Two Heads Are Better Than One

 There is no doubt Albert Einstein had a wife and a secretary to remind him to take his heart medication. He had enough going on with the Theory of Relativity and studying Gravitational Waves to tend to the necessities that kept him alive long enough to accomplish what his remarkable brain was capable of producing. All of us at some point could use a helpmate, a partner, a waiter, a cleaner, a social secretary, a bureaucracy cutter, an extra pair of hands, and an extra mind.  If one mind is overwhelmed by the pressures of the world, it is beneficial to have another mind to pick up the slack, as backup, power in reserve.  A second mind can keep us on track, call for reason or calm, but can also incite us to action.  Those who ignore the input of others are destined to become isolated dictators who rule over silenced populations, kings of the wasteland.  The collective knowledge of our fellow men can keep us from making catastrophic mistakes.  It is worth our while to listen.  

Folk wisdom suggests that men are bad listeners and that may be true.  They tend to be single-minded about things and don't always consider all sides.  Maybe that is why many women are not fast shoppers.  There is a time for consideration and a time to act.  Prolonged deliberation promotes frustration and in that state people often make rash and harmful choices.  In our decision-making, all voices, whether they are individuals, companies, or governments, are not equal.  We tend to pay more attention to what has helped us in the past, but this can lead to stagnation, with the helpers wishing to  perpetuate the status quo so they can maintain their position as valued advisors.

Every individual has the potential to bring an unknown universe to another's doorstep. We learn from each other and if we don't we are doomed.  We learn that we can teach one another, defend and protect one another, and if we listen, we will understand that we have basic human desires in common.  There are differences in the way each goes about fulfilling his needs. Individual cultures permit certain things that are forbidden in others, but if we can see beyond these, and not go to war over the details, we can all benefit from the relationship.  

If a scientist has a brilliant idea and shares it with his colleagues, the idea can take wing, but if it goes no farther than him, it risks dying in his own mind. Collaboration and cooperation are the best ways to complete many tasks.  None of the great civilizations would have been built without these pillars, but as high-flying as these pillars seem, they are constructed through the act of one man communicating with another.   The state apparatus of these influential civilizations may have been questionable, based as it still is on versions of slavery, but with reluctant cooperation, advances were and can be made.   Many lives were sacrificed to pull the majority of the world population out of starvation.  There is backsliding and there are leaps forward, but as MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."  With good will and correct action we can steer ourselves in the right direction, but we need to listen to each other to understand the varied colours of the arc and to accept them as being as valid as our own. In silence, ignorance, and rigidity, lies misery.

Like minds can inspire each other to step up to new heights.  Van Gogh and Gauguin entangled their universes and bounced off each other, both coming away altered by the experience.  Each had his own style and palette. They weren't trying to be better than one another, but to show each other what they could do.  It wasn't a competition, a sport that pushes a man beyond what he believes are his physical limits, requiring a winner and a loser, but a game of comparative virtuosity.  The goal was not to win, but to strive to be better, to run faster than before, jump longer and higher, to try for a personal best. 

We don't understand all there is to know about the chemistry of human encounters.   When we see other humans from a distance, we exchange non-verbal signals as they get closer to us, hoping for a non-violent outcome of our impending encounter. When we are a short distance from each other we try to read body language, faces, and intent.  Even closer we might exchange words and odours.  If we don't know the person there may be eye contact and there may be a greeting as we pass. If we do know the person or are intentionally meeting them, there is often some form of physical connection, a handshake, a hug, or even a kiss.  It's in this physical contact, like animals touching noses, or circling nose to tail, that we exchange molecules, perhaps bacteria or viruses, but a physical exchange happens. If we pick up a virus from the other person, something that might not require contact but simply closeness, our well-being can change.  We can bring death to one another.  In every human interaction there is the possibility of gain or pain.  Van Gogh experienced the anguished side of the equation when he cut off his ear after Gauguin abandoned his idea of a community of artists.  Two can be stronger than one, they can stand back to back against the slings and arrows, but they can also destroy each other.Yet someone who opts to be solitary, risks floating off into the clouds like a hallucinating saint with no church to anchor them. 

The common wisdom is that it takes a village to raise a child, but I believe it takes a different type of village to raise an adult.  We never stop learning, and are always touched by the lives we encounter, whether we want to be or not. John Donne understood this when he wrote that "No man is an island entire of itself."  Since we are connected by our common humanity we must learn to give more space to the ideas of others, to listen to considered advice, to remember our history, embrace our divinity, and to act for good when action is necessary.   Separation, isolation, and entrenchment, lead to wars, but communication, tolerance, and understanding, can bring peace.  If we are able to put aside our egos and listen to others, we can arrive at solutions neither of us would have come to alone.  This is not a stand-off compromise, agreeing that one plus one will always equal one plus one, but that one plus one can equal two, lifting both parties to a better and stronger state.  The unity of two heads, two minds, and two hearts, is always better than one head alone in the wilderness.

The message here is a love letter; a thanks and appreciation for all of the souls who touched me, who shared their lives with me, who gave me their sparks of genius and their diseases.  Many are lost but not forgotten, and I treasure all of those communicators who tapped me on the shoulder, and said "Pay attention to me." 

Russia's Nightmare

 "At least we have a roof over our heads."  In rural Russia, where the ceilings of temporary housing disintegrate overhead, and the earth reabsorbs the inadequate building foundations, it is a small but misguided comfort.  There is no money to fix things and the collective apparatus has broken down, so everyone struggles to get by.  It's the best that can be hoped under the circumstances.  Anyone with aspirations has gone to the city.  The people of the land who have scratched out a living for generations, first as serfs to landowners, then on collective farms, are now cut adrift in the middle of nowhere.  The infrastructure that supplies them is rotting and the government hopes these last outposts will disappear when the roof really does fall in.   

When the communists took power in Russia, small landholders were forced into the collective farming system, but when that collapsed it left individuals to whom private property was prohibited, with nothing.  These people were initially robbed of their land, made into slaves of the collective, then thrown out the door when the state collapsed on its imperfect foundations.  There is a generational sadness in the eyes of men and women whose dreams have been reduced to ashes.  Like the rest of the world, they were wrenched from the age of God-sanctioned monarchs by the Godless carnage of the war.   While the west retired to lick its wounds and rebuild, Lenin decided to experiment on Russia by translating Marx's thoughts into single party communism that had nothing to do with democracy.  Lincoln's definition of democracy was "by the people, for the people", but the Russians were only allowed half the cake.  Their government relieved them of the "by the people" burden on the grounds that ignorant people didn't know what was best for them.  Until they are re-educated, they can't be trusted with the responsibility of self governance.  Under another guise, small landholders again became serfs working under a master's whip.  If they didn't carry their weight in the collective they were punished, not with the Tsar's riding crop, but by peer pressure and accusations about sabotaging the entire motherland.  The world would never know the glory of collectivism unless everyone stayed in line. If they stumbled they were traitors to the noble cause. 

Rather than give an opinion on why the communist experiment went wrong, perhaps the best idea is to illustrate one of the many mistakes made by the planners of this new society.  The Russian government wanted to change the way people lived.  Workers shouldn't be at the mercy of capitalist bosses, have their wages reduced or be fired from their jobs by greedy corporate barons.  In a communist brave new world they would be provided with essentials to live a dignified life, including an all-important roof over their heads.  In cities like St. Petersburg, where there had  been a massive influx of the poor in search of work, the government of the day confiscated noble houses and partitioned them into accommodation for families.  When the communists took over, they declared that a person only required 9 square meters to live comfortably.  A few years later this was reduced to 5 square meters, which allowed people to rent a corner of a room.  When there was no more space in converted palatial residences, the government began to construct communal apartments.  They were late in doing so and were desperate to prevent a catastrophic housing crisis, so the buildings were thrown up quickly and as cheaply as possible. Usually these communal blocks were built in newly created satellite villages on the outskirts of cities but they were poorly served by public transit.  Nobody except a bureaucrat had a car.  

On Lenin's orders, the accommodations were to be organized on collective principles.  Each family had its own room, or two if the family was large enough, but the hallway, kitchen, and bathroom belonged to nobody.   Although these common areas should have technically been everyone's responsibility, they were considered nobody's, so if one resident made a mess, nobody should clean up after them.  Notes were posted to remind the delinquent residents that keeping their space clean was their duty to the state, and if they failed to do so, would be reprimanded at the next compulsory tenants meeting.  There were schedules and rules to be sure, but these were for kitchen or bathroom use so everyone wasn't underfoot at the same time, but queues still formed.  Though each family had its own cooker, or as little as a burner on a cooker, there were not enough sinks to go round so dishwashing times had to be staggered.  In the few bathrooms of no-man's land, everyone brought their own toilet paper and their own toilet seat.   The shotgun central hallways in these residences were lined with wardrobes, suitcases, bicycles, and crumbling boxes.  Electricity cables looped across the ceiling. Locks were not allowed on doors.  After all, everyone was part of one happy communist family.  Why would anyone steal from a comrade who was just as badly off as him?  Lenin's objective was to "unite different social groups in one physical space," but it was an idea that seriously underestimated human self-interest.  A doctor who works long hours, with life and death responsibilities, is not going to live comfortably with a drunk who is determined not to work and disrupts the entire group with his brawling and fighting.  Neither one or the other is better off for the experience.   Communism only works for the committed, and there has always been and always will be those who do not agree with the government of the day.

I was a child in the 1950's who grew up in a small frontier town in Canada.  We didn't lack anything, had parents who worked full time, and had a mortgage on our large comfortable house.  There was never any expectation of paying it off. That would only happen years later when all the us children had grown up and moved away.  Two working parents allowed us to have a car and the borrowing power to replace the wood fired heating in the house with a gas furnace that would run as long as we could afford the fuel.  Our childhood friends all lived in the same circumstances and we presumed everyone did.  Very few children lived in apartments.  There were sprawling suburbs for those who didn't want to live in the inner city.  If a family's budget didn't stretch to a house purchase, there were always houses to rent. 

If I compare this to a child growing up in Russia in the 1950's, who lived at the same latitude as me, our lives were very different.  We had neighbours but we did not all live together. Everyone had their own free-standing house on at least a fifty foot private lot, with a front and back garden. If we didn't like our neigbourhood we could move to another one, or to another city.  The government hardly kept track of us except to keep our address current, and we were permitted to live anywhere in the country we wished.  In a wide open and new country like Canada, this gave its citizens a sense of limitless possibilities.  I presumed my Russian brothers lived the same way, but at that age I had little knowledge of how hemmed in and controlled they were.  Russia had the same open spaces and possibilities, but its citizens were not encouraged to be individuals, to rebel, and go exploring the country or the world for themselves.  They had a duty to the motherland that was more important than frivolous voyages of self discovery.

I recently heard an interview with a young woman who had grown up in Yugoslavia.  The Russian ally Tito had been in charge of keeping the country united, but  by the 1960's the cracks were showing.  The young woman's parents had grown up in a society that wholeheartedly subscribed to the Russian version of communism.  Up to that time, the national factions in Yugoslavia had been at each other's throats in centuries-old tribal bickering.  The newly unified country was happy to wear its young socialist identical uniforms and do its part for the glorious nation that would show the world what miracles a communist society could perform.  Things didn't go as planned, and Yugoslavia was marginalized on the world stage.  Years of rote propaganda couldn't hold up an economy that was based more on hope than reality.  When Tito died and Yugoslavia separated into its original tribal units, the parents of the young woman were devastated.  The more European their country became the more they realized they had been made to live and believe in an experiment that was based on a faulty interpretation of Marx, and that they had suffered and sacrificed for nothing.

Although political and economic movements like communism profess to serve the common good, scratch any human being and one will find some self interest.  Everything can't be for the state.  Although it is admirable for a man to  contribute to the community that supports him, he is more than that. He is an individual, and to take that essential state of existence away from him is to do violence to his psyche.  

In the 1950's, European countries and large cities in America also threw up faceless housing for the post war population boom, and most of these buildings were quickly and cheaply constructed, but outside the Soviet Union, families weren't expected to live all together by sets of strict rules and believe the propaganda about sacrifices for the motherland.  Outside Russia, many of these housing projects became slums because they were not owned by the residents but by the government so they were not maintained.  These attempts at social housing using the Russian model failed spectacularly.  In capitalist America the government had better luck subsidizing the construction of individual residences because that's how people preferred to live.

 Half of my family origins are English / Scottish, so because of their immigration, I knew from a very young age that travelling was as easy as buying a ticket and getting on a boat or a plane.  It never entered my mind that this was unusual and that citizens of some countries, those designated a communist, were not allowed the same privileges.  Why would a country lock its citizens behind a wall?   

When I was a young man I drove and hitchhiked through much of Europe, often meeting like-minded souls from other countries, mostly European ones, but also American and Australian.  We had little money and weren't allowed to work in foreign countries, but we had saved money from jobs we had quit when he left home.  We were free spirits who were able and allowed to go wherever we wanted.  I never met a Russian doing the same thing, but then neither did I meet anyone Chinese - if they weren't American Chinese.  China was in the middle of a revolution.  I never met a black from Africa hitchhiking around Europe, though I did meet Arabs from North Africa who had the same urge to explore as I did.  American men were few on the ground because of the Vietnam war, but Russians were nowhere to be seen. I met a professor from Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring of 1968 who had found his way out for a few days and was on a culture-absorbing rampage through as much of Europe as possible before the iron curtain came down again.

Russians of my postwar generation had already grown up with parents who accepted communism as an everyday fact.  Spiritual life was not allowed unless it was underground, because religion was the opiate of the masses and those who believed in God were victims of a cult of superstition.  Atheism was the official doctrine of the party.  If there ever was a country that needed to provide an opiate for its long-suffering and deluded workers, something to allow them to escape the monotony of their predestined future, it was Russia.   Instead, many Russians tried to forget their grey lives by drowning themselves in cheap vodka.  Besides hockey, drinking was the national sport.  Western society offered every kind of decadent temptation although Westerners knew that the best of these things were available only to the rich.  But they also knew that with good judgement, luck, and hard work, they could become wealthy and have the stuff of their dreams as well, not something that was an option in Russia.  

In poor countries, often the only way to get ahead is by trickery, by cheating, and not playing by the rules.  If a man lets another steal something that is not bolted down before he does, then he is a fool.  The wise man is not the one who listens to his scruples and conscience.  He will go hungry, but the better man is he who got there first to claim the illicit prize.  This moral stance erodes all trust.  When people see the agents of government indulging in corruption, they understand that there are no rules, and that dishonesty wins the day.  It's worrying to think about several generations of Russian people growing up like this, people who do not play straight, who will lie and cheat to get what they want because they have been brutalized and used like lab rats by their governments, and have lost all hope or aspirations for the future.  Having a roof over their head is as much as they can expect.  Instead of dreaming about being head comrade in some state-supported disintegrating factory, they would probably rather be cruising the Mediterranean on a luxury yacht with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a prostitute in the other, doing every decadent thing their government has denied them.  If they or their fathers had been allowed to flirt with these impossible dreams all along, they would have learned how shallow such aspirations are, but it's hard for a man to think deeply about his actions, to question his morals, when every trace of the higher human spirit has been erased from his soul by a failed experiment.

In my view there is still time for Russia to rise from its ashes, learn from her mistakes, and build a truly socialist state that does not strip away personal initiative and allows free movement of its people.  The country has the resources to re-invent itself, but in this century has done nothing but resist the dubious charms of the West and try to resurrect its long lost empire, without offering its people workable solutions for modern life. There is no reason except pigheadedness why Russia doesn't look at her Scandinavian neighbours who have high levels of social satisfaction, and try to save the crumbling motherland  from another bloody revolution, though perhaps things have gone too far by now for reason to prevail.

Post Paradigm

The digital revolution has decimated print media and network television and changed the way we receive information. These days a wise man would be foolish to limit his input to one editor's opinion, to squeeze his information-gathering and entertainment into a time slot dictated by a television executive. The ten o'clock news has fallen by the side of the road along with tree-gobbling newspapers and the dial telephone.  Citizens can record the day's events on mobile phones and post them on the net faster than media empires can move their monstrous behinds. Though the traditional news media have deep archives for context and experts to offer sophisticated analysis, they don't broadcast the news itself, but an ongoing aftermath of opinion, a sort of journalistic masturbation.  Meanwhile the tom-tom drum of worldwide events is available on the screen of a small device that a Saharan camel herder or a Tajikistani nomad has access to.   An African migrant on a rubber dinghy in the Mediterranean has a cellphone.

Visual entertainment media is a sector that has grown steadily since the invention of moving pictures.  In a sense, it has been around since men painted on the walls of caves to tell hunting stories.  And thanks to our hunting and survival skills, the moving image has a visceral effect on our attention.  It draws us in like a cobra.  There is a place to contemplate the image of a man on a cross, but big media tempts us with a compelling and lazier way to get the message, by telling the story with heroic characters blazing across a screen.  Media conglomerates have the resources to raise production values far beyond the capabilities of an individual with a mobile phone, so it is more satisfying to watch the big boys.  Unfortunately, the nuances of the lessons are scrubbed away in the process.  Entertainment spectacles encourage us to sit back and take it in, no effort required.  All the work has been done.  Watch, don't think. While we're watching we're offered a special deal on reclining chairs that will allow us to lose the excess weight caused by our sugar addiction and inactivity. Moving visual media fascinates us, whether it is the latest streaming blockbuster, a collection of funny videos, black and white wartime footage, a classic movie, or shakey mobile clips from the streets when revolutions take place.  

More information is available to more people more of the time than ever before, which has caused a leap forward in our understanding of each other. We can see a person in the Siberian countryside preparing vegetable stew, or another in Tokyo making rice cakes.  This low-level information exchange helps us realize that we are not so different from each other no matter what our governments and its media would like us to believe.  

These days, if an alien landed in Africa, the event would be on social media within minutes. When the traditional news outlets pick up the story they will speculate about what it means, but the news of aliens without the analysis would be enough to turn many of our neat scientific theories on their heads.  We know things within minutes of them taking place, and everyone can know them.  Governments may block internet sites but that is as futile as trying to stop the tides.  Information and images leak through barriers in spite of efforts to destroy the evidence.  People have eyes and memories. 

Although the technological revolution has changed the way we see the world, there is also a risk of being plunged back into a new dark age as I described in a previous essay called Book Burning.  We hope that this doomsday scenario never happens as we give thanks to digital mobility and the strides it helps us make in knowing each other on an individual level.  Travel broadens the mind, but when we are not allowed or able to move, we can instantly connect to see how each other live and die in our simple profound universes.  We still need businesses to provide the infrastructure for communication, the smart-phone manufacturers and satellite launchers, but the platform providers who host content should have no political axes to grind.  Currying favour has always been the lifeblood of traditional news peddlers. The freedom of information that the world wide net offers, has ripped the shabby cloak away from the man who would be king, and shown him to be a money-grubbing petty dictator who will sell out to the highest bidder. Give me a phone and a walk through a favourite city, or sit down in a Greek mountain taverna, listen to an interview with a rebel from a previous generation, see a cartoon to make me laugh and remind me how human I am, or watch a refresher on how to fix a bicycle tire, and I can dial the roar of media hysteria back to its proper level. 

Apart from the phone's original function as a connective device that has upended perception, it has also wormed its way into so many aspects of our lives it has become another appendage. Phone books don't exist anymore.  There was once an industry of data collection, printing, delivering, and recycling that has come to a halt.  I no longer have an address book - everything is on a phone and backed up online. I don't need a timer to know when the laundry is finished or an alarm to wake me up.  If I want to make a note of anything my phone is always at hand.  I don't need reference books like encyclopedias, or any books for that matter.  I read my news from a variety of sources without consuming a single tree.   I don't need a bus schedule, plane, or train times as I can follow transport on a digital tracker.  I can take photos and show them to my friends or to the whole world. I can monitor my heartbeat or the intake and burning of calories.  I do my banking online and purchase goods that are delivered to my door. I can translate from Korean to French, check medical results, identify pieces of music, and so much more. The magic in a pocket that digital media offers is a science fiction dream, but for those who cling to the traditional, the beeps, alarms, and ringtones of personal devices are an electronic death knell. The old guard can't accept what history teaches, that once the genie is out of the lamp, he can't be stuffed back in.

The bad news is that we didn't know when we let the genie out of his bottle that he would have a flea in his ear.  Now that flea has grown a million-fold and become an infestation of individual users who believe that their ignorance has the same value as knowledge.  The algorithms that are programmed into hosting sites cater to individual users by suggesting content that is similar to the user's viewing choices, so will show only that to the viewer and leave aside the larger picture.  This has created a society of individual insects without the sophisticated organizational skills of a honeybee, who are more like wasps who will attack and dismember each other. They have no group-massage instinct toward the greater good, only their individual survival.  The Internet brings a unique and beneficial connectivity to our hive, but we must be on guard against the deadly wasps in their single poisonous nests.  

The Unreconstructed Man

"Good day folks.  I've been sent here to keep you entertained for as long as I can keep it up and you can stand it.  That might sound suggestive to you, but as we know, everything boils down to money and sex.  I've got no money so I'll stick to what I know. 

"You down in front, the guy with white hair and jeans.  Have you heard of sex?  Yes?  Nod twice for yes, otherwise I'll think you're falling asleep. 

"And you, the young lady with the toothpaste smile?  Yes?  Does your daddy know that you know? Oh, that's not him with you?  Sorry man.  Her uncle?  You're her uncle?  Well this is awkward.  Before we all end up in family court, I suppose I should tell you why I ask about sex.

"Sex is something everyone should have, but finding the right person to do it with is as easy as solving a Rubik's cube.  Of course there are rare Casanovas who can solve the thing in four seconds but what fun is that?

"Sex should be easier than a twisting plastic cube, but it seems the further along we get in time, the more complicated the puzzle gets.  Sex used to have only two sides but now there are at least as many as there are in a cube.  Until LGBTQ+ came along there was only MF, and I don't mean motherfucker.

"In the middle of the 20th century, feminists were loud in their insistence that women should have a voice, and I think you'd agree this is correct. As the women's movement gained traction, men stopped asking "What's a woman doing at the head of a successful company?" If a man had a brain cell that wasn't dominated by testosterone, he might see that would be as stupid as asking why a redheaded man made it to the top of the ladder.  As women gained status and power, role models popped up, women as heads of state, as astronauts, university chancellors, referees, jockeys, soccer and hockey players, and soldiers.  We're still waiting on the lady General who will lock up the boy's war toys until he learns how to use them responsibly. 

"Women have found their feet. With their emotional intelligence, multi-tasking skills, and sense of continuity and community, they have the ability to keep things in perspective, to see the bigger picture, unless someone has stolen their parking space, and then the verbal guns come out.

"In the 20th century, while the role of women changed from wife and homemaker to tax-paying member of society, a reconstruction of the male took place.  There was the Manchurian Candidate, a film about brainwashing, and a decade after that, The Six Million Dollar man, with its "We can rebuild him," tagline.  Women and men were both going through changes, but women seemed to know where they were going and men only heard that they should be 'bigger, stronger, and faster' as well as modifying their social behaviour to respect the opposite sex. For a lot of men this was like stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time.  Some men went shooting forward but others crept slowly forward making a lot of noise and smoke, but many men stayed where they were, spinning their wheels until their motors internally hemorrhaged. Those are the unreconstructed types.

"Enlightened women have taught their brothers, sons, and lovers to walk side by side with them or even a step behind, never in front. When a woman wants something, she expects her partner to be there to provide it, to protect her, to back her up when she needs support, and to carry at least half the weight of the household.  Men have been taught that they should hold doors open for women, that it is alright to push baby carriages, buy tampons, and tell her sweet lies about her body.  A man should also put the toilet seat back down when he has finished pissing all round the bowl.  Reconstructed men accept this role because if they want a balanced rapport with a woman in the 21st century, they have no choice.  Women have let men rule for millenia so it is high time men know how it feels to be at the other end of the stick.  You men out there, have you ever thought about how it feels to be asked if the reason you are cranky is because you are on your period?  You would probably snap back a hard NO, and marvel that anyone could ask you such a question. How would you feel if someone asked you if you were behaving like a bitch because you hadn't had sex in too long.  Reconstructed men have been taught not to even think it.  

"These recent changes in male behaviour have highlighted an existential dilemma for men. The modern man, the reconstructed man, with his happy wife, happy life submissiveness, has a counterpart who doesn't wish to be tamed.  This is the unreconstructed man.  This man has no restrictions on toilet seats, shopping trips, what he eats or drinks,  the people he hangs out with, or that he picks his nose.  Laugh.  I've seen you do it.

"The unreconstructed man has not been tamed or feminized and if he finds a partner, the relationship is adversarial.  This man is number one in his world.  He doesn't take his shoes off in the house and doesn't iron clothes.  He doesn't change the toilet paper, clean the sink, or put the cap back on the toothpaste.  He pretends he hasn't heard of recycling and throws his beer cans in the trash along with pizza scraps and coffee grounds.  He whistles at women from the window of his truck, and sings out dulcet phrases to them like “Hey baby I want to f*** the lips off you.”  There are many ways for this man to send the message to women that they are there for his pleasure.  This man likes his women bountiful, not skinny, unless they have big tits and then he will forgive the rest of the body.  He sees his women as sex cushions, then baby makers, then mothers who will look after his every need.  He engages in slut shaming, not seeing that his own behaviour is worse than those he criticizes.  Hands up you men who have been guilty of this.  Nobody?  Well then you're all remarkable specimens, gentlemen.  If only we could believe you.

"Unreconstructed men are xenophobic and racist because they don’t trust anyone who isn't like them. They exhibit a tribal instinct that prevents them from trusting strangers, even if they are from the next village, no matter the colour of their skin. The stranger is different, unknown, and potentially dangerous.  They're like dogs circling around each other baring their teeth. It's not a coincidence that most unreconstructed men are straight white males who had submissive mothers.  Any of you out there who had mothers who said "No damn way," to being put in her place, are the lucky ones, and will probably find a chair at the table in the next century.  The throwbacks will be left peering through the bars, fighting over scraps, too stuck in the gumboots of their forefathers to understand what they are doing wrong.  They will put on the guilty and sorry look of a dog caught shredding rubbish all over the kitchen floor.  "Did you do that?"  "Yes mum."  "Why?"  "Something just came over me." "Bad dog!"

"Unreconstructed men make inappropriate jokes, while reconstructed men don't tell jokes because all humour is at the expense of someone.  Unreconstructed men use swearing as their first choice of self expression, while reconstructed men swear only in private and try not to use religious or sexist epithets.  Unreconstructed men don't know the difference between their inside voice and their outside voice while reconstructed men often have to be told to speak up. An unreconstructed man doesn’t read instructions or ask for help, not even when his Ikea table is upside down. He uses climate destroying aerosol in the bathroom and doesn't close the door when he is on the toilet. He prefers his women barefoot, pregnant, and indoors, carrying out their gender assigned duties.

"An unreconstructed man wants sex when and how he wants it, usually at 5am when every male gets a dream boner.  His preferred position is anything dominant.  He refuses to give up his addictions but prefers that women in his orbit don't have any.  When he is ill, he thinks he is dying and never takes a basin to bed because he is not the one who will clean up afterwards. He prefers to get into a made bed but he never makes it himself.  

"The unreconstructed man is a hunter by instinct.  If he has nowhere to indulge this urge, he will play video games, often ones where he is the first  person shooter.  Pow, pow, pow. The unreconstructed man laughs at his own jokes.  He has learned the basics of computers and smartphones, and feels compelled to make comments, but he is intimidated by critics who make fun of his spelling, so when he has something to say, he expresses it in phonetic form, like "aaiiyyaaah!" or "oooffaahh!"

"Some are threatened by this refashioning of social norms because they believe that gender roles are fixed.  Anthropologists, those professional people watchers, tell us that these apparently inborn traits are not permanent and have constantly evolved to help us survive in varying climates and societies.   But even with the advances women have made in the 20th century, we still live in a patriarchal society.  If an unreconstructed man denies this fact, he should turn the tables and ask himself what a matriarchal society would look like and what would his place be in it.  In short, he will not be at the top of the totem pole or at the bottom.  Matriarchies have existed in the past and may exist again, and their resurgence would send a host of unreconstructed patriarchal Neanderthals running for cover like vampires fleeing from sunlight. There will be holdouts in the new order, throwbacks who will be recorded in history as maladapted dinosaurs.  So men, get your nurturing papers in order, because when women realize they have to take up arms to root out the last obstacles to progress, to beat the patriarchs at their own game, there will be some serious homemaking skills to be learned.  But women should also be wary because as a threatened species, unreconstructed men may go to ground and claim they are fighting for their survival, which though true, is a lost cause.  Unreconstructed men will be consigned to that crowded place, the wrong side of history, in the illustrious company of Mussolini, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Gaddafi, and Donald Trump.

"So to any men out there who have a strong strain of the caveman in them, it's time to reconstruct yourselves so we can create a more balanced society for the next generation to inherit.  Put down the PlayStation and be a man, a real man, a he-man, a man who shoulders his share of the sky. 

What the Hell is Gay?

 Don’t get me wrong. I am a man who is proud to be gay, but I am sometimes confused about what exactly that is. Gays are a minority as they make up only about ten percent of the population.  If being gay didn't bring with it serious consequences, it would be no different from having green eyes or being left-handed.  People have an instinctive fear of the unknown, so ethnic minorities suffer racial slurs because it is impossible, nor would they want to, hide what they are. The mothers or fathers of these minorities might give them tips on how to survive in an alien culture, but unlike gays, these children never have to hide from their parents the reasons they struggle to fit in.    

It’s entirely appropriate that the rainbow flag has become a rallying symbol for LGBTQ people because there are so many hues of sexual preference that only a rainbow having a psychedelic dream could represent them. There isn't enough space here to unravel all of the colours so I will stick to what I know and explore the gay male part of the spectrum.

There has been a sea change in gay male behaviour in the new century.   When the sexual liberation of the 1960's bloomed, many men understood that along with women, they had the right to love whoever they wanted, and that society's backlash against this was outdated and prejudicial. Through the last decades of the twentieth century, being gay went from something secret and scandalous to showing itself off in gay pride marches.  As unabashed gay life opened up, men were surprised to discover how many others there were like them.  In the gay community they found that heir preferences were not a sin or something they should be ashamed of.  The more men who came out of the closet, the more they were accepted by the straight population.  Everybody knew somebody, or had a relative or a friend who was gay. 

This acceptance caused a sexual shift in the next generation.  Children grew up with the knowlege that it was okay to be gay.  If men wanted to colour their hair, wear nail polish, or call their friends bitches, it was nobody's business but theirs.  Along with this openness, the cultural arbiters and opinion makers honed in on certain aspects of gay culture they found worth exploiting.  What could be funnier than watching a man in a wig tottering around on unaccustomed high heels?  The problem with this stereotype, is that people come to believe that the comic character with a feather boa and wig, is what being gay is all about. They assume every gay man wishes to be a woman so they make them into figures of fun since everyone knows that the clown in the high heels will come to a bad end.  This misinformation has led many young men who suspected they were gay, to commit suicide.  They didn't behave like the mincing stereotype and had no desire to wear women's clothes.  Their sexual preference for men would make marriage to a woman dishonest and harmful.  There would be no children.  What they imagined their future would be, had been extinguished.  Some found no way out of this impossible situation except death. 

Rather than cry about tragic statistics, I believe that those who peddle ideas to media conglomerates, should get off the gravy train of humourous tropes and portray gay men and women as they really are. There have been attempts, but television still desperately milks the comic vein.  The connected world we inhabit today is made up of many people who don't fit the family mode of two parents of the opposite sex, with two children, living in a home in the suburbs. Fewer people than ever fit the example of what is considered the default. It is possible, if all the non-traditional family units, including single people were counted, they might outnumber the traditional ones. Roles have changed. People's lives have changed.  They no longer feel stigmatized for living by their own lights, for finding a way to survive and thrive that works for them in today's world.  As the expression goes, "I'll do me."

Gay couples are a part of the landscape because humans have a natural instinct to be partnered, though many gays prefer to stay single given the strictures of traditional fidelity.  People who are not gay don't realize that for a gay man to work in an office of only men, is like a straight man working in a office of only women. The sexual tension and temptation are difficult to deny.  Although it is not the same for all gay men, most of their interest in other men is sexual, some of which involves penetration.  This is not something straight couples ever have to consider.  Because of this, there are categories gay men have organized themselves into, that a straight man would never think about.  There is a minefield of sexual preferences to sort out at first contact.   If either party in this complex mating ritual draws a line and says "I won't do that," the connection can fail completely or the two might settle into being just friends, and in some cases, friends with benefits.  .  

There are tops. There are bottoms.  Some men are 100% tops and some are 100% bottoms.  There are tops who sometimes bottom and bottoms who sometimes top.  There are power bottoms who take control of penetration and power tops who are sexually aggressive and long lasting. There are transvestites, drag queens, and transgender individuals. There are men who behave like drag queens but don’t dress up in women’s clothes.  There are men who are gay but prefer an ultra-masculine look with facial hair instead of a smooth face, but who give themselves away as soon as they speak.  There are men who are gay but show no evidence of it in either speech, dress, or manners. There are men who will only have sex with another man if there is an emotional connection, and there are men who will have sex with anyone and anything.  There are daddies and sons, bears and cubs, masters and slaves, leather men and sissies. Although the gay community has always celebrated diversity, the general trend seems to be toward the asexual, neutral, and celibate.  It could be that this trend was the result AIDS and other STD's, causing some young men to judge it too risky to engage physically.  It was safer to connect online.  Apart from a strong eeewww factor in a snowflake generation who have never known the blood and guts of life, there is also an economic consideration for young people.  Setting up on their own when they have no experience cooking a meal or paying a bill, is daunting for them, and having children would be unthinkable when they are still children themselves.  A few generations of this cultural shift away from breeding, might get the world's spiralling population under control.   

Most scientists accept that homosexuality is caused by a combination of genetics, hormones, and some post-natal influences.  The genetic element is passed through the mother's side, and the hormonal influences take place in the womb.  Although the cake is baked by the time the child is born, there are some after birth factors such as permissiveness which can determine whether children grow into or away from their tendencies. 

The public aren't generally aware of all the conditions a child can be born with.  There are common problems that can be fixed with surgery like a cleft palate or a clubfoot, but there are others that involve organs not being fully connected, partially missing, or in the wrong place.  I once wrote a novel that had an hermaphrodite as the main character, and learned in my research that although the majority of people are born with the standard X and Y chromosomes in combination, XX for female and XY for male, there are also those who are born with XXY chromosomes, or XXXY.  Some of these combinations cause conditions that result in babies being mis-gendered by doctors, and some are said to cause psychological problems. 

Although medical science continues to study the causes of homosexuality, there is reason to worry about how the knowledge could be used.  Once a condition is fully understood, there are questions around whether its course should be altered.  Treatments might be developed to prevent serious diseases by tampering with an embryo's genetics, and before long the techniques might be applied to eye colour or other physical traits. At that point, how long would it take before there are similar alterations to eliminate homosexuality? It would be unethical to do this but the worst among us have been known to behave in unethical ways.  Given the uptick in singles and childless gay couples, scientific fixes for homosexuality are not only unethical and counterproductive.  Whatever it means to be gay, which is different for every man and woman, it would be a crime to rob humanity of the kaleidoscopic manifestations of the third sex. 

Book Burning

I admit to the cultural sin of burning books.  It was a long time ago, and I did it to liberate myself from the opinions of others.  At the time, my Marxist wife and I, always on the hunt for a better house with cheaper rent, had just moved for the 4th time in 2 years.  We had enlisted my family to help us move, but after carrying box after box after box of books into our new place, they suggested the next time around they would pool their resources and hire a moving company.  As we settled in for winter, we started using the fireplace in the big living room to reduce our heating bills.  One night we found ourselves in a discussion about excess baggage in our lives, both emotional and physical.  In my head I heard the words of her ex-boyfriend, a golden-haired hippie who often repeated Occam’s Razor like a mantra, that we shouldn't “complicate entities beyond necessity”.  Since my own mother was a person who hated clutter, and would throw something away as soon as look at it, my preference for travelling light came with my genes.  My wife was an army brat  who was used to moving, and unlike her parents, didn’t want the accouterments of bourgeois life.  She had saved no furniture from her turbulent life before we met, but in the ten years since she had earned her degree, she had hung onto her boxes of textbooks like they made her education legitimate.  She had paid good money for them. 

We started with these.  There was no second-hand bookstore that would accept the superseded textbooks except to be recycled for pulping, so they were the first to be consigned to the flames.  To be clear, it is difficult to start a fire with only books. One page at a time will burn, but tearing and scrunching up every page of a Bible-like tome would take an eternity, and we had boxes of the stuff to get rid of.  A crackling fire of Douglas fir split-logs was set roaring in the fireplace before the books went in, but the books could only be fed in one at a time, like spooning out food to a hungry baby.  Dumping a boxload of them onto the flames would have smothered the conflagration like a fire-blanket. 

The books we decided to burn were mostly works of criticism.  There was literary criticism, criticism of economic theories, social deconstructions, and cultural mis-readings.  The red line on which works had merit, vacillated when it came to choosing Ruskin’s writing on Venetian architecture or Sartre’s Saint Genet.  What was derivative and what was original?  It was just as well we weren’t burning the texts for heat because books don’t burn easily.  The title of Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451 made it obvious why.  To stay alight, the books had to be poked open and flipped over like steaks on a grille.  Sometimes more firewood had to be piled on top to consume the resistant spines as if they were the heaviest bones of a cremated animal.  The next day there were a few fragments in the ash, puzzle-pieces of crumbling papyrus.  It was a liberating experience for both of us, who as educated people, had done what we were always taught was taboo.  We agreed that critiques of critiques add nothing new to the world and do nothing to solve real problems.  Tears would not be shed by anyone if the second-hand opinions were consigned to the flames.  In practical terms, we lightened our load for the next time we moved.

Since they were first published, books have always been under threat because they are vessels for ideas.  Every book contains its share of genies trying to emerge, but physical copies of books can be heavy and take up space.  These days, continents of ideas and images are accessible on the screens of mobile phones everywhere.  Who needs printed books?  Aficionados appreciate the feel and scent of a book, the handy shape of it, and the possible journey that it made land in their hands.  To them, books are treasures worth keeping. 

Bookworms aside, booksellers have had a difficult time in the digital age.  Some are still breathing, but they risk following video rental stores down the road of comedian’s jokes and closed up shop-fronts.  LP vinyl records have made a small comeback to satisfy devoted fans but vinyl will never return to the universality it once had as a vehicle for affordable musical propaganda.  Physical copies of books may soon follow the same path and what we once thought was commonplace, will exist no more.  Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and CD’s, with their history of decline and disuse, will puzzle those who see them in technology museums.  Our ancestors probably predicted the demise of the book when paperbacks came along, but the opposite happened.  Because they were cheap and accessible, paperbacks were a publishing boom, but in this technological age, the content of a book, many books, can be stored on something the size of a fingernail. Traditional publishers are in trouble and have become nothing more than advertising agencies. Giant publishers swallow the small players, and now market a four format model, with hardcovers, paperbacks, audio books, and digital files.  Digital books will make hard copy volumes into curiosities for the type of collector who also likes the needle in the groove.

Assuming our way into the future, we could see all works of art being visible digitally and not available in any other form.  There may be a physical object somewhere, like the neatly illustrated manuscript of Alice in Wonderland in the British Library, but physical copies of it will not be extant. Libraries will not have a reason to exist except as digital hubs.  Global warming may incinerate most of the trees and there will be a paper shortage. The bundles of newspaper and cardboard boxes we threw away in our lifetimes will come back to haunt us.  Examples of the visual arts like Van Gogh, will be hidden in bomb-proof bunkers in Amsterdam, though images of the paintings will be widely viewable. 

Into this digital paradise may come a massive solar storm or a virus that consumes content as fast as it is uploaded.  If this happens there will be little evidence of what came before, no YouTube videos to explain how to change a bicycle tire or to explain the causes and context of the last great war.  

Mankind is notoriously bad at learning from history.   People don’t like to dwell on the past because the present is enough of a struggle/  When a war finishes it doesn’t last long as a topic of conversation. However, if our eggs of knowledge are all contained in one digital basket, there will be nothing left if some unknown force blows a hole in said basket. 

It could be argued that keeping original works of art or literature on such unstable materials as paper or canvas, also puts them at risk of being burned up in an old-fashioned fire. But if the New York Public Library goes up in smoke and Marx’s original notes for Das Kapital are destroyed, there are printed copies all over the globe that can pass on revolutionary ideas to any future generation who might be interested.  If digital storage goes blank, and we have disposed of all books as inconvenient encumbrances, there will be no works of long dead philosophers or artists to inspire future generations.  They will have to reinvent the wheel.

            In the late 1990’s the term burning was used for the technique of transferring information onto a CD.  Whether it was a CD or a cassette tape, all of the methods used for storing information were unstable.  When floppy discs first came out they were touted as the digital storage solution for all time.  Fifty years later I still hold onto a few floppies because my computer can’t read the information on them.  In the meantime, we have gone through cassette tapes, CD’s, iPods, USB sticks, and cloud storage. The methods change as quickly as engineers can invent them, but they are all at risk from major magnetic events.

     There have been times in history where books have been burned to stamp out what the state considered dangerous knowledge.  Arts and sciences may have been set back by these events because in the times when such autocratic ceremonies were carried out, the items burned may have been one of a kind. The library of Alexandria went up in smoke.  By the time the Nazis got to book burning, they could empty the libraries and bookshops, but there were already enough printed copies in other places that it was a foolish idea to think they could stamp out ideas they didn’t agree with. But book burning has a wider objective than just the destruction of paper.  It is carried out to cause fear in anyone who has knowledge of the content of the banned and burned books.   Those who have this knowledge are unwilling to come forward, because revealing information that is awkward for a strong-arm regime, can have catastrophic health outcomes for the whislte-blower.      

Another sort of book burning is still taking place in an ideologically divided America.  While nobody could resist the backlash of an outright book burning, books are being removed from schools and libraries if they are deemed contrary to Christian values, which for the conservative bodies who decide, include mention of gay and transgender people.  We had finally arrived at a place where kids were comfortable admitting they had two moms or two dads, but the holier-than-thou fascists have snatched that acceptance away from them.   Schools and libraries are not burning books in the street because there are more discreet ways of making them disappear. No actual flames are involved but the effect is the same.  It becomes taboo again to stray outside fixed gender stereotypes, a moral stance that does enormous harm to young people.  Many teens who commit suicide do so because they suspect they are gay and don’t want to be.  When truthful information about being gay, trans, or any other way, is not available to them, they lack the knowledge to make rational decisions, and tragedy is the result. 

Before the technology of the new millennium, there was a British royal scandal that the press agreed not to publish, but fax machines had become ubiquitous in offices, so copies of the French press were easily faxed to offices across the channel.  It became all but impossible to suppress news. Various dictator’s have tried to limit access to the web, but there are always ways for information to leak through. These days everyone has a camera phone and there are worldwide social platforms, so it’s difficult to keep information secret.   Images can find their way onto whatever platforms remain in a restricted country, and even if they are taken down within hours, they are first seen and passed on by sympathetic viewers.

There is danger in the widespread broadcasting of details of unremarkable lives.  We drown in a sea of irrelevant information about what the influencer had for breakfast, what they wore that day, and what streets they walked down.  It is like watching a work colleague's holiday photos.  It has minimal entertainment value and shoulders aside perspective and context.  “This is me on vacation” doesn’t have much to do with the location travelled to, except for how the weather treated the content creator.  The average social media influencer probably doesn’t know who Karl Marx was or the effect of his writings. They probably don’t know what dial telephones were or how music came out of a cassette tape.  If we pull the plug on the digital generation, not only do we take away their daily addiction to candy, but leave them with no framework that will help them get their feet back on the ground.  The maps that could tell them which way to go will have evaporated in the solar storm and paper maps will be out of print. 

Forced to be ever more mobile for work, citizens will have discarded their heavy loads of books and other weighty knowledge containers, so if the digital world is erased, records of what existed before will be wiped clean. Those who still have memories will tell tales to their children about transcendent paintings, inspiring sculptures, and magic books that opened portals in the human brain.  Luckily a grandmother or two will still remember what foods to harvest and how to make bread, but the few minds that remember there was a theory of relativity or a theory of surplus value based on labour, will have to wrack their old brains to remember what it was about.   Those who have become media dependent will be inconsolable.  Their lives will hardly be worth living. 

Nature abhors a vacuum, so after the deluge, a figure may come along to fill the blank minds with twisted ideological claptrap, and the empty headed sheep will be happy to follow.  This time there will be no books left to burn, but like Hitler’s Germany or Ray Bradbury’s dystopia, the hunted will be the passers-on of ideas that are contrary to the new regime’s plans.  Orwell warned us that when nobody remembers history, the propaganda machine can make wrong out of right and vice versa.  Like dogs, humans can be trained to hate and kill each other.  It has happened before, and given the spiral form of the galaxy that rules everything, it will come round again.  

 

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.