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.

Knowing Sarah Connor

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women in Canada the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

Sean Crawford, excerpt from below

Hello Reader,

Remember Sarah?

In the wake of the third Terminator movie—the others don't count; it has sure been a long time since T2—I decided to re-run a post by my idealistic younger self from ten years ago.

But first:
Here's what full-time writer and former journalist John Scalzi said on his blog, Whatever, for November 3, 2019:

As I walked out of the film last night I posted a five word recommendation of this film: “It gets Sarah Connor right.” This actually matters because despite the name of films, the “Terminator” films are about Sarah Connor, and the arc of her life dealing with the terrible fate that life has dealt her: Victim to fighter to avenger. Sarah Connor is realistically (within the context of these films) damaged by this fate of hers; particularly in this film she’s a PTSD wreck. And, well, she would be, wouldn’t she. It’s important that the Terminator films show her this way. It’s for better or worse the grounding the films need to make every other absurd thing that happens in them function on the level of plausibility.

My old blog essay:
Having a hatred for war and a fondness for feminists, I have a soft spot for the tormented Sarah Connor in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah is a single mother who knows that an atomic war is coming but instead of being paralyzed by her knowledge of Judgment Day she is determined to do whatever she can. One might assume that T2 is violent, (yes) action-filled (yes) and ... nonfeminist. (no) No, it is a moral movie: To see Sarah is to glimpse feminism. 

 For several years I was a nonvoting member of the University of Calgary Women's Collective and Resource Center. One of the other males at the center did that thing where a man dresses in spongy body armor head to toe, (cap-a-pie) and then the women are encouraged to hit him as hard as they can. The results may go beyond learning literal self-defense: On a metafilter web site a woman describes how from such practice she swiftly became empowered to react differently in so many aspects of her life. Feminists believe in empowerment.

 Were I to hit a man in such armor, my first blow would likely be at half strength, but then my next blow would probably land at mostly full strength. For a number of women, though, blow after blow is delivered at only a teeny fraction of what they are capable of: such is the power of social conditioning. Call it “learned helplessness.” In all fairness, those same women would strike desperately hard if their child was being threatened. I respect Sarah Connor for her self empowerment to strike hard: Not only does she learn to use various military weapons but even after she has a life sentence to the insane asylum-prison, even when her life is over —or at least into limbo— she is determined to stay as physically fit as she can. In that hopeless jail, if she has nice muscles, it has nothing to do with attracting men—she is trying to Be Ready. 

Of course feminists can attract boyfriends and have families and worry about their children. Sarah’s tribulations are during the cold war, when all children, worldwide, are at risk. Some day our grandchildren may be baffled at how we could learn to live with the horror of missile silos, but we did, the same way we could ignore how women didn’t have equal rights: Humans are good at denial. During those dread times we could choose to try our best to stave off Armageddon, or we could be passive.

In those strange days when most people would wimp out, be overwhelmed, throw up their hands in defeat...
if I felt like Crazy Eddie who, after being condemned by the king to death, got the king to commute his death sentence "for one year" so that he could "teach the king's horse to sing..."
 then, in those trying times, I could always depend on the Women's Movement to keep up with me, to keep slogging away at my side. Feminists believe in peace.

 When a man confronted Eddie for being crazy enough to think a horse could ever sing, Eddie answered gaily, "A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might learn to sing."

As a boy I learned the lyrics to a spiritual: "...Joshua fit (fought) the battle of Jericho, and the wall come a-tumbling down." During those years when I was encouraging people to "hold on," to "never give up," because there might be a miracle, I never imagined that one day a horse over in Berlin would sing. Sarah never gives up. She can't: She can't forget the vision of herself in a gingham dress, which Sarah could never wear, in a park with her children, whom Sarah could never know. Who can forget seeing her other self and the children in that searing wind of death? Not Sarah. She won’t dial down her consciousness. Feminists are willing to know things.

 Given her obsessed lifestyle, with no chance to attend a weekly women’s consciousness raising group, it is unlikely Sarah would stop to think long enough to call herself a feminist. But she acts like one. Sarah is barren of sisterhood yet in her lonely way, she finds a philosophy.

In T2 she angrily confronts a scientist, Dr. Dyson, who will soon be largely responsible for triggering our Day of Judgment. Losing her temper she yells that people like him kill because they cannot create life, cannot feel a child growing. In the book version by Randall Frakes she goes on to point out that men's version of creating is to give their name to the guns that they create. Meanwhile, the Calgary Police Service has adopted a new service pistol and wouldn't you know, it is named after Mr. Glock.

 In my young adulthood I watched as a few "woman's libbers" got other women the freedom to have jobs as notary publics and judges, doctors and police officers. We take this for granted now, but not then. It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

 My own mother believed in peace, but I can't deny there are other cultures, equal to ours in the sight of Allah, but not the same as ours: There are places where mothers teach their children to hold on to a double standard for women, and for foreigners, to hold fast to their hatred, and, in the end, to value hatred over peace. “Oh well,” says Eddie and I, “at least in my father's lifetime no two democracies have ever declared war on each other, so perhaps as democracy spreads...?”

Democracy is where two heads are better than one. Sarah, unfortunately, has little access to the democratic give and take of free speech. Bereft of a circle of empowering sisters she is alone with her knowledge of the coming horror...

 Alone, Sarah almost destroys her soul but then she suffers a child to be her call unto sanity. As young John says to someone else, "Don't you get it? Haven't you learned anything? You can't go around killing people." And Sarah cries.

 Feminism, being for equality, includes men too. As my dictionary says, it means “political and social and economic equality to men.” I am picturing, from just before "women's liberation," a “power to the people” 1960’s male activist: As he feels confident and equal, as he feels truly empowered, then he will no longer need the silly crutch of having women make the coffee.

A feminist visiting Sarah's asylum would ask if the patients, men and women, are being empowered to be all they can be, by growing as much as they can, by making as many decisions as they can. Democracy in America, as the French observer De Tocqueville once explained in his 1835 classic, is where a free people make little decisions, often, so they will grow fit for making big decisions, occasionally, at the voting booth. Perhaps democracy, then, is a prerequisite for people to be motivated to even care to know what growth is, let alone care, Allah willing, for the growth of women.

 When I first saw Sarah she was a simple girl. An emissary from the future warned her: She was going to find strength she never knew she had, grow in ways she never thought possible. And grow she did. 

 Sarah reminds me of my own world. It wasn't very long ago that editors would not publish Andrew Vasche's mysteries about an ex-con, Burke, who fights child pornography rings, because nobody could believe such rings of men and women existed. Now we believe. Feminists, at first feeling alone, and being told they were crazy, have helped us to know that such horror exists.

If Judgment Day is a moral movie then it must have karma. It's only right that a shrink who messed with Sarah's mind has his own mind blown, such is the shrink’s karma, but what of Doctor Dyson? How could a husband and father have a rendezvous with death? Easy: Because of Cyberdine Industries.

 That's where a suspended pteradactal alludes to nuclear winter, where their secret vault requires two keys, turned simultaneously, to open up. When I was a child during the cold war hearing the sad air raid sirens being tested, “sorrrrrryy,” we all knew that if the man in Washington ever “pressed the button” it took two keys to empty out the silos. In that vault at Cyberdine was the “button." There rested the preposterous robot hand and the impossibly advanced chip. 

Dyson saw. He was a scientist and citizen who knew that science and democracy requires questions and transparency, knowing that if an invention requiring a previous series of steps suddenly appears, then either the steps have been kept secret or the device has been stolen; he was a scholar who knew how to search the science literature and scrutinize the newspaper files, those files which would have led him to Sarah Connor's story; he was a man of planet Earth who knew we all must be alert to question strange new paths of death, from factories putting mercury down pipes into the sushi of Tokyo bay, to pesticide sprays killing the higher animals, to fluorocarbons rising up to blast the ozone; … and so when Dyson was ordered, "don't ask!" and when he agreed not to question that button in the vault, when he passed along those orders, when he silenced an idealistic young long haired scientist, then, like a good Muslim German, he failed in his duty as a scientist, citizen, scholar and moral human being. Dyson failed.

 "The future is not set," said the emissary to Sarah Connor. "There is no fate but what we make." I agree. I believe devoutly, “Our greatest enemy is despair.”

 So hurray for Sarah! For me it is almost worth the price of admission just to see, for one second, my hero do a victory hop and skip in the prison hallway. In that second I see a human being go from victim to survivor, from shuffling peasant to purposeful citizen. In that moment I see our lady of holy fire: Sarah will always create her own empowerment.

Sean Crawford
Still traveling through time,

at one second per second,
November
Calgary
2019

footnotes:

~For more on karma and morality, see my essay Morality, Boys and Hollywood, originally entitled Terminators and Boys, of July 2013.

~I still get homesick reading the pre-feminist 1940's Martian Chronicles. We had thought the future was set, that we were fated to more gadgets but no social change.

~Roll call:  Alexander Kalishnikov, (AK-47), Heckler and Koch, (HK33), Mills bombs, (British grenades) Maxim, Vickers, Samual Colt, Henry Derringer, Gatling, Winchester, Browning,  Beretta, Martini-Henry (Kipling's troops) Lee-Enfield (my dad's rife) Ross (the infamous dysfunctional rifle) Gerber (the commando knife) ... and others too, down a long line.

~The biggest surprise ovation I will ever receive was at a weekly (for ten weeks) peace meeting.

The meetings were so big that a huge lecture theater proved inadequate for the first meeting; (people were sitting in the aisles) we subsequently had to use a music recital hall. Most of us were from off campus.

After someone complained about the futility of declaring the campus a "nuclear free zone" I said that yesterday I felt the same, but here, today, I was trying to be positive, for such declarations are not an end but a means to an end, a way of moving us further along the road to a solution that we cannot conceive of yet. 

Without mentioning Crazy Eddie I reminded them of other unpredictable miracles such as Alcoholics Anonymous and stopping the White (A-bomb) Train, miracles that offered a way out from a hopeless terminal condition.

I said building peace is like everyone working together on a giant mural while you can only see the one little leaf that you are painting so painstakingly. You don't just quit. Instead you have a blurred vision of this big world that we are all working towards... And then, starting from off on the right, everyone in the hall applauded long and loud in solidarity.

Contempt for Calgary Teachers

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Editor’s note: I had planned to keep with this month’s theme of sound, with a piece about a friend’s hearing impairment, but news has overtaken me.

Hello Reader,

Got breaking news?

Just when you hoped teachers could learn? 

BREAKING NEWS: 

Bullying Report Merits Contempt says Sean Crawford

This week, the Calgary Herald newspaper page 3 headline (Thursday October 17) goes, 

Staff training urged in CBE bullying report. 

(CBE stands for Calgary Board of Education) Right below is the “kicker,” 

Critic charges board review ‘dismissive’ of parents, students facing difficulties.

As it happens, although I graduated from the department of disabilities at the local university’s Faculty of Education, with due respect for my fellow alumni, I must agree, not with the school board that made the report, but with critic Barb Silva, the spokeswoman for the Support Our Students advocacy group. The context is the suicide of a bullied nine year old girl in March.

History repeats. I sympathized with parents and students back in mid-2015, in my essay Saving Tomorrow Land (regarding a movie about George Clooney wearing a jet pack) where I noticed that Bully Solutions, with 40 case studies, gave little hope because nearly all of the solutions had come from parents: Teachers with university degrees seemingly knew less about bullying that an untrained parent with common sense. Hence my contempt. I am of the opinion—let’s hope I’m wrong—that the tragic death of that nine year old, and the many tragic deaths at the Columbine School, have been in vain. In tomorrow’s land, as astronauts soar into space, the bullying down here will go on and on.

Please forgive me for voicing this distressing opinion. In February I reviewed What We Want You to Know by children from a good affluent area of southern Ontario, subtitled Kids Talk About Bullying. Of all the stories told, (think case studies) the teachers were effective only twice. May God and parents help those poor children, because nobody else will.

The fresh report by the CBE (Calgary Board of Education) says teachers need more training. Really? Where have I heard that line before? Oh yes, in South Vietnam and Iraq, remember? 

Experts told us that with “more training” those well-equipped armies would bravely take on, face to face, ragged insurgents and ISIS forces which are without training, only common sense. Rubbish! Soldiers will not risk their sacred lives, nor teachers risk their sacred comfort, unless they feel mutual trust in each other, having confidence that the “hearts and minds’ of everybody else are in agreement. In February I documented, from practical U.S. for-profit hospital meetings, how such a “win” is indeed possible—without reliance on classroom “training,” while noting it might take a year or more for teachers to trust each other. The founder of those for-profit meetings is living right here in Calgary, a former Calgary Alderman and Member of the Legislative Assembly, (think US state government) Brian Lee. (Note: Lee’s plan takes three years, not ‘one year and then stop,’ lest confidence, attitudes and momentum be lost) 

The school board, through Kent Donlevy, interviewed 150 CBE staff. Donlevy said there was no time to interview parents and students since the research was done over the summer months. Silva asked, “So why not do this important research over the span of a year?” The Herald article by Eva Ferguson notes, ‘But Silva argued the language being used in schools is too vague and serves little purpose:’ “Why use well-being or wellness? Why not call it what it is? It’s bullying. Where is the discussion, action and initiative around conflict resolution for students? Where does the board address emotional resilience?”

Long ago a philosopher said, “If a goal is true and good and beautiful, AND if it is not being reached, then there is an obstacle in the way.” Want to stop bullying, unrelenting misery and suicide? There is an obstacle here, and it’s not the parents.

Sean Crawford

Wetaskiwin

October

2019

Footnotes, for those with hardy stomachs: 

~A field tour of Vietnam stopped after one year. (Six months for officers) Unfortunately, children may be in misery for years, plural, according to those Ontario students.

(Reminder: There’s no excuse for being surprised anymore—It was back in the early 1970’s that Women’s Liberation, to society’s big surprise, discovered that even drab nuns in shapeless clothing can be assaulted, with rape being not from arousal, but from the joy of violence and bullying)

Three news links from the BBC, from this year:

(link) A wife and mother, even though (sarcasm) ‘kids will be kids and you should just ignore them,’ has Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

(link) A young girl was repeatedly sexually assaulted by bullies on the playground but her teacher didn’t believe her until she was too sore to sit down.

(link) A boy is no longer the same since he was raped by a bully on a play date.

Three essays of mine, archived from this year:

Human Warmth and War of the Worlds includes a part regarding a  U.S. school shooting, and teacher’s CYA response, May 2019

History repeats. During Vietnam, angry young soldiers observed that army paperwork was not to advance the war effort but “to cover your ass.” (CYA)

Bullying Still, is regarding teachers at that Calgary school not changing their culture after suicide, and a girl, with an award from the prime minister, having to change schools, May 2019

Bullies and Teachers, regarding practical advice for teachers, beyond “try harder,” February 2019

For folks “archive challenged,” here’s (a link)

URLs Again

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got a yearning for URLs again?

(Again? Yes: This post is the sequel to a light-hearted post that hasn’t run yet)

I have been perusing my older essays. As you know, I like to collect my various links all on one blog page. This time, unlike my post of (hasn’t run yet), these older URL’s were not intended as “brights” at the end of a page; therefore this “URLs Again” post has more prose, less music and darker content.

If a URL here is not clickable, then I would expect you, Dear Reader, to use your “Copy” (not cut) and “Paste” feature to go to the web sites. With my usual contempt for SEO, Search Engine Optimization, I present no links on a silver platter for “surfers” who are “patience challenged.” (“Why not link?” you ask. See my top ten (by visitor count) essay No Links is Good Links archived July 2012)

Bullying:

(God bless society for slow-w-w-ly starting to become ready to begin to face the effects of child bullying)

Being returned to a sixth form bullying environment can later cause PTSD-like trauma for a wife and mother 

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-49362577

(After referring to a controversial Bullies and Teachers quote…) I had felt foolish from the thought of readers scorning me for daring to say that children would bully and sexually assault each other. But they do. Since then, here is a story where a teacher called a six year old victim a silly girl. Her assault from peers during school playtime only became undeniable when she was too sore to sit down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-49084906

And here’s a new story where the mother notes that today her “raped on a play date” son “is not the same boy”

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-43884776

Of course I like our dear school teachers… AND I’m also feeling strident today, like a new feminist.

Music videos:

A whimsical parody song by a (former) history teacher, as an assignment for her night school class. 

It made my computer technician howl with laughter—he thanked me for showing him. By the way, that’s her own child in the video, how sweet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO0-7YAxxDY&feature=c4-overview&list=UUAiABuhVSMZJMqyv4Ur5XqA

Same history teacher, singing like Lady Gaga for Bastille Day. The link was in an essay on alienated young folks in big cities getting caught up in communism, holy terrorism and other revolutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXsZbkt0yqo

David Wong of Cracked Magazine has a piece that uses funny photos to explain a serious subject. 

Although now a liberal city slicker, Wong grew up in the country He remembers how it was, and can still “method act” what it’s like to be rural.

Six Reasons for Trump’s Rise that No One Talks About.

Two favorite quotes from Wong: 

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elite. “Are you assholes listening now?” 

And “But you might as well take time to try to understand them, because I'm telling you, they'll still be around long after Trump is gone.”

https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

The Ca-na-da song 

that all of we who knew centennial year sang. 

I found it by using a search engine. This is NOT, unfortunately, the version that played on TV commercials, causing the CBC telephones to ring off the hook with folks requesting the lyrics. That one the CBC must have lost, as I saw no trace of it during Canada’s 150th anniversary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vE17TazIvM

Blog essay 

Ten Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America. Written by an American, but not by an “Ugly American.” Mark Manson, living abroad, has truly mingled as an equal, and has a Brazilian wife.

https://markmanson.net/10-things-most-americans-dont-know#.tb3xib:Ta4m

Song by Carol King of Anticipation, (These are the good old days) sung outdoors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NwP3wes4M8

*** *** Got Feminism? *** ***

There is a viking exhibit on now at the royal museum in Edmonton. Turns out the scientists were wrong about gender:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/15/how-the-female-viking-warrior-was-written-out-of-history

Today feminist theory is not from regular folks in consciousness raising circles, reflecting on lived experience, but from ivory tower academics:

http://quillette.com/2016/08/26/what-i-learned-in-my-womens-studies-classes/

News story: As regards a women’s liberation “laundry list” of the attributes of domestic violence and emotional abuse, only now being recognized by the Scottish police, old-is-new-again, here is a link. I had placed the link not on my blog but in one of my comments on Penelope Trunk’s blog post about why there is no “hashtag me too” for domestic abuse.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-42890990

Blog page: Curiously, although Penelope’s post has her usual vast number of readers, it has far less than her usual number of commenters. Some readers could only bear to contact her privately.

https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2019/07/20/the-reason-theres-no-metoo-for-domestic-violence/#comments

One can submit to Allah and still, just like the Muslim with daughters I wrote about in London, believe in basic rights for women, even unto infuriating the Mullahs in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The London attraction with the most visitors is the Tate Modern:

“At the exhibit gift shop—some shelves and counters by a cafe—I picked up a collection called Sister Outsider, essays and speeches by Audre Lorde, the U.S. Black poet and university teacher. About a decade before the taking down of the iron curtain, she went to Uzbekistan, a Soviet Socialist Republic. She wrote on page 29: 

QUOTE 

But she talked most movingly of the history of the women of Uzbekistan, a history which deserves more writing about than I can give it here. The ways in which the women of this area, from 1924 on, fought to come out from behind complete veiling, from Moslem cloister to the twentieth century. How they gave their lives to go bare-faced, to be able to read. Many of them fought and many of them died very terrible deaths in this battle, killed by their own fathers and brothers. It is a story of genuine female heroism and persistence. I thought of the South African women in 1956 who demonstrated and died rather than carry pass books. For the Uzbeki women, revolution meant being able to show their faces and go to school, and they died for it. A bronze statue stands in a square of Samarkand, monument to the fallen women and their bravery. Madam went on to discuss equality between the sexes. How many women now headed collective farms, how many women Ministers. She said there were a great many ways in which women governed; there was no difference between men and women now in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics… 

UNQUOTE”

*** *** End Feminism *** ***

Another blog feature. 

I make no comment to you about this one, showing diverse views, thanks to the US freedom of speech, regarding US management of social resources.

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/why-does-america-have-potholed-roads.html

Song by Pete Seeger, singing Who killed Norma Jean, from my essay about Group Level Integrity of February 2012

http://www.musictory.com/music/Pete+Seeger/Who+Killed+Norma+Jean

*** *** Start Doctor Who *** *** 

music by fans

Here is a sentimental fan collage over the song I don’t deserve you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrCB5n-bbU

fan music video

a gorgeous fan music video that has glimpses of Clara's last Christmas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Q97xHs-NE

Song 

If you remember Don Maclean’s sympathetic song “Starry starry night,” and if you don’t mind “stills,” 

(still photographs from the moving pictures) 

then here is the sympathetic song “Chances,” performed by Athlete, with lyrics, where the doctor gives aide and comfort to the greatest painter who ever lived. 

Incidentally, as they go up the art museum stairs, on the landing is a statue of a Greek hero using his polished shield as a mirror to see Medusa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4aVKQZaSmY

Drama clip: “It’s OK to change, as long as you keep moving”: The 11th doctor’s fated change from his life as #11 into #12, with comfort from a dearly departed companion. You see a close up of her wedding ring hand as she goes down the bannister. It’s a comfort to fans: the girl who did stripper-grams married at last; she and her husband passed on at the same time. As Amy said, “Together, or not at all.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwacha2xLuo

*** *** End Doctor Who *** ***

Lengthy BBC news feature documenting how you can immigrate “on paper” 

and yet “in reality” not like or respect your new homeland, 

but for this family, 

in the end, love finds a way 

“I was forced to marry my cousin”

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-48949483

Seven Reasons Why Europeans Don’t Like the EU

From the Washington Post newspaper, 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/25/7-reasons-why-some-europeans-hate-the-e-u/

Live action Song, by anime fans, of gentle sympathy, like a Gregorian sacred chant, 

composed in late 20th century Japan for Elfen Lied, 

Surely Elfen Lied is the most violent anime I will ever see, about abandoned children, some innocent, some not, all trying hard to be brave. 

Very moving, but I can’t recommend it to anyone my age because of the violence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvCpCg0sGkg 

Another version of that song, illium, that is NOT linked on my blog: 

I have just now found a full choir in a Kiev church with beautiful overlapping parts. “Comments are disabled,” perhaps to stop ignorant anime-fans who would scornfully say the innocent choir doesn’t know the splendid anime. Nice to see that Godless communism did not extinguish religion.

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

At Japanese pop culture festivals, 

Down in the US of A, 

the fans will always make music videos at a sunny campus, or convention centre, amongst warm green grass and open waters.

The only Youtube music exception to sunshine is this one, filmed in my adopted home town of Calgary, 

up in Canada, 

with background snow. 

The music is from the end of the movie Wreck-it Ralph, by Owl City.

https://vimeo.com/56749712

A long movie review, 

4/5 stars for a one-of-a-kind flic, Boyhood, on Roger Ebert’s web site. Apparently the movie, rated R, asks questions: 

is “normal” a construct?; can we change ourselves?; and can we “put away childish things?” There are over 130 comments, which is unusual.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/boyhood-2014

A sour lengthy book review about a book’s “social context,” which I don’t agree with, but handy for young people curious to realize how certain others think they see behind the curtain of this Omelas we live in. 

I can understand writers becoming strident, but I have little patience for writers driven to sourness. The review is of Book Two of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/03/the-prime-of-life-by-simone-de-beauvoir.html

Music for Parents, opening credits

of nice anime shows:

If your teenager is trying to tell you that Japanese cartoons, anime, is NOT like childish funny American Saturday morning cartoons—with childish funny opening credits— and with American- style super-short attention spans, then here are three 13-episode “story arc” shows (one season) you can watch together:

The first is where a virtual high school has a few deceased real teens among virtual characters. The setting is limbo, before heaven. The angel-student at the piano is all alone without friends, because she wants the other students to move on past limbo into heaven, but they are “rebels against the God.” Lots of guns, but amusing, because of course no one in limbo can die. Called Angel Beats!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjnOt6xaxXg

This one is where older big angel kids take care of younger angel kids until they can move on to heaven. They live in a walled city with rustic wind turbines, full of peaceful humans. Again no deaths, no guns, no wicked witches. Called Haibane Renmei

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjnOt6xaxXg

This one is of a lone traveler with a talking motorcycle. The first of the 13 episodes, with criminal people on the road, is a foil to set up all the lawful city-states to visit. Only if you truly hate the first episode should you skip ahead to the 13th episode. (If you do, then you’ll skip back to episode 2, for sure) Practising pulling out the pistol is not to be a western gunslinger, but to follow the eastern sensei’s teachings of the “way,” or “do,” as in ‘way of the tea ceremony’ or ‘way of the empty hand.’ (karate-do) As it happens, the tea ceremony is as rigid as tai chi or a martial arts kata.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVgHN8cfy1I

Here’s a link to a nice blog post, 

inviting the reader to feel “yes!” and a sense of community, about how writing on her blog would “hold memories” and “change perception of time” and “extend time.” Well expressed. I couldn’t comment on it myself, because the comment thingy would not take my URL, but you may have better luck.

https://margaretgraw.com/2019/02/16/writing-as-soul-food/

What is a nerd? 

Roger Ebert explains in his movie review of Revenge of the Nerds II

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/revenge-of-the-nerds-ii-nerds-in-paradise-1987

A blog post about why trying something with low odds of success can be good for you, by one of my favorite bloggers, a fellow I have corresponded with, Scott Berkun. 

…Queerly enough, the link was in my post about modern Arabs still being tribal, something westerners need to admit before they can ever (mistakenly) hope to impose western values.

https://scottberkun.com/2014/why-bad-odds-can-be-good/

Feature article by a pilot 

on how passenger jets are pressurized, and whether it’s safe for an air marshal to fire his pistol inside the cabin at 30,000 feet.

https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/how-things-work-cabin-pressure-2870604/

Fiction: From the publisher, lengthy excerpt of the first three chapters of an award winning Chinese science fiction novel, translated into English. The communism history matches what I’ve read elsewhere.

https://www.tor.com/2014/09/30/the-three-body-problem-silent-spring-excerpt-chapters-1-3/

A letter by Captain Kirk’s hero, President Lincoln, read aloud by General Marshal, the best WWII general the US had, according to business guru Peter Drucker. As for General Patton? There is a good reason other generals in Europe outranked Patton, while Marshal outranked them all. His duty was to stay in the pentagon, at the request of the president, and that is where he served out the war. After the war the president made him the secretary of state, and insisted that his name be on the great plan to rebuild Europe: The Marshal Plan. The reading is from early in the movie Saving Private Ryan.

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

I wanted to include here my link to a South Korean Youtube of the song Marching Through Georgia but I see it is now restricted as being “private.”

Lastly, something NOT linked in my blog:

LENGTHY printed news feature that I once printed out to show a mother: My disabled son- ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

https://www.bbc.com/news/disability-47064773

Sean Crawford

Calgary

2019

Footnotes: 

~From just two days ago comes an article on why kids become bullies, and it’s not from reasons we have traditionally assumed:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190913-why-some-children-become-merciless-bullies

~Here’s that controversial quote mentioned for the second link at the top, using the original fonts. I’ve included a preceding paragraph to give context. 

Sorry to say, I just cannot imagine a teacher reading this quote out loud at a staff meeting. Let’s hope I’m wrong; let’s hope I’m being “imagination challenged”:

QUOTE

Since my day, according to reports by kids in the book, there are now anti-bullying assemblies, sometime complete with skits. I doubt they are any more effective than those assemblies in my day that pleaded with us to intervene if we saw someone vandalizing. 

(Incidentally, at my school, vandalism included the main girls “smokers” washroom having every steel stall door ripped away) 

Of course we all thought our teachers were crazy to suggest we intervene. Today the assemblies are probably as useless as ever: Obviously they didn’t help any of the kids testifying.

I wonder how many boys and girls, bullied and sexually assaulted, end up losing their innocence … growing up to be well groomed, well employed, socially skilled adults moving among us, adults who are social isolates because they have lost something along the way… A kid above says, “I just can’t be around people anymore.”

UNQUOTE