Against categorizing people

12 Monday Nov 2018

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How odd it is, the number of people with intense opinions / judgements about millions of total strangers.  Whether these opinions are positive or negative, the very underlying premise–that a person can have an accurate opinion about millions of strangers–is ridiculous, even if it’s quite commonly done.

It usually take the basic form of, people from ____ country are _____. Nations get reputations, or people from these countries are thought to embody certain supposedly national traits.

Another form of generalization comes from people making an assessment of the government of a certain country, and judge citizens of that country in relation to what they think of the people ruling it.

It’s usually subconscious, and it’s done even though it sounds quite stupid when said aloud.

People from rich Western countries look down on people who live under totalitarian rule, like North Korea, or under more or less military rule, like Pakistan. I suspect North Americans will say they care about the lives of such people, and they may, but there’s still a quiet and automatic feeling of superiority. We have no control over the system of government we’re born into, but I suppose many people here feel like we earned it. Like we deserve to have been born in a stable, wealthy nation.

I know people who hate Trudeau, yet are prepared to judge millions of people in another country by who rules over them. There are people who make an assessment of a foreign country’s leadership, then, based on this, believe these countries should be militarily invaded and attacked. Really, consider this.

My rule of thumb is, anybody who can’t name the language spoken in another country, let alone actually speak it, can’t really have an opinion about that country worth hearing. I lived in India for 1.5 years and didn’t learn Hindi. I only interacted to a subset of people who speak English, and this was very limiting. I know a lot more about India than I used to, but for a real political opinion, speak to a native. Natives from different regions. You can begin to understand another country’s politics when you understand their political cartoons.

The thing that determines status worldwide is money: Rich nations export their culture, and their culture becomes international pop culture. It’s not necessarily because it’s better art, there’s just money behind it, and confidence, and this sends it around the world. The fact that it’s been exported convinces people it ought to have been exported, and they’re more likely to embrace it because it was presented to them than they would if they stumbled on it themselves in some remote corner of the internet.

That art from their country is present around the world makes the people from that country feel superior, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the art’s creation. That’s why politicians eagerly claim artists born within their borders, even if they didn’t fund or inspire or have anything else to do with the art. Countries even brag about writers who spent their lives denouncing that country, or at least its government. Politicians are likely to praise local writers they have never read, let alone understand.

It’s not a coincidence that America’s culture has circled the globe, and so has its military. Beyonce is great! Coca Cola is shit. Governments judge art not aesthetically but by how much Soft Power it’s worth. Art in this sense has no artistic value, or at least is not valued for its actual artistic value, it just confers status and prestige. If you see the way people scream at concerts, from Beatles to Bieber, you’ll see it’s as if they’re responding to partaking in their status by being in its presence, rather than showing appreciation for music they enjoy.

I am definitely not criticizing American artists! Most writers and musicians I love are American. I repeat, I love them. But all countries produce excellent artists, and we simply never come to know them. I’m sure of it. People claiming prestige because they come from the country that produced Melville, even if they’ve never read Moby Dick, are the same people judging strangers by what cultural capital that country has allegedly produced.

Culture in North America usually takes the form of ready-made Products–songs, novels, something ready for sale. In India, I found culture was mostly created to make the surroundings more beautiful. Textiles were created so people have something nicer to wear, and even though of course they are sold, its inspiration was artistic rather than commercial. Music is played in temples, to accompany prayer. I went to Piano Man to see some jazz, but small venues like that are rare. When I wanted to listen to some music, I went to my local Gurdwara.

Cultural needs to be understood in its context. There are people who think Pakistan isn’t a cultural capital because it allegedly hasn’t produced novels in the Western Canon. This is like saying American writers are behind because it hasn’t produced any good ghazals.

Anyway, I submit that people shouldn’t judge strangers by things that have absolutely nothing to do with them: their government, their artists. The truth is, they say you can be married to someone for years, and one day wake up and realize you don’t really know them. How is it then, that people form such strong and rigid views about millions of perfect strangers?

We’re probably hard-wired for the days when humans lived in way smaller groups, and even though it’s tempting to do we’re not mentally equipped to process reasonable verdicts on millions let alone billions of people. Especially total strangers. So it’s good to recognize this limitation, and only judge people or things after making reasonable contact. Don’t judge things without context. It sounds easy, but we all kind of do it.

Calibrate your outlook according to your staggering ignorance (no matter how many things you know, there’s way more you don’t…this has nothing to do with lack of intelligence, there’s just way too much out there to grasp–it’d take many lifetimes), be humbled by this, and keenly appreciate how little we know. Then judge, or not judge, accordingly.

 

On what I currently listen for in music

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

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My musical ear has changed. I always listened to excellent music—my first loves were MC Hammer, Aerosmith, Dance Mix 92-95, Phish and of course Grateful Dead. I don’t regret one note I listened to, but I wasn’t listening to the whole of every song, and gravitated too heavily to the guitar.

It’s begging the question: Did I focus too much on guitar because I was a guitar player, or is that why I became a guitar player in the first place? In either case, I didn’t properly value rhythm sections. I should have listened to everything. This might seem like not really a big deal but actually I think of it now as a sonic sin, akin to watching only 80% of the every screen while watching a movie. Musically, I was crooked.

Rhythm sections were something I responded to, I felt them, but didn’t hear. To be fair, I listened to a lot of bootleg Dead tapes with varying degrees of audio quality. But to listen to the drums without really hearing the bass is to hear the drums without their context. Drums and bass live together, there’s a dialogue between them in the music, and to only hear one is to really miss both.

I have known this for a while now, maybe months, but felt this quite intensely the other day messing around on a bass while my buddy drummed. The bass drum and the bass guitar are a tandem. It’s very possible to like a band because of their rhythm section without quite knowing that’s why you like them. That’s why Dave Byrne of Talking Heads wore that big suit, to make his head look small and his body look big as a reminder that music is fundamentally physical, not intellectual.

Early, the jazz bass player’s role was to support a soloist improvising over the tune’s harmony. They soloed, too, but it was mostly a supportive role. In 1970 Miles gives us Bitches Brew, which isn’t just a killer album title, it provides musical hints about the new direction: the instruments simmer together in a cauldron. Gone is the formula for 50’s jazz and even the freer 60’s stuff, where all instruments play the head of the tune, principle soloist solos first followed by second and third horn, drum solo then close with the song’s opening melody. Rather, there’s one groove that everyone participates in at the same time.

I had one saxophone lesson in 2007, wherein my teacher made an astute observation that astonished me: Coltrane was a hog! He kept soloing forever and forever, with the best rhythm players backing him. There was no melodic exchange. Now, I love Coltrane deeply, but this is more or less what he did.

A nasty alto player who used to run the Dal sax department told me something similarly astonishing: He said Cannonball Adderley was content with his bad ass swing, while tortured Coltrane changed his sound every week because he was just unsatisfied. I had thought Coltrane’s quest to find music’s highest height was a service to humanity. I will never say a bad word about John Coltrane, whose sublime music has genuinely given to me more than what religious people get from religion. Once in a while I’ll play him and have a kind of sacred experience, but generally I need music structured differently.

Miles said he learned from Sly and the Family Stone how to dismantle that old standard jazz formula, and melt his horn into the other instruments, rather than playing one after another in their turn.

The Band is the perfect sound for me now because of its balance. On the surface they don’t appear to have anything in common with Miles, but not only did they play on bills together in the early 70’s, their music is both a cauldron even if the brew is nothing alike.

The Band was a bar band for 10 years before they recorded their first album. This is key to understanding them. They had played loud high-octane Rock in every bar in the American South and Ontario. In the studio, in Big Pink, they wanted to turn the instruments down, hear each other, play songs on which their instruments intertwined. No virtuoso guitar or drum or bass solos. Their music is on a foundation of interdependence.

Most bands only have one or two super talented members whereas everyone in The Band is an all star. So maybe other groups can’t be as balanced as they are because their talent is dispersed lopsidedly—it’s a question of talent, not vision.

Glenn Gould said it’s “anti-democratic” for a pianist to have one dominant hand. Sure, but commitment to democracy isn’t enough, it’s very difficult to have a left hand that plays as deftly as the right. Gould would call The Band democratic. They are perfectly, utterly balanced.

There’s something so tacky to me now, even vulgar, about million-notes-a-minute guitar solos. So guitar-centric. “Play rhythm for me while I shred” is like asking friends for a favour rather than hanging out together on equal terms. This kind of solo is a physical achievement of dexterity, not necessarily a musical one. I can marvel at Steve Vai and G3, even feel envy at their shocking chops, but I don’t really want to listen to it.

Picasso had to prove he could paint in a renaissance style before his more abstract stuff was taken seriously. Why? For many people art can’t be serious unless it passes a certain threshold of technical achievement. This is understandable to an extent—you don’t want to celebrate an artist that produces something an untrained infant can.

Yet complexity does not equal quality. Would his abstract work be any less incredible if Picasso couldn’t also paint in a renaissance style? Does Neil Young need jazz chops to be taken seriously? Of course not, it’s ridiculous. Every artist is their own genre.

Most art presupposes the possession of certain amount of artistic skill, but not all. Judging art purely by the skill required to pull it off, rather than by the vision or soul behind it, is nearly as vulgar as judging paintings by how much money the Art World says it is worth. A solo isn’t good because it’s hard to play, but because it’s musical. Of course it’s OK to be impressed with a tough passage, but only if it’s musical.

Art is a mood, a vibe, a sound, a feel. Art is not ranked along any one ultimate hierarchy. But in music, I think it’s important to give the same weight to all the instruments. Actually I think Western Classical generally privileges melody and harmony over rhythm, the first conditioning of the Western ear. This dynamic trickles down.

The ironic thing is African music was often called “primitive” specifically because the rhythms were literally too sophisticated for Westerners to process. There’s a moment in the Ginger Baker documentary when he’s hanging privately with one of his hero drummers as a teenager, who plays records of some African drumming. Baker is asked to name the time signature, identify where the beat starts. He cannot.

Balance for me in music is along this axis to, between harmony, melody and rhythm. Rhythm should be a feature, not in service to the other two. I listen to a lot of Atlantic Soul records now, where the punch is the groove, not some dazzling soloist.

Music is infinite permutations of tension and release. I want to caution against confusing sophistication in music or art for quality: Like I said, I still love that old Dance Mix stuff, and a lot of old E-A-B blues is basic on paper but sounds like shit unless you play and sing with feel. If you can dance to a tune or you like hearing a song, that song has done its job.

But the music hitting me hardest now has togetherness, it’s communal. The Band sounds like they’re all having a great time hanging out together (and when they stopped enjoying hanging out, their music immediately suffered). It’s not an accident that they all play each other’s instruments, live and on albums. They’ve transcended their particular instrument and are playing music.

A wise friend told me once there are four stages to music. The first is “unconscious-unknowing.” Think of a child who plays air guitar because they feel the music in their bones but have no idea how to play actual music. Second is “conscious-unknowing,” the beginner who labours to follow the basic instructions, but is now playing music. Third is “conscious-knowing,” the accomplished musician who knows what and how to play but still must think about it. The final stage, that almost nobody reaches, is “unconscious-knowing,” where music is simply felt and transferred to the instrument immediately, without thought required.

This fourth category is filled with musicians who have transcended their instrument, or maybe two or more instruments. Their music isn’t a physical phenomenon anymore. It’s not even a cerebral one, because while it takes brains to play, it’s about feeling as much as thoughts. Not just the degree of thoughts and feelings—not how much intelligence and feeling is there–but the nature of these things.

The only pertinent question to musicians in the fourth category is: what are their musical thoughts like? How good are these thoughts/feelings? Charlie Parker’s music is nearly impossible to play, but that isn’t his real achievement. It’s his ideas that are impossible to conceive of. Lots of people mimic Parker today, and they are incredible musicians! It’s very, very hard to do! But they are reproducing his licks, not the mental originality that gave rise to them in the first place.

Musical ideas need not be complex to be good. It’s instructive that when musicians get tired of playing bebop, they mellow out and play grooves. Miles’ Birth of the Cool or even Kind of Blue. Thought of this way, the idea of ranking musicians or bands in sequential order is ridiculous.

I worry that a lot of people hear music on YouTube and it sounds like shit. MP4s, or iTunes, sounds like shit. Non-flac digital files compress music so that a device can store a million songs. Really, the sound waves have a narrower range. It’s a real distortion. Apple, Spotify and YouTube offer immediate access to every song on earth, and in exchange, they don’t sound as good. This may differ from recording to recording, or on your speakers or something, but I suspect there is a generation hearing subpar music. As TVs have improved their picture, our audio quality has gotten worse.

I say this not merely as grumpy man, but from having taught guitar to kids for years and seeing how they listen now, on devices or computers. I suspect the worsening audio quality impacts the way contemporary producers and DJs create and play music. Medium Is The Message kinda thing. But that’s a longer story for another day.

An old proverb I heard is “chess is an ocean in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.” Same goes for music. Take from it as much or as little as you want. If you like having it on in the background, cool! But listening actively is a life-long activity that evolves, and pleasure really deepens. However far you want to go in listening to music, there are many who have already gone further. That this is true is just such, such a blessing.

Am I in the echo chamber, or are you?

06 Saturday Oct 2018

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This will sound sarcastic, but honestly I never got accused of being influenced by an “echo chamber” until after I moved to India to work as a journalist, and after making a deliberate effort to read non-white and non-male writers.

To review, an “echo chamber” is the phenomenon where a person only exposes themselves to views they already have, and the more online they are the more they deeply entrench their own beliefs/biases.

Whatever people think of my views, objectively speaking, I’m not a product of an echo chamber. The accusation is laughable.

I read Conservative media. I used to be conservative. For years I kept tabs on the heart of Conservative Canada by reading the FB updates of my cousin’s husband, a former speech writer for Harper who is currently strategic director of communications for Doug Ford.

This guy has defended Trump, Breitbart, rejoiced when NFL planned to shut out Colin Kaepernick, Betsy Devos, and more. He once accused me of being in a social media echo chamber, and has since defriended me from FB. I cannot help listen to Ford without being deeply aware that he hired a man with these views to communicate for him.

I read the National Post for years–I know the work of Rex Murphy, Blatchford, the Kays, Conrad Black, Robyn Urback, Lorne Gunter, and the rest. I used to see the Sun’s Sue Ann Levy at city hall when I wrote about that circus, and ran into Tarek Fatah in an elevator in Film City. I read (hate-read) Wente at the Globe.

I can’t read Ezra Levant on Twitter because he blocked me, but I’ve seen this former National Post editor’s Rebel segments and read enough of his writing, from his early days at Maclean’s. I read Barbara Amiel, Conrad Black’s wife and the former wife of George Jonas, a small-C conservative voice I read fondly in the National Post for years.

I worked for Zee Media, basically India’s Fox News. Sudhir Chaudhary was my editor in chief (I was on Web and he was TV, and mostly does Hindi news, but still, I sat in story meetings and am acquainted with his thought). I have read/watched enough Jordan Petersen and have talked with him before.

I had to read US Conservative media in the summer of 2016 when researching for a TV show I was writing about Trump. I don’t read it all the time now because it’s exhausting and time-consuming, but I know the work of Ben Shapiro, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Bari Weiss at the NYT, Sam Harris. I used to read Krauthammer, and still read former Bush speech writer David Frum.

I was in the belly of the beast of India’s Conservative news machine. When demonetization was announced, we got an order not to write anything critical about it.

The BJP announced Demonetization on literally on the night of the US election, and like everyone I was consumed by Trump news. While I had reservations about demonetization right away I thought my fellow Indians on the desk were better suited to pronounce on it than me. Maybe this is me rationalizing a moment where I should have quit on principle, out of disgust for the flagrant conflict of interest–the owner of my station is an independent member from Haryana of the BJP, the ruling national party.

But the point is, I’ve seen first-hand how money influences/determines coverage of economic policies. Even without telling this story, my station ran a disgraceful commercial that promoted not WION, but the government policy! Imagine CBC running a commercial promoting Trudeau–that’s what my station did.

When people claim that Postmedia is affiliated with the conservative party here in Canada, it means they informally do what in India is done formally. It’s not an accident that Tarek Fatah writes for the Sun here and appears on Zee TV.

What become undeniably clear to me during my time in journalism is the extent to which economic reports are deliberately and shockingly cooked, both by ostensibly neutral economic institutions like the IMF and by journalists covering the industry.

I had a good talk with John Perkins, the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, who for 10 years negotiated in backrooms with the leaders of Central American countries, unofficially but decidedly on behalf of American business interests. Perkins was recruited by the NSA, and his book outlines the basic process:

  1. Corruption: Offer leaders money and perks if they give major contracts to American businesses
  2. Propaganda: Tell the leaders, we will cook the books/stats so that your citizens believe (wrongly) you will benefit the country.
  3. Threaten: Cooperate, otherwise, see examples where national leaders were removed by coup, to be replaced by cooperative leaders.
  4. Threaten more: Cooperate, because if you don’t play ball and a coup doesn’t work, the US will simply assassinate you or take power by force

People in Toronto seem to have no awareness that Free Market ideology is an ideology. It’s assumed that the current stage of consumerism/capitalism arises here naturally, like lakes do, that the Free Market’s global success is do to its innately superior properties, and not to external pressure applied by wealthy people.

They think the Market is a non-human entity, an omniscient force that somehow distributes the right money and jobs to the right people based on a complex but merit-based algorithm. That it somehow weighs people’s personality, skills, responsibilities, and other criteria and allots to them the salary they deserve.

I believed something like this. But it’s total horseshit. Of course the control of money has human fingerprints all over it. It’s incredibly naive to believe that ultra rich people simply entrust their fortunes to fate.

Really, they acquire and guard it ferociously–there are entire industries that exist so that people with immense wealth can use either legal, quasi-legal or illegal means to shelter their fortunes from tax authorities in offshore accounts. Money buys politicians or media influence. People know this–every pseudo-sophisticated political observation is based on the wonderful quip “An honest politician is one who when he’s bought, stays bought.” But I suspect most people downplay how much this of a role this plays in politics.

I had a fascinating conversation with a longtime Canadian journalist who mentored me, who said that the Globe and Mail is basically a money-losing entity that only exists so the owners can frame the national discussion. Obviously they’d rather make money than lose it, but even if it bleeds money, it’s a very worthwhile investment, and anyway it’s only a small part of the owner’s portfolio. The Globe’s target audience, according to internal documents from the Globe, is people who make over $100,000 annually.

The Sun and National Post–2 of 4 of Canada’s major daily newspapers–are the Conservative Party’s low brow and high brow blogs, respectively. But even the Globe is not there to expose white collar crime or anything that seriously undermines how the Free Market.

These newspapers work on the assumption that the grotesque and ever-growing income inequality is by definition justified because the market dictates it, and to interfere with the market is akin to sticking a wrench in Nature.

While social conservatism is often berated in public and in media, when it comes to money journalism in Canada and really everywhere has a right wing bias. Look at a newspaper: there are entire sections devoted to Cars/Driving, Travel, Movies, Sports, and now Cannabis–these papers will neglect some life-and-death issues (jailing, housing crises, police brutality) while reporting on subjects that might be interesting but are only only important because money is concentrated there.

These are complicated topics, oversimplified here for my purposes. It’s impossible to talk fully about the Market and how money works without talking about race and gender, and that’s also beyond the scope of this little article.

I have an acute sense that my FB friends despise my political posts (I do too! I swear, politics is miserable and depressing). But my views are in the minority in the broader community, too: Toronto elected Tory and Ontario elected Doug Fucking Ford.

So, if my views are unpopular, doesn’t that suggest my views were arrived at despite the echo chamber?

Isn’t it possible that the people and media institutions with long histories of promoting the status quo are the creators of the echo chamber?

There’s a concept called “Vertical Integration” coined by an old sociology professor of mine. The idea is this: If a theory is incompatible with other types of accepted explanations of the world, it is likely bogus–it’s not enough that the Bible says that the Bible is true, because it’s contradicted by so many interdependent branches of science. This is begging the question 101. The more a theory tallies with different kinds of thought, the more buttressed it is and the more likely it is to be true.

The Bible is a self-contained echo chamber. I put it that conservative politics is drifting further and further into the same kind of realm.

Trump calls any credible media report that doesn’t flatter him “Fake News”, and a hostile country flooded social media with fake accounts (“bots”) that pathologically promote Trump, who has created an entirely alternate reality for his followers to believe in because his views are so incompatible with the actual world: Isn’t it possible that *this* is the echo chamber?

The left is frequently entreated to watch 4 hours of Jordan Petersen videos to see that his latest misogynist quote was deliberately misquoted to smear him. I’d like to ask those on the right to do a type of mental back flip, a very hard thing to do and no small ask, but really, ask yourself: “am I the one in the echo chamber?”

PS: I am happy to discuss any of these broad topics with more nuanced with anybody, privately or in the comments or whatever. I do think it’s important to be approachable: Sometimes my writing comes off snarky because the truth is I can be a little shit, but I do get bored talking to basic liberals and find these and other conversations very fascinating.

To my conservative friends…

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Politics

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Many conservative voters object to overt, extreme forms of racism, then have a hard time reconciling how leftists can accuse them of being racist. They don’t feel racist. They get defensive and accuse the liberal in turn of being over-sensitive, or using “racist” as a smear to dismiss without cause anyone they disagree with. Everyone and everything is racist, these days.

I posted an article to Facebook shortly before the 2018 Ontario election about a white supremacist podcaster hoping Doug Ford would win. There was nothing contentious or up for dispute in the article: the white supremacist was a self-declared white supremacist, cheering on Doug Ford because, in his opinion, Ford was the only candidate who would implement white supremacy.

“Ronny Cameron, a white nationalist blogger who has recently published several pro-Ford posts, suggested that when Ford declared ‘we gotta take of our own before we take care of anybody else,’ every single white nationalist said to themselves: ‘we know what you’re sayin’, Dougie.’”

I didn’t sabotage Ford’s character by connecting him to something odious where there was no real connection. I would never do that. Rather, I sabotaged his character by highlighting a very real connection he has to something odious.

Here is how I introduced the article on FB on June 3: “self-declared white supremacists have a crystal clear favourite in this upcoming Ontario election and if your vote aligns with theirs, have a talk with yourself.

Don’t let trumpism rat fuckery come here, for the love of all that’s holy.”

I said nothing inaccurate, or even contentious. An interesting thing happened next though.

A Conservative insider who worked for Doug Ford’s provincial campaign and once wrote speeches for Stephen Harper, commented: “I’m voting for Ford. Are you calling me racist?”

The conservative’s must have a PR handbook for deflecting attention away from conservative racism. Such a handbook could read, “when a liberal draws attention to our racism, respond with attack by implying that the accusation itself is a grave insult—but, and this is key, never address the actual racism they were correct to highlight, it’s bad branding. Make racism about you, not them.”

A motto for conservatives could be, “Are you the victim of racism, ie did someone call you ‘racist’? Vote conservative!” Conservatives love it when liberals accuse them of racism. They feed off anger, it unites them. That people called “racist” are currently drawn to one party, well, what does that say?

Conservatives, I say to you: racism isn’t a feeling. Whether a person feels racist only matters to that person, but racism happens (at least one form…) when non-white communities receive second- or third-class treatment.

There are reasons a person may vote for Ford that have nothing to do with race, but none of them change the fact that a vote for Ford is a vote for a certified racist.

Ford was elected premier only a couple months ago, and here is a partial list of what he has already done so far:

–Ford cancelled a promised $500,000 grant for at-risk youth to receive musical instruments and instruction.

–Ford pledged to increase police presence in at-risk neighbourhoods, bringing back the cancelled TAVIS, against the wishes of community leaders and experts

–Ford wants to bring back “carding,” a practice the Liberals cancelled because it stigmatizes and hassles racialized people and has absolutely no proven benefit in fighting crime. (Police have been asked repeatedly to provide proof carding helps them fight crime, and have never provided any.) It’s also unclear how the personal data on private and innocent citizens, dubiously acquired by police, is stored and used.

–After a shooting near Jane and Finch, Ford was pictured with three local residents and the anti-racism minister, Michael Tibollo, who wore a bullet proof vest and described the area as, essentially, a war zone. (In contrast, after the Danforth mass shooting local politicians were (correctly!) destigmatizing the Danforth, promoting it as safe family-oriented place, and encouraging Toronto residents to visit, mourn and patronize businesses. While a police spokesperson said Tibollo’s bulletproof vest was given “to err on the side of caution”…it is impossible to imagine this photo op happening in a white neighbourhood. Note, Ford didn’t wear a bullet proof vest.)

If you examine the quotes and gestures in isolation and one at a time it may appear like simple nitpicking from oversensitive libtards keen for another hammer to attack Conservatives with. But if you connect the words and images with where and how Conservatives are choosing to spend money, a picture emerges. Is it really a coincidence that Ford and his people say allegedly racist things, then do in fact de-fund these communities and send in more weaponized police with pre-emptive permission to hassle residents? It’s only been two months.

If Ford and Tibollo and other Conservative politicians merely said but did not do racist things, it’d be less of an actual problem. But make no mistake, the words are followed up with action. People said trump was just all talk, that his racism was for ratings. No, no, no. The Conservatives will harm at-risk communities in real and tangible ways. Lives will be damaged. People may even die in ways that don’t immediately appear directly linked to Ford’s cuts and policy, but are.

Not to be too dramatic, but it’s true. The point isn’t that Doug Ford (or other Conservatives labeled “racist”) is a cartoon embodiment of a racist: I doubt he is restraining an urge to wear KKK sheets or lynch minorities. Racism can be very damaging when it’s more subtle. It often takes the form of white men in suits making policies which favour white communities at the expense of non-white communities. It’s economics. Whether the cancelled investment in Jane/Finch was driven by active hate or “taking care of our own before we take care of anyone else,” it’s racist. It is a distinction without a difference.

I know people who grew up on Talib, Tribe and De La, who today oppose their politics. Conscious hip hoppers were always social justice warriors. The Right Wing Culture War machine would have you believe that SJWs are “virtue signaling” about minorities to be retweeted, or sticking up for women’s rights merely as a tactic to fuck them. They disparage the alleged motive, and do not address the argument itself. Trump and his people like to paint critics as just humourless PC babies…sure, like Eminem and Borat.

I’m sure there are many good and conscientious wealthy Conservative voters who would be appalled if they saw what their vote contributed to up close. But they won’t see this. They may see lower taxes, but never what paid for the reduction, so they’ll never really come to understand the harm Conservatives inflict.

They don’t live in these communities, and have no contact with the people there whatsoever. Like me, they don’t go to Jane and Finch. I “taught” at Emery for one brief and disastrous month. But I grew up in Forest Hill. The closest people there get to Jane/Finch is Oakdale Country Club. To get a sense of how sheltered conservative thinking can be, consider that Federal Conservatives are pitching the idea that the people in crisis in the “Refugee Crisis” are the people safe in their homes inside Canada, not the stateless and traumatized refugees fleeing war and death. I doubt Conservatives actively want to harm non-white communities, they’re just indifferent to them, and this leads to harm. In any case, malice in the motive isn’t required for harm to occur.

In 2010 Rob Ford cancelled the planned LRT that was going to finally connect Jane and Finch with the rest of the city via rapid transit. Doug will continue making cuts, there and elsewhere. I didn’t feel racist when I voted for Rob Ford, but eight years later I still wrestle with the fact that before I was politically formed, I voted for an international disgrace in a mere municipal election.

I felt and feel extremely stupid and ashamed of this. There’s more I can say, but my feelings then and even now are irrelevant. I didn’t feel racist, but I voted for one. Today, my conservative friends, your feelings do not matter. What happens in the world does.

 

Addendum:

I’d like to describe briefly how and why I have come to believe what I do, because the general public probably has a Right Wing Media conception of “social justice warrior,” so people may read things I wrote above through that lens.

Like all smart-ass young writers I was enthusiastic to reject all teams and labels, etc. I still do, but with less of a hard edge, and some laughter. People will call me a leftist, and my views tend to fall that way, but I’m not associated with any organization, I don’t get paid to express certain views, I don’t represent any group—it’s just how I feel is all, and underlying it is:

The god of organized religion doesn’t exist; we’re all going to die one day and there’s no purpose to any of this shit apart from what we make of it; race is a social construct that is in one sense completely arbitrary and made up, but try saying race doesn’t exist, or that oblivious phrase “I don’t see race,” to the descendants of slaves.

The individual’s ability to love people and things and produce fascinating, sublime, beautiful works of art is what’s truly worth the reverence religion receives.

I hear things from conservatives like, “I support equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome,” which is a naïve but surface-smart sounding way of saying, effectively, “It’s OK if generations suffer harmful yet predictable outcomes in life based on their race, gender and class, so long as these social evils are arrived at naturally, not by state coercion.”

You’ll notice, conservatives often criticize “SJWs” for allegedly having some filthy ulterior motive, but they never consider the possibility that, actually, things like fiscal conservatism, often described in lofty universal philosophical terms, nearly always results in whatever benefits that person’s self interest the most.

The theorists who reduce humans to animals are half right—we are animals, obvs, but they often take it one step further, saying we ought to continue our existence in the jungle conditions of other animals. No! The whole point of civilization is to use our intelligence to impose and shape order on our natural impulses for the betterment of society. The notion that it’s wrong to correct for our inherent flaws, such as our innate tendency to break into tribes and then war against neighbouring tribes, opposes the very idea of civilization influencing our civilization.

“Equality of opportunity” is a super important thing to have enshrined in law, and can’t be taken for granted. We need it, it must be celebrated. But we know that in practice things like generational wealth, gender and race undermines the living shit out of “equality of opportunity.” The people dealt the best hand say, “sorry, such are the cards!” And the people dealt the bad hand say, “this isn’t a fucking game, this is life.”

I understand that the ancient Greeks distinguished between two kinds of knowledge. First is understanding a concept abstractly, then there’s first-hand knowledge from experience. You know someone must feel extremely sad when somebody they love dies, but you don’t know the feeling until your loved one is dead. There’s knowing and there’s knowing. 

There’s a kind of argument I see a lot of online that’s so pedantic and theoretical and unconcerned in how life actually is–it’s based on this first kind of knowledge only. I’ll never know what it’s like to grow up poor, black, female, Native. I just won’t. No social discourse can be complete without this second kind of knowledge. Various people must give input, or life is only described in two dimensions, not three, and the world is three dimensional.

It’s in this sense that I’ve learned a lot from listening to people from a wide range of backgrounds, from reading and traveling, but really from listening to people. You don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve been humbled, I‘m more convinced I don’t know a fucking thing on this earth, that the more confident someone sounds the more likely they’re faking it, they’re simply wrong or paid to lie.

So, anyway, to my conservative friends: Zuckerberg and co benefit from people freaking out. The internet is murder. Unwind, unplug. Give it all a think. Listen to different kinds of people. I’m the same pretty chilled dude I always was, but I will definitely write some more angry shit on my facebook about trump, ford or whatever right wing shitlord you voted for. They’re disgusting, and I reserve that right. If you disagree with something I write, feel free to respond in the comment section. I’ll be nice! It’s good to have a group airing. Or DM me. This will avoid that performative urge to appear better informed or too pithy that sometimes comes when private chats are conducted in public. You won’t be piled on or dragged by my ruthless FB friends, either.

Love,

J

Response to Professional Essay: Exercise 3.16–Writing By Choice, Eric Hendersen

04 Saturday Aug 2018

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Writing By Choice, Third Edition. Eric Hendersen. Oxford University Press. Don Mills Ontario. Page 96-96

  1. Briefly analyze the essay’s introduction. Consider the effectiveness of the opening and the thesis statement. Is Halperin successful in establishing his approach to the topic of dog versus houseplants?

“They’re barking money pits, these dogs, and for too long we’ve been under the false impression that they’re better than houseplants.”

Yes. Halperin’s opening and thesis statement are effective–finally, a writer addresses the crucial issue of “dogs versus houseplants,” for so long neglected by the Mainstream Media.

 

  1. How could you characterize the writer’s tone? Give specific examples. How could awareness of tone affect your reading of the essay?

Halperin’s tone is fearless. Resolute. Some writers are glib in the face of society’s most dire crises, relying on humour as a crutch because the grimmest truths are too uncomfortable.

“Unlike dogs, plants will forever maintain their poise no matter how many times you ring the doorbell…Dogs, on the other hand, are famous for attacking mailmen—an obvious sign of class warfare.”

In an era where mafia states infiltrate Western countries, where the planet’s ecology is systematically destroyed and sold, and global economic disparity is increasing grotesquely in an age of post-scarcity, these are dark times and it is comforting to find a writer as serious and perceptive as Halperin.

 

  1. Analyze one of the body paragraphs, using criteria discussed in this and/or previous chapters.

“Finally, after years of attachment, your plant will grow and so will your pleasure with it. With casual care, your plant can actually outlive you. No matter how much you care for your dog, it will end up dead in a crumpled heap on the floor…”

Here, Halperin’s overflowing optimism is balanced against his aversion to sentimentality. Without being mawkish Halperin manages to describe love’s unfathomable ability to survive death, so long as the heart in which it resides is true.

The world has not seen metaphysical musings combining cosmic seriousness with comic playfulness since John Donne, 1572-1631. Of course, no criterion in this university textbook can sufficiently describe the lofty heights reached in this paragraph or any other.

 

  1. Identify the compare and contrast method Halperin uses and the bases for comparison. You can use the appropriate diagrammatic model on page 95, above, to show method and bases for comparison.

“It’s not all economics. Plants give back oxygen without even being asked. This is a real kindness because you can’t overestimate the importance of oxygen…dogs only give you something with the understanding that you’ll throw it back to them in an endlessly futile cycle.”

Halperin uses the compare/contrast method in body paragraph 5 to denounce the way capitalistic societies have become totally transactional—where the commercial pay-or-be-paid ethos filters down to inner lives, so that even personal relationships are conducted like bookkeeping where every positive and negative action/remark is kept inside a ledger, where all existence is reduced to a realm where altruism by definition does not and cannot exist. This is definitely what Halperin is really getting at.

 

House Plants Are Better Than Dogs

[full text]

[1] Some people believe that a home isn’t a home without a dog. To hear these people talk, you’d think that shedded hair, sharp fangs and crap on carpets are trivial matters. They’re barking money pits, these dogs, and for too long we’ve been under the false impression that they’re better than houseplants. Let’s investigate.

[2] Unlike dogs, plants will forever maintain their poise no matter how many times you ring the doorbell. Calm, cool and collected, the houseplant is a model of patience and even temperament. They bow down to nobody, see no race or class. Perfectly reflecting the modern zeitgeist, plants represent the highest ideal of egalitarian tolerance. Dogs, on the other hand, are famous for attacking mailmen–an obvious gesture of class warfare.

[3] You can be sure plants won’t harass the company at your next dinner party, but don’t be fooled into thinking they’re entirely dormant. They grow in response to Bach fugues, which would be a compliment to their ear, if they had one.

[4] In light of nuclear disaster and the rising cost of gas, there’s a big hubbub about how best to harness the sun’s energy. But plants settled this millions of years ago. Living off the sun’s rays, plants are their own solar panels. Scientifically way ahead of us and financially more responsible, plants don’t need government handouts for their energy exchange program. Shame dogs don’t eat rain and sunshine, eh?

[5] It’s not all economics. Plants give back oxygen without even being asked. That is a real kindness because you can hardly overstate the importance of oxygen. Plants can’t help but be givers. In comparison, dogs only give you something with the understanding that you’ll throw it back to them over and over in an endlessly futile cycle. Also, dogs need to go to school just to figure out how to sit down or play dead. Plants don’t need to be taught how to play dead. They’re autodidacts

[6] Admittedly there’s something to be said for a dog that quietly nestles on your lap after a hard day’s work. But ask yourself: has your dog signed a contract indicating he won’t revert to pissy pre-housebroken days? What if some horrible canine violence on TV suddenly provokes him and he becomes a biter? Plants offer unrivalled peace of mind. You can take plants at their word. Nothing can make them bite you or crap under your bed.

[7] Finally, after years of attachment, your plant will grow and so will your pleasure with it. With casual care, your plant can actually outlive you. No matter how you care for your dog, it will end up dead in a crumpled heap on the floor. If you have kids, they’ll cry. All’s well that ends well, but it never ends well with dogs.

[8] Yes, dogs can be sweet, cuddly and affectionate–they aren’t wholly without commendable traits, even though it’s much, much better to get a houseplant. But in all fairness, at least dogs are a cheaper, lower maintenance, and cuter alternative to getting a baby.

Identity politics VS politics

30 Friday Mar 2018

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The conservative idea of “identity politics” is sheltered and oblivious and needs consideration.

In one of the latest incidents in US police brutality Stephon Clark, a father of two, was in his grandmother’s backyard holding a cellphone when police shot him twenty times. Fatally. [Correction: eight bullets hit him, they fired 20 times.] Drawing attention to this, calling this outrageous and demanding it end is a no-brainer. It’s not a partisan cause or some niche side-interest to take up unless you think black people are only secondary members of society.

Maybe conservatives would care about it more if framed as an issue of government overreach, as in it’s wrong to spend tax dollars (often a huge salary) on government workers who don’t just fail to do their jobs, they literally kill sovereign citizens. 

In the age of video, white people need to be wilfully ignorant to still believe the innocent people killed posed a reasonable threat to police, that police were justified to feel their lives were at risk.

Stephon Clark was unarmed on his grandmother’s property and they shot him 20 times.

Philando Castile was calmly telling police he had a gun in his glove compartment before they shot him dead in front of his wife and child—it was licensed and they were in an open-carry  state and the entire interaction lasted about 40 seconds. The examples go on and on.

There are also multiple incidents of white people carrying machine guns brought in alive by police, even after they killed people or even after they pointed the guns at police.

The difference is instructive and extremely damning. The problem isn’t that these white people are brought in alive by cops—that’s a good thing. It’s that evidently police feel more threatened by an unarmed black man than a white man pointing a gun at them.

Police couldn’t be failing more to meet any standard of discretion, let alone the high one required before society should grant them the right to use lethal force on citizens.

Let’s do a thought experiment: if you didn’t know to what race you belonged and were told of two problems plaguing society, the first encouraging the use of trans-approved pronouns and the second state agents killing people with the court system’s permission, what would you say is a bigger problem?

Conservatives here are single-mindedly fixated on changing pronouns for two reasons: even the slightest accommodation they’re asked to make feels oppressive because people in power are used to demanding not accommodating, and conservatives are utterly sheltered from actual social problems.

Even if you thought that government control of language was only a prelude to gulags, the police are already killing people with the state’s permission. Why are those frothing mad about what they claim is potential fascism silent on what’s already happening?

Because conservatives only care about their identity politics.

Consider how natural it is for the conservative to see his identity mirrored in NFL pregame ceremonies, with Navy or Army veterans singing the anthem with a brass band, an American flag seen from space and fighter jets screaming over the field in formation.

They don’t even term this “identity politics” because it’s just the default way of doing things. But what else is it?

Conservatives feel under siege when their identity politics pre-game ritual is even slightly altered, so slightly nobody even saw Colin Kaepernick take a knee during the anthem for weeks until a reporter caught on and asked him about it. They were deaf to the fighter jets but the man silently kneeling pierces their ears. Think about that.

Conservatives often get offended when you tell them that actually the flag and fighter jets are blatantly identity politics, especially the kind of conservative who brags about how they cannot be offended.

In the way conservative’s invoke the supposedly sacrosanct right to own guns but defend police for killing a black person because they claim the black person was holding one, conservative fury at Kaepernick exposes their sham concern for free speech and the right to protest.

Identity politics is politics and the stakes are high. The FBI is surveilling Black Lives Matter activists, like they did Martin Luther King Jr, calling them “black identity extremists.” In other words, the feds are potentially criminalizing innocent black people joining a group that is peacefully responding to innocent black people being killed by police. Think about that circular logic.

Identity and politics are seldom separated. So for people to minimize what is literally a life and death issue marginalized communities face as mere “identity politics”? Anyone who does this must take a hard look at themselves and ask why.

Hopefully conservatives reading this won’t become defensive. I know political alignment is mostly determined by Clan Loyalty and it’s hard to break group ties and emotional bonds. Just, really consider what you actually believe and why.

On Trudeau in India

24 Saturday Feb 2018

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Indian’s love for Trudeau was palpable to me when I was there. I’d ride on the Delhi metro, people asked where I was from, I’d say Canada, and they started praising him, eyes lit up. Colleagues went pretty gaga too. Not everyone, but many.  
That’s worn off, it seems. Indian media got a whiff of how thick he lays on overt shows of multiculturalism. Corny and embarrassing, he made an exhibit of himself. You can wear Indian garb without drawing too much attention to yourself. Trudeau wore juutis to meet SRK.  It’s hardly apocalypse, though. Just clothing. I’d rather have a leader who tries too hard to appear multicultural than one mostly silent in the face of Muslims being lynched, or another who is soft-on-Nazis.
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The author at a wedding in Delhi, February 2016.

Oddly I’ve just been reading Khushwant Singh’s old essays on the roots of communal violence in Punjab. The Atwal episode is indeed strange and unjustifiable– a mistake was made. There are questions not just about how Atwal got invited, but about how he was suddenly allowed to enter India, when Jagmeet Singh was denied a visa. More will be learned about this. Right wing Indians suspect Trudeau’s government covertly supports Khalistan independence. I doubt Justin knows what that is. Likewise, it’s amusing how the attack dogs in conservative media here are suddenly experts on Khalistan.
 
While Trudeau’s India trip went stunningly bad, it’s not like the stakes were very high. What would real ties with Modi–the Hindu nationalist killer of gujarat–look like? What was to be gained here was relatively low in dollar value, high in cultural exchange between nations with a strong, historical fondness for each other…ie a great trip for Trudeau would have brought about results mostly symbolic anyway. India’s economy has lost its sheen post-demonetization/gst and Nirav Modi has the spotlight back on ol’ fashion crony corruption. Trudeau is in Delhi now with Hayley Wickenheiser and Ladakhi hockey players on an exchange–My loves, combined! Canadian Ice hockey and not just India but Ladakh coming together, it’s a warm thought.
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Ladakh!! August 2017.

Modi has less to gain than Canadians may think by posing with Trudeau. They each represent countries that get along well, apart from that they have nothing in common. Some from India’s right celebrate trump’s birthday by eating cake in Jantar Mantar. Trudeau may be more useful as a person to be distanced from. Not even his worst detractor here will call Trudeau a strong-man leader. Modi’s coolness wasn’t an accident, but the Canada-India cultural connection is too strong for him to sideline Trudeau altogether. They hugged in the end.
 
But Modi ran to the airport to hug trump the instant he landed because he feels a kinship with a leader who also leads via personality-cult and fascist tendencies. And trump has new condos to sell in India, so he pretends to care about India. Indeed, trump Jr is in India right now talking with billionaires, to try to get their money.  Trump backs India enough to hug Modi and do the photo op because it suits his personal economic interests, but will deny H1B visas to Indians seeking to come to America because ultimately they’re not white.
 
That’s my view of things, from the vantage of TO. By the way, I love and miss you India!! Reminder: a country is much, much more than its leader. Indeed, national leaders almost never reflect their country’s actual inhabitants.
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Canada at 150 in New Delhi at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

“Me Too” backlash is ridiculous

27 Saturday Jan 2018

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Some people are mad (or scared!) culture seems finally determined to protect women from sexual assault and rape. They may insist protecting women is a good thing, yes, but the effort has gone too far!

“It’s a Witch Hunt!” they say. No, it’s not. There are no such things as witches. Creeps and rapists exist. They’re everywhere.

OK, but now any woman can say anything and just like that, an innocent man’s life is ruined. Actually, when a female victim comes forward, it’s she who gets piled on, threatened, her reputation attacked. There are very real barriers keeping victims from speaking out publicly. The notion that women are lining up en masse to make up lies just to destroy innocent men is ridiculous.

Why is there more concern about these theoretical men who could maybe have their futures ruined, instead of all the actual women whose past, present and futures contain suffering?

“OK,” they say, “but not every creepy thing is rape!” Who can’t tell between a grope and forced penetration? Women know the difference. Any normal person does. They’re all unacceptable, but they’re not interchangeable or identical. This is easy to understand.

The’re a fear that employers and political parties are just throwing anybody from Aziz to Weinstein under the bus together. Well, companies and political parties have always clamored to protect their reputation / brand. When have they ever cared more about ethics and legal justice for workers than their own self-interest? The only thing that’s changed is, now, enough people consider sexual assault to be bad that they want to disassociated themselves from it.

The notion that men can’t make jokes in the workplace anymore, because anything will get them fired…is it really so onerous, to ask professionals to be professional? I held some zingers back. It kind of was a crime! They were good ones. But, damn it, I was a committed professional in my last office.

People are very quick to defend an accused man, even before anyone knows what he’s accused of. An illustrative example is Patrick Brown, the Conservative candidate for Ontario until a few days ago. His entire staff stepped down when it became known that a report accusing him of sexual assault was imminent. Brown denied all guilt. Many supported him. I heard his backers suggest it was merely a butt grab…even before they had any idea what he was accused of.

Turns out the accusation is that as a federal MP he gave alcohol to an 18-year-old and asked her to suck his dick. Words to the effect of that or “put this in your mouth.” She did, then she was uncomfortable and stopped. Another woman accused him of giving her alcohol when she was 18, and throwing her on the bed trying to kiss her. He maintained his innocence, his party tossed him out.

I’m not sure hatred for Kathleen Wynne was the only reason people rushed to defend Brown, because women in general are doubted. Rather than try to glean reality accurately, there’s a tendency to minimize, to reduce all accusations to the mildest one any man has ever been accused of.

Brown is an interesting case, because journalists and insiders apparently knew about him long before. They interpreted this story as finally it’s coming out, whereas this came out of the blue for most people, myself included. Who else knew, and when? That can be asked of every case.

Recall, even Weinstein initially insisted on his innocence and people believed him. Even though now apparently everybody knew. It’s been since reported in New Yorker’s “Army of Spies” that he hired former Mossad agent to spy on women he abused, to make sure they didn’t come forward, and to make sure journalists didn’t report on him for it.

There’s a fundamental difference between the court of public opinion and actual courts. An accused has the presumption of innocence when the state can imprison them. This is as it should be!

But by granting accused men the presumption of innocence in the court of public opinion, they assume women coming forward are guilty: it’s impossible to assume they’re both equally innocent at the same time. The neutral thing is keep your opinion suspended until more is known. Though I admit, I am now inclined to believe women.  Remember, this court is just the collective society’s opinion. It can’t punish anyone. Public opinion never fires someone, only companies or political parties do, and it’s based on their perception of how public opinion will affect them.

The flood of men being called out is because there’s a decades-long backlog. It’ll slow down, hopefully, when men improve.

Also, ignore boomers when they inevitably say ridiculous things like “in my day, we didn’t consider that assault!” as if their obsolete standards should matter in this day they just acknowledged we’re not in. Do they think assault should be tolerated now, because they tolerated it?

More to the point, who cares about them? Black people had separate water fountains in the US until 1964, and the last Canadian Government-run residential school closed in 1994. It would be a needless shame if we calibrated today’s world according to what that generation found OK.

I should add, nothing above is really partisan or buzzkill-y. Have sex! Enjoy! Fuck! Have afternoon anal for all I care. Just have it be consensual, which isn’t a big ask. If your’e doing it all right she won’t merely give you permission, she’ll repeatedly beg you to fuck her harder.

[Note: Jan 30–I don’t want to be mistaken for sounding flippant last para: I should have made my larger point clearer, that if a man/woman sends “mixed signals” it should interpreted as a red light not a green.

Also, I used salty language here perhaps unadvisably but not mindlessly, to indirectly combat the misguided notion I fear is kinda prevalent among men, that concern for safety/comfort of your sexual partner is somehow for prigs or killjoys.]

 

On Aging: An increasingly growing problem

29 Friday Dec 2017

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On my forehead stand a couple relics, hairs that have bravely refused to recede. They demarcate the old boundaries of my hairline. A stinging reminder of what was. Proud but sad, like a luxury hotel in an abandoned country.

I noticed them years ago when a Cool Barber downtown cut them off. Why is he applying a razor to my forehead? It was my first time at a Cool Barber so I thought maybe that was a trend? What I’m saying is, it was inconceivable to me that my hairline could recede.

When a buddy told me in 2014 that I was in fact losing some hair, I feared he was losing his mind. Me? When time begins to deteriorate the body, it doesn’t usually announce itself. Timing and severity is the difference between the balding 20-year old and the Silver Fox whose thick grey hair signals, unfairly, both old age and youth. But my situation seemed doubly unfair: Not only am I subject to hair loss, but why do I have in several places where hair isn’t strictly necessary, but not my head? What kind of shit is this, fate, you bastard?

My dad used to point to the skin on his head and say to me: “Look, son: this is your future.” I laughed. It was funny then and even now, despite the statement’s latent horror. The unavoidable fact is I am older than I used to be.

People say when you return home after skipping town things stay the same. That isn’t quite true. The cost of Toronto housing has become three or four tiers more insane and my social circle includes literal babies. The sign you have completed one major revolution in life’s cycle is hanging out with people well under the legal drinking age.

How, when did it come to this? Timeless questions. Age and time was once automatically measured and felt when it was linked to a school year. Time was divided into neat sections, then every few months was a milestone. Summer. As reward for completing some little time unit, go drink and smoke in the woods for two months (camp, fun place). Then start it all again. Repeat. Such was time. One day there is nothing left to graduate.

But my god, I’m not dying! I’m 33. Growing up, especially for males, was to have an immortality complex. The first signs of aging doesn’t mean death is around the corner, but it’s a sign that I am in fact subject to death. This is new and tbh not altogether pleasant.

With age comes responsibilities, some great and inevitable, but I don’t want age to determine things.

One of the best nights I had in India was hanging out with a 55-year-old friend, drinking and singing songs on guitar until 5am. In North America and in consumer society in general people are slotted into demographics. The more they are targeted, the more its reinforced and they come to think of themselves in narrow age terms. This is reductionist and limiting. People feel they can’t learn new skills or art, adventure. Age groups do not mingle here. It’s not like that elsewhere.

In 2016 I went to a rager Holi party loaded with babies and grandparents. That obnoxious class of people—20-somethings—were in abundance too. There was a kiddy pool, fully-catered food and open bar. I was wet, full and drunk. Some military gentleman hosted it in his Defence Colony home. The dance floor was hot, karaoke was bumping. I wasn’t sure what affect bhang would have on me, so I took it twice. Everyone went home by 4:30pm.

This party would never happen in Canada, not just because Holi is Indian but age here creates rigid barriers. Silos. Surrounded by people of different ages, people perform. The young strive to appear mature. The older, mature enough. People try to be an age, instead of themselves.

This different schema/outlook has parenting implications. My good Delhi buddy is a 40-year-old father with an 11-year-old kid. The boy came to some parties and saw us smoking hash. It’s a funny time in Toronto as we await Canada legalizing weed—there are people (crusty obsolete weenies) who would call child services and report this maniac of a dad, even as conservative politicians who recently demanded mandatory minimums for possessing weed jostle to become drug dealers. (Great article on Julian Fantino’s hypocrisy) My buddy justified it on very principled, philosophical grounds. In thrust, “I live a moral life, so why should I have to hide anything from my child?”

Aging requires answering one fundamental question: Will I live how my parents/community did, or carve out something different? There is no right answer There are probably elements of both. It’s worth saying, some otherwise indefensible values are defended simply because it’s the traditional way of doing things. But the familiarity and sense of belonging to one’s own culture can be meaningful, too.

This will affect where people decide to live, whether to raise a family, what kind of values underlie all this in our adult lives.

Actually, I no longer believe there is any such thing as “adults”. When you’re six, the nine-year-old at the playground is intimidating because they’re enormous and, being nine, they know life. I wonder what senior citizens think, as they watch people in their 60s and 70s fuck up the planet so badly. As a kid you see a friend’s parents, or your own, and you assume they’re responsible and wise. No, some are just children ravaged by time, so they look like that. Really they have coke problems, mid-life crises or other complexes. Maybe they’re terminally immature.

Age guarantees nothing. There are many very wise children and elderly maniacs with no grip on reality. Don’t get me wrong all things being equal, age brings wisdom and I respect people who lived through stuff. But all things are not equal, and the notion that people are on a guaranteed track marching forward towards Responsibility and Wisdom simply because they haven’t died yet is not true.

Wordsworth and Blake were onto something when they praised children. I’ve never seen an infant commit genocide! Everyone loves childhood innocence. What about adult guilt?

My hope is AI replaces everybody so we can all chill for a living. I’d like for us to all age gracefully, without being so fixated on the look rather than the health of our bodies. I don’t want to be forced or nudged into abiding by social mores concerning age that aren’t mine.

I won’t be a different man when those lonesome, heroic forehead hairs finally admit defeat. Other hairs will surely go, too. I accept my age now. It’s OK! Again, I’m not 101. But when I am fatter and even more severely weathered I hope there’s still a party for me somewhere, playing guitar until late. If there isn’t, I’ll make my own. Even if I’m saddled with those ever-present things going around these days, children.

Happy New Year’s, everybody!

 

Male sexuality post-Weinstein

22 Wednesday Nov 2017

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I usually keep my personal life out of my writing, but it’s impossible to write about the flood of men accused of sexual assault without some reference to my own experience as a male in the 90s and 2000s.

It’s weird—ask any guy and they’ll agree that of course (of course!) sexually assaulting women is wrong, but there’s a feeling in the air that this surge of men being accused of doing just that is dangerous or somehow bad.

I’d like to try explaining this.  Men have taken a hit lately, and for good reason, but I don’t want my explanation to read as an attack on men, or an apology / justification for assault or bad treatment. Just perceptions in a difficult time.

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Some men are (understandably, but regrettably) confused now because we grew up in a hyper-sexual world predicated on male sexual desire, and we are being bombarded with incontrovertible evidence that this world was anything but innocent. We, men, are and feel implicated in it.

Let’s be clear, women have been describing what‘s currently in headlines for years, and we didn’t listen. We didn’t want to. That world was very fun for us, and we didn’t want the party to stop.

Imagine existing in a world that accepts and caters to the deepest impulse raging through your body. That’s what it was to be male growing up in North America in the 90s and 2000s.

Imagine, the jokes, movies, the socially acceptable professional / unprofessional dynamics in so many ways all reflected and encouraged precisely what you most badly wanted to do. Both nature and nurture said the same thing: go for it.

Would anybody turn this off voluntarily?

This is about power—the reason good men (not Nice Guys, actual good men) may be uncomfortable today or even worried about women publicly describing how men have assaulted them is, for the first time, the world is making a demand on men, and we’re actually being expected to obey it.

That the demand is an ultra small demand—don’t be greasy let alone actually rape women—doesn’t change the fact that it’s a demand. It’s not the substance of the demand causing discomfort really, it’s that there’s any demand at all. (This is an explanation, not a justification for the discomfort.)

Male impunity is gone in the present and the past, and there’s a backlog of behavior being held accountable that was never supposed to be held to account.

In short, for the first time, men are not in total control. Ceding power is perceived by some men, MRA types or alt-right fuckers, as weakness. The connection they make between social power and sexual prowess is explicit in their use of the term “cuck” (from cuckold, as in a male whose wife has sex with another man) as a general pejorative. Males who don’t dominate are weak, to this type. Trite, brain dead alpha macho shit flourishes here. Of course progressive types can be misogynists who assault women too, which only shows that this transcends politics: it’s a male problem.

But every normal person across the political spectrum agrees that sex crimes against women (or men) are wrong, so I want to look at the culture of my youth, which at the time I (like everyone) enjoyed but now seems incredibly unhealthy and toxic.

In one of countless examples I can name, my friends and I lamented what we perceived as a crackdown on fun, when the summer camp I went to ended a staff rec tradition of the “Sex Olympics”, where among other things, female staff (16+) competed to see who could best deep throat popsicles. That this ever existed seems as ridiculous now as cancelling it did then.

But of course the Sex Olympics seemed like a reasonable thing to do in 2001. That was for staff. As campers we were brought up in this culture, and if 13-year-olds could inhabit a milieu that was near in spirit to hardcore porn, why shouldn’t people 16 and up? I called this the pussification of society. Casual misogyny abounded here. At the time, it was life and life as a young man then was fun.

I wonder about people who read my facebook posts supporting the female accusers, who saw me drunk as hell on a dance floor grinding with a random or telling or laughing at obscene ribald jokes, and think me a hypocrite. Well, I doubt anybody has an unblemished record, and this isn’t really about me. Every guy should be frantically searching their memory for bad shit they might have done, otherwise they’re inexperienced or part of the problem.  I leave it to them.

Women have described what’s in the headlines for years, but it’s reached the point where it’s simply impossible to deny. Thankfully, women are finally being believed and the public is getting a feel for the scale of the problem.

So, how to move forward?

Civilization is, in essence, order imposed on the lizard brain. Civilization is the collective act of using human intelligence to lift us above the conditions of feral animals, and choosing how life should be then enforcing it. At its root, art is ordering chaos. Laws do the same. Art and laws are civilization.

But, that we have the capacity for rational thought obscures the fact that rationale is not what primarily motivates us. The lizard brain has a much larger say than we want to believe. That’s why progressives can prove to be just as sick fucks as anybody else. Not having principles and setting them aside amount to the same.

The facts are as follows: human beings survived because of evolution, and evolution implanted in us the innate desire to want to fuck. It’s why we think of sex every seven seconds. Among other things, this sex drive led to the survival of our species (good!) and terrible consequences for women (terrible!).

I’ll say something my leftist friends have given me shit for: males and women are hard-wired differently. To be crystal clear, I believe nothing is more important than an individual’s right to be / do whatever they want, and I hate narrow or even broad gender stereotypes. The idea of telling anyone how to live, or of being told, repulses me. But can it be coincidental that over the course of history, the physically dominant gender has dominated?

I took a course in evolutionary psychology (EP) where the class text was written by a female feminist named Anne Campbell. This was by design, as leftists are suspicious of EP because they fear (sometimes correctly) hard-wiring is invoked in an attempt to justify male superiority, or the naturalistic fallacy, that something is desirable and maybe even inevitable for being natural. No. 

EP just posits that something can be said to fit into “human nature” if it is found to exist across time and across the planet. In other words, to qualify, an underlying behavior must occur basically always and everywhere. Can anyone name an era and place where women held real power? Sure, Google may turn up an isolated indigenous matriarchal society, but what does it say that you need to Google it? In the enlightened West women couldn’t originally vote. Same with celebrated Ancient Greece. The leading military figures and robber barons, the people with real power, have all been men.

The notion that women are people does not come naturally to men, who categorize them in two groups, women to be and not to be fucked. Hot or not. People need to unlearn a lot of messed up ideas they inherited, and ones pre-programmed in their brain.

It’s not for me to condemn male behavior—every person only knows what they’ve done in their life and that’s their responsibility. Of course women are the victims of patriarchy, but there isn’t one social institution that fosters any real sense of philosophy for its own sake. How to be friends with people, how to feel and be, how to love. Men suffer from this too, even the ones who behave badly and impose suffering on others.

Chivalry is essentially rituals around men ceding power to women—holding the door open, pulling out their chair, taking off a coat to warm them when it’s cold. Subconsciously, the idea boils down to: I’m physically more powerful than you, but I will use my power for you, rather than against you. Men must continue doing this, but writ large rather than in small isolated and ceremonial acts, and in ways that don’t directly benefit men. If chivalry is just a way to fuck a girl, it’s not really chivalrous.

The point is to give up power because it’s the right thing to do. I doubt this will happen. Even as more guilty men fall, I doubt things will fundamentally change. I hope I’m wrong.

The beast is in so many social institutions and reflected back at us because it’s in us in the first place. Men. The cycle moves in both directions. It’s in our lizard brain, so it’s in our movies and conversation, the office, the streets, the home. Everywhere. Men haven’t been asked to reckon with this, to amend our behavior.

Well of course we were asked, but we denied there was a problem. We denied we were the problem. Denying it was wrong then, but it’s impossible now. No guy can claim innocence ever again.

Every guy is hopefully having a private reckoning, assessing how they behaved in the old world by the new standards. Assuming your conduct was just gross or shameful and not illegal, there were excuses, even if bad ones.

But what you do now moving forward in the post-innocence era is up to you.