Art, a Man, and Intuition

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Hello Reader,

Got art and intuition?

Art

I hate to sound like I was once a sick puppy, but yes, as faithful readers know, I have a past. And so I was already middle aged, over 35, before I took an excellent lengthy aptitude test as part of my undergraduate class. My dominant job aspect? “Artistic.” I said, “Oh.” Me? Really? Of course I’m not prejudiced anymore against fancy artists but… it took a while to sink in. Apparently I would make a good executive on Mad Men.

Happily, I have since been privileged to go with others to periodically visit an artist, my sensei, Sheri-D Wilson, in her living room as part of making my War of the Worlds poetry manuscript. In mid-winter once, after supper at the Wainwright Hotel, I walked through the starlit snow to see Sheri-D perform at the Canmore Opera House. (A wonderful log building) So I know a little about artists. In fact, during a weekend poetry workshop by Sheri-D, I said I was only now learning to feel right saying “we artists.” A lady then began crying, saying she too was learning to say “we.”

A man

I suppose having an artistic streak explains best-selling writer Michael Korda. I found his book about T.E. Lawrence to be, as a blurb writer wrote, “unputdownable.” I started over halfway in, beginning with Lawrence of Arabia’s postwar year, and read through to the end. Took three hours. 

Besides his amazing originality in warfare and statecraft, Lawrence also went on to bring in reforms including (“but not limited to” says my Yankee lawyer) eliminating the taken-for-granted ankle puttees and Prussian collars for the RAF. While working with RAF speed boats, for rescuing planes downed in the water, he innovated a hull design that would be used by the U.S. Patrol Torpedo boats. His small motorboat manual, according to Korda, was excellent in having concision, and being comprehensive, and including extra things such as how to manage during storms. Lawrence’s reforms were quietly accomplished through people he knew of high rank, with no limelight for Lawrence. His own postwar rank? ( Enlisted) Airman second class. (Yes, nearly everybody on base knew who he was)

Apparently Lawrence had an artist’s disregard for conformity. He began the war as a young army lieutenant, and ended as a young lieutenant-colonel. Before the war, of course, he was an archeologist and graduate of Oxford university. Postwar, in his thirties, he translated Homer’s poetry epic, the Odyssey. But not as a poem, as a prose novel: How strange, how delightful. Also strange is how the man who was too poor to afford a boarding school such as Eton ended up a friend to frightfully rich, famous, original people such as George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. For his friendships, and for his life in general, Lawrence had complete disregard for “fame, rank and fortune.”

So was Lawrence socially, then, an artist among artists? Obviously Shaw was one, but not the others I know of, although of course the British education system at the time stressed being well rounded. Churchill, as it happened, not only painted as a hobby but wrote a book on the subject. 

(By the way, I have seen one of Churchill’s paintings hanging in the stairwell of the Lieutenant-Governor’s house, back when she lived off Jasper avenue across the asphalt plain from the old provincial museum, the one that has since moved downtown to just off Churchill Square. May I boast? I once held the door open for the lieutenant-governor to enter the museum. I didn’t know I was supposed to let her royal Canadian mountie do that, until she laughingly told me so.)

I wonder: Was Lawrence artistic? I don’t think so: Because I have no knowledge of him using art for self-expression, although maybe his entire unconventional life was a work of art. Perhaps his postwar life as a clerk, and as a mechanic, fulfilled a creative streak in him that I don’t know about.. The main reason that I don’t suppose he was “artistic” is I can scarcely imagine a good artist achieving such exceptional success in war. (Incidentally, Napoleon said a general was no good unless he could look dry eyed at a silent body-strewn battlefield)

Perhaps, then, his amazing originality came not so much from an “artist’s creativity” as from feeling “unfettered by society.” Willing to fearlessly think and see. Like young Patton and Eisenhower scandalizing the military establishment by working on newfangled battle tanks together. 

(Patton had to scramble to recover his reputation by writing magazine articles on horse cavalry tactics) 

You can achieve a lot if you haven’t had a lifetime of self-training in automatic conformity. 

If my speculation is correct, then Lawrence’s social circle was not other artists, but other “originals,” folks who were themselves unfettered. I wonder if they formed a secret club of those who conformed in dress, speech and thought only out of politeness, who would then fondly enjoy relaxing in private with likeminded friends. 

Like how if you and I were transported to the 1950’s we would naturally gravitate to relaxing among individuals who believed in equal respect for women and nonwhite races, and enjoying drinks among folks who believed it was OK for males to be verbally skilled and cultured, instead of “strong and silent.” Maybe if I went to live in the year the twin towers fell, I would be dining among those who share our 2020 A.D. belief in the appropriateness of homosexuality, and of gender transitioning, for schoolchildren. Or maybe not.

It was a countryman of Lawrence, the Nobel prize winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell, a man born in the Victorian age, who said you could achieve the freedom of a “licensed lunatic” if only you “made it clear, even to the stupidest, that (in being original) you were not criticizing them.” I can relate, having a life-time of self-training in being nice and polite. Truly, no one angrily says, “Who does he think he is?” Except maybe the very stupidest.

Everyone knows I’m a thinker; no one calls me a nerd,. As for thinking, my new insight on T.E. Lawrence being not an artist but an original has “made my day.” That, and being amused at the idea of a secret club. 

Last month in London, I socialized with a chap from Oxford who was born rich middle class, now a multi-millionaire. And even though “I’m just a poor boy, from a poor family” I swear we both felt perfectly normal around each other. Call us club members.

Intuition

As for what club my poetry teacher would belong to, I have no idea. She is certainly intuitive. By this I don’t mean the usual definition that might, maybe, possibly, be “explained” by having a subconscious like a super-computer, putting together teeny tiny unnoticed clues. I suppose a lifetime of being willing to see would aide the inner computer. 

No, what I mean is Sheri-D Wilson had access to “an extra perception.” You’re on your own with that one, as I can’t begin to explain her various examples. One thing my sensei could (rarely) do is like what was documented by Robert Masters, a British officer stationed in India, who could speak both Gurkha and English. He once overheard a British Tommy and a Gurkha soldier, each speaking only their own language, having a sensible conversation.

There are things beyond us, oh Horatio.

I’m artistic myself, yet I don’t know if that explains my having a “weird intuition” three times last month while I was in Central London. 

(By the way, I just barely beat the virus by flying home February 28, started coughing five days later… but it was only a cold. Praise the Lord.)

In a Bloomsbury used book store I asked a handsome, plainly dressed staff, “Are you a linguistics guy?” We talked. He was from Italy, and yes, he had minored in linguistics. 

(I wanted to know why foreign languages have so many syllables; his answer jived with my essay where Doctor Who pronounces “Vincent Van Goff”, archived as Anglicizing, June 2018) 

In a diner near my hotel I asked a young lady with an original hairstyle, “Are you a poet?” We talked. (Besides putting poems fortnightly onto my blog, I attend a weekly poetry cafe) Not only was she an active poet, she was just learning to write sestinas. (poems with the hardest rules, harder than a sonnet) 

In a Van Gogh exhibit on loan from Holland, in a huge special tent, I found a pretty teenage girl on a bench in the lobby, waiting for her father. I asked, “Are you a Doctor Who fan?” She was excited to answer “Yes!” and told me that part of the TV episode with Vincent Van Gogh was included near the end of the tour. We talked. I told her and her dad about the Who Store being only 30 minutes by tube east of Central London, and about a fan’s “Doctor-and-Vincent” music video on Youtube. I play it often. The dad knew of the band ,Athlete, although I didn’t. Here’s the link.

By “weird intuition,” I mean: Who in the world would suddenly blurt out speculations about perfect strangers—and be right every time?

Sean Crawford 

East of Banff, 

March, 

2020

Footnotes: 

~I usually forget that I can figuratively “open my third eye” for about ten seconds at a time. No more, because it blinds me. Some knowledge is too much. Like how a social work student can do the in-class exercise “What I hear you saying is…” and then refuse to do so in the student union building—because who wants to know how very seldom we “get it right” in real life?

~Speaking of smart people, I had a friend who, although from remote Saskatchewan, knew foreign languages, and attended medical school without needing to take the Latin course. 

In my essay Blair, Being Smart, archived September 2011, I wrote of how Blair coped with being so brainy.

~In my essay Loving Greek and Latin archived March 2012, while feeling a gentle breeze from Oxford, I wrote of learning among future physicians and biologists.

Social Media Silver Lining

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got a silver lining to the covid-19 social media?

I was amused by the failure of nerve by the National Post. One full-page spread after another—and it went on for quite a few pages—had blue headlines at the top. Labeled Myth on the left page, and Fact on the right. This was a needed public service, but… —my mirth was from the National Post not daring to have the left side headline as Social Media Myth.

Because let’s face it, when someone tells you a myth, in person or on the telephone, they nearly always got it from social media. “My uncle Tom knows a guy, who knows a guy, who forwarded onto social media something he interpreted from the Web.” Misinterpreted, that is.

Who are these social media forwarders and believers? As it happens, I subscribe to a weekly email from famous blogger Mark Manson. On Monday he posted about how he published two nearly identical posts, exactly one week apart. The first one was well received. The later one resulted in all sorts of hysterical hatred and scorn. Why the difference? Manson has several theories, which might be phrased, in composite, as this: The Internet users were the sort of idiots who were slow to wake up to the virus that was already being reported on responsible channels. Here’s the link to Manson’s scathing “3. A tale of two emails.”.

Idiots, indeed. Over in South Korea some folks passed around a water bottle laced with household ingredients that would make it virus proof. In fact, they all got covid-19 from the same bottle. Did they get the idea of a safe water from social media? I don’t know, but such is the sort of thinking I would expect from social media lovers. Call it “being innocent of the need for common sense critical thinking.” Or call it stupidity.

Recently an acquaintance earnestly told me, over the phone, about something important she had just learned from social media. About how having a drink every 15 minutes would make you safe from the corona virus. You ask: Did I pour cold water on the idea? To my acquaintance, who maybe doesn’t have a high school diploma, did I talk down sternly from my mighty university degree in critical thinking? No-o-o.

Because a few years ago I did a thought experiment: Consider two young men. One fellow, full of idealism for saving the planet, has a non-union low-wage factory job. The other, even lower waged, and with less idealism, is employed at the local campus as a graduate student and teaching assistant. Which one saves the planet by using a ten-speed bicycle? I picture the bike rider as being the grad student, I bet you did too.

To me the difference between the two is not not knowledge of ecology, and not I.Q, but “knowledge” nevertheless, in the sense that “knowledge is power.” We all want a sense of power, of agency, and of control over our lives. "If I don’t feel power from knowledge then I’ll seek power from a fine set of wheels." Feel free to disagree, as I suppose I’m oversimplifying. Meanwhile, “they say” the panic buyers who valued toilet paper over the conventional “food and ammunition,” besides being too scared to think straight, were seeking a small sense of control in the midst of chaos. 

It seems to me that a person who has trouble with, say, science articles, or those traditional newspapers with “journalism ethics,” is going to fight against that nervous tornado of facts-hard-to-grasp by resorting to “power from social media.” And that’s why I didn’t have the heart to squelch my friend directly, but instead indirectly referred to my faith in fact-based journalism.

So where are we today? 

With all the distasteful tales whizzing around within social media, with many horrible lies needing long articles to refute them, with horrors needing a doctor on CBC radio to refute many myths at length, is there also, during this dark storm cloud, a sliver lining? As compensation, dare we hope? Has humankind, at long last, learned not to believe in social media? …

Nope. No silver lining. Not as long as people’s needs are not met by traditional media.

The good news, judging by the wimping out of the National Post, is that readers of social media can overlap with readers of ethical media. Maybe the readers of social media are both unknowing, and knowing too. In which case social media is more something to be ignored and kept in perspective, than something seen as a harbinger of social decent into barbarism. And maybe those of us with a sense of responsibility are just going to have to quietly live with the believers of social media. Like how during the blogging frenzy—remember?—folks with library cards (as noted by Neal Stephenson) were ignored by our new improved digital society, and in turn they ignored society’s practise of dull skimming and superficial soundbites, preferring instead to just quietly kept meeting with each other to have those deep conversations they loved, which society ignored. 

How many years did it take, in the time of our great-grandparents, to know that not all stuff in print is true? I think it will take us, in our own time, just as many years before we finally will say, “Just because my stupid brother-in-law forwarded it, does not mean it is true.” May God grant me patience and understanding.

If someone blindly believes in social media, or blindly distrusts journalism ethics, then it might help me to “chill out” if I remember: Some people—judging by their actions—also believe in gossip that morphs, instead of honest unchanging facts; some people won’t make the effort needed for ethics, any more than they will strive to become ladies or gentlemen. In the end, some people will make my blond aunt very nervous because they forward without forethought.. All this while peach fuzzed cub reporters are proud to be “gentlemen of the press.”

It’s been decades since I walked as a volunteer student newspaper reporter at university, yet I still check myself when I speak or write on the Web. With all due respect to social media folks, being a gentleman has become a way of life.

Sean Crawford

Dutifully stuck at home

In a plaster-walled wee cabin at the old city limits

2020 

Update: The BBC has an article, complete with a picture of the corona, about how to stop bad information from going viral.

Another Update: The government has just started up a rapid response unit. Sounds serious. Real serious. Is it serious enough to shake people's faith in social media? Not if my thesis in the above essay is correct. Sorry.

Footnotes: 

~What is a lady? I used to often say to my client Sheila-Ann, “Everybody likes you.” Gracious, thoughtful of others, never swearing, and ever polite. I noticed: Tough Handi-Bus drivers wearing rough work gloves would become smiling gentlemen around her. Now, that’s a lady.

~I documented fake news being a communist plot—er, I mean, a Russian plot, in the Part 2, Pax, to my essay Russian Trolls Meet Social Media archived December 2019.

~Three comprehensive posts defining three aspects of journalism ethics are archived in March and April of 2018.

~Of course the frenzied folks who skim sound-bites won’t have the patience to go over to my archives, and that’s OK. Better for them to stay away completely than to click an all-to-easy-link to a post intended for patient lovers of print.

The Uptight Aftermath

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got emotional suppression?

How do individuals, and communities too, become normal after things like an abuse or the loss of a town factory? I don’t know; I can only grasp parts of the truth.

To me it’s normal to be uptight and to insulate one’s emotions, for however long it takes to process healing inside… and of course to also change circumstances outside…

I can imagine someone processing things at one level while playing with his grownup toys and gifts. In my family when I was a boy any Christmas gifts with store-bought gift wrapping would be from the Legion or father’s workplace. Relatives used newspaper. In today’s War of the Worlds poem, I imagine all the fancy electronic toys have been rendered inert by a Martian magnetic pulse, and the economy shattered, worse than when Sherman marched through Georgia.

All my future poems to be posted here, of heroic survivors, will be from my last manuscript section, called After the Martians.

Uptight Man

In a boy’s mechano set

screws and nuts extend steel plates and girders.

After every Gameboy got pulsed out,

the kids enjoyed their flat black mechano engine.

Hook it in and wind it tight

to have a mechano moving truck.

Just swivel the black lever,

release the hidden spring—whir-r-r-r-r.

Maybe I grieve for lost dogs, and birdsong,

and Mother Nature, so bent over her walking stick.

She’s not the upright girl in the smooth green dress 

she used to be.

I grieve for gentle Uncle Jack. 

Maybe I miss my mum and dad,

and childhood,

and I don’t even know what I’m so sad about,

but I know I’ve lost something.

In my grief I am a mechano man,

wound up tight, unable to whirrr.

I still walk and talk like a man,

tough like the other guys,

to hide my flat spring heart.

Beneath the open ribs of a church,

with sagging stained-glass windows,

I tightly curve over my prayer book,

in a silent congregation of strangers.

Can a single blade of grass, poke through a wasteland?

Will a warm church of fellowship, ever form here?

I swivel my jaw, “Amen.”

A tear falls to the page.

Splat!

Everyone can hear it.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

March

2020

Two Footnotes: 

A book I regret not buying:

In a London library, I found a collection of pre-television children’s games, many more than I ever played. It was being discarded for a (dollar) pound but I had too many books at home, or so I thought at the time. Too bad, for I could have taken it from the shelf anytime the world was getting me down, the nerd reader’s way of having a playground in my mind. You know, like in the 1972 hit song. (link)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFONCfjewgM

A question posed by our principal which no child in my elementary school class could answer:

Where does nylon come from?

SIDEBAR ON TOYS

In place of big leggo, we had small red blocks like bricks that snapped together along the tops. The blocks came with a cardboard green roof you could cut to shape. 

The counters in the monopoly set were carved round wooden abstracts; the most “real” was a “milk bottle,” the houses and hotels were wooden too. In the affluent 1960’s there came along plastic toys, including a plastic cannon that did everything, including having a flip up grenade launcher. (like a fancy vacuum with attachments) That was the “Mighty Moe,” hence the song kids still sing today:

Jingle bells, 

Christmas smells, 

Santa Claus is dead,

Someone took a Mighty Moe 

and shot him in the head.

Plastic swept in during the 1950’s, and was still rolling along at the time of The Graduate. But the age of cheap plastic only lasted a few decades. Now toy soldiers are tiny, cheap and squished, and you just cannot collect figures in the cereal boxes anymore, not since the Arabs raised the price of oil.  

…Economic Interlude…

—Oh, if only the U.S. economists, capitalists and the public had WAITED, knowing from Pareto’s law that cartels don’t last more than a few years—I suspect the former two did know, as it would be business school 101, but didn’t tell the public— 

Instead of waiting, capitalists invested in big oil wells, the Arab cartel predictably broke up, and then the Americans needed to keep the price of oil HIGH so big capitalists could get their investment back—I suspect Americans then purposely inflated their money supply, without telling the U.S. public about the “mysterious new inflation,” to help with their balance of payments to the Arabs… 

(Of course, this all makes me sound like a conspiracy nut, I mean, surely someone else would have noticed while inflation was screwing with us. And raised the public’s ire. So you are welcome to check into my suspicions yourself) 

My favorite essay to leisurely “sneak up rather than throw truth in your face like a wet dishrag” is called Conspiracies and Inflation, mostly about inflation, not climate-gate, archived November 2013. https://essaysbysean.blogspot.com/2013/11/conspiracies-and-inflation.html

…End of Economic Interlude…

The pre-sweetened cereals never had the toys because those junk cereals could already count on kids to want them. I collected sports figures, Robin Hood’s merry men, the jungle book animals, Eskimos and even “computers wearing tennis shoes.” Never any wee dinosaurs or soldiers in the cereal, though. Those I had to buy as tiny critters in a store-bought package. But hurray—Now that I’m an adult, I can buy big dinos! 

(For a while I had a big Dino with a leg hooked over my flat screen to help me see if I had the wrong picture size) 

Many of the toys of the sixties were silly novelties, sold through silly TV commercials showing pretty people smiling too hard for real life, made for affluent families with too much money on their hands. For example, a collection of beetles that would flip through the air, using the principle of squeezing soap, if you hit them with the plastic bat. The target was a big frog. 

Bop, bop, 

bop the beetle;

hit, hit, 

hit it right.

When you hit the frog,

It’s mouth, 

Shuts tight.

Differing Abstractions

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

“Canadians all live in igloos”

Some dude in Texas

Regarding their mayor:

“They kept reelecting him because he was grandfatherly and worked hard to help individuals and families who were having trouble. They didn’t care much whether he also set good policies—that was too abstract for them.”

Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card, 1991, p 238

Hello Reader,

Got differing abstractions?

Introduction

I hadn’t planned to continue last week’s theme of middle class guilt. My current blog post, right up until today’s posting, begins:

QUOTE

… I am writing this … under the spell of Audre Lorde, a member of several minority groups: Black, and a woman too, “but a traitor” with a nonBlack partner, raising children, but “without a  family values marriage,” lesbian, and speaker of truth to hands-on-ears fellow feminists… 

UNQUOTE

Differing

Trust us writers to care about the nitty gritty of sentences. So there I was, only three days after posting the above, still under the spell, among about a dozen writers, at a big long table, studying sentences, and I spoke of U.S. Blacks, and—I was corrected and told that now we say Persons of Colour. This was in Canada. You may wonder: Did Canadians genuinely ponder and decide to change names, or is this a case of swift Yankee imperialism? (Because hey, you’ve got to admit such things happen)

You ask: What did I think of being corrected?

I answer: I think it’s time to talk about levels of abstraction. But don’t worry, I’ll get back to Audre and me.

Here’s how I explain two words: I could say, “Gee, I better stop procrastinating.” Or I could say, “Well, I better get to my work.” The former is sentence is more “abstract,” the latter more “concrete.” By concrete I mean you can see it, like cement, and measure it, like with a ruler, and beholders can agree, “Yep, there’s Sean, working at his table saw.” But if you entered my man cave and saw me silent in my easy chair, the eyes of the beholder wouldn’t agree on whether I was procrastinating, or hard at work dreaming up some new poem about the Martian invasion. When it comes to something abstract like labels for people, there can be a whole lot of opinions going on. 

Abstractions have power. Are people “developing” the land or “exploiting” it? Both words are easy to argue about, as both are abstract.

How many races do you count? On the prairies, or great plains, the first nations medicine wheel abstracts four: black, white, yellow, red. 

Black or Person of Colour? Again, abstract. A member of the Mongolian race, or a Person of Colour? A higher abstraction: Here colour means not specifically black, but non-white. When my father was a boy, history text books always started out listing the various races of man. When I myself was a boy, the How and Why Book of Primitive Man began by saying scientists don’t like to say the word race. 

(With race being not so much concretely found in nature as being abstract concept we make up. Hence laymen in Europe, when Dad was a boy, as documented in brown paged books in the campus library, would say that folks on two sides of a river were two different races. I bear no ill-will to 1930-Edmonton scientists or 2010-Saskatchewan indigenous elders. They both abstracted as best they could)

That would have been about the time the term Mongolian was dropped—should I now say East Asian, Oriental, or just what?—and when, for folks with a specific disability, the term Mongoloid, with its racial implication, was replaced, on our side of the pond, with Down Syndrome. 

If people argue about abstract single words, then they can get even more heated about abstract logic chains. I can remember when a Marxist study group, meeting down in the basement, would learn a set of steps to a conclusion for good comrades, but by the time the idealists got up onto the streets, among the rest of us, they would be forgetful about the abstract steps, and go right to the Politically Correct conclusion. It was when the rest of us were puzzling over the half-missing steps that leftists felt the need to be especially strident and shaming by saying, “Trust me, that’s not PC!” Well. Human nature means that we will calmly discuss the value of cement versus concrete, while our fiercest arguments will be over fuzzy abstract things like religion, politics and PC.

Fun with abstract scenarios

If I am at a big long table with a dozen folks—not writers but my buddies who play World of Warcraft—and I want to talk about Yankee imperialism by certain Texas Yankees, then my peers might get their Star Trek shirts in a twist: “What if a U.S. citizen was spying on us from Texas using a super-telescope and heard you calling him a Yankee? He would be offended because the Texans fought on the side of the Confederacy, Rebels against Yanks, for the U.S. civil war, so shame on you, for not being PC.”

Same table: One of my male ice hockey buddies, being a little more realistic, might use a few of those few English words that help us to phrase an imaginary state, words known as the “subjunctive,” words such as were, would or could. He might say, “What if a Texan were in this room and what if he would hear you talking about imperialism… and so you shouldn’t say such things, even if, as I must admit, no Texan is present.” 

Next to speak up is my hockey buddy with a sense of humour: “What if a Yankee—I mean a Texan—was just outside the window on his hands and knees in the shrubbery, so we couldn’t see him, but he heard us, and then stood up and yelled in the window?”

Now, I just have to chuckle, and get into the game too, making things four sided. “Well buddy, suppose I had my own telescope to Texas, and so I called them long distance while they were talking. One of them goes over to the land line and says, “Hey you guys, the call display says Canada… Hello?”

“I just heard you people saying some falsehoods about Canada, some myths, shame on you, for no, we do not all live in igloos! You’re not being PC!” …Somehow, I doubt stereotypical Texans care much about PC, not these days. 

(I remember the scandal when new Texas vehicle license plates came out that said, “The friendly state.” Texas changed that in a hurry! At the time, my roommate from Kansas opined that Texans just like to bug the rest of the union—and I can blab that, because I’m in Canada)

At this point, as we are each getting into our differing private abstractions, if any of my buddies claims to have The Truth and be the centre of world, then I have to gently remind him, “Excuse me, an Ugly American would act that way, too.” (By the way, it was secret agent Matt Helm, settled in Santa Fe, who noted: No self-respecting New Mexican wants to be caught sounding like a Texan—and yes, I know I shouldn’t report that on a Canadian blog)

Obviously, talking about labels and “what if” will always sound a little crazy. My buddy says with a tense jaw: “We label jars not people; you must say ‘a person with a gimpy leg,’ not a gimp; say ‘a person of the Jewish persuasion…’”

More private abstractions

One of my thinking tools is the abstraction of Political Correctness. 

According to PC, —I could be wrong— isn’t there is a PC sound barrier, not to be broken, between us and Yankee-land? And doesn’t PC include the concept that if you talk about others then you are “speaking for” them? We would say of a Canadian woman holding two Ph.D’s in “American Studies”, that if she travels below the 49th parallel, she knows less than a high school drop out, at least about certain things in “real” American life, and so if she travels down to the States then she shouldn’t “speak for” Americans. I guess it logically follows: PC-wise, I can’t rush across the border and vent my spleen at some Texans I hear mentioning igloos, either.

At the same time, in the name of Political Correctness, the Americans have no right to complain as my professor talks, when up here, among us fellow-Canadians, about “those” imperializing Americans, no, not even if she accidentally tells us some myths about Yankees. 

(Of course she would document and footnote and quote U.S. citizens in good faith, like me quoting Matt Helm, of course)

Maybe I feel a blazing social warrior leftist temptation to drive to Montana and shout “Power to the 99 per cent!” … Still, I have to let U.S. citizens seek their own salvation. Or at least, not shout, but talk nicely to those Yankee salt of the earth folks politely, talking with them, not at them. Maybe mail them some footnotes, if asked. 

It was an apologist for communism, self-described “Chinese” writer Han Suyin, who said, “Revolution must be neither exported nor imported.” Yes. My citizenship papers are stamped Canada, not U.S. of A, so I’ll cackle whatever crazy thing I want to “among us chickens, up here, about them eagles, down there.” My latest theory is that the U.S. public enables their Yankee Imperialism by holding on to an ignorant plausible deniability. “What? Us? Imperialize? We’re so innocent!” Yeah, you just go on saying that.

A wide eyed peer might earnestly ask me, “Yes, but what if an eavesdropper was innocently out of sight below the window?” 

(I suppose this is getting away from the abstract into the actual concrete examples)

Easy: If it was me I would stand up, walk around the building and enter through the proper door. I would go to the room by the window and wait to be invited to join in. And then I would not hijack the conversation, but wait until it was appropriate to swing the conversation around to igloos. As a Muslim said to me in London, humbling and politely and without any hijacking, “If you want to know anything about Muslims then you can just ask me, for I’m Muslim.” At the time we were sharing a vegetarian, OK-for-Muslims-and-Jews, pizza.

Fun with peers

I wrote about that Muslim man on the jet back from London, for my last visit, just as this time flying home I wrote about Audre Lorde. It was while I was part way through Audre’s book that I met with a man who had moved across the globe to Oxford to raise his boy because it was a “diverse” city. That man was Derek Sivers; we knew each other through his blog, and he bought me a nice breakfast near Saville Row in London.

You may ask: Does the boy call his father a Caucasian? I don’t know, I never asked.

Does the boy know about the various formal races of man, including, “but not limited to,” Caucasian, as found in old textbooks? I doubt it, the boy is only eight. Does he give himself a label? Sure, one he either made up or hears being used by his child peers: He self identifies as brown.

Historians are only half right: We don’t learn from history, but we do learn from our peer groups—too bad they don’t learn from history. They differ in their ability to abstractly see beyond the here and now, just as they vary in their ability to think in term of time and space. Seriously: Have you ever tried to organized a street protest before the deficit has worsened into a dragon? One snorting cutbacks, and breathing fire against government programs? Have folks declined your request to take to the streets early enough to do some good, even though your peers surely know what horrors we went through last time we finally had to kill the deficit? If so, then surely you were viewed as “a crazy minority of one.” Power to the people.

It would be nice if groups were all equal, but no, they aren’t all the same. And that I like, since my different peers can express different aspects of me. Today I see I have mentioned peer groups from writing, computers, athletics and, if you include a peer group of just one, a Muslim. It seems to me that fighting within any given peer group, over fuzzy abstractions, words and labels, is like fighting over fashion: Even if I am are “right” I am are apt to walk away feeling somehow foolish. 

(Example: Should we dress for Stampede Days like a cowboy, or like a real cowboy? One could argue. Should my businessman’s trench coat be a real trench coat, complete with a wee loop for my pistol lanyard? And yes, on Saville Row they do indeed sell such coats. A young British businessman, sent to work in Italy, found that all his peers wore coats without epaulets, so he felt compelled to go back to his hotel and cut off all the epaulets on his coats. Now, before you would make a face in scorn, I would advise a pause… sometimes we really need our sense of "humour and compassion" for a poor lad craving a peer group) 

Specific words

The most Positively Correct peers for me have been the ones who will like me and buy me a beer.  If they go from properly saying cellular telephones to crudely saying cell phones, then me too. The worst peers share my hot ideals but lack a sense of proportion: No "humour and compassion." For them, as they grate on me, I will reach for the lubricant of humour, and alcohol too.

If you, dear reader, want me to say Person of Colour, then all you have do is say that word around me, like my peers saying “cell phone.” But that begs me to ask the question: Up here in Canada, when would you ever say P of C in real life? It could mean that, in order for you to change my everyday language, then, in your own everyday life, instead of talking about the the weather and such trivia, you would need to speak of what you were doing around racism. Yes, I sympathize; it’s hard to take action, and then it’s hard to share from your heart. But if I keep naturally hearing Person of Colour then I’ll naturally start saying the term too. Like how even bigots have exchanged the horribly stigmatized word homosexual for a nice, pretty, new improved one, gay.

Right now, from dear Audre, I keep hearing the word Black… God bless her.

Sean Crawford

In her majesty’s dominion of Canada,

(although Dominion Day has been replaced by Canada day)

At the foothills of the Rocky Mountains,

In the sweetest home city in the world,

(although our sibling rivals in Edmonton would say otherwise)

March

2020

Update of Thursday March 12, regarding opportunities to say to others, "Person of Colour."
There are two Person of Colur documentaries are showing in Edmonton on March 19 at the Garneau. About the time the Person of Colour Panther headquarters was being shot up, as noted one post back, innocent Persons of Colour women working in hospitals were facing the National Guard in their quest for a decent wage. Link

Meanwhile, today on CBC, writer Kiley Reid was interviewed for her book about the Persons of Colour situation called Such a Fun Age. I tuned in at the part where a middle class white woman felt safe that her husband would have no sexual desire for a domestic worker because she was a Person of Colour. 

Reid, a self described as "light-skinned (I forget if there was another word too)" reminded those of us privileged to live in the developed British Commonwealth, including, "but not limited to," Canada and the United Kingdom, how it had warped her life, diverted her employment choices, to live in the only developed country in the world without national healthcare. 

Footnotes:

~I Met a Muslim in London is archived September 2017

~Guilt and Toronto, with Audre Lorde, is archived last week, in March 2020. You might be interested in the essay for Lorde’s definition of racism.

~In Commenters and My Responsibility archived May 2018, I quoted Derek Sivers, who moved to Oxford, at length in my essay, His words in the footnotes are in yellow; his words about the financial costs of unclear writing are in the main essay, in a slightly larger typeface, with some bolding.  

~Call me an artist, but this post was written in the subjunctive imagined world; while in the real world I lack a table saw, man cave and certain peers.

Amusing (and tragic) difference in abstracting the definition of racist:
While normally I would retro-change the words "Negro" or "Black" to Person of Colour, the humour below doesn't work as well unless I report the "dialogue" accurately.

As our leftist friends know, every man, woman and child in Canada is racist because we soak it up from our culture. As least most of us aren't as bad as the TV bigot Archie Bunker, although he could at least have Persons of Colour, the Jeffersons, over to visit him and Edith, or have his son-in-law's Person of Colour friend Lionel come over. All in the Family was the first post-colour TV show filmed (videotaped) before a live studio audience.

 The "and tragic" part of my amusing memory is how my roommate, who divided his time between Canada and the States, driving a sports car down to California, had a definition of racist that differed from our leftist friends—Actually, I guess he spent more time down south than here, since he thought "minus four degrees centigrade" was cold.

I was renting the upper half of a duplex, while down below lived a Malaysian couple who were soon moving out. So they gifted me with a plastic silver platter covered in food and supplies. I remember one gift was a white container of Johnson's baby powder, only the blue writing was in Malaysian, not English.
 So there I was, coming up the stairs and cackling like a witch. Seriously, I was cackling. My roommate was at the top of stairs. "What I like about me," I laughed "is I'm not a racist. Look at all this cool stuff I just got."
The guy exploded, "Sean, of course you're not a racist! You're living with a Black man!"

Guilt and Toronto

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got annoyance at Toronto snobs?

Preface 

Audre Lorde, down in the U.S.A., taught a college English class:

“…I wish I had recorded some of it. Like the young white cop in the class saying, “Yeah, but everybody needs someone to look down on, don’t they?””

Your Silence Will Not Protect You, page 75.

… I am writing this in Toronto, under the spell of Audre Lorde, a member of several minority groups: Black, and a woman too, “but a traitor” with a nonBlack partner, raising children, but “without a  family values marriage,” lesbian, and speaker of truth to hands-on-ears fellow feminists… 

Grrr, those elitist Toronto people—who do they think they are? I mean, they go around feeling like “guilty white liberal middle class” types.  

Not me. I’m a westerner, I own two cowboy hats, and I don’t do guilt. For one thing, my middle class “membership” is rather honorary, the result of getting a university degree. I’m still poor, not  rich. My big family (Dad had eight siblings) is solidly blue collar working class. (I have five siblings) I still retain our old-world fear of impulse buying, let alone going into debt.

Today, as a regular guy, I refuse to criticize minorities for things they can’t help… It logically follows I feel no guilt when I can’t help being born white and male. As for my various privileges, including being born into the biggest country in the free world, well, what the heck can I do about it, to avoid guilt? Besides, that is, virtuously saying, “Women and children and oppressed people first!” Hard to say with a straight face, I know, easier to look serious if I am yelling it.

Guilt, to my eyes, is useless. It adds no energy for the good fight, no political empowerment, no spring to my step. What it does do, out east in Toronto, is something yucky: I keep reading that guilty white liberal females are disempowering their white Arab sisters by wearing islamic hijabs “in solidarity,” forgetting that not all Arabs are religious-and-conservative. 

In fact, some Arabs are atheists, just like some Israelis, while others are religious-and-liberal. Some of my white Muslim sisters are born right here, smack dab in the First World, where just as I do they disagree with those parts of religion that supposedly call for Iran to murder protesters in the streets, and maintain a big infamous torture prison. Let’s speak truth to middle-class power: Our Muslim sisters are against war, holy or otherwise, against oppression of women, and against domestic abuse. Me too. This as guilty Christian liberals would “help” their sisters by wearing the tools of the oppressor.

Regular people, back west where I live, can only know about liberal guilt in Toronto if we read the newspapers, reading about poor and non-guilty women desperately pleading, begging, trying to reason with the rich middle class liberal women that no, the burka (big tent with eye holes) and hijab (hides the hair) are not in the Islamic scriptures. I am sure Lorde would agree with me on this: Throughout time and space, every patriarchal culture, no matter how “religious,” manages to physically hobble its women in ways the culture just doesn’t use to hobble its men. (And has invisible hobbles too) Because that’s what “patriarchy” does, of course, feeling entitled to do so.

Naturally, I could be wrong about Toronto, since it’s so far away. At my Toastmasters club two different people who came here from out east told us of having misconceptions about the west, and one of them was especially embarrassed: She was a retired schoolteacher, and had been teaching western history wrong for years. To be charitable, maybe distance does that—or maybe Toronto people are just racist, geographically and culturally racist.

I am still chuckling from the time I left Alberta, and crossed several mountain ranges to go further west into another time zone, visiting my sister up in cattle country in central British Columbia. In the kitchen my niece asked, “Uncle Sean, are you a red neck?” Her father answered for me. “He’s an intellectual red neck.” 

Meanwhile, in Toronto—the only city in Canada which can, bizarrely, hold the Grey Cup game with only sports fans caring, without any citywide buzz of excitement—the rich liberal racists probably don’t grasp that you can have a degree, be artistic, and also have dear friends and relations who are blue collar. I think Toronto racists won’t grasp that you can live back west and still be a world class artist.

Am I angry? How can you tell? Here’s what burns my neck red: A fellow writer endured a negative and utterly rude book review by a Toronto elitist, a rudeness my friend is convinced she would not have endured had she lived within the city of Toronto, or even in the greater Toronto area. As for Audre Lorde, she had her own mighty frustrations with white feminist racists, just as I surely would in Toronto. Reading  Lorde, I scrutinize her word “entitled,” and her definition of “racism”: It is nourished by, motivated by, and produces… a sense of entitlement.

If the artsy elite, entitled to be snobs, who avoid the Grey Cup, are racist against westerners and their Muslim sisters, then maybe their entitlement produces… a passive sense of guilt. A guilt where a “liberal” member of parliament (Justin) disagreed with anyone who would call genital mutilation, here in Canada, “barbaric.” Really Justin? Please STOP your misplaced guilt—If it’s not barbaric, here in the 21st century, then tell me: What exactly is it?…  “Grotesque?” 

(Not a good word for immigrants with English as a second language)

Like playing rock paper scissors, the action of “giving up entitlement” beats guilt. Simple. But out east in Ontario it’s very hard for a liberal rich man to do so, standing there beside his camel and needle.

Too bad I can’t ask anyone here what’s going on between Toronto ears, since nobody I know back west—and hey, some of my best friends are liberals—feels guilty. Here on the prairies I haven’t seen the wind, but I have seen my friends and I taking action against injustice and oppression. 

As for Toronto folks, for the sake of my artist friends back west, I sure wish they would stop feeling entitled to snobbery. More importantly: I wish the middle class ladies out there would drop their guilty support for domestic violence and inequality.

Sean Crawford

In the Toronto airport, 

and 

In the fuselage of a 

Westjet,

March

2020

Footnotes:

~Joke: The graphic Mad Magazine once proved how it is possible to get a camel through the eye of a needle. You tie a rope around the camel’s belly, lift it up with a helicopter, and fly through a giant needle. “Nobody said how big the needle had to be.”

~ In Canada, soon after Star Trek ended its run, we de-cloaked our invisible hobbles by using consciousness raising circles. …But in our new century those pesky Romulans have cloaked again.

~A self-defensive note: (In a tired voice, after mentioning white Arabs) Yes, my politically correct friends, I do know there are Black Muslims, and Pacific Muslims, with millions in the city of Jakarta alone; yes, I know one can do holy terror without being Arab, with the worst country for “global reach” into Europe being Pakistan…. But many of my readers, as in that country song, “don’t know Iraq from Iran,” and so I concentrated on Arabs. …Besides, experts on the vanished Indo-European language say Arabs are part of the Aryan nations, from Eire (Ireland) to Iran, so that makes them white to me, and why can’t racists see that?

Sidebar 

Audre Lorde’s World

Long before 9/11 raised our consciousness  about the existence of Islamic family violence, Audre Lorde visited the Second World and quoted a woman feeling triumphant against hijabs and honour killings. I quoted them both in As Epilogue a Feminist Regards Muslim Uzbekistan archived October 2017.

As for Audre, it’s a small world: The last time I was in London, at the Tate Modern Art Museum, 

(the most visited London attraction, according to a recent BBC News article)

I bought a green book of her essays. This time around, in a Bloomsbury store, I bought a pink book that has her essays and poems. Many of her poems are referenced in her essays,
 (including A Conversation with Adrienne Riche) 
which is delightful because Lorde thinks by using poetry first, not by using words. 

(Other ways of thinking are in my essay How You Learn, archived February 2020)

The Tate exhibit was of U.S. Black political art, and it was so very sad for me to see some old black and white TV sets, outside in the lobby, each showing a person speaking, all of whom were dead except for Angela Davis. I think she survived because she was in prison during the police killings. When they took her away, Black writer James Baldwin said (I forget) something like, “Dear Angela, if they come for you in the morning, they will come for me in the evening.” 

I had already known about police shooting up a Black Panther headquarters in a surprise attack, but the exhibit included a door of someone’s home with many police bullet holes: Shot while soundly sleeping. I do believe I once read about a third such door too.

For any readers who still wonder why U.S. Blacks, including sweet gentle sisters, gave their brother, O.J. Simpson, the benefit of the doubt after his arrest, a memory has popped in: 

Back in the 20th century, perhaps from submarines mysteriously going missing in remote waters, we had a saying: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.