The Tangled Threads Of Colonialism

 Public sculpture is one way a society says, “This is who we are.”   Statues of faded past heroes are out in the open for anyone to take potshots at, and the shots are usually deserved.  Sometimes it is a relief to see a statue’s day of reckoning comes earlier than its exhibition. The City of Edmonton recently decided not to place the two sculptures they had commissioned for each end of the Walterdale Bridge because after they were finished and ready to be mounted, someone had second thoughts and canceled the project.  One half of the work was a simple buffalo standing on a rock, an expressionless lump that could have been laser-printed using a child’s toy as a model. The other half of the work was a fur trader sitting on a small mountain of buffalo hides.  What is surprising is not the cancellation, but that the design was approved in the first place.  The artist chosen was a Chinese Canadian American, a representative of a people the Indigenous tribes considered unwelcome interlopers who had claimed everything except the air for themselves, and pushed the buffalo to extinction, a disaster for those who relied on the animal for survival.  The sculptor was aware he was recreating an image from time when the buffalo were on the urge of extinction, but how he thought anyone would enjoy a public exhibit of a massacre is beyond belief.  He claimed that by putting the buffalo on one side of the river and the hunter on the other, that it would illustrate the gulf between the two sides. Though the fur trader is sitting on a lump that raises him to the same height as the buffalo, that almost featureless hillock should have been rendered in colour so we see it for what it is, a heap of fur, blood, and gore. Apparently the artist wanted to demonstrate that man-made disasters like the near-extinction of the buffalo and other acts of colonial vandalism are not confined to the past.   The fact that these sculptures are for a bridge and not a museum of shame, compounds the planner’s deafness.  People don’t wish to be reminded of tragedies on their way to work every day.  If they want their hearts broken they can visit a military cemetery.  The artist’s original theory about colonialism being alive and well, was substantiated when at the same time the Edmonton officials cancelled the buffalo sculpture, the mayor of Calgary approved a statue of Winston Churchill.

Perhaps these figurative sculptors imagine that their work will go down in history as new Michelangelo’s.  Michelangelo lived 500 years ago and though his work is sublime, public art has moved on from the literal to the abstract, though for the initiated even the most detailed figurative work can be loaded with symbols and ideas.  It's a direct line from Michelangelo to Anish Kapoor, whose public works can be appreciated at face value without having to work for their meaning, but what message, either subliminal or literal, does a man sitting on a pile of dead animals convey?  If the sculptor wanted to express the tragedy better he could have stood a European entrepreneur holding hands with the Prime Minister at the time, standing on a pile of aboriginal skulls.   The artist’s intention was admirable but the expression of it is unworthy and offensive.  It’s just as well the project was cancelled because it would have been rapidly defaced and the trader pulled down from his stinking prize.

Sculpture is not only a European habit.   There are carved stone reliefs from Mayan Central America to Angkor Wat.  Like Northwest totem poles, they have been created to commemorate ancestry, history, people, or events.  A spirit of a bird by a Haida sculptor is still recognizable as a bird to a Nigerian, though it wouldn’t be one he knows.  A piece of sculpture is relevant to the place it was meant to be exhibited, but in its specificity, it should also have an element of universality.  In western societies we erect up statues of those we think are deserving of honour, but as any human knows, things change.  Individuals who were once celebrated by certain segments of a population, are found later to have no right to be on a pedestal.  Whether this is for past crimes or because the culture has moved on and has deemed certain deeds to be criminal.  Regimes come and go. Whenever statues have been accessible to the public they have had their noses broken or their eyes gouged out.  The damage is done by warring elements in a society or by invaders who wish to not only occupy the lands of the losing side, but to obliterate the old culture by breaking its icons and planting their flags on the new territory.  Christians knew what they were doing when they built churches on the sites of ancient temples. Whether it is zealots like the Taliban blowing up Buddha statues in Afghanistan, or Christians chiselling crosses into the marble foreheads of Greek statues, there is a long tradition of cultural vandalism.  

The colonization of North and South America, Africa, as well as the Near and Far East began when man learned how to navigate the oceans.  There had already been similar invasions and assimilations, biblical conflicts, the expansion of the Roman Empire, the Norman invasion of England, countless religious wars,  and royal wars of succession.   In many of these conquered territories, the local people were no more than slaves in their own land, oppressed not only by having their freedom of movement limited, but by the psychological trauma of having their cultural touchstones smashed to pieces. These pre-colonial patterns of conquest were the blueprint for the occupation of worlds that were once unknown to Europeans.  To aboriginal societies, the strange men who showed up on beaches, would have been like visitors from another planet, but it wouldn’t take long for them to understand how little power they had against the invader’s weapons and diseases.

There is a mural near my home that shows Queen Victoria on a bicycle with a Canada goose riding in her basket.  The artwork resisted graffiti a while, but when it crept in, it was all directed to the face of Queen Victoria.  The artist has now repaired it by painting an octopus stuck to the queen’s face so she can’t see where she is going.  So far the mural is unblemished.

Statues erected by conquerors are always at risk of being overthrown.  Shelly’s Ozymandias must have secretly known that his mighty image would eventually be toppled and swallowed by sand.  Statues are transitory things, loved by one faction, hated by another, but because they are exhibited in public places they are the easiest targets.

People are more gentle with some public art, perhaps because there is a proliferation of gigantic hands, ears, or noses, and fewer phallic towers emerging from the pavement, so they are less political and less likely to be vandalized.  A clever trick of some of Anish Kapoor’s popular sculptures is that they are reflective, so doing damage to them is like doing damage to oneself.  Since the observer sees a reflection of his society with him in it, the message is less polarizing, as if to say “Here you are,” an idea that doesn’t take a stand one way or the other.

Public art may be the visible face of a culture, but there are more insidious ways of colonization, like the devastating practice of rape as a weapon.  This is not a new phenomenon, and though it is a reprehensible thing, it only affects a portion of the population, but for them it is a lifetime of inner torment.  The more effective way to wound a culture's heart is through its language.  Besides physical repression, it has always been in a conqueror's interest to suppress the defeated side’s dialect and promote his own.  When I spent time on the Greek island of Rhodes I learned that when the Italians took the island from the Turks in the 1930’s, schools were required to conduct lessons only in Italian.  Priests and parents had to teach Greek to children in secret.  This happened less than a century ago when Germans, Italians, French, and Dutch were expanding their empires in an attempt to replicate the centuries-old British and Spanish occupations that had stretched around the globe. 

No matter what the century, none of these invasions were justified.  They were planned and financed for economic gain with the sponsoring countries expecting to put their foot on new territories with exploitable resources, and declare it belonged to them, or their king or queen.   Any indigenous societies that existed at the time of the invasion were nuisances to be overcome, like swamps or black-flies.

Although we think of colonialism as a thing of the past, there are still powerful nations like Russia and China, who believe that putting a soldier’s foot on a people’s neck and occupying their land, is a valid way to conquer.  This way of gaining control began to fade when the United States came into existence.  Their foreign policy was to play the anti-communist policeman in many international conflicts and to topple figures they saw as dictators, but they never occupied anyone’s land beyond their borders.  They did not try to seize Canada or Mexico.  Alaska was acquired as a business purchase.  Hawaii voted to become a state.  What the Americans have done, in an effort to expand their businesses worldwide, is to gain access to other cultures through television, computers, and mobile phones.   Those who protest about American hegemony are probably making their ideas heard on iPhones.   Any nation’s attempts to limit internet access and content, are as unsuccessful as trying to catch lighting with bare hands.  Even the lowly fax machine has been used in censorship busting.  When UK newspapers were requested to suppress royal scandals in the 1980’s, faxed articles sent from other countries were available to anyone who had a machine.  The news was out no matter what the powers-that-be wanted.  These days mobile phone footage documenting wars and invasions is available to anyone with the technology to watch it.

I have noticed in news reports of immigrants arriving in Italy from North Africa, that many of the young men who arrive have mobile phones.  Their phones may be all they possess except for the clothes on their backs, but phones are not just phones.  A refugee can send a message to his relatives to say he arrived alive and he can watch his own rescue from a sinking rubber boat on a television news report.  He can listen to whatever music he likes from anywhere in the world.  He can see how much things cost in Italy and what time the trains leave for Stuttgart.  This small handheld device, with its access to dissident voices in Russia, right wing politician’s threats to close borders, immigration rules, and job opportunities, is a powerful invention, with marketing ploys that encourage a kind of cultural colonialism.  This instant access to all information, is changing the rules of conflict and showing there is no need for physical invasion, the enemy is already in their midst.  

It is said that man’s time on earth started its countdown to extinction when agriculture was first practised.  Until then nomads had survived by moving with the seasons, but when men planted seeds near their doorsteps and they grew into food, they realized there was no longer a need to battle the beasts and other tribes to survive.  However, as his family grew and flourished they needed a greater food supply.  Outgrowing their traditional territories, they expanded onto other land which was often occupied by others.  Wars insured, tribes conquered other tribes, and soon they became nations.  We have now arrived at the point when there are so many people on the planet we struggle to feed them all.

Nomads were not without troubles and had battles with each other over hunting grounds, but overall they were stable societies who didn’t need to take over their neighbours' lands to feed themselves.  Each had his area, his customs, habits, and diet, and anyone who suggested stealing from another tribe was voted down by wiser minds. Although each tribe had its traditional hunting grounds, the land was not owned by anyone.  Land ownership was as strange a concept as ownership of the air.  It belonged to everyone.  Native people must have been surprised when they saw the new arrivals put fences around their land and say “This is mine.”  It was like saying, “Don’t breathe my air.”

Colonizing other people is not a practice of nomadic tribes but it is one in agricultural societies who require ever expanding resources to meet their needs.  I would argue that with the demise of manufacturing and lifetime jobs, we have become a new kind of nomadic people, moving to wherever the work is, becoming proprietors of ourselves, without an ancestral attachment to any one place that goes back further than our grandparents.  We are learning that when we encounter another culture we should let it be, appreciate it for what it is, and not impose our own suppositions and prejudices onto it.  We travel more lightly these days, in pressurized cabins with our ubiquitous cellphones.  I would hope this wide overview of the world, the sight of the earth from the moon, leaves us less inclined to leave public statues and images of ourselves, even ephemeral digital ones, for a conquered people to worship. They have their own icons that are more suited to them than ours.

Pushing over statues doesn’t erase the damage done by colonization because its nerve-threads run deeper than physical pain, but in a healthy organism, in the absence of further aggravation, wounds heal, and we learn to bow our heads as a sign of respect to the God in the other.  

 

Life As A Bug

A young woman stopped by my house just as the cat brought home a live mouse to play with.  My visitor commanded the cat to let the mouse go but the orders fell on deaf ears.  She chased the cat but it ran off with its catch to the far side of the courtyard. Flailing with a broom, she chased it until it slipped out of a gap in the wall, the mouse squeaking in the cat's mouth.  Half an hour later as my visitor was leaving, she stopped to admire a cactus flower.  As her nose honed in on the scent, she suddenly jerked her head back like she had been poked by a spine.  She pointed mutely to the flower as if it had bitten her, and we watched a black ant crawl out of the blossom.  She backed away from the pot, brushing down her blouse and stamping her feet because she had noticed a few ants around the bottom of the pot.  

“Eeew eeew get rid of them,” she shrieked.  

When I turned over a nearby boulder, she may have thought it was to smash the few ants we had seen, but under it, was a swarm of the panicked creatures running everywhere.

She began screaming, hyperventilating, and when she could, shouting,  “Kill them! Kill them!”

I washed away the ants with the garden hose but she was still shocked and jumpy and had given a wide berth to the scene of the outbreak.  Her world had been invaded by horrible beasts.  As she was leaving, I asked her, “Can you tell me the difference between an ant and a mouse?”  

“No. What?” she asked, like I had set her a child’s riddle. 

“To some people, cats are pests,” I said.  “To some cats, the big ones,  humans are pests. We all have a place on the food chain.”

“I don’t get it,” she said, edging out the door like I was about to ask her for a donation to the Flat Earth Society.

“Maybe you will one day,” I answered.  “When you grow up.”

She tossed her strawberry blonde head and I never saw her again.

 

Recently there has been cluster of reports on the news about random killings in various cities, street murders of unrelated individuals at the hands of men who are angry and fed up with life and everyone in it.  Parents of these unhinged young men are often the first ones in the line of fire because family members are easy to demonize.  If a man can kill those known to him, it is a short step to killing strangers.  The innocent victims are annoyances, worth no more than rats.  

By nature, men don’t lash out and kill other men, but if they feel threatened, they may turn their fears and prejudices into paper tigers, which they attach to their enemies so they seem less human.  A Ukrainian general recently said about the Russians, “We are at war with non-humans.  They are orcs.”  Soldiers understand the technique of dehumanization, but they learn to use this mind trick only in appropriate circumstances.  When a civilian with a pre-existing mental imbalance begins to see other humans as less than him, he lashes out.  He might target property at first, but it is more satisfying to squash the life out of a living breathing pest as if it was an insect. Humans become bugs. If we are threatened by a tiger who sees us as prey, we can overlook his feline beauty, his value as a species, and kill him before we are killed.  Humans have survived by sorting their threat responses into compartments but sometimes these systems go awry.

We presume that bugs aren’t sentient, but we are selective in our beliefs.  Looked at objectively, shrimp and lobster are no more than large insects of the ocean yet we see them as delicacies.  There is a growing call against lobsters being boiled alive in case they feel pain.  Crayfish don’t fiddle any happy tunes when they are plopped into boiling water.  If lobsters feel pain, the same must be true for ants.  If I wash away a nest of ants, I have not only destroyed their physical structure, but created chaos of the ant’s primal need, which is to keep eggs safe so the clan survives.  There is no time for anguish in an anthill.  Catastrophe’s happen.  They all have jobs to do and will deal with the casualties later.  

The chicken eggs we eat are a sideline of that survival imperative, but the desire to protect the nest has been bred out of domestic hens.  Humans are fine with eating the eggs of various birds and fish if they are collected at the right time, but ant’s eggs have never become a delicacy.  The Aztecs built their floating gardens in the shallow waters of a Mexican lake and cultivated worms and grubs for food, which are full of protein and readily available in the environment.  There are 500 species of insects in Mexico that are consumed as food.  In other parts of the world people eat raw oysters but gag if given a worm.  They crunch on the crispy legs of a baby shrimp but turn their noses up at a pan-fried beetle.

 Creepy-crawlies surely bring bad things to humans, but the view that they should all be eliminated is willfully ignorant.  Billion dollar industries have been created around killing bacteria, but as the anti-antibiotic lobby slogan says, ‘Not All Bugs Are Bad.’  The war on bacteria has created superbugs.  If we see an electron microscope image of the skin on our faces, we are confronted with the horrifying truth that there are insects and worms going about their business of clearing and consuming debris, while we talk, smile, and scratch ourselves. We don’t want to believe it, and try to erase the memory. If all bugs and bacteria are bad, then what will turn milk into cheese, or replace yeast fungus to make bread rise?  If we could see the creepy crawlies around us, we might never leave their beds - oh wait, beds aren’t safe either.

 

Our blue planet is mostly salty seas, wind-scoured deserts, uninhabitable polar regions, and green fuzz where the prevailing winds drop precipitation.  The moss that grows on the wet and warm rocks of our planet is vegetable matter, grasslands, jungles, and forests.  It is populated by fauna that scamper under the green canopy, and range in size from elephants to insects. We humans are somewhere in the middle, closer to the smaller animals when we are born.  The earth has no plan, direction, or nature, except to remain suspended between its centrifugal pull and the sun’s gravity.  Humans, elephants, and ants, don’t figure in this titanic standoff, but are only slithering creatures just below the blotchy green skin. Perhaps a pitiless killer has the same sense that neither he nor his victims will ever rise above the slime, so whether he takes his own life or the lives of others, hardly matters.  Like the rest of us bugs, he’ll return to the organic ooze, and it won’t make any difference to the turning of the earth, only to the innocent’s grieving family.

Greenwashing

There is a recycling crisis that our governments have not found a way to manage.  The production of plastics has grown from almost zero in the 1950s to 350 million tons in 2018. Since China banned imports of plastic recycling in 2018, there is nowhere for the 100 million tons of waste to go.

When the recycling boom first started there were boxes everywhere encouraging citizens to recycle newspapers, bottles, and plastic.  It was our duty to help save the planet.  After a few years, when more newsprint was collected than could be processed profitably, the boxes disappeared. Every household once had a thick telephone book that could be recycled, but when the local charity organizations who did the footwork of collecting the books learned they had earned nothing, they stopped doing it. Luckily a few years later, the internet made phone books obsolete.  When too much of the glass recycling was contaminated, the glass bins disappeared as well.  There were innumerable government programs and PSA’s about recycling, because “That’s what we do.”  After a few years, news came back from China and the far east,  that they didn’t want our trash any more.  There were red faces and containers were sent back to North America but waste companies who are willing to risk getting caught continue trade.  As long as there are profits to be made and the troublesome stuff disappears, nobody wants to dig too deep. 

The recycling sham continues with government encouragement and very little to back up the fact that any significant volume of recycling is taking place. The government says that 97% of Canadian households use at least one recycling program, which makes it sound like 97% of rubbish is recycled.  Statistics suggest that less than only 10% of discarded plastic is recycled. A recent consumer test asked three companies to recycle identical bales of plastic.  One incinerated the plastic, one took it to the landfill, and one recycled it into pellets.  The waste from incinerating any plastics has to be buried in landfills because it is toxic.  Most plastic can only be recycled once.

We rely on package delivery more than ever.  For reasons of health and safety, many more people stay home in their cocoons. Digital media has killed the daily newspaper delivery to the door, people rarely send letters in the post, bills are sent and paid electronically, so the only person who comes knocking is the delivery man.  He is not the one who takes away the packaging or the old item that is being replaced.  Running alongside this boom in online purchases is a supply chain that keeps the digital hardware operational.  Computer hard drives, monitors, keyboards, POS systems, and communication equipment, all need replacing when they wear out or become outdated.  Most businesses have a minimum of a printer and/or a photocopier.  An industry of logistical games has sprung up around deliveries and returns.  To atone for polluting the environment with used electronics and plastic toner cartridges, a system of return waybills has been created to send the replacement parts back to their distributors.  When these materials are returned, they are sorted, re-used if possible, and the rest find their way to landfills. The delivery companies appear to be towing the line, to cover their backs, but in truth there is a profitable side-business in tracking these returned items.  This uses both human and mechanical resources, the cost of which is borne by the shipper, as an environmental tax.  Given that most of these items are smaller than a loaf of bread, all of the packing, shipping, pickup, and delivery is a losing financial proposition.  But the companies involved, pat themselves on the back, and tell us that they are helping save the planet, when really their clever plan to squeeze more money out of the consumer, while waving a blue flag, only compounds the problem.  It is probably better to send a toner cartridge to a local landfill than to send it halfway across the world, only to have it end up in a foreign landfill.

Big businesses like soft drink companies imply that their bottles will be transformed and reshaped into useful things.  It is a romantic idea but that is not the case.  A recent study by Environment Canada suggested that more than 90% of plastics end up in landfills.  Recycling companies will not recycle anything unless there is a profit to be made.  Canadians throw away 3 metric tons of plastic waste a year, and 2.8 metric tons end up in landfill.  I live in a city which has had a single-use plastic ban for several years.  There are no plastic bags available in supermarkets, only paper which are awkward and don’t stand up to weather.  I used to recycle my grocery bags as rubbish bags, but now I have to buy rubbish bags that also end up in the landfill.  This is illogical, unless the companies who manufacture rubbish bags have cleverly lobbied the green faction into a policy that helps their profits. 

The supermarket where I shop makes extravagant use of plastic clamshell packaging for pastries and vegetables.  Where fruit and vegetables are not prepackaged, there are rolls of free plastic bags to contain them, but at a checkout plastic bags are forbidden.  There is an option at the checkout to buy a heavy-duty reusable shopping bag with the supermarket logo for a high price. We are free to consume that particular plastic if we pay.  This is deceitful, like the current practice of selling packages at the same price as before, but reducing the amount in the package.

Although landfills have been used extensively in North America since it was settled, it has never been an ideal way to dispose of trash.  Out of sight out of mind does not mean the danger has gone away.  For many years people dumped things including rubbish into the sea, believing that it would magically disappear into nature’s great washing machine, but as time goes on we have discovered that dumping nuclear waste into an ocean doesn’t make it disappear. 

Landfills can leach into waterways if they are not properly situated, and some elements end up in the water table no matter where they are buried.  There is a large supermarket in my hometown built over a landfill that for 30 years was the city dump. Anything and everything went in there until the gulley filled up and the city opened a more massive fill on the clay banks above the river.  None of the shoppers or employees in the supermarket know they are working over a brew of toxins, and nobody publicizes the fact because it would be bad for business.  Most regular shoppers know that the underground parking stinks but they don’t know why.

Where are organizations set up under the umbrella of NGOs who deem themselves the ones to bestow eco-friendly ratings on businesses who want to crow to their clients about how green they are.  The application to participate can run to several pages with detailed questions about heating, cooling, power use, and waste management.  It is easy to exaggerate the truth to nudge statistics to the positive side.  Does the business have a geo-exchange system?  Most managers don’t know if they have or not, but imagine if they  say yes, if it will land them a better rating.  Three green keys instead of two.  The ratings company rarely does inspections, but if a business does get caught out in its lies and the green organization rescinds its rating, another eco-talking greenwasher would be happy to put his sticker of approval on a window.  The general public don’t know the difference, the business owner will be happy as he appears to be doing his part, and the government boasts about statistics they have had no hand in measuring. And so, the pleasant illusion of environmental righteousness continues. 

A third of our waste comes from households, while two thirds comes from industrial, commercial, and institutional sources.  Regulations, like single use plastics in shops, concentrate on private citizens because individuals are easier to convince than corporations. Our mountains of garbage have only been around for a short while.  My grandparents retired to a lake in the 1950’s, and made only a weekly trip to the dump for the few small bags of real rubbish they could not use.  Much of this was tins that had been flattened so animals wouldn’t get stuck in them, but all excess paper was used at home to start fires to cook meals, glass bottles and jars were re-used, and organic scraps went onto a compost pile.  Plastic barely existed so we had nothing to throw away.  Yet plastic, which we are so bad at recycling, and which has a shelf life of usefulness in our environment, comes from petroleum, which is in limited supply.  We generate so much rubbish that our grandparents would be astounded at the waste.  Along with the arrival of plastics, came its marketing tag word of ‘disposable’, which sounds convenient but is a lie.  Before Einstein’s words on energy, Lavoisier in 1789 discovered that matter cannot be created or destroyed, only change its state and form.  Ignoring that, we are busy extracting minerals from the earth and spreading them in microbeads all over our planet.   The age of plastics might go down in history like the age of dinosaurs, which did not end well.

From the beginning, humans recognized there were environmental problems to be solved.  It didn’t take long to learn that throwing scraps outside the family cave would attract the wrong kind of attention. In the 20th century, the penicillin century, when more people lived longer, so many new materials, including nuclear options, were developed with little regard to their afterlife.  In the early 1960’s when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she was standing on the shoulders of others, but even with this foreknowledge, the speed with which the earth continues to be buried under garbage and toxic waste is astounding.   The best response our society can come up with is greenwashing, which encourages lip service and pouring money into policies that demonstrably don’t work.  We fiddle with regulations while Rome burns. 

The solutions to these problems don’t rest with individuals or governments as they are onlookers to the multinational business engines that drive the world’s economies.  These global companies have the skills and intelligence not only to fix the recycling crisis, but to take innovative steps toward getting us back to the uncontaminated garden we humans once enjoyed as our home. Instead they choose to exploit everyone and everything as they have always done, and to parrot the greenwashing lies because real solutions generate less profit.

 

 

Memoir

Io Vagabondo - A Memoir: The story of a gay man's life - from the middle of the last century until the start of the new millennium, this book begins in a small town in Canada. Caught between the valuable lessons of living on the land, and the excitement of the city, the young man goes from a disastrous start at university, to thirty years of wide-eyed adventures in Canada, England, France, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Australia, and California. The book is populated by a collage of characters from artists, prostitutes, musicians, countesses, astrologers, and movie makers. The author’s emotional adventures take him from a life of single hedonism, to serial monogamy, marriage, divorce, and out through an open window into a sophisticated world of international connectedness where he meets an unexpected new love. Through the travel and turmoil, the author has worked as a bank clerk, draftsman, taxi driver, highway surveyor, gardener, property caretaker, night auditor, and delivery driver. As an observant vagabond, he has gained valuable insights into life, and he hopes the reader will hang on for the ride as he stumbles toward enlightenment. 

Available on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle edition.  Also available on Google Play as an e-book.
 

Coming In Second

Canadians are often the butt of jokes about placing second in international competitions. We would like to win, but we are fine with second place since it means we are up there with the best. Third place works too, though it is only a close shave away from disappearing into the anonymity of the pack. When we compete, we give it our all, but we are not maniacally driven to win or die trying.

We applaud those who are the best in their field, but we are not an exceptionalist people who will push others around in a childish need to claim victory. When nominated for a prize, we are flattered yet embarrassed to be in such illustrious company. We have been, and will be, decorated for first place, perhaps by fluke, and only for a brief moment, but we will bow to our neighbours in the sincere belief that the trophy could just as easily have been theirs. Second place, third, or even tenth place is a badge of merit, earned through persistence, determination, and skill. We don’t need to take first place to win.

People, teams, parties, and nations are strongly motivated to win whatever races they enter. Our social structure encourages us to find ways to feel superior to others. Consumerism waves promises of success at us that are available only to a few. Invisible caste systems still exist. Our governments have long understood the tactic of diverting its citizens from concrete problems by pitting them against each other on issues that could be easily resolved. Pockets are easier to pick when everyone is busy watching the game.

There are strong men who cry uncharacteristic tears when their flag is raised or when the flower of their nation is on the podium. Team sports generate scenes of blind and ecstatic loyalty. Fans are tribal aggregations moulded from the same clay as the players, bursting to celebrate a win for their side. Politicians call opposing parties evil incarnate and try to win by scaring the wits out of their equally shrill rivals. Losers sulk and winners gloat. The toxic effects that a competitive society produces are all around us.

The urge to compete, to judge who is better at a specific task, has often been blamed on testosterone. Yet in these times of inclusiveness, it is obvious that women, with only a fraction of male testosterone, have demonstrated an equally strong desire and capacity to win. There are other inborn factors that push humans toward competition.

There is competition in the animal world but it is based only on survival, a competition for resources. Extravagant mating displays and proof of fitness tests are engineered by nature to keep a species reproducing and viable, not to win medals or trophies. The Lion King’s only motivation is to ensure the survival of his offspring. There are no dancers and drums for him except in a Disney universe. Reality is tooth and claw. Humans have similar instincts that drive them to compete for different sets of resources, though food and safety remain at the top of the list for both. Humans understand the roots of their behaviour and attempt to channel it into ritualized competition. Except in war, we do not take our games so far as to kill each other, but there is a tragic undercurrent in all competition that is based on the law of diminishing returns. How much do we sacrifice in order to win? Will the victory be worth the price?

On a personal level, we are touched by the plight of someone who is in need of help. Competition doesn’t enter the picture unless desperation has made us twisted enough to steal from blind men. To offer assistance is in our better nature, but if we take a few steps back, and look at the unfortunate person as The Other, as someone who is in competition with us, as someone from the other team, we are capable of exhibiting mindless cruelty. It’s either him or me.

When George Orwell fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, he was never sure if he managed to kill anyone. His best chance came one day when a soldier ran across a clearing directly in front of him, but the man was so close, and holding up his trousers like he had been caught in the middle of a nature call, that Orwell couldn’t shoot. The soldier was too human, too much like him. If he had been unrecognizable in the distance, trying to pick him off would have been like target practice.

Winning is a human instinct, at least that is the thinking of the colonial west, but in reality it is a patriarchal answer to channel the urge to compete. Somebody must come in first place, and it may as well be me. But there is a more satisfying way forward than the habitual path of guts and glory. It takes the form of another human instinct that has been proved in the crucible of evolution, and it’s name is cooperation. Doing things for the good of all. It is not nearly as exciting as a good fight; there is no drama. There are no winners and losers, but only a quiet reasoned resolution for everyone.

We know that on a personal level, if the desire is there to do so, appropriate concessions can be made on all sides. The natural instinct to cooperate is demonstrated in times of disaster. Nobody asks a drowning person who they voted for or what is their favourite football team. If a scarcity of resources is the problem, an arrangement can be worked out to accommodate the needy. This is preferable to the poor fighting the poor, the anarchy of cold and hungry neighbours breaking down each other’s doors to steal each other’s hearth and home. While robbery might look like a win for the bully, it is a destructive win, the fingerprint of a personal coping mechanism gone wrong, a behaviour that will not serve the bully well in the future. Bullies love competitions, because they separate the weak from the strong, but what they don’t understand is that their judgment is based on their own limited opinions, and that they grossly underestimate the nuances of weak and strong. Their truth is relative, it is not absolute.

Correctly fielded, another person’s need to be first can be easily undermined. I had a friend who worked as a nanny for a mother with a stubborn competitive streak. Her husband was a successful writer and though she wasn’t jealous of his realm, she needed something of her own, a dominion that she hadn’t yet found. She was often irritable and would pick fights over little things and my friend, as a defensive strategy, would stop her in the middle of her furious polemics to tell her, “Okay, you win.” This infuriated her, and she would shout “That’s not fair. Stand up and fight!” When he would walk away calmly she would shout “Come back and fight like a man!”

“If she needs to win so badly,” he said. “I let her.”

Her children had already learned to back off when she behaved like the bull of her astrological sign and that left her further isolated with nobody to pick on. She would slam out of the house in a rage to find a place to calm down and assess her options before she would rejoin her flock. When she came back it was like nothing had happened. Bullies have their own demons to conquer.

I don’t see people fighting on the street unless they are drunk or trying to shake off the police. Disagreements in families are usually confined to private spaces; public arguments between neighbours are rare, but people will turn violent over property disputes. In Mediterranean cafes I have seen families threaten murder over the perceived theft of a strip of land only wide enough to plant a row of artichokes. Death is not the usual outcome. Solutions are found, either by correcting the original sin, by paying reparations, but sometimes there remains an eternal simmering war between families. These disagreements are often based on honour rather than the value of the object in discussion. Both sides want to win, nobody to back down, even if it is better for the welfare of the group. This buried rancour can poison any reasoned attempts at solutions, because in their crusade to pull down their neighbours, they pull down the entire tribe. Village life is a microcosm of all lives. Cooperation is always better because competition poisons the well, and should not be given first place.

Chimpanzees live in male dominated societies, but every so often the succession goes wrong. A ruling alpha male may be injured in a cross-tribe battle and be weakened and diminished, so his next in line takes charge. The successor may turn out to be a tyrant of the first order without little understanding of the fragility of the social structure. His reign of terror tests the females and less powerful males, but none of them will fight him directly because he is stronger and will beat them severely. After a few seasons of being pummelled, pushed around, and seeing their relatives maimed and killed by the dictator, the females and secondary males do what needs to be done, and the aberrant alpha male disappears.

It is not wise to concede to bullies, who in their own twisted way believe they have won, even if they have broken unspoken rules to do it. Hitler would have been happy with world domination. But with the right tactics, bullies can be punctured and deflated as the puffed up clowns they are.

Canadians don’t think that a competition is worth dying for, so we don’t always find the last ounce of momentum that will carry us first over the line. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. We tried, we enjoyed the experience, maybe we will win the next time or maybe not. Life does not pivot on a moment of victory or defeat. There is always another game. Whatever the outcome, the loser and winner will both leave the field and return to their humdrum lives. As life knocks some rough edges off them, they mature and learn that there are richer and more rewarding pursuits than extreme games, and that coming in second can be a blessing in disguise.

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 that the injury presented. As soon as I could dress and undress myself I was back doing exercise at the gym. I had to work around the steel plate with screws that held my shoulder together. My rotator cuff hadn’t fared well in the fall either. Looking around the gym, I realized that I wasn’t the only one with a handicap. Most of the 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 favour 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 they 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 systems suggest straightforward logical AI remedies, which when dealing with humans are not always the best idea. In order to advance, a society needs to let its past injuries heal in peace. Every citizen needs to work around the handicaps he is given. Some people rail against their limitations and bang their heads on the sky, others surrender and drown in substances, while others sweat like unheralded paralympians to show, if only to themselves, that there is a way around. Our society often stumbles, but we always find a way forward, a fix, a path learned the hard way through false starts. If we aren’t ready to alter the structure of our society, we need to connect the unifying elements in the wreckage of the present to build bridges, otherwise we will shake each other to pieces in never-ending, mutually damaging war. The body, the soul, society, and even the marketplace run on compromise, 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 booms 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 the workaround is that putting undue pressure on a fix may cause another system failure. The ship needs is 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 houses and start again.
In the world of entertainment, Prince called himself a symbol because his name had been sold to Warner Brothers. 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 brand-similar names and imitative packaging, though any attempt to sell a McDonalds burger or a puppet mouse with a particular face, brings down the legal weight of ferocious brand defenders. An obvious and clumsy workaround can be easily dislodged.
In some countries, people who build houses leave unfinished construction rods poking out of their 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 can’t 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, that 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 have their children accepted into name universities even if the applicants don’t have the qualifications for admittance. Because those caught were celebrity parents the story had more traction than it 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 learn eventually. That’s what tutors were for. The workaround practice of buying university places isn’t new, but it came as news 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 crystal 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 a smart phones 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 outside, it won’t take long for tinkerers to adapt VR and drone technology to let our eyes go out to explore while our bodies are indoors, safe and protected. Whatever happens we will find a way around.
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 hunting. The children benefited by 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 worker’s rights. The new strict labour laws applied only to companies with more than fifteen employees. As a result, many companies limited their growth to avoid being subject to the new rules. The change worked well for artisans and unionized employees, 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 worldwide supply and demand. When the markets changed, the big companies were as loyal to the country who courted 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 in the first place 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 their lives. Solutions that range from anti-depressant medication to wellness marketing, are nothing more fixes to get around our feelings of inadequacy and sadness. We turned coping methods into big business, but in the end the offered solutions are all workarounds that prop up something temporarily but do not fix the original problem. If someone suffers trauma, there is no way to reverse the original injury, so we find ways to work around it and live with it, but the memory and subsequent pain will never disappear until we learn how to cancel memory.
There are 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 was already learning to find ways around the embarrassing phenomenon of tears. .
When politicians suggest imperfect fixes for long term problems, they may not be aware 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 less inclined to accept a patchwork of temporary fixes than traditional politicians. Those on the more radical left, advocate changing the system from the ground up, advocating for fundamental change rather than putting more fingers in a failing levee to protect territory that is already under water. The wisest of those who resist radical change, probably know that their wilful 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 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 a 500 kiloton bomb that he can drop on you if he is in a bad mood, it can be stressful. Throughout history people have shouted that the sky is falling, and it has not happened. Now we know that it could happen and how it will happen, but so did the prophets know, based on hearsay of all sorts of celestial rain. Probably the most well known and used stress reliever is religion, followed by alcohol. People find ingenious ways to cope. Making beer is an art.
Tobacco, since its worldwide diffusion, is another method of dealing with stress in an instant. A quiet cigarette is a moment to stop and reflect, and a nicotine hit on the run, is for someone who has no time, but needs a calming top-up fix. But we all know what many years of using cigarettes as a stress reliever does to the lungs. As can happen, that particular workaround might be worse than the monster it is trying to avoid. Alcohol plays a similar insidious part.
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 for better economic opportunities, and because of wars or natural disasters. Climate change will provoke new generations of refugees. The outside forces that cause people to pull up stakes, are either because they are persecuted in their homeland, or because there is no way for them to produce enough to stay alive there. 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 health care, education, infrastructure and a fair rule of law. Regardless of what the Bible says, it is natural to want something that is 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 they want more and can’t have it right away, people 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 living the rest of their lives living with the workaround.
Men have tried to construct societies where nobody suffers from want, but it has been demonstrated that 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. They want more than their neighbour and are willing to become outlaws if that is what is needed to achieve their objectives. In an unjust society we look for fixes to the system. In a just society we look for workarounds to destabilize the equilibrium 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 Kludge and rebuilding 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 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.  Unless worn by true aboriginals, the wearing of feather headdresses and Mexican sombreros as costumes has 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 taboo are now out in the open.  We behave as if prohibition never existed.  Behaviours that were once commonplace have been ruled out of order.  But pushing that least favourite article of history to the back of the closet doesn’t cancel it.  No amount of nose holding or looking the other way will make it disappear.   Being aware of the past is a necessity for survival.  How many times can we make the same mistake?   The past shouldn’t be something mysterious, unimportant, remote, or forbidden, because humans have a knack for forgetting.  Their psyches tell them that 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 had to use what little they were given and what they could learn, in the race to survive.  It is easy to ignore history when the greatest personal accomplishment is to stay alive.  Defeated people have no stomach for remembering the gory details of the past; they only hope that the present and future will be better, but they have forgotten 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.  

There are many statues that 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 American’s 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 sharp differences of opinion, usually based on mutual ignorance, which keeps people fighting amongst themselves, a useful result for those who hold power.

Nobody has put forward a fair and workable political system, but the idea is 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 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 accidentally driving down a cul de sac.  It is true that there are some sins too big to wash away, that no matter when or where they happened, 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 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 also 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 CocaCola, 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.  But even 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 was 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 get him 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, 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.  He would probably have said “Everyone’s gotta eat,” and they would have left it at that.  Worse damage was done to the image of blacks, by entertainers like Stepin Fetchit, who had no 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 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 was done in white.  Although blacks playing black in works from 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 like 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 and gave me 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.  Better to find out 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 had occasion 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 now jumped out as being on the wrong side of history, but were 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 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. There was a Chinese community who 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 were dope fiends, a title only slightly less respectable than running a laundry, a place where people took their dirty clothes even though they were nervous it could be an inscrutable front for nefarious dealings. Most Chinese had originally been brought to Canada as disposable labour to construct the railway that was supposed to bring prosperity, and it was assumed that they would leave when the job was done.  When they wanted to bring their families over, the government put on the brakes 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 in the First War,  the government imported eighty thousand young Chinese men, destined to be shipped to European War to work as sappers, 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.   After the war, Canada passed the Chinese Expulsion Act,  which disenfranchised any resident Chinese.  Struck from the voters list, 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 the same war, 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, who after two months at anchor, 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 in the Second War, 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.  

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 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 up 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 their lances in 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 is stripped of his good intentions and pushed naked into the same human swamp that 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 fulfill 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 onto 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 thick makeup to pull off a convincing Adele, Mick Jagger, or Taylor Swift.  There have been both tanned and powdery white 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, the sin that was being committed, but more likely they 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 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 was called an immigrant.

The US news reported recently that Orange County’s John Wayne Airport should be renamed because he made 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 have bad judgement.  Perhaps the solution to constant cultural revision is never to put anyone’s name ever again on a building, a street, a park, or airport, and that they be called building 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 an 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 judgement 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.