The apologists for evil

 

       

        

To listen to the apologists

for evil, they have become

evil themselves, with excuses,

doublespeak, and out and out

lies; all the lies they tell, 

these will come back 

for them, like terrorists

    (for every lie

    is a terrorist

    killing truth)

--these apologists

for evil will be visited

by evil, they will know

what they've done

as they drink tea

or coffee, as they sit

in their homes

with the doors exploding

letting in the terror 

and war cries 

celebrating death, the terrorists

with faces covered, 

with their guns 

& holy books,

with their conviction 

in their beliefs,

their absolute conviction

in the order of life

they adhere to, with

their absolute conviction

and belief in killing anyone

who stands in their 

way--

                25 October 2023

Memory, and how it got that way

 

Years passed. The seasons came and went, the short animal lives fled by. A time came when there was no one who remembered the old days before the Rebellion, except Clover, Benjamin, Moses the raven, and a number of the pigs.

                                                                —George Orwell, Animal Farm 

Forget remembering the old days, most people`s memories don't go back much before nine days ago. In fact, a neighbour tells me that her mother's advice is that if you do something embarrassing, not to worry; after about nine days people will have forgotten what you did. And our collective amnesia and revision of the past is what Justin Trudeau has relied on. Have a former Nazi celebrated in parliament, go on a vacation to Tofino on National Reconciliation Day, get caught wearing black face? Quick! You're an actor specializing in sincerity and people are suckers for apologies, the more sincere the better. Apologize or not, in a few days it will be as though you never did anything embarrassing. 

    The old days of free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of religious expression, and freedom to own property, the public will get used to these being cancelled, they will even thank Justin for deleting them. Forget how things used to be, those old freedoms were dangerous to the collective, they made some people feel unsafe, and they were necessarily cancelled. We never want free speech again because it hurts people's feelings, people who say what they think or they believe in something we don't believe in are often deniers of alleged scientific fact or of the latest compulsory belief.

    Remember when we used to own property? When we wrote letters instead of emails? When we read newspapers printed on paper, it was a record of what had happened, not something digital and therefore deletable, revisable, or denilable. Remember? Remember? Remember? Remember? Is it a false memory? Are you confused? Think back to the way things used to be and what we lost and what we still remember. Remember when we had only two sexes, men and women, that’s gone. Remember values and morality? Sorry I mentioned it. Remember seeing someone walking down the street reading a book, absorbed in reading a book? How many people do you see reading a book anymore? But you will see many people walking down the street looking at their IPhones. "Remember to remember" said Henry Miller. 

    Justin Trudeau relies on people having short memories; remember the way it used to be before 2015 and we had our own thoughts, it wasn't Justin's agenda imposed on the country. Remember 2015, there was Justin walking to Rideau Hall with his cabinet behind him, his wife beside him, they were all smiling and laughing and optimistic and glorying in their good luck, their new power and authority; my God, the hubris was palpable! They were going to change the world, instead they destroyed a country. It wasn't a new beginning, it was the end of what we loved. There was Justin and his wife who was wearing a white coat and directly behind her there was Melanie Joly wearing the same white coat and both women were laughing, what was that all about? And there were others there, men and women, some have since felt the Wrath of Justin and been dumped from cabinet, others have hung in there, and all know the true measure of Justin Trudeau. We, too, know the true measure of the worst prime minister in Canadian history. Now we laugh when we see him, now we don't believe anything he says, now we know he was never anything but a high school drama teacher, no great intelligence or profundity there, just ruthlessness and cunning. All the good people, all the intelligent people, have been deleted or jumped ship from his cabinet to escape the shipwreck Justin would make of the country; and the ones who remain? They are the deluded, the hopeful, and the relentlessly ambitious. 

We don't yet live in Animal Farm but we are headed there, and if we end up at Animal Farm our collective amnesia will make us wonder what the past was really like or if it ever existed, all it takes is nine days and the past is forgotten, deleted from memory. As George Orwell wrote,

As for the others, their life, so far as they knew, was as it had always been. . . Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones's expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing with which they could compare their present lives; they had nothing to go on except Squealer's lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better. The animals found the problem insoluble; in any case, they had little time for speculating on such things now. Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse -- hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

Poundbury, The Village, and the 15 Minute City

On television, a few days before the coronation of King Charles III, there was a programme on Charles's idea of a model village, Poundbury, in the south of England. This community was designed by Charles in the 1980s to highlight his concept of the perfect community; for instance, everything is within walking distance and cars are restricted or banned. These are all fairly commonplace ideas today but, when imposed by someone who has more privileges than any of us, it is a bit galling: it is the limited and privileged vision of someone who has had it all and now thinks he can impose his vision on other people, for their betterment. I was repelled by Poundbury, it seemed to me to be a place of social control made acceptable with the inhabitants' consent; they like living in this place or they'd live somewhere else. It's a community for the managerial class. There are rules and regulations for everything, enforced by a town council, and reinforced with the peer pressure of a homogeneous population. 

       This programme on Poundbury immediately reminded me of The Village, the setting for most of the episodes of The Prisoner television series broadcast in 1967-1968; this was a very popular programme, disturbing, dystopian, and Orwellian, starring Patrick McGoohan. The Village is a place for containing people who know too much regarding British intelligence; they have been warehoused in The Village, put out to a benevolent pasture, kept alive and in a comfortable prison life, but without bars, without cells; if you behave and accept life in The Village you will do well there. Meanwhile, someone like Number Six, played by Patrick McGoohan (none of the inhabitants of The Village have names, they are referred to by a number), is tolerated and even indulged. What the authorities ostensibly want from Number Six is to know why he quit his job at MI5 or MI6. But this is really beside the point, the mission of his captors is to break him down, make him lose his own thoughts, make him into a number, make him believe the concept of reality they want him to believe, as happened to Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984. 

    The other comparison with Poundbury is the 15 Minute City, another form of potential social control that seems, on the surface, to be benign and even a lovely place to live one day. However, this is an example of urban planning gone wrong, it suggests that the best community is one in which all of the necessities of life -- grocery stores, pharmacies, places of work, schools -- are easily reached within a fifteen minute walk or bicycle ride. It almost sounds good except that many of us have always lived in a place where everything is available within a fifteen minute walk; but we didn't talk about it or try to make it something it isn't, it was the organic expression of city life, the way we live, and for many people it still is. 

    Where I live everything is within walking distance, it always has been; that is city life, that is living in a community that is part of a neighbourhood that is part of a borough that is part of a city. No one feels contained by where they live, it is nothing special; when it becomes something "special", needlessly part of a new urban planning idea, then it takes on other qualities; there is a dark, shadow side to all of this happiness and convenience that is imposed on us. Post-Covid many people are working from home, and some people have quit their jobs because they no longer want to work in an office, or live in the city where their workplace is located. Urban planning is trying to re-invent the wheel, and it is coming out square and not round; if you oppose their idea of the future city you are some kind of conspiracy nut, but that is just their way of dealing with anyone who disagrees with them. An extension of the 15 Minute City is the fenced off gated communities already existing in the United States, with a guard at the entrance. You walk everywhere and if you have a mobility problem you will get around on a golf cart, but there are consequences to living in the 15 Minute Gated City, or The Village . . . 

    Do we really want to live in this type of place? There will be no room here for the exceptional, the eccentric, the rebellious, the odd ball who lets his grass grow long and his ramshackle house unpainted. Whether it is Poundbury or The Village or the 15 Minute City these are places for the unimaginative managerial class, the values of this class will control all of us. And, no doubt, fences will be put up around those other unfortunate communities, the homeless (now referred to as the "unhoused") who inhabit parts of many North American cities. No, they are not "unhoused", they are homeless with all of the pathos, suffering, and terrible insecurity this word suggests; to be "unhoused" is an antiseptic word that denies the emotional meaning of living on the street. 

    And what of the arts, spirituality, free thinkers, anarchists or nihilists, odd balls and misfits, the angry, the grieving, or the ecstatic; what if you let your place deteriorate, will you be isolated by peer pressure or a council investigation? This is not a place of barking dogs, crowded streets, the smell of someone's cooking, living cheek to jowl with your neighbours so you can hear them fighting, laughing, talking, humanity as lived by the poor, the artist class, the thinkers, or the way things were in the past that many immigrants to North America experienced; immigrants produced ambitious people who worked hard to make money and move up the social ladder, and they even improved society with jobs and philanthropy; this is not included or suggested, or can even exist in a place like Poundbury or The Village, there is nothing suggesting social mobility, creativity, or freedom of thought in those places; they are retirement living, places of stasis. 

    A recent newspaper article on Glasgow has a subtitle, "Scotland's biggest city is a brawny celebration of industry, ingenuity and individualism", things not found in Poundbury, the Village, or the 15 Minute City. Montreal is a city of neighbourhoods, each distinctive, just as New York City is a city of boroughs, all different and unique -- Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island -- just their names resonate with qualities of distinctiveness, ambition, vibrancy, and life. There is a totalitarian feeling to Poundbury, a place that is a reflection of King Charles's concept of an ideal society; but what does he know about how average people live or what they aspire to? It's a good thing he is only a king and has no real power, and being king he will be limited in what he is allowed to say about the future of society. 

    Be seeing you.