If Trump – or Obama or Scott Morrison or Hillary Clinton – saying that 2 + 2 = 4 makes you automatically deny the math because your bête noire simply cannot be correct, you might want to take a deep breath or two and reflect on your approach to life. You’re broken. Don’t be that person.
Arthur Chrenkoff, “Denying the sky is blue because Orange Man Bad”, The Daily Chrenk, 2019-10-18.
November 19, 2019
November 18, 2019
QotD: H.L. Mencken on “moral crusades”
H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.
The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the republic – against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the cigarette, against all things sinful and charming – these astounding Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates.H.L. Mencken, “Moral Indignation”, Damn! A book of calumny, 1918.
Comments Off on QotD: H.L. Mencken on “moral crusades”
November 17, 2019
Mark Steyn on the post-Basil-Fawlty John Cleese
He’s trying fairly hard not to turn into one or another of the stock characters he’s played over the years:
John Cleese at the Byline Festival, 2017.
Photo by Raphael Moran via Wikimedia Commons.
“John was a boy that kept to himself,” recalled Mrs Hicks, Reg and Muriel Cleese’s next-door neighbor in Totnes in Devon, deploying the formulation traditionally reserved for the landladies of suburban serial killers. “I suppose he was all right with his Cambridge people, but us being country folk he wouldn’t say very much. At one time I looked after John for a couple of days and did his bedroom when his parents were away. He was writing something on his desk at the time. Course I didn’t look at it, but it was sarcastic sort of stuff about Churchill. I do often wonder what happened to him.”
Listening to Mrs Hicks, you appreciate the particular challenge of comedy writing – for who could ever improve on that? Nonetheless, she’s not the only one to wonder what’s happened to John Cleese. He turned eighty a couple of weeks back, and the jubilations were more muted than one might once have expected. My local PBS station still shows Fawlty Towers as part of its Britcom lineup, but Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, bemoans that Cleese has now turned into Basil Fawlty lui-même. Younger “comics” regret that the a great comedic talent is now the pub bore he played in his youth.
And why would that be? Well, after supporting Brexit, he moved to Nevis in the British West Indies and announced that the imperial metropolis was “not really an English city anymore”. Mayor Khan replied that “Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength” – although, strong as it is, it doesn’t seem much use during a knife attack. During the ensuing Twitterstorm, an opposing Tweeter declared that “I can’t stand Englishness”, and Cleese wistfully responded:
I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing. But in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it.
The Two-Minutes Tweet-Hate rampaged on, and Cleese retreated to the charms of his post-colonial backwater:
Nevis has excellent race relations, a very well educated population, no sign of political correctness… conscientious lawyers, a relaxed and humorous life style, a deep love of cricket, and a complete lack of knife crime …and the icing on the cake is that Nevis is not the world centre for Russian dirty money laundering…
I think it’s legitimate to prefer one culture to another. For example, I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation. Will this be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them?
Is this the room for an argument? Not anymore. There are just things you’re not meant to bring up, lest the hoverers pounce.
As it happens, I agree with almost all of the above. But then I always have. It’s odder to hear it from Cleese. In essence, he misses the England of Mrs Hicks, of couples called Reg and Muriel, of saloon-bar majors, bowler-hatted civil servants, Church of England vicars, socially insecure lower-middle-class hoteliers and all the other stock types of a now vanished Albion he mocked at the height of his celebrity. The counterculture triumphed so totally that there is no longer a culture to counter, and the void of “diversity” makes London feel, even overlooking the stabbings and clitoridectomies, just like a large version of every other cookie-cutter multiculti western city.
“I know they were very disappointed with John,” Mrs Hicks told Cleese’s biographer Jonathan Margolis. “Muriel was so excited when she came in here and said John had passed his exams at Cambridge. They thought he was going to be a solicitor, and then he fell in with David Frost and that was it.”
Comments Off on Mark Steyn on the post-Basil-Fawlty John Cleese
QotD: Socialist beliefs about “capitalism”
- Wealth is either fixed in amount, or, while it might be destroyed or diminished by certain human activities (such as war), if wealth grows this growth occurs largely independently of human ideas, choices, actions, and institutions;
- trade and commerce, therefore, are largely zero-sum – that is, each exchange situation pits a party who will win against one who will lose;
- trade and commerce, in turn, involve activities are thus, at best, suspect; trade and commerce too often reward greediness and duplicity while penalizing generosity and honesty;
- the “distribution” of wealth – whether conceived as financial flows or assets, or as access to real goods and services – is determined largely by power;
- prices set on markets are largely arbitrary; prices seldom play any role beyond determining how much one party “wins” from trade and how much the other party “loses.”
- each of a handful of large groups of people, mostly as conceptualized by intellectuals with no understanding of economics, has its own “interests” – interests that are shared by all members of the group and that are at odds with the interests of other groups; for example, “labor” has interests that are are shared by all workers and that are at odds with the interests of “employers”;
- while the state can be captured by ill-intentioned people, the state – especially under unlimited majoritarian rule – is also the only possible savior of the powerless against the predations and frauds of the powerful;
- absent vigorous state intervention, ordinary people – people whose main asset is the value of their own labor – lack both the power to get their fair share of society’s wealth and the intelligence or self-discipline to use wisely whatever share of wealth they do manage to secure;
- social progress is achieved by the powerless grabbing power under the leadership of men and women of singular vision, intelligence, and courage; “the People” will be led to the Promised Land – can be led to the Promised Land – only if they faithfully follow their caring messiahs;
- those who argue in favor of free markets are either soulless mercenary cronies for the powerful propertied class or they are ideologically blinded dupes for this class; no intelligent and decent person could possibly deny the enormous benefits available to “the People” when the state is empowered to work on their behalf against the propertied few.
Don Boudreaux, “Some Links”, Café Hayek, 2017-10-08.
Comments Off on QotD: Socialist beliefs about “capitalism”
November 15, 2019
“In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington”
Mark Steyn on the foggiest of Foggy Bottom diplomatic bafflegab on the first day of the :
Yesterday I caught a bit of the impeachment theatre en route to a lunchtime speaking engagement. To be honest, if they’d come round and performed it live in my hotel room, I’d still have fled. If universally respected eminent lifelong career foreign-service bigshots Bill Taylor and George Kent are Adam Schiff’s star witnesses, their chief purpose seems to be to get Democrats pining for the charisma of Bill de Blasio and the self-effacement of John Kerry.
In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington. When Taylor and Kent whine that there seemed to be a “shadow foreign policy”, the shadow is theirs; they spent a day testifying that everything had been going ticketty-boo for decades just as they’d always done things – and then Trump came along and took a different view. Oh, my! Anyone would think that, as Barack Obama once proposed, “elections have consequences”.
First up was George Kent, the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus”. He warmed up the crowd with some extensive biographical material about the “nearly sixty years” of George Kents (I believe he’s George III or some such) who have “chosen” to endow America with the blessings of their “public service”. It didn’t help that he wore a bow tie. Eventually he stopped talking about himself and started talking about Ukraine:
Our strategic aim for the entirety of my foreign service career is not possible without a Ukraine whole, free, and at peace, including Crimea and Donbas, territories currently occupied by Russia.
Crimea is, of course, familiar to anyone who’s read “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do or die…Or, in the case of low-level diplomats who’ve never had a single conversation with the President, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or tender their resignations after first ensuring that their pensions won’t be affected. Instead:
Into the valley of the SCIF
Rode the six hundred hearsay witnesses…As I said, any Tom, Dick or Harry can bandy Crimea, but it takes a career striped-pants Foggy Bottom public servant to toss in “Donbas” with gay abandon. It would have been interesting to see whether Adam Schiff or anyone else in the room could have found Donbas on a map. The odds of pinning the tail on the Donbas blindfolded are better. It’s bordered to the north, east and south-east by Russia, so it’s akin to the Russian foreign ministry regarding northern Mexico as a vital national-security interest of Moscow’s.
In fact, northern Mexico is a vital national-security interest of America’s, but, under the mass wankerization of public policy, Perma-Beltway cares more about the borders of Ukraine than it does about the borders of the United States.
Comments Off on “In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington”
QotD: Understanding trade policy
Now let Jones secure Jackson’s approval for his actions. Jackson expresses his approval not only of Jones obstructing your freedom to buy across-town tomatoes, Jackson also approves of Jones taking some of your money directly to help Jones pay for the employment, arming, and dressing up in fancy costumes of a street gang who will do the actual dirty work of caging or killing you if you refuse to abide by the tomato-buying terms that Jones imposes on you.
When you object to the injustice of Jones’s actions, he reminds you that you had a vote in this matter. But being outvoted 2 to 1, this majority outcome, by some mystical process, transforms Jones’s pure and simple thuggery into perfectly acceptable – even noble – “trade policy” the violation of which would make you the anti-social criminal.
Further, Jones, to his delight, discovers that Jackson has been hard at work on a treatise that details the many dangers of allowing you to buy your tomatoes without obstruction from across town. Jackson’s treatise even has empirical data on the number of tomatoes and labor hours that would no longer be grown and and worked on your Elm St. block if you are left free to buy your tomatoes unobstructed. Combined with criticisms of “simple-minded” defenses of free trade and with explanations that tomatoes grown across town are sold at unfairly low prices, Jackson’s treatise rids Jones of the few qualms that Jones’s threats of violence against you caused him to suffer from time to time
Thus is “trade policy.”
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-10-23.
November 14, 2019
Albertan separatism – “we don’t want to become Newfoundland”
Colby Cosh discusses the hot topic in western Canada, separatism:
In trying to puzzle out the immediate future of Greater Alberta’s struggle with Confederation, one is naturally exposed to many varieties of the question “What are you blue-eyed sheiks complaining about?” Alberta is still a province with relatively high incomes despite a labour market that has been in the doldrums for years: why, people ask, is there separatist panic in a place that is still far wealthier than, say, Newfoundland? A good short answer to this would be “That’s why everybody here is going nuts: we don’t want to become Newfoundland.”
Newfoundland, unlike Alberta, was given the choice of joining Confederation on a bare majority vote; the result, in time, is that the province’s defining cod industry was permanently annihilated … thanks to expert, scientifically informed, completely well-intentioned centralized management from Ottawa. Hey, mistakes happen! One long-term consequence of this one is that a large fraction of the ethnic stock of Newfoundland now lives and works in Alberta. It might be that “Wexit” sentiment is especially strong in this expatriate community, though no one has any hard data to hand yet.
A crucial purpose of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s “Fair Deal Panel,” announced on the weekend, is to gather some. Kenney announced, in a speech which reaffirmed his own strong commitment to federalism, that Preston Manning will head a group of MLAs and academics whose job will be studying ideas for giving Alberta more autonomy within Confederation. The “Fair Deal Panel” is going to look at a number of concepts that have been swirling around for decades but which were ignored by Alberta’s Progressive Conservative governments. One notes, however, that the panel does have a mandate to sound out public opinion quantitatively, through polling and focus groups.
Some of the political concepts recommended to the Fair Deal Panel for study appeared in what is remembered as the Alberta “Firewall Letter,” authored by Stephen Harper and a group of Calgary School fellow-travellers (not including Kenney); the letter was first published in this newspaper in 2001. The firewall had five components: Alberta withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan, Alberta withdrawal from the federal Tax Collection Agreement, the revival of an Alberta Provincial Police force, a request for tax points from the federal government in place of cash transfers for health and welfare, and a provincial referendum on Senate reform, which was still a thing back then.
Comments Off on Albertan separatism – “we don’t want to become Newfoundland”
November 13, 2019
George Orwell: A Life in Pictures
Albion Noise
Published 27 Dec 2015George Orwell: A Life in Pictures is a 2003 BBC Television docudrama telling the life story of the British author George Orwell. Chris Langham plays the part of Orwell. No surviving sound recordings or video of the real George Orwell have been found.
Awards:
International Emmy 2004 for Best Arts Programme
Grierson Award 2004 for Best Documentary on the Arts
Comments Off on George Orwell: A Life in Pictures
QotD: Western culture’s mortal wound
None of those attempts were as total or as successful as the 20th century ones, due to several things. The first was that nations hadn’t had their spirits broken as thoroughly as WWI broke them, so people weren’t willing to lend credence to things spouted from on high with that much eagerness, and things leaked through. HOWEVER the most important thing that the twentieth century had in hand to try to remake culture was this: public education, mass media, mass news reporting.
Did it succeed? No. The only result of trying to mold human beings into the utopian version of the man who would live happily under communism was 100 million graves, and a Europe that is dying of senescence and lack of reproduction.
However it succeeded brilliantly in not only separating, now, I suppose two or three generations from their roots, but also convincing them that they are superior to their actual learned ancestors, and somehow, yet, the product of the worst civilization of human history.
Western culture is dying of WWI partly because the “cure” imposed by state education apparatus, corrupted by Soviet agitprop and continued by “intellectuals” who know nothing except that they’re superior to everyone else, more enlightened, kinder, and that they should design society and the world to “improve” it.
Sarah Hoyt, “A Generation With No Past”, According to Hoyt, 2017-10-19.
Comments Off on QotD: Western culture’s mortal wound
November 11, 2019
The Berlin Wall – A Street Party With Sledgehammers – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published 9 Nov 2019Thanks to World of Tanks for sponsoring this episode. Download the game on PC and use the invite code
CHECKPOINTCto claim your $15 starter pack https://tanks.ly/2NoVfjx.The Berlin Wall has become a symbol of the Cold War. It encircled West Berlin, separating it from the Soviet-controlled East Berlin, placed to try and stop the flood of skilled professionals leaving to the West. Multiple US presidents had penned speeches about tearing down the wall, to no effect. But the Wall did fall. As the USSR underwent massive reforms and the Velvet Revolution was underway, East Germany was undergoing its own reform. And one clerical oversight in a press conference will destroy the Wall for good.
Update: Austin Bay linked to a column he wrote in 2009 on the 20th anniversary of these events.
Many in the West, including the U.S., believed that the communists had history on their side. The wry debate reply from the defeatist lefties favoring unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament was “better Red than dead.” For decades — I repeat, decades — this crowd had a media pulpit from which its self-proclaimed intelligentsia preached the moral equivalency of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and at times dropped the all pretense and fingered the U.S. as the “fascist state” and global oppressor.
In the language of the defeatist left, the U.S. was the jailer, the warmonger, the threat to world peace.
The Berlin Wall’s collapse exposed that Big Lie, as did the documented moral, political, economic and ecological wretchedness of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, we still hear echoes of this “blame America” cant lacing al-Qaida propaganda and the lectures of hard-left reactionaries like Bill Ayers. The great anti-American lies of the Cold War are recast as the great anti-American lies of the War on Terror.
Breaching the wall in 1989 was bloodless, but the Cold War certainly wasn’t. World War III did not break out along the intra-German border and produce a nuclear conflagration, but the Cold War’s battles on the periphery (e.g., Greece, Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Angola, Afghanistan) were expensive, fatiguing and deadly.
Comments Off on The Berlin Wall – A Street Party With Sledgehammers – Extra History
November 10, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on today’s doomsday cults
The recent antics of Extinction Rebellion activists in London encouraged Theodore Dalrymple to do a bit of reading on the psychology of such cults and their followers:
Man is the only creature, as far as we know, that enjoys the contemplation of its own disappearance from the face of the earth. We find the prospect of our annihilation by disease, famine, war, asteroid, or climate change deeply satisfying. We feel, somehow, that we deserve it and that the world would be a better planet without us.
When to this strange source of satisfaction is conjoined a license to behave badly in the name of salvation from earthly perdition, we can expect a mass movement that approaches insanity. So it is with the Extinction Rebellion, whose fanatical members have brought chaos to London recently by blocking streets, occupying crossroads, gluing themselves to public buildings and railings, and standing atop underground trains, to the fury of thousands of rush-hour commuters who don’t want to save the world but only get to work.
In order to try to understand their state of mind, I recently read a book by three psychologists, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, first published in 1956, called When Prophecy Fails. It recounts the reaction of a small doomsday sect in America founded by a housewife, who believed that most of North America was soon to be inundated by a great flood. When this failed to happen on the predicted date, members did not immediately conclude that the absurd grounds upon which their belief was based were false, but became even more convinced of their truth. When there is a contradiction between what we want to be the case and what is the case, our desire to believe often triumphs, at least for a time.
The beginning of the book gives a brief and selective history of sects that have predicted Man’s total annihilation in the near future, among them that of the Millerites in the 1840s in the United States. Reading the account of this sect, I could not help but think of the Extinction Rebellion that is now gripping London, to the growing fury of the rest of the population.
Comments Off on Theodore Dalrymple on today’s doomsday cults
November 9, 2019
The Milk Dud and “sin”
Chris Selley believes that introducing the notion of “sin” as an appropriate thing to discuss with a politician will be a very bad idea for Canadian politics:
Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.
At a Wednesday press conference in Ottawa, a Globe and Mail reporter asked Andrew Scheer if he believes homosexuality is a “sin.” He didn’t answer, as has become his trademark on this file; instead he pledged, for the umpteenth time, simply to stand up for gay rights in all their forms.
It has been maddening to watch: Despite literally dozens of opportunities, he could never bring himself to explicitly support equal marriage. Bringing “sin” into the question is a novelty, though, and it’s one of which we need to be exceedingly leery.
[…]
The question of “sin” takes us into new and dangerous territory, however. There is what politicians do, and then there is what they think, and then — buried way down under many layers of irrelevance — there is their personal relationship, if any, with higher powers and their associated scriptures; there is the question of what they think that higher power would make of other people’s behaviour; there is what they believe will happen to those people’s immortal souls.
These are not topics the secular media should be concerning themselves with, and nor should the average voter. No one would approve of someone they like being put through such an inquisition. Liberals would be aghast if their avowedly Catholic leader were asked if his faith played a role in his government not eliminating restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood, for example. Liberals often speak glowingly of the days when politicians set aside religion and pursued the greater good — politicians like Pierre Trudeau, a devout Catholic who famously said “what goes on in private between two consulting adults is their own private business,” but who somewhat less famously spoke of “separating the idea of sin and the idea of crime.”
Trudeau Sr. was absolutely right that the state should have no dominion over sin, in any sense of the word. That should go for politics, too. Politicians of known faiths and devoutness have advanced many of progressive Canadians’ most cherished causes — public health care, most notably — and politicians of unknown faiths and devoutness have taken us down dark alleys. And vice versa. There is nothing we can do with information about a politician’s personal metaphysical views except raise new barriers to entry into a politics that needs fewer.
Comments Off on The Milk Dud and “sin”
November 8, 2019
Brendan O’Neill on the “Battle of Canning Town”
This piece is derived from a speech he gave on November 3rd at the Battle of Ideas festival in London:
One of my favourite political events this year was the Battle of Canning Town. This was the moment when Extinction Rebellion decided to send its painfully middle-class agitators to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work. What could go wrong?
Quite a lot, it turned out. There were many wonderful moments. The two posh greens who climbed on top of a Tube train at Canning Town were mocked and eventually dragged down. A commuter can be heard branding one of the protesters a “ponytail weirdo”. Elsewhere on the Tube system that day, commuters pointed out that the London Underground is run on electricity and is therefore pretty eco-friendly. “Are you that fucking stupid?”, one asked a smug-looking couple of XR agitators. “No wonder you can’t get jobs …”
But the best moment came during the Battle of Canning Town, during that clash between working people and eco-elitists, when one of the commuters shouted at the protesters: “The world is not coming to an end!” I thought that was brilliant. This woman was just trying to get to her job and yet she found herself having to act as the voice of reason against the new hysteria. And she rose to the occasion wonderfully. She said what many of us know to be true: humankind does not face extinction.
The reason I admire the Battle of Canning Town is that it represented a potential turning point in modern green politics. It was really the first time in a long time that eco-hysteria was subjected to public judgement, to democratic rebuke, to the rational scepticism of the people. For far too long green ideology has been insulated from public challenge and public debate and this has allowed it to become increasingly eccentric and even unhinged. The Battle of Canning Town represented a reasoned, bottom-up pushback against the protected hysteria of modern environmentalism.
This is the thing I find most fascinating about Extinction Rebellion: its very name is a lie. Those two words themselves are untrue. Humankind does not face extinction, and all reasonable people know this. We know that there is nothing in the IPCC reports – which themselves are often over-the-top – to justify XR’s harebrained claims that we have 12 years to save the planet, and if we fail billions of people will die. They’ve just made this up.
As for the second word – “rebellion” – this is a lie, too. Extinction Rebellion is not a rebellion. Rather, its ideology and misanthropy are entirely in keeping with the outlook of mainstream politics and popular culture. From the educational sphere to Hollywood’s output, from the political elite to the worlds of advertising and publishing, the ahistorical, anti-human idea that mankind is destroying the planet and will be punished by Weather of Mass Destruction for having done so is entirely accepted, and increasingly unquestionable, in fact.
Comments Off on Brendan O’Neill on the “Battle of Canning Town”
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Feds to tackle Quebec’s ongoing repression against minorities
Chris Selley on the situation in Quebec, where first-class citizenship is only available to those who speak French and don’t expect their religious beliefs to be respected:
One of the fascinating things about Quebec politics is that it’s often impossible to predict which absurdities will become controversial and which will be accepted as reasonable. The province’s linguistic and more recently cultural debates operate in an atmosphere so divorced from normal reality that it’s impossible to know how any new idea or event might react to its unique and volatile mixture of gases.
The classic example is Pastagate: An inspector from the Office québécois de la langue française found an Italian restaurant’s menu was riddled with Italian — calamari, antipasti — and issued the appropriate cease-and-desist notice. At no point did anyone suggest he had misinterpreted the law. Despite universal scorn and worldwide mockery, at no point did anyone successfully explain why this inspector’s actions were obviously ultra vires, while the OQLF’s other insane diktats — say, forcing a bilingual community newspaper to segregate English-language and French-language content such that English-only advertising will never appear on the same page as a French-language article — were reasonable.
As a result, Quebec politics is like a festival of trial balloons. Most recently we saw languages minister Simon Jolin-Barrette float the idea of banning merchants from greeting customers with “bonjour-hi” — a Downtown Montreal-ism that turns language hawks crimson with rage — only to have Premier François Legault shoot it down a couple of days later amidst widespread ridicule.
By contrast, we’re supposed to think it’s totally reasonable that the National Assembly voted merely to request that merchants use state-sanctioned greetings. Unanimously. Twice.
Ban religious symbols for all civil servants, or only those “in a position of authority”? Which civil servants are “in a position of authority”? Should currently employed civil servants affected by Bill 21 be grandfathered in or not? You can poll all you like, but until any given idea goes through Quebec’s intense media ringer, no one knows how it’ll shake out. With fundamental rights at stake, the majoritarian randomness of it all is truly alarming.
November 7, 2019
Replacing “dead, white male” writers with contemporary First Nations writers
Barbara Kay, as you would expect is not a fan of this move by this school board in the Windsor area:
Some years ago, the late, great writer George Jonas asked me about my intellectual influences. Who did I remember as especially formative? Oh, George Orwell, of course. I read Animal Farm in my mid-teens, 1984 a little later, and most of his other writings over the course of my salad years. It would be hard to overstate his effect on my understanding of concepts like “freedom,” “power” and “decency.”
Since Orwell has never been “owned” by the right or the left, both admiring his prose as a model for clarity and coherence, he is the one English-language writer I would consider indispensable for any high school literature curriculum.
Up to now, most educators have concurred. But the Windsor, Ont.-area Greater Essex County District School Board has announced that, in accordance with the spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Orwell and other canon favourites in the Grade 11 literature curriculum, including Shakespeare, will be set aside in favour of a course wholly devoted to Indigenous writing. Eight of the district’s 15 schools have already replaced former standards with such books as Indian Horse, In This Together and Seven Fallen Feathers under the rubric of Understanding Contemporary First Nations, Métis and Inuit Voices.
“This decision wasn’t made lightly,” said Tina DeCastro, a teacher consultant with the school board’s Indigenous Education Team. The decision arose from a motion passed by the school board’s trustees as a response to TRC calls for action. Eastern Cherokee Sandra Muse Isaacs, Professor of Indigenous Literature at the University of Windsor, defends the radical change as necessary on the grounds that Indigenous stories have been ignored in the past. “Our stories predate Canada. It’s as simple as that.”
Is it really that simple?
I don’t think there is a sentient Canadian today who isn’t aware that Indigenous voices have been neglected in the past, and who would not wholeheartedly support the addition of Indigenous writing to contemporary literature curricula. But an entire year devoted to Indigenous literature that supplants revered works by great writers from the civilization that produced Canada as a nation-state, in order to redress the offence of historical inattention to Indigenous people, is to rob the majority of Canadian students of their cultural patrimony.
Comments Off on Replacing “dead, white male” writers with contemporary First Nations writers
