The Freedom of Disguise

I never thought I'd find myself praising the burkha, though I understand its value for privacy (a value which doesn't mean its imposition is acceptable). Generally westerners think of it as imprisoning, yet in today's environment of mass-surveillance by CCTV it might represent freedom. Modern life is ironic, that way.

When spy cameras are installed in the halls and entrances of apartment buildings (against the pleas of those who value privacy), it puts us in mind of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1791) -- a jail where prisoners might be spied on at any time by guards without knowing when they would be, so they behaved as if they were at all times. Correction officers did the spying, and "correctness" rules our lives today; we are monitored in more ways than one. 

Today, CCTV surveillance is used in schools, asylums, workplaces, streets ... There's no escape. Hats and hoodies aren't enough, we need some sort of mobile tent to hide within if we want real privacy when we go out beyond our own front door. 

But wait! That mobile tent already exists: the burkha. No wonder women is some countries put it on with a sense of relief. That is counter-intuitive to us westerners, but privacy and anonymity too are forms of freedom, which is going extinct .

So now I see the point of burkhas, for their wearers. It's for disguise, a place from which you can see but not be seen, and in that there's a freedom we lack as we come and go down residential hallways, minding our own business but being tracked like criminals.

Who knew a primitive length of cloth with some very negative associations could become a tool of freedom in the also-negative metamorphoses of modern public spaces? You might not know who's wearing one. "Burkhas For Privacy"? Take that, spies!

Housing

 

Bear 1:  Did you know humans want to dig Earth Homes here?

Bear 2:  What?!?

Bear 1:  They have a housing  shortage. They'll model them on bear dens. They think it's ecological.

Bear 2:  Hah! They'll probably line them with insulation foam and fill them with plastic gadgets and heat pumps ...

Bear 1:  ... and put a cellphone tower on the mountain-top.

Bear 2:  There goes the neighbourhood.

Bear 1:  I'm sure they won't spend the winter quietly asleep.

Bear 2:  They want to be one with the land.

Bear 1:  Poor land.

Bear 2:  Yeah. Thanks for the nightmare.

The Writing After-Life

I wanted to write my Memoirs, but I got writer's block. So I hired a ghost-writer to write the book for me. The results are invisible, but I do sense an authorial presence. So I'm making presents of non-copies for creative visualizers who enjoy imagining the content of a magical ghostly gift. I think they'll find the prose hauntingly beautiful.

The memories I meant to put into my Memoirs have dissolved into phantoms of forgetfulness anyway, which is just as well because all sorts of unorthodox and embarrassing things happened in my life which I'd rather forget. I needn't tell readers about that -- I don't want to make a spectre of myself.

Finding a ghost-writer is a good way to market shadowy shades of literature -- even fifty shape-shifting shades, perhaps. No unkind book reviewer will find any grammatical faults at all, and the book will waft readers straight into a world of Holiday-From-Reality magic. I imagine already my Memoirs on bookstores' shelves, enticingly hovering in the Fantasy section.

In January, I hired the ghost-writer to write my How to Keep to Ten New Year's Dream-Resolutions. My writing career is really taking off. I'll be mysteriously prolific this year.

The 'fifteen minute city' offers zero minutes of peace and quiet.

A healthy city needs a town centre. A commercial centre. "Downtown" is where you find banks, shops, offices, Municipal Hall, museums, professional services conveniently clustered. You go there to do business so you don't have to do business everywhere else. Beyond this commercial centre there needs to be a non-commercial fringe: the residential space. 

Historically, towns began as commercial centres on trading routes, or places where transport routes intersected. For convenience and access to work, growing populations gradually settled near and around them, each family in their own house or cottage with its own food-producing garden and often a fence or hedge for privacy, and for peace and quiet.

The "fifteen minute city" has no minutes for peace, quiet and privacy. Commericalism is everywhere. There's no relief from business, from busy-ness and crowds -- the "madding crowd" which Thomas Hardy recommended getting far away from. There's no escape from what poet William Wordsworth called "getting and spending / laying waste our powers". He meant powers of reflection, of quiet unhurried thought. The old-fashioned residential zone beyond the Town Centre vouchsafed gardens, fruit trees, cats on fences, porches with a mailbox and a shelf for the sprinkler that kept the lawn alive on which the kids could play. The fifteen minute city means the opposite: compression and some supposed version of "convenience" ... but never fifteen minutes of solitude or silence. 

How mentally healthy are people crowded together without solitude, silence, and space for reflection? There used to be an ideal of a Green Belt surrounding an urban centre, reached in stages of sub-urbia which gently declined into wooded space. Now we contemplate a city comprising only one continuous Grey Belt, in which "work, play, and business" are bundled together. This doesn't work for those who want a private house and garden some distance from noise, commercialization, sun-blocking high-rises, and jostling crowds.

Sit down, Comic

What's a comic's job? Number one job is to be funny. But too often, stand-up and TV comedians decide they want to be a social influencer. They seem to confuse sarcasm in aid of a political stance with being humorous. It doesn't work. How much "ally-ship" can a good joke survive?

Preaching is inherently non-amusing. You, Stand-up Comedian, are heir to a long line not of preachers but of the opposite. You represent the begging-to-differ folks. Your forebears are clowns, jesters and jocose performers for royal courts in which kings and queens had to be amused -- but not openly challenged. 

Court jesters got away with saying the unsayable, the unpopular, by cloaking it in word-play and subversive artifice. Too often today's comics want to be social commentators and influencers: they're talking to their tribe. So they don't subvert ("turn under"), they parrot the correctness slogans of the tribe. 

But that's no surprise. since mainstream media, TV specials and comedy clubs want comics to please a hip, "woke" crowd. So the comic seems to feel safe focusing their act on personal grievance, since a grievance culture is what we now live in and people relate to it; audience members curate their personal brands of victimization. 

What a distance the comics have come from their jesting antecedents, whose role was to challenge prejudices, not to follow the crowd -- but to challenge cleverly, subtly, with double-entrendre. Sadly, stand-up today mostly rises only to single-messaging, confusing propaganda with humour, and reacting to the threat of cancel-culture. When that fear rules, it's better for the comic to sit back down.

It was more entertaining when comic-as-social-critic lampooned and laughed at the prevailing message, the "right thought" of the moment. The comedian is not supposed to prop it up. Let the social-improvers do that, the self-appointed dictators of values.

It's a cultural loss when the comedy community joins that crowd, because we need humour more than ever to play its subversive role in boosting mental health. Transgressive laughter heals; correctness fosters anxiety. So do your traditional job, Comedians -- transgress!

It's better than merely parroting correctness, or being a weepy fish shoaling with the grieviance crowd. 

                   

See also: "The Comic in Tragic Times" -- https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-comic-in-tragic-times.html

The Poop-Up Art Show by J.M.W. Turder

The Anti-Dog lobby of Saanich BC has set up an activist art display by J.M.W. Turder. It features misty seaside paintings (scenes sans chiens, of course), plus a large central sculpture made of dried dog and cat turds. On-leash anti-dog "keep 'em out of parks" activists, joined by "keep cats indoors" activists, have been busily collecting desiccated dog and cat feces. The artist fashioned them into a fetching sculpture -- in protest against fetching by dogs of any sticks on beaches.

Unfortunately for the Poop-Up artist, someone mistakenly donated dried-out raccoon poop. A local turd-nerd noticed and attacked the anti-pet activists for misrepresentation of mammalian identity groups. 

A counter-art show in the style of Whistler is being planned by dog-walkers who dog-whistle their dogs very successfully at parks and beaches, and think it's the City Councillors who should be kept on a leash. 

"I don't want to have to read a 50-page Bylaw every time I take a stroll with Fido," says one citizen. 

She won't have to worry about the Poop-Up Art Show though, because the Health & Sanitation Bylaw has  banished feces from all indoor spaces. Freedom of Expression activists are protesting that one, but it's too late -- droppings-in at the gallery have dropped off due to atmosphere of municipal contentiousness.  

Trouble makers pictured here:       

       

                                  

      

    

Why is AuduBON now considered AuduBAD?

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was a mixed-race (French/Creole) son of a West Indies planter and slave owner. Growing up in France he became a painter. Birds were his specialty and his passion. At 18 he moved to North America,  eventually becoming an art teacher and professional portraitist of people and of birds. His avian drawings were well-received in Scotland and London, then published in book formats with text 1831-39 and now universally recognizable. Later Audubon moved to New York and brought out more bird books in partnership with other ornithologists, which led to the use of his name by the first Audubon Society in 1896.

Many regional and national Audubon Societies were formed, but as John Audubon has in recent years been called a racist white-supremacist, by 2023 many of the societies had dropped his name. Others haven't, because to them the name "Audubon" stands for conservation, not racism.

Plant and animal names derived from the names of those who first described them (genus and species nomenclature devised by Carl Linnaeus), have also come under attack. Many naturalists involved in description and nomenclature have been accused of "colonialism". 

But it isn't only individuals coming under attack; Science is as a whole. We'd expect scientific classification to be above or outside of identity politics ... but it's not allowed to be. Nothing is. Science, learning and study may no longer be a-political. Everything has to be absorbed by the Culture Wars. 

Many European naturalists whose names were attached to plants and animals became "colonials" when 18th - 19th century shipping technology made it possible to travel the world collecting specimens from distant regions which contained earlier settlers, the ab-original ones (the Latin prefix "ab" meaning before). "Our ancestors had already discovered those plants and animals", say their descendents. Of course they must have, but they didn't devise a scientific classification system for them -- they hadn't devised written language at all. The Linnean system is about species themselves and their biological descent, not about the people who brought the specimens from the field to the laboratories of Europe (where the microscope had also been invented, which made detailed description possible). 

Like other aboriginal people, in Celtic lands the pagana ("women of the countryside") knew all about native herbs and their properties for good and ill, health and disease. Plants, roots, leaves and berries could heal, or poison. Pagana, knowing which was which, were powerful and others might revere or fear them. Accordingly they were called wiccans, druids or witches. They were anonymous like the native peoples of the New World ... but the official classification of species was done later by biologists. It was never about race-politics.

Yet now, not only are Audubon, Linnaeus, and specimen collectors black-listed; the names of plants, birds and animals themselves are being laundered by Correctness. There are offenders in your own garden that you may have to re-name, or dig up. No longer will you be able to host fuschias (named after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs) or dahlias (named for the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl). And abandon your forsythia, named after the 18th century Scottish horticulturalist William Forsythe, and your gunnara, after Johan Erntegunnerus, the Norwegian bishop who compiled Flora norvegica, 1766-72.

Bannish any Clarkia you host, named for Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But would your Echeverria be okay, named after Mexican botanist/artist Echeverria y Godoy? He drew the plants of Mexico and perhaps kept any views on slavery to himself. He might fare better than John Audubon. Lady Sarah Amherst, like Audubon an ornithological artist, painted her namesake-pheasant (and other) illustrations while living in India: terribly colonial. But no doubt "Joe Pye Weed", a lushly-purple pollinator-attractant, will be allowed to keep its name, as Joe Pye was a Mohican chief born in the northeast US in the 18th century.

There's a Cooper's hawk, a Harris hawk, and a Wilson's warbler -- common names all, so who knows which are infamous, and what for? How about the Rivoli hummingbird and the Anna's hummingbird, named for the Duke of Rivoli and his wife Anna? Do the name-censors know for what crimes they might have their names struck off the bird list? Or why an American Quaker naturalist and a Surgeon-General should be?

How far will this censorship go, we might ask? We can assume that in the present heated climate (societal, not planetary) it will spread like dandelion weeds. But Audubon Societies are conservation societies, and we should ask, given that 29% of all Earth's species are facing extinction, which is more urgent -- species-conservation, or race-activism? 

In any case, for many peace-loving gardeners uninterested in the Culture Wars, a dahlia will always be a dahlia and a fuschia always a fuschia.