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.

Joy of Mother Indira

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got joy?

At our Friday Free Fall writing a lady of East Indian heritage did a poem about how her parents were so pleased, here in the New World, to have a Ford car, a house that wasn’t made of mud, and—I forget what else she wrote. She was writing to honor and appreciate her parents. Me too, in my own poems. I said, “Well, I have a poetry manuscript… where some of the poems deal with poverty after the Martians.” I didn’t tell her that one of the characters was someone the British would call Asian, or, less often, South Asian.

Mother Indira

Mother Indira, 

who fled harsh parents in India, 

once had crumbs of love, 

lots of learned books, 

but no husband or children.

Now in a commune she knows love and orphans.

Harry and Molly have lost their father and mother

but not their need for love

to fill them in the morning and at bedtime. 

Mother Indira wears army boots,

and a sensible sweater under a thin pretty shawl.

Harry enters the kitchen,

“May I please have a glass of milk?”

“Have you had one today?”

“No.”

“Then you may.”

Molly enters the kitchen,

“May I please have a slice of bread?”

“Have you had one today?”

“No.”

“Then you may.”

Mother Indira saws the bread for Molly,

as Molly always ends up cutting a triangle.

Molly returns the loaf to the breadbox.

Mother Indira clomps around the kitchen.

There is a little extra milk,

and a little extra bread.

Her eyes crinkle with affection,

thinking how surprised the kids will be to have this dessert.

“Bread pudding—oh boy!”

“You may, you may, you may” 

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2020

To Camrose from Gotham

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got New York eyes?

“Sometimes, due to the publishing houses being in New York City, and hence many writers being glued to New York, I think we readers may absorb a biased New York person’s view of the world.”

Sean Crawford

Note: Camrose is legally a city to me, with over 10,000 people. But to New Yorkers? Especially when looking down several blocks of Main Street, sans traffic lights? It’s a town.

Forget concrete canyons cramped between cold skyscrapers… Via the vast open road grid of the singing plains I returned to the big town of Camrose. Being further from any big city, Camrose is bigger than other towns, big enough to have it’s own comic book store on Main Street, big enough to have a Japanese (anime and manga) youth-culture store sharing floorspace with a maternity store: This was over in the industrial-retail area of quonset huts and flat-roofed warehouses, just a couple blocks off Main.

This time, instead of a day visit, I decided to “overnight,”—for two nights, in fact— staying at the foot of Main Street in one those big old hotels with toilets-down-the-hall: My usual hotel preference, being a frugal fellow. This time I had a plan, as I told the locals: “Something I’ve never done in my life, anywhere, is spend the day going down Main Street, stopping at one coffee shop after another, reading good books.” I still haven’t done so, my plan failed, as adventure called. What might amuse you, dear reader, is not my private adventure, but seeing Camrose through the eyes of a stereotype New Yorker. Hence this essay.

I have gleaned that in New York City, partly for historical “concrete jungle” reasons, 

(where City Hall wouldn’t help you unless you were part of a group having “some pull,” with the classic question being, “Who is your rabbi?”) 

“everybody and their dog” is part of an ethnic group. Not here. In Camrose folks are just regular. A highway history sign explains that immigration began with a pastor back in Norway sending people on over, but today you wouldn’t know a Norwegian from a Scandinavian from a European in general. 

A New Yorker might wonder: Are the townsfolk insular, are their clothing stores only for working on farms and ranches? No. Some folks here holiday far south to Mexico, while their computers reach across the world. (As farmers check commodity prices) I was talking with a young man at Walrus clothing: The store had no stiff jeans or plaid, only cool, hip stuff. I walked around the racks thinking, “Wow.” He had no single ethnic background, his father from Britain; but he had relatives all over Europe, and had traveled, or meant to travel, to a lot of places on the continent, but not to Germany. “Not Germany? That’s the country I know best, as I was stationed there.”

I related how at college, which draws students from prairie towns, in September we went around the class saying our heritage: something we saw as being in our dim past, not our present. When we got to me I said, “Heritage? Well, I guess I’m a mongrel.” Laughter. (Having ancestors from three kingdoms and the republic of Yankeeland)  I wonder what would a New Yorker think, hearing us in that prairie store, without ethnicity, conversing about the wide world? 

The young man was going to London soon, but only for a week. “Only a week?”

“A busy family,” he explained. 

“I get it. The family store? (Nods) Let’s hope you can get a tax write-off or something—you deserve it, for having your own business.”

“My dad’s an accountant.” We smiled. He wanted to know where to go in London, so I tried to think of things. He already knew to avoid the giant ferris wheel. (Because of line ups, as he had found at the Eiffel Tower, and really, who wants to “take in the view” for a whole 40 minutes?) When I went back later, I only found his sister. She was going to London too, she said, so I could safely leave him a message with her. 

“I forgot to say he could try the Imperial War Museum, after a nice walk from the tube station. It has a V-1 and a V-2 rocket suspended from the ceiling.” I don’t  know if it was from her youth, or from being a nonreader, but surely it wasn’t from being a small-towner: She didn’t know what a V-2 was! I kept a straight face: “It’s a guy thing, your brother will know.”  

A few doors down, again going against the small town “dowdy matron” stereotype, was a ladies clothing store called Fun Fashion. I just had to walk in, right to the back, squeezing past all the lady shoppers, and then out again, thinking, “wow,” because everything in there was fun. In New York they respect, “Bad ass.” At Fun Fashion was sign saying, “big ass woman” next to a sign saying, “Raised on love, sustained on lipstick.” I tell you, “big ass town” does not mean “boring.” 

If towns are less insular these days it’s partly because of economics. I stood chatting in a store selling art, furniture and handicrafts, all locally made, as children, while their artist mother knelt to assemble her merchandise rack, played on the floor. The counter clerk rattled off for me a number of local ethnic restaurants, up and down the street, which I could try. Yes, townsfolk are more broad minded these days, but then again, society is more affluent these days. People here can have exotic palates because they can afford to dine out more than back in my boyhood. Plus, now they can truly afford to eat.

At Fiona's coffee shop I talked to a granddaughter of starving pioneers. Call her “Sue.” Sometimes, as a young mother, Sue had almost no food for her kids. “You can’t make food out of dust bunnies,” she said. Now over 80 years old, younger than my parents had been, she was quite talkative, no doubt as she had talked during her many years as a waitress. Sue told of spending her tip money on the way home to buy a scanty bit of food. I nodded, saying, “My mum had nothing to feed us but jam and rice.” You do what you can, of course; Sue took her husband back three times before telling him to “take a hike,” after he could afford to take his girlfriend skiing, but not give Sue any food money. 

Along the prairie road grid, with relatives and children in all sorts of small towns—isn’t that nice?— Sue would happily drive, but not as much now because, although in good health, she had a spell of  “road hypnotism”—the roads are so straight!—driving miles past her intended stop for coffee. And Sue recently told her daughter she won’t drive into the big city anymore, “you can come and get me,” because Edmonton has all changed.

Her grandparents came from Dakota with 200 head of cattle, but they lost all but two: one of which, thank God, was a milk cow. They had to keep that cow alive at all costs. Some aboriginals collected long grass from sloughs, while other natives brought the parents food. An indigenous man carried a pot bellied stove for them all the way from town. So Sue has no patience for anybody believing in racism against Indians. I didn’t say so, as conversation flowed so fast, but I was reminded of novelist Pat Conroy’s family: While his dad, The Great Santini, was usually stationed in the American south, Pat and his siblings were forbidden to soak up the surrounding white racism: His dear mother’s family, back in the hills, had survived only because good black people brought them food.

I don’t suppose Sue had ever heard of the “hash tag MeToo” movement, but she told me of her sister and her becoming tough fighters so that word would get around amongst the workers to leave them alone. One night they piled too-many-in-the cab of a Peterbilt truck to go to a dance. That dark night the sisters—you never went to the outhouse alone—jumped up onto the truck bed to fight thieves trying to steal some truck chains and stuff. The heroic girls prevailed, partly because the dance emptied out to the excited of calls of “Fight! Fight!”

We talked of dogs, and of her grandpa’s half-wolf dog being nice to her. I spoke of staying with folks in the bush and a visitor bringing a wolf-dog who would do big half circles around us. I joked that we should put a shark fin on that dog. He didn’t like it when I started half circling him!  

Sue and I had a good time… I wondered what a cold New Yorker would have thought, of us talking of old bush life, along with a perfect stranger saying hello to me as she passed my table.

Speaking of friendly, and of me staying two nights: On Day One I spotted a sandwich board inscribed, “The buddha bowl is back!” So I turned on in and asked. A tall man with a wispy goatee explained how they start with a bed of rice and build up shredded veggie layers, with black beans or chick peas, hot or cold sauce. We discussed how early I could arrive and still get fresh-cooked-that-day rice. On Day Two a young lady at the counter said she had heard I was coming in for a buddha bowl. More friendliness: A young man with gentle blue eyes and a plain white Sikh turban was bustling around the back and out near the counter. I asked, “Are you a Khalsa?” That was indeed his brand of Sikhism, and his brand, he told me, was big on yoga. I said, “My roommate was a Khalsa, would invite me to temple on Sunday for free vegetarian food… I met his mother; she was a Roman Catholic.”

I learned that the structure of Catholicism is compatible with the structure of Sikhism, and as we talked I couldn’t help wondering if New Yorkers would be surprised: Of course we out west have converted Sikhs, and Muslims too: There’s a CBC television comedy series called Little Mosque On the Prairie.

Another surprise might be walk-in gender neutral washrooms—in a cafe-store for gamers. And for book lovers. There, besides buying new games and new books, you could play used games and borrow used books. And have coffee. And beer. I asked, “Eh? With minors in here?” Turns out they have a licence like a restaurant would, even with minors present. So I had a craft beer from Turner Valley, South of Calgary, using a Germany recipe, for “Fahr,” a sort of wheat grass beer. Very smooth, I really recommend it. 

I related how the first man to sell investors on drilling for natural gas in the valley took a couple financiers walking in an open field, then suddenly said, “Let’s cook lunch” and knelt to set a match to a puddle on the ground. Cooked a whole meal. Sold!

Good thing I and the youthful owner, father of a two-year-old, had a nice conversation before I ordered my beer: So he cheerfully didn’t hold it against me when I couldn’t stay awake at my table. At least I snoozed sitting up. I truly hadn’t known that my body, after my private adventures, was so marginal a single beer could do me in.

Getting back to racism again, he had a special section for selling new anti-racism books by and about Indians and Metis. (And one was by a US black about whites being silly) That’s because, he explained, if he didn’t offer the books, then where else would you find them? I said I had just learned how the French, through a concerted effort, assimilated the Occitan in the early 20th century. “Alsace-Lorraine?” No, the Occitan were all through southern France. …Incidentally, during my two days in town I saw only two young “persons of colour” (Blacks) together. Perhaps I saw indigenous too, but if so I have forgotten, as I wouldn’t have thought to take note. And of course in a Chinese restaurant I saw a family, “Asians” to us, who, down in the States might have been, according to my reading, self-described as being “persons of colour.”

As I’ve noted on my blog before, I have a knack for talking to strangers; meanwhile, they say visitors to New York are told to avoid even making eye contact—yet, I received one or more stranger’s “hello” on the Camrose sidewalk. I am amused to think that in a single day I had talked cosmopolitan travel, life in the bush, Sikhism and assimilation. I guess I’ve had a well rounded life… even if I never care to visit the “Writer’s Mecca” of New York City.

Sean Crawford

On the Great Plains

April 

2019

Footnote: 

This blog is less journalism, and more what I’d tell you in a bar, but the dialogue is not so much what I would tell you in person, as what fits the printed page. “Less journalism” means I won’t torture myself with lengthy qualifiers, nuance, and excruciating correctness, while if I was a journalist then I would have collected names and proper spelling.

Resources:

~For assimilating the Occitan into French, see a lengthy BBC -Travel- quote at the end of my essay Assimilation, archived January 2019.

   

~For my previous day trip to Camrose, about six months back, see Road Trip Reflections, archived October 2018.

~For talking to strangers, tourism style, see A Tourist Making Conversation With Locals, and Meeting the Locals, archived July 2017 and February 2018.

~For authentic hotels see Cheap Hotels are Fun, and Cheap Hotels I Have Known, archived November 2017 and January 2018.

~For a day of NOT talking to strangers, on a really bad hair day, see Say Hello to Strangers, archived March 2014.

~And lastly, regarding (by hit count) one of my ten most popular essays of all time, regarding why I do refer my readers to look in the archives, and don’t serve to my readers “links on a silver platter,” see No Links is Good Links, archived July 2012. (The blog started in 2009)

Assimilation

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

E pluribus unum
"Out of many, one" U.S. national motto, found on most U.S. currency

Hello Reader,

Got history?

Amusing idealism for assimilation: I once a read a letter by the founder of Boy Scouts, Lord Baden-Powell, referring to Northern Britain. A footnote explained that this was the term for Scotland, for some people, back then.

Amusing reverse assimilation: During elementary school in British Columbia everybody sang the Twelve Days of Christmas line: 

…four collie birds, (three French hens)… from the Scottish word collie meaning black. 

(And we spelled Hallowe’en with an apostrophe, and we had a portrait of the queen in every classroom) 

Now we have assimilated the song into America: on the radio I hear “four calling birds” A collier, as you may know, is a ship or barge carrying coal. My dictionary says it also means a miner. Some folks say the original collie dogs were black.

As you know, the Americans don’t believe in hereditary titles: Sir John, a Canadian hero, was “of North America,” but not “an American.” Maybe you’ve heard of his equivalent, Alexander Hamilton. Here’s the opening song to the current stage musical, Hamilton:

How does a bastard, orphan, 

son of a whore and a Scotsman, 

dropped in the middle of a forgotten

Spot in the Caribbean by providence, 

impoverished, in squalor

Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

Part of the American Dream was the concept of a national “melting pot” where you would feel shame at being “unAmerican,” a shame fuelling your motivation to be American, and you could even become, in the brave new world, something revolutionary, new, and exciting—a hero. Yes, don’t call Alexander Hamilton a “dirty traitor”—once the revolution succeeded, he became a Founding Father.

Canadians, perhaps as part of their heritage of colonialism, have never said “melting pot.” I remember my grade five teacher, Mr. Thompson, telling us about a father and son from merry old England, down in Washington State, being angrily just about thrown off the bus as they struggled to understand U.S. change for the fare box. Up in Canada, he told us, without a melting  pot, the pressure to fit in was not so intense.

“Hey buddy, got assimilation?” 

At the time of the U.S. revolution in 1776 there were better maps of New England than of the Scottish Highlands.—While earlier in that same century, the kilt and the bagpipes had been outlawed—By next century, by the time Canada had become a formal country, a “confederation” of provinces in 1867, the British maps were up-to-date. And then it was NOT an Englishman, but a Scotsman, Sir John A. MacDonald, who became Canada’s first prime minister. 

By the time Canada had its 100th birthday, in 1967, Scotland was vastly English speaking, as were vast reaches of Ireland. True story from my boyhood: An Irish shopkeeper asked two young schoolboys why they weren’t speaking Irish. The lads replied, “We thought that was only for in school.”

By the 20th century, in national times of strife, such as World War II, or the Falklands, the entire British Isles (except for the republic of Ireland) would instinctively act in unison, with the “Highland” units fighting as British units against tyranny.

In other words, as generations had passed, assimilation had succeeded. As with the coming of the industrial revolution, there had been groans, bruises and iniquity early on. Blake's poem Jerusalem includes the phrase "those satanic mills" Except for English literature, today there is little way to be immersed in a rural-feudal culture that had lasted so many generations. In elementary school we had vinyl record players; sometimes there would be a still-picture film strip projected, we would advance a frame every time we heard a squeeze-horn beep. It was then that I heard Dirty Old Town, a song I would not hear again until the Pogues covered it, so many years later. 

We heard women and children, as historical characters, speaking about the horrors of the industrial revolution. And at the end an adult would tell the child that although there are dark times now, some day the industrial revolution would lead to a better, sunlit world…

You make a revolution by breaking bones, an omelette by breaking eggs, and assimilation by breaking hearts… Maybe there is no softer, easier way.

Comedian George Carlin, known for his cutting no-nonsense humour, was born and grew up in Little Ireland in New York City. Of course he was fond of his childhood “culture,” but, as he put it in his autobiography: I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I’m an American. You know—you GROW.

It was in 2014, three years before “Canada 150,” (national birthday) that I found myself in London England, reading newspapers, short days before folks in Scotland were having a Scottish-only referendum on national independence from Britain.  I wondered if it was to keep their sacred culture. (Maybe it was charming how they allowed children as young as age 16 to vote on this grave issue—maybe a low voting age was part of the Scottish culture. Maybe.)

I can imagine someone like Carlin joking about the letters to the editor posted from Scotland to London newspapers by people who were pro-independence. (I read them with interest) Carlin might ask: 
Did writers lament pre-teen kids not speaking Scottish in stores? 
Or teenage girls kneeling to play discs that weren’t of Scottish folk songs, but of the Fab Four from Liverpool? 
Or teenage boys preferring English blue jeans to kilts? 
No, no indeed. People told the editor about having scorn for “those rascals in Whitehall,” (parliament) and wanting a government closer to home. Carlin would sympathize with distrust of government. 

Sometimes, the ability to perceive tyranny is not always Common Sense: Hence the booklet of that name, by Tomas Paine, to convert colonists from hailing their leader to doing something new: making a revolution. It’s not always easy, but it is common sense to believe whatever your peers commonly believe, even when they agree to not knowing in advance whether assimilation will succeed or be worth the cost.  As they will say with techno revolutions, industrial and digital, time will judge.

Canadians might not have been able to perceive their colonial legacy, not able to question their taken-for-granted belief in God and king and country and assimilation. Meanwhile, perhaps a few were frustrated that the rest of the English speaking world respected “American literature” and “English literature” but not Canadian literature. Such is colonialism. 

In Canada there was no political revolution. If Canadians, on rare occasion, for their ancestors, use the term “Founding Fathers” one senses an embarrassment at applying this U.S. word to Canadians who are not in the same major league as the neighbouring Founders. Certainly in Canada the “Fathers of Confederation” never risked death by hanging as dirty traitors. In fact, the queen wanted the provincial colonies to assimilate with each other in 1867: “All the better to resist Yankee imperialism, my dear.” 

The United States civil war, remember, only ended in 1865, and it is a sad historical cliche that countries are sorely tempted to imperialize after victory. For example, North America only entered the history books after the Spanish forced out the last of the Moors in 1492. That’s when Queen Isabella did her thing. Every schoolchild knows: "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

A few hundred years after Isabella, a man, a mere mortal, a known heavy drinker, became Canada’s first ever prime minister: Sir John A. MacDonald. Call him the first Father of Confederation. About a century and a half later, in 2018, a statue of that man, outside the provincial parliament of British Columbia, would be deemed persona non grata. (person not pleasing) Removed. This action made the Canadian newspapers coast to coast. 

“Nations get the political leaders (and statues) they deserve.” (As my uncle said, when he dropped bombs on Berlin) 

Why is Sir John being reviled? Besides everything else, assimilation. He instigated Residential Schools, with infamous results. Children of various nations (tribes) were assimilated into the common language, true, but the effort was botched so badly …I will not take space here to explain, as right now experts are explaining better than I… so badly that first nation children would not even be taught to feel pride in their second nation. Not like, say, modern characters in Doctor Who, such as his medical student companion, who speaks proudly of “we British.”  

I think beliefs around assimilation have changed. Just as there has been, in my own lifetime, a change from citizenship requiring five years residency, voting age being 21, and capital punishment being legal and good. Those have all changed. Now we believe in the right of homosexuals to exist, to have freedom of assembly, to have rights in their private homes, and of children to be transexual. How nice to have a living, changing culture under a trusted, living God.

Since about the time Canadians wrote their own constitution, (I was already an adult) called a charter, there has been official belief NOT in assimilation of Indians but rather, that they will always be separate, in perpetuity, preferring to live and marry among their own kind, with membership officially based not on “race” but on bloodlines. This charter, when I was a young man, had led to a Canadian judge ruling that a person of aboriginal heritage can cross the international border out of loyalty to his or her tribal-nation, not Canada. 

As well, possibly to avoid a double standard for native and non-native, more probably to include Quebec, (There was a 1970’s government report on Bi-lingualism and Multi-culturalism) when I was still a boy, Canadians began believing in a “multicultural mosaic” in place of assimilation, something “better” than the U.S. melting pot. This meant separate cultural identities were OK provided, like pretty mosaic tiles in plaster, people were assimilated into a common bedrock of language and cultural identity. Times have sure changed: Our very latest prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has said that Canada does not have any common culture. To me he is a minority of one; I think future Canadians, and the next prime minister too, will not agree. Such is Canada. 

In the U.S., from what I’ve read, people have gone from confidently believing in a “melting pot” to less confidently believing in “pluralism.” Their shared plaster would be their constitution. And democracy, of course. And also—?… I will tell you what’s too hard to say with a straight face: “We believe in the values of the enlightenment.” I realize that such is Europe’s response to Islamic extremist asylum seekers, but over here that would be too nebulous for a regular person.

I suppose shared culture is like shared customs: As an anthropologist said, “Better illogical customs than no customs at all.”

I wonder what the next change will be, for the U.S. and Canada? “The pendulum swings as the pendulums do.”

Sean Crawford

January

2019

Sidebar: While Canada has two official languages, English and French, it wasn't just the British who believed in assimilation. Today French is standard in France, but not until pressure: (from BBC-travel- The Language the French Forbade link)

Graham Robb, in his historical geography, The Discovery of France, noted that despite three centuries of efforts to make standardised French the language of all of France, in 1863 in the south of the country more than half the population remained non-French speaking. In the Dordogne the numbers were even higher, where more than 90% of the population was still largely Occitan speaking.

But a little more than 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th Century, the central government launched an aggressive campaign to extinguish any language that was not the standardised French. Occitan was forbidden to be taught in schools, and any children who used their mother tongue were punished, a practice that infused deep shame in many people. Many older adults in the Dordogne still tell stories about being humiliated in school for speaking Occitan.

  

Footnotes:

~I see I'm getting hits from Europe: I wrote Assimilation For Success, about Europe, archived December 2017, with a link(s) and footnote references to my related essays. Also see George Carlin and Diversity, archived October 2016.

~Of course it's possible to immigrate "on paper" but "in reality" not feel respect or love for your neigbors, as with this family in Scotland, at first, although later love led the way.

~I wrote about Baden-Powell’s idealism and thrift in two essays archived in September 2018.

~The question for we of today, if being judgemental of John A. MacDonald, is binary: Did Sir John ignore the "common sense" of his peers, just like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today, to be a "minority of one," or are we of today ignorant of history?

~UPDATE: In the newspaper for Saturday Jan 5: The Manitoba Public Insurance agency, referring to the "truth and reconciliation"  (for residential schools) hearings, is considering disciplinary action against staff who initially approved a Star Trek fan's vanity license plate for his car (since revoked) His plate had a border "We are the Borg" and "Resistance is futile" The problem? The plate read ASIMIL8 ...  This news story documents that, regardless of what Sir John may have thought, Canadians no longer believe in assimilation for indigenous. .. although surely they used to, recently enough for the idea to now be hurtful. (Someday, tragedy plus time will equal comedy, as I remember Lily Tomlin saying)

~Now that time has passed, my favorite act of assimilation was right after the civil war. I chuckle at Abraham Lincoln, on the White House lawn, ordering the band to play “the south’s” song, Dixie. To the horrified onlookers gasping, “Dixie?” Abe joked “It’s ours now, we captured it fairly” but what he meant was: There must be no divisions, the U.S. must now be assimilated, all together, for all time… In this effort, unlike certain countries where historical resentments linger like roadside plastic wrappers, the U.S. nobly succeeded.

~As for pendulums, and a map of England, (link) here is a fun 1965 Roger Miller Youtube song, called England Swings.

~And here’s the Pogues singing Dirty Old Town.