonely parts of Canada to teach first nations kids for commendable reasons. They sure didn't go for high pay and creature comforts. In their worldview, literacy mattered. We are the ones who demote it, who parrot ideological slogans out of fear of being "racist", and of being de-platformed from jobs and social media. Tell those early educators that they "stole" aboriginal languages (which had no written form at all, of course, and weren't shared among the warring tribes themselves), and they would think their descendants had gone mad.

We've gone unjust. We've marginalized and victimized many now-anonymous teachers who might have enriched the lives, in many ways, of some first nations students.

Our favourite national pastime is toppling statues of people who for better or worse built our (passably democratic and prosperous) country. Maybe a generation from now they'll erect a Memorial to the Unknown Teacher, the one who inspired a kid here and there but whose name we have made a point of erasing from the history books. That erasure will come back to bite the ideologues one day, for there's no reconciliation with censorship.

The Hidden Violence Around You -- Who Knew?

You think you live a quiet life, minding your own business in peaceful surroundings? No: there's hidden violence all around. Remember when there was just common-or-garden-variety violence? Violence of the street, perpetrated by criminals? Now it's perpetrated by everyone, and you probably don't even know all the names under which it rears its mystifying head:

Data violence,  Misgender violence,                                                                    Ablement violence (not to be confused with Disablement violence)            Epistemic violence (and its murderous cousin, Pernicious Ignorance)   Hermeneutic violance,  Policy violence, Symbolic violence,  Categoration violence

These are of course related to the "micros" (fleas of injustice biting the unwary in society's multiple unsafe spaces …): micro-aggression, micro-assault and micro-invalidation ... 

These are closely related to the new generation of "isms": linguicism, normism, audism, blank-slatism, colourism, technofeminism, dysconscious racism (not to be confused, presumably, with conscious racism), vaginism and Zoomism (Okay, I made the last two up; why not?)

So if you go down to the socio-linguistic woods today -- deep, dark and dangerous -- prepare for a big surprise: systemic incomprehension.

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