The Art of The Workaround

I recently pitched over the front of my bicycle and broke my collarbone, which forced me to find ways around the limitations my injury presented.  As soon as I could dress and undress myself, I was back at the gym, having to work around the steel plate with screws in my clavicle.  My rotator cuff hadn’t fared well in the fall either.  Looking around the gym, I saw I wasn’t the only one with a handicap.  Most of the gym rats had wrapped knees and wrists, or wore belts, but like any injured athletes, they didn’t stop training.  If they had to cut back on leg exercises for a while to pamper their bad knees, they concentrated on upper body workouts until they could add some lower body to the routine. I took to calling my workouts my workarounds.  Because I had to back off my weak spots until they were healed, there were tedious hours of light weight lifting, feeling like I wasn’t making progress, but I couldn’t stop.  I had to baby my injuries until they were better and build up slowly once they were.  The clavicle and shoulder were gradually less painful, and the doctor assured me that the fix was stronger than the original bone, though I wasn’t convinced, now that it had so many screw holes in it.  Anti-inflammatories were also useful. 

Having the ability to find a workaround requires both vertical and horizontal thinking, an important skill in a host of professions from the petty thief to the holder of a corner office.  Problems arise in the real world, and conventional wisdom suggests straightforward remedies, which are not always the most helpful. In order to advance, a society needs to let its past injuries heal in peace without pushing too hard against the pain.  People learn to work around the handicaps they are given.  Some people rail against their limitations and bang their frustrated heads against the wall, others surrender to substances, while a few apply themselves like unheralded paralympians to show, if only to themselves, that there is always a way around.  Our society often stumbles, but we find ways to move forward, often a path learned the hard way through false starts.  If we aren’t ready to alter the structure of our society to fix recurring problems, we need to glue together the salvageable elements from the wreckage of the past to build bridges to the future.  Otherwise, we will shake each other to pieces in a never-ending, mutually damaging war.   The body, the soul, society, and even the marketplace run on compromise and innovation, or as I like to call it, the workaround.  

An early parallel to the workaround is the jury rig, which brings to mind ship repairs, with sailors lashing a broken boom with rope so the ship can sail home. There is a theory that the jury part of the phrase comes from the French word for day, jour, implying that the repair might only last a day.  One of the weaknesses of this workaround is that putting undue pressure on a fix may cause another system failure. A permanent repair to the ship would require a new piece of uncompromised timber.  

A jury rig, given full rein, can end up as a kludge, defined as an “ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole."  A mechanism like this may continue to function, but it is clumsy and temporary, and related to the words bodge or fudge, which brings to mind MacGyver, the king of the workaround. 

Hackers are in the business of workarounds.  Software developers build systems, and hackers, from curiosity, notoriety or profit, delight in finding holes in the system that they can slide into, like cars merging on a freeway.  Before the system is aware, it finds itself serving another master.    Programmers know that to block hackers, they sometimes have to burn down their poorly constructed houses and start again.    

In the world of entertainment, Prince called himself a symbol because his very name belonged to Warner Brothers.  Television networks routinely bleep words they don’t want viewers to hear, leaving the impression of free speech intact except for the odd forbidden word.  The act of censorship itself is a futile attempt to cover up the truth, but the reality still exists behind the fig leaf.  An iconoclast would destroy the offending statue, but the humanist finds a workaround that saves the entity and appeases the censor.  

We see products on supermarket shelves that are designed to imitate original brands and skate close to the wrong side of patents and trademarks, so that only the original producers of champagne and Parmigiano Reggiano are allowed to use those names.  Shady producers sell merchandise with similar names and imitative packaging, though any attempt to sell a McDonald's burger or a puppet mouse with a particular face brings down the legal weight of ferocious brand defenders.  Obvious and clumsy workarounds like these can be easily dislodged.    

In Greece, those who build houses often leave unfinished construction rods poking out of the roofs to indicate that the building is not finished, because completed buildings are taxed at a higher rate.  To an outside eye, the rusted corner ornaments are a cultural curiosity, but they are visible signs of a broader social breakdown.  The authorities suspect the building may never be finished, but they have no certain knowledge of the owner’s intentions, and cannot prosecute uncertainty.  Until a government realizes the need to rewrite a law, people will find ways around it.  In this same country, cynicism is rampant.  People believe that when the government decides to make a law, they make an escape window or workaround for themselves and their friends, then build the law around it.   
 
Recently, it has been brought to light that rich parents can buy their children's acceptance into big-name universities even if the applicants don’t have the qualifications for admittance.  Some of those caught were celebrity parents, so the stories had more traction than they might have in another time and place.  Not long ago, an English aristocrat would have assumed he could purchase a place for his son at Cambridge or Oxford by making a large enough donation to either University.  His son could eventually learn.  That’s what tutors were for.  The workaround practice of buying university places isn’t new, but it came as a shock to some.

Workarounds are used so often in our lives that we hardly recognize them for what they are.  Objects that have been invented to help us, like eyeglasses,   originally started as workarounds.  Somewhere in history, a man noticed that rock crystals in the right shape could become a tool for starting a fire.  The best fire starters had magnifying qualities, which, over a thousand years of refinement, were ground into eyeglasses or even contact lenses.  We have adapted materials like quartz, silica and petroleum to make smartphones that exceed the thinking speed of the human brain. The use of these building blocks began as a way to overcome difficulties, like distance, speed, and human frailty.   If one day soon we can’t go outdoors, it won’t take long for tinkerers to adapt virtual reality and drone technology to let our eyes go out to explore while our bodies are indoors, safe and protected.  Whatever happens to poison our world for human habitation, we will find a way around it.  

Some basic social supports, like daycare, began as workarounds.  It was a logical fix in early societies that the duties of motherhood could be shared with a network of sisters and relatives, so that more women were able to participate in activities that benefited the group, like agriculture and food preparation.  The children benefited from having an extended family with its broader range of educational input.

The best of intentions can have unintended consequences.  In Italy, the government passed a bill to protect workers’ rights.  The new strict labour laws applied only to companies with more than fifteen employees.  As a result, many burgeoning businesses limited their growth to avoid being subject to the new rules.  The new law worked well for artisans and family businesses, but economic growth stagnated.  To fill the gap in industry, the government courted multinationals who initially performed well, but were, in turn, subject to the pressures of supply and demand.  When the markets changed, the big companies were as loyal to the country that courted and supported them as a hen is loyal to an egg.  The hosts had been used, but they should have seen it coming.  They had shot themselves in the foot with flawed rules that business found easy to work around.  The original ill-conceived law, a workaround in its own time, had been a detriment to everyone.   

One of the most lucrative markets in modern times cashes in on the problems people have in coping with existence.  Solutions that range from antidepressant medication to wellness marketing are nothing more than fixes to get around our feelings of inadequacy and sadness.  We turned coping solutions into big business, but in the end, the offered workarounds did not fix the original problem.  If someone suffers trauma, there is no way to reverse the original injury, so we find ways to push it to the back of our minds, but the memory and subsequent pain will never disappear until we learn how to cancel memories, which will not be a good step forward. 

There is a wide range of coping techniques involving drugs and therapy. Humour is one method for exorcising pain, perhaps because we can transfer our pain to someone else. Their misfortune is our healing laugh.  When I was young, I often went to the movies on Saturdays with my older sister.  To stop myself from crying during sad passages in the film, I would look over at her, sure that she was well ahead of me in tears, and the sight of water running down her face would make me laugh.  It kept the sadness on the screen from entering my heart.  I didn’t want to be sad, so at that young age, I was already learning workarounds to avoid the embarrassing phenomenon of crying in public.  

When politicians suggest imperfect fixes for long-term problems, they refuse to think that they are stacking one jury rig on top of another. Social democrats wish to eliminate the flaws in a system that permits inequality, but are more reluctant to accept a patchwork of temporary fixes than traditional politicians.  Those on the radical left advocate altering the system from the ground up, calling for fundamental change rather than putting more fingers in a failing levee to protect territory that is already underwater. Those who resist radical change probably know that their willful blindness will come back to bite them.  

Temporary fixes and workarounds were never meant to solve problems permanently.  Sooner or later, structural changes need to be made.  When change comes, any workarounds in place become unstable or fail altogether.  Workarounds are brittle constructions.  They are not positive or negative in themselves, but are tools that can generate temporarily beneficial or disastrous results.    

The further we go into our future, the greater the effects of stress become apparent.  Stress has always existed, but its force has grown in proportion with our ever-expanding shared knowledge.  It is useful to understand your adversary, but when you know that he has an atomic bomb he can drop on you if he is in a bad mood, it can be stressful. Probably the most well-known and most commonly used stress reliever is religion, followed by alcohol.  People find ingenious ways to cope.  Making beer is an art.  

Tobacco, since its worldwide diffusion, has been a method of dealing with stress.  A quiet cigarette is a moment to stop and reflect, and a smoke on the run is for someone who needs a quick nicotine top-up.  We know now what many years of using cigarettes as a stress reliever does to the lungs, but if soldiers in the 20th-century wars chose that over going out of their minds with shell shock or having a smoke, the cigarette was the clear choice.  As can happen, a particular workaround might be worse than the monster it is trying to avoid.  Alcohol plays a similarly insidious role.     

The obvious way to relieve stress isn’t to find new coping mechanisms, but to eliminate the stressor that causes so many to turn to workarounds.  Historically, people have taken the drastic step of leaving home because of wars, natural disasters, religious persecution, or for better economic opportunities.  Whether the reason for flight is violence or hunger, the main driver behind these migrations is always money.  Wars are fought over control of territory because territory generates wealth.  In a new world order, people would not need to move to stay alive, because they and their neighbours would have the same benefits of clean running water, electricity, transport and communications.  The proliferation of mobile phones has all but accomplished the latter, the evidence being that a video can be posted online from a dot on the map in Africa and be seen immediately by the rest of the world.  Food, water, and employment are taking longer to catch up.  When a man who lives in that dot on the map sees how the rest of the world lives, he wants the same benefits for himself.  Along with the promise of adequate food and productive employment, he also wants healthcare, education, infrastructure and a fair rule of law.  Regardless of what the Bible says, it is natural to want something better than what you already have.  If you have a broken-down, jury-rigged plough, you wish that you had a sturdy, unbroken one.  When people want more and can’t have it right away, they become jealous, vindictive and make bad decisions.  To attain the promised land, people who don’t steal from others are forced to work as wage slaves because that is the only road open to them.  They hope it will be a temporary solution, a fix, but they end up spending the rest of their lives in the limited options offered by the workaround. Is poverty in Peru worse than poverty in the United States? Climate change will provoke new generations of refugees hoping to change the trajectories of their lives.   

Men have tried to construct societies where nobody suffers from want, but it has been demonstrated that mind-numbing uniformity kills initiative.  In the end, these utopias fail because people have a tendency to work around the rules to reinstate a hierarchy of wealth.  People want more than their neighbours have, and are willing to become outlaws if that is what is needed to achieve their objectives. We look for workarounds, honest or dishonest, if we think it will improve our lot.    

The cautionary sting in the tale of workarounds is that we should not depend on them, and if necessary, should consider discarding the entire jury-rigged kludge and building a sound structure from a new set of plans that do not totally revolve around money.  If we ever manage to conquer our petty jealousies, envy and greed, war will be relegated to being an awful curiosity of the past.  

Race & Culture

These days, darkening one’s skin to pass for someone of another race is considered disrespectful and wrong-headed.  It's just not done. Unless worn by true aboriginals, the wearing of feather headdresses and Mexican sombreros as costumes has also fallen out of favour.   The collective sliding scale of acceptability has pushed them to the naughty list.  A web-connected public plebiscite decides what should be relegated to the back drawer of history, and what will be allowed to stand, for the moment.  At one time or another, everything comes up for analysis, and it has always happened that totems of the past are thrown onto the bonfire by the guards of the new revolution.     
      
Things that were once out in the open are now taboo, and things that were taboo are now out in the open.  We behave as if prohibition never existed.  Priest pump for peace as if holy wars never happened. Behaviours that were once commonplace have been ruled out of order.  Pushing these now unacceptable events of history into the closet doesn't cancel them.  No amount of nose holding or looking the other way will make them disappear.   Being aware of the past is necessary for survival.  How many times can we make the same mistake?   The past shouldn’t be something mysterious, unimportant, remote, or forbidden, because humans would rather forget. Their psyches tell them it is unhealthy to revisit bad experiences too often, but they shouldn’t take the balm of amnesia too far.  When memory is erased, mistakes are repeated, and new strains of bad old ideas come along and take root again.  

Toppling statues of icons like Saddam, Stalin, or Nero is a post-conflict knee-jerk reaction to life under a dictator’s heel, but it does not change history.  People have always used what they were given and what they learned from the mistakes of the past in the struggle to survive.  It is easy to ignore history when the greatest personal accomplishment is to stay alive.  Defeated people have no stomach for dredging up the wrongs of the past.  They hope that the present and future will be better, but they ignore that a hungry, intimidated, and uneducated populace is easier to control. The indignant can vent their anger on statues, but it is the ideas, not the statuary, that need addressing.  

Many statues should be consigned to the scrapheap, but pulling them down won’t erase the sins of the past.  The buzz about cancelling offensive images from the culture is a distraction from the real thing.  There is probably laughter, margaritas, and tortillas at a Cinco de Mayo party, but many Americans don’t know that it celebrates a Mexican victory over French troops, who would have gone on to join the US Confederacy, helping the slave owners defeat Lincoln.  Yet even in Texas, they mindlessly celebrate Cinco de Mayo while protecting statues of Confederate generals.  These contradictions are usually based on mutual ignorance, which keeps people fighting amongst themselves, a useful tactic for those who hold power.

Nobody has put forward a fair and workable political system, but the idea often finishes dead in the water simply because it is a system.  People are not systems.  They are round pegs trying to fit into square holes while experts debate whether it is better to make the holes more round or humans more square.  Meanwhile, to survive, humans find their own ways to adapt and move forward.  Along the way, they may ask themselves if there could be things they are doing now that will be considered unfathomable errors by historians of the future. They drink beverages from open containers when it is known that exposed liquids are bombarded by harmful viruses. They wear eyeglasses, an outdated technology, akin to a pirate having to strap on a wooden leg.  They fail to provide free healthcare, housing, and food to the weakest members of society.  They send soldiers to kill other soldiers over remote pieces of land so they can move forward another square on the chessboard of domination. They fill the atmosphere with poison.  

Looking back and judging things according to today’s standards is like driving down a cul-de-sac and expecting to get somewhere.  It is true that there are some sins too big to wash away, that no matter when or where they were committed, they will always be unforgiven. “Just following orders” is less convincing today than it once was. Concentration camps have always been hell.  Traumatized soldiers were once shot for desertion.  Hungry, thieving children were sent from the UK, over the edge of the earth, to Australia.  

In a tightly organized society, anxiety is a problem.  Presumably, bees and ants don’t feel the frustration of constant collisions with their own kind but experience the event as a bonding ritual.  People look for ways to keep themselves calm in the mêlée.  Tobacco was once the most widespread worldwide remedy for anxiety, but it has become a health taboo. Like Coca-Cola, its addictiveness was an early experiment in product loyalty.  But smoking, drinking Coke, and chewing tobacco had willing consumers, early adopters of microdosing, playing Alice in Wonderland, a bit more of this and a bit less of that, until they had found the right balance to help them navigate their unintelligible lives.  Most smokers don’t know that in the First War, soldiers used cigarette smoke to cover up the stench of rotting corpses.  Lung cancer was the least of their worries.  

If a long-dead, barely remembered man like Al Jolson were to come back from purgatory, he would be sent straight to hell by the latest cultural posse who would lynch him as if he were the antichrist of blackface.  He would be greeted by howls that his face paint is insensitive, hurtful, and dehumanizing. But it is dehumanizing to forget that Al Jolson was an actor and a singer who was trying to put food on his table.  If he thought that painting his face green and pretending to be a Martian would help him get work, he would probably have done it.  People did not believe he was an actual black man; blackface is never convincing, but he was a good singer, and that’s what mattered to his audience.  He didn’t think he was offending anyone.  When he was at the height of his popularity, the American Civil War had ended fifty years earlier, and though black entertainers were becoming known, they were not allowed the same access to the public as white artists.  Jolson paid homage to his black brothers; nobody saw it as mockery.  He played a character who knew how to tug at the heartstrings, and the audience thought he did a very good job of it, whatever colour he was. Disney probably copied Al Jolson to create Mickey Mouse, but there has been no outcry about mice in blackface.  There may have been black singers who were angry that Jolson was taking work that should have been theirs, and they were correct.  Jolson would probably have said, “Everyone’s gotta eat,” and it would have been left at that.  Worse damage was done to the image of blacks by entertainers like Stepin Fetchit, who did not need to put on blackface.   Like many actors, he discovered that he couldn’t find work unless he played a stereotype.  Some actors with big noses only find roles as greedy Jews or bad guys.  

As a post-war child, I saw some of these early performances repeated on television, though by then there had been some breakthroughs in the theatre and cinema by having blacks played by blacks.  Who could imagine that ”A Raisin in the Sun” could be presented by any other cast except one of colour?  It would not make sense if it were done in white.  Although blacks playing black in works in the 21st century is correct and admirable, in the beginning, it was controversial, like the current discussion of handicapped actors playing roles as handicapped characters.    

I grew up in a place that never had a black inhabitant until the mid-nineteen sixties, so the earliest impressions I had of black people came from stereotypes like Amos & Andy, and old clips of Bill Robinson teaching Shirley Temple to tap dance.  I didn’t know if the radio actors who played Amos & Andy were white or black.  It wasn’t a question I asked myself.  I was aware that they poked fun at each other and their wives, like Ralph and Ed on The Honeymooners. They could have been the Happy Gang, always good for a smile and a laugh, but I didn’t ask if their characters represented anything.  

With the taboo of blackface, brownface, or any other kind of cultural appropriation, people find other ways to step out of themselves on occasion.  They paint their faces blue, copy sci-fi creatures, and make tails out of pool noodles.  But will some real alien come along and tell them off for being disrespectful?  Children who dress up for Halloween would be mortified to be laughed at.  They are paying homage to their idols, and to them it doesn’t matter if the skin is green, painted like a skeleton, or a pleasing shade of tan like Princess Jasmine.  Blackface in show business may have been a lame imitation, but it was never comical based solely on skin colour.  

In more innocent days, I was friends at school with a skinny native boy with a mop of unwashed hair and dirt-streaked skinny arms.  We played marbles on the pavement around the school building and counted our wins together before the bell sounded to end recess.  One day, I came home with a yellow cats-eye cob that my friend had given me. 
 “That’s nice,” my mother said.  “Did you win it?” 
“No,” I piped up in my six-year-old voice.  “Fleabag gave it to me.”
“Who?” she turned to look down at me with a hard stare that made me shrink.
“Fleabag,” I said, unsure of myself.
“That’s not a name,” she spoke sternly.  “He must have a name.”
“Everyone calls him Fleabag,” I tried to excuse myself.
“Well, you are not to do it just because everyone does.  Find out and use his real name.”
My mother was a nurse and a democratic woman.  She had seen enough sickness and death to know what was good and important and what was wrong.  I was embarrassed by my thoughtlessness, but the event triggered a different and better way of looking at things. I have been allergic to nicknames ever since.

Recently, while researching a story set on the North West Coast of British Columbia, I needed to spin through many reels of microfilm from a small town newspaper printed in the early twentieth century. In these photographed broadsheets, I regularly came across evidence of racism that jumped out as being on the wrong side of history, but was accepted back then as normal.  The ignorance passed down from one generation to another had prompted the Canadian government to pass race exclusion laws, though not all citizens were convinced.  World news in these old newspapers was surprisingly well covered, with the latest in European battles, troubles in Ireland and Russia, as well as the latest Chaplin film at the Empire theatre, but between the ads for stomach remedies and cigarettes, there was an ongoing litany of small stories about men being killed in fishing, lumbering, railroading, drinking, and fighting.  

There was an alcohol prohibition in the province at the time, so the papers reported a constant parade of bootleggers before the judges.   Many of the accused were repeat offenders, bartenders who were only allowed to sell near-beer, workmen caught on a binge, an old widow selling spirits to buy food, and even a few policemen accused of selling contraband. The Chinese community came off very badly in the papers, because the court reports were also full of opium cases.  The accounts gave the impression that all Chinese were dope fiends, a title only slightly less respectable than running a laundry.  A laundry was a place where people took their dirty clothes, even though they were nervous that it could be an inscrutable front for nefarious dealings. Most Chinese had originally been brought to Canada as disposable labour to construct the railway, which was supposed to bring prosperity, and it was assumed that these immigrants would leave when the job was done.  When they wanted to bring their families over, the government put the brakes on and imposed a head tax. 

I read about one or two blacks who ventured north from Seattle on the steamer and ended up in street fights prompted by racist remarks.  Locals fought with outsiders, even though all of them except the natives were outsiders themselves.  There were women of no fixed address who were shown the road out of town when an unseemly disturbance made their profession clear to the court judge.  There were backcountry men who went mad and tortured or killed their families, and there were stopovers by minor royalty.  Breathless reporters gushed over celebrated transcontinental biplane pilots who had touched down just long enough to refuel on their way to Alaska.  Both local articles and items picked up from the worldwide press reeked of such blatant racism that a millennial would choke on his bubble tea. 

The Chinese workers that Canada had used to build the railway had done a good job, but some complained there were too many of them.  But then, the government imported eighty thousand young Chinese men, destined to be shipped to the European War to work as sappers.  These men were quarantined and trained at William Head in Victoria.  There were riots and escapes from the harsh conditions.  Politicians wanted a 2% cap on Orientals.  White women were not allowed to work for Chinese employers. Chinese were required to sit in the balconies of movie theatres.   In the 1920s, the government of Canada passed the Chinese Exclusion Act,  which disenfranchised any resident Chinese.  Struck from voters' lists, they did not have the right to join professional organizations as doctors, accountants, dentists, or nurses.  Since they weren’t officially recognized and certified, they weren't allowed to work. 
  
During WW1, 8,500 civilian prisoners, most of Ukrainian descent, were arrested and held in internment camps across the country, only because they were originally from Eastern Europe.   In certain periods, Canada encouraged immigration, but only accepted the right kind of people, Western Europeans mainly, preferably women who could be brides.  Germans and Russians were not welcome.  

There were the Sikh passengers who arrived in Vancouver on the Komagata Maru.  After two months at anchor in the port, they were sent back to India to be arrested and shot. The official word was that “having been accustomed to the conditions of a tropical climate, immigrants of this class are wholly unsuited to this country.”  

While researching the Miller Bay Indian Hospital near Prince Rupert, I discovered that the site was originally a farm belonging to a family called Miller or    Müller, who were believed to be Swiss, but because they spoke German, their property was confiscated.  

I knew there was worse to come in more recent history.  The internment of the Japanese during WW2 had traumatized the parents of some of my schoolmates.  They told me their parents had been lied to and robbed, and never felt safe again in Canada.

In 1936, a test case before the Supreme Court about a bar in Montreal refusing service to blacks concluded that it was in the interest of good morals and public order to refuse service to black people.  

Canada’s own aboriginal population were herded into residential schools to “civilize” them, and they were not given the right to vote until 1960.  The last racially segregated school in Canada closed in 1983, which brings us close enough to the present day to make it clear that there has always been racism in Canada.

 It used to take an invasion or revolution to shake up the structure of society,  but the ubiquity of the digital revolution has accelerated the exposure and drawn battle lines.  With a sense of history that only stretches back to the last ephemeral trend, new generations might come along and ask, “Who are these guys and why did they do that?”  They will learn that the world is, and always has been, full of good, bad, and questionable characters.  The bad ones are more fascinating, but their stories have already been told, so the sleuths go looking for chinks in the armour of those who have been judged to be good.   They want to stick in their lances to see what spills out while the spectators huddle round pretending to be aghast.   These pokers and prodders are not looking for context, but sound bites, the more shocking the better.  Online scandal-hungry communities attract like-minded moral bankrupts to their flame, until their indignation becomes a hurricane and causes a shift in the current moral compass.  Another figure in history, like the first Prime Minister of Canada, is stripped of his good intentions and pushed naked into the same human swamp the critics inhabit.    

When the ego-inflated, indignant boots of online crusaders march in, schools, streets and parks are renamed, and statues are pulled down. This general or that governor had views he shouldn’t have and needs to be stricken from the record.  Every person, living or dead, is fair game for the lawnmower of public opinion.  There are reasons that states are not governed by public referendum.  People are too easily manipulated.  The title of demon of the month moves as fast as fashion.  As Heidi Klum would say, “One day you’re in. The next day you’re out.”   

 Collectively, Canada likes to think of itself as a tolerant country, though we are made up of people from every part of the globe who landed on someone else’s native shore and imposed our way of life on them.  We are no different from the tribes from the steppes who swept over Asia, or the Normans who invaded England. 

In Canada, the English prevailed, so colonial tactics were adopted to subdue the troublesome natives by selling them alcohol, infected blankets, and by stealing their children.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the imperial machine was at full power.  Canada was sparsely populated and needed people, so various schemes were cooked up to attract the right immigrants.  Unlike the now hollow American boast of “give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses”, Canada tried to be selective and open its borders to those who might settle successfully and participate in the experiment.  They didn’t want dreamers or idealists, revolutionaries or Bolsheviks; they didn’t want Chinese, Italians or Slavs who would stay on after their backs were broken.  Canada offered free land as bait, but the conditions were harsh.  There was a high failure rate, and many could not fulfil the conditions to keep the property they had been given, but they were allowed to stay on as wage slaves.   

Politicians have always pandered to voters and given voice to xenophobic theories by playing on the insecurities of populations struggling to make a living, who want someone to blame for their condition.  The implication behind these ideological campaigns is that the doors to the country should have been closed behind their ancestors, who were the last of the good immigrants.  

Canadians are fed pablum half-truths about their country and its history, so it is no surprise when a long-forgotten shoot of racism sprouts from the stump of a tree that was supposedly cut down long ago. We can never remedy the mistakes of the past, but before we trumpet ourselves as a do-gooder immigrant haven who never had a bad thought for anyone, we need to be aware of what we have already done.    
 
If others are offended by cultural practices that are no longer acceptable, we need to listen to their reading of the situation, but we should not be too hasty about throwing everything into the fire.  If blackface intends no harm, is not meant as a joke or a mockery, there should be nothing wrong with playing a part that pays homage to another race or culture.  

I watch a lot of Italian television.  There is a popular evening program in its ninth season that challenges contestants to imitate popular singers from the past, a mix of Italian, British and American artists.  These are not parodies, but genuine attempts by the performer to create the magic of the original.  It is difficult even for an olive-skinned Italian to be Louis Armstrong, early Michael Jackson, or Donna Summer without some sort of makeup.  If the contestants are from the south of Italy, some need white makeup to pull off a convincing Adele, Mick Jagger, or Taylor Swift.  There have been both tanned and powdery pale versions of Lady Gaga.  The point of the performances is not to make fun of the popular singers, but to be as true to the originals as possible, to find the soul in the song.  There is racism in Italy as there is in all countries, and some comic sketches that poked fun at ethnicities have been recently censored by the state media.  It could be said that the makers of this content didn’t understand at the time what sin was being committed, but went for the low-comedy, cheap laughs.  However, as they do with food, Italians take music seriously, and musical interpretations are not intended to be disrespectful, hurtful, or insensitive.  Italy has its own painful racist history, and a present situation that finds its shores the principal landing point for African migrants, so it is in the thick of coming to terms with its own multiracial society.  In the 1950’s, a man who moved from Sicily to Milan for work was called an immigrant and looked down on as dirty and uneducated.

The US news reported recently that Orange County’s John Wayne Airport should be renamed because the actor made some racist remarks in his time.  Actors are often unreconstructed examples of humanity, and some promote ideas which are questionable at best, but actors, like all of us, are human and sometimes exercise bad judgment.  Perhaps the solution to constant cultural revision is never to put anyone’s name ever again on a building, a street, a park, or an airport, calling new buildings A, B, or C.  Even that might be exclusionary to those who don’t use the Western alphabet, so we are reduced to symbols like illiterate people.  

There have been bad players in history, and their errors have been pointed out, but there is a mistaken assumption that everyone in the past should have acted according to our modern standards.  Dredging up forgotten sins and passing judgment on them doesn’t serve the present or the future.  The motto for the Province of Quebec is “Je me souviens,” which translates as “I will remember,” and is good advice for the entire country.  We should not forget the past, because it explains how we got to where we are now.  We can never be free from our history, nor should we be.