seanessay.com (over 1,000 words)
Still in London,
Where the museums of history and art
are now explicitly non-racist and non-colonial
For you and I, culture persists, AND, culture-wise, we individuals have free will. I’m thinking of imperialism and “male socio-economic class”-ism.”
In a long ago college English class, when we took Earnest Hemingway, I said, “Wow! That’s exactly what I thought a real man was like!” We decided he hadn’t created “real man” culture, but had gleaned it from his surrounding life and times.
If some of your best friends are Black, then you may appreciate that back when US Black brains were being imperialized, Black men began responding with “Black pride” and “Black is beautiful.” Unfortunately, their new cultural ideal was very Hemingway-like. So where did that leave an idealistic Black man who preferred reading books to fixing cars, being articulate to being “strong and silent,” and liking knowledge work over hands on work? Did that man lie abed at night crying out, “Am I a real Black?” …Not having a space-and-time machine handy I feel no guilt, white or otherwise, and no responsibility to go help.
Here’s a current dilemma of culture: Whether to believe in short term thinking and spending, or believe in a middle class culture of long term thinking and saving. Just this week I heard a man being interviewed on the CBC: He said the only prosperous people he saw in his neighbourhood, “hood” for short, were the pimps and drug lords—oh, and before we “blame the victim” for where his parents lived, let’s remember that a slum is something you may walk away from, but a ghetto, here and historically in Europe, is something people are lawfully, and/or figuratively, ordered to remain within.
Again, I won’t stretch out an arm to help today because I have no time-and-space machine, while living across an international border, and I know it would not be Politically Correct, PC, to drive my space car (footnote) down to get involved in a Yankee’s life. … Say, perhaps the concept of PC seeped into our society from the leftists.
Sounds right: I picture a Marxist study group where the teacher stops a young lady by saying, “Comrade, that’s not politically correct.” FULL STOP “So you don’t have to worry and keep thinking about it, not like a “capitalist running dog” worrying a bone.” (Comrade reader, I’m not sure what a “running dog” is either) What any autarch wants, be it Vladimir Putin or a communist official in China, is for people to turn over the burdens of democracy to a “dear leader” elite who will “take care of the people.”
At this point in my essay, try as I might to be interesting, I must admit I might be fearful, fearfully avoiding a big issue. Let me take a deep breath: I grew up so poor I though it was natural for book pages to be brown. I grew up so long ago that my television set, once it had warmed up, would play black and white movies from the days of white imperialism. In books, Abel was blond and Cain was dark haired. For a first page explaining the races of man—as I saw in various school text books—I recall once the male Negro having feathers and a shield, while the male caucasian had a shirt with epaulets: all the better to go adventuring and imperializing. I grew up under colonialism.
Today, somebody who enjoys feeling outrage and self-righteousness might claim that all of my parent’s generation believed in imperialism. And Racism. Well no, not quite. Time traveling down the years, at one second per second, is a document by George Orwell. From it I glean that artists and snobby intellectuals didn’t all believe in imperialism. They mocked Rudyard Kipling even as everyone else would often find a verse of Kipling’s popping into their heads: Just as today a verse of a rock song comes to mind and then, if I take a few seconds, I can usually tell why my subconscious popped it up.
A cynic: “Sure, pre-war artists made it their business to be mentally free, but everyday engineers and scientists all believed.”
Reply: “Ya, by group stereotype they are a mundane bunch. But not as individuals.” I once, from the days of 35 cent paperbacks, found a book by a science fiction writer called The Puzzle Planet. (Cover) A murder mystery: A science expedition is on a rural planet (not many suspects) where the natives speak broken pidgin English and figuratively look up to the Earthmen. Just like in an old Hollywood movie. But here’s the thing: The hero discovers the aliens have telepathy, that the first scientist to arrive believed in imperialism, so that’s how the aliens all behaved.
That science fiction writer, born in 1916, is proof people can surmount their dull culture, seeking a rich wine. This while peer pressure can turn culture into water, like for a fish: invisible and taken for granted. Hence Hemingway’s culture persists—but not in the London museums.
I postulate we are not doomed. Not doomed to believe the beliefs of long dead white males. Surely, with freedom, culture may change. What’s true for the individual may become true for the species. Karl Marx invented communism; Eleanor Roosevelt decided that Blacks could go into combat. Of course I respect my fellow Canadians but, “If you believe everything your society believes, hook line and sinker, then you might want to think about that.”
Right now, needless to say, it’s not PC for me to cross the border to go teach an indigenous US citizen what to believe. Meanwhile, here in my own country, there are Canadians who oppose our duly elected First Nations chiefs, claiming that “hereditary chiefs” should have all the “political decision-making power.” For pipelines. Because culture. I postulate: “Culture and democracy is like science: It changes. Culture only time travels at one second per second, but it does change. If humankind is now obtaining best results from democracy, then you might want to think about that.”
As I lie in bed: Imperialism of my mind might be done without my consent, but never against my will.
…
…
Sean Crawford
May, 2022
Footnotes:
~It popped in, “My friend, the communist/Holds meetings in his RV” by Sheryl Crow, (lyrics)
~My space car: Come on, it has a digital (not round) speedometer, in the middle of the dashboard (not by the steering wheel) while the dashboard, instead of having dials, is all software on a grey rectangle, with the power source, besides unleaded gasoline, being a vast electric battery, charged by braking, with the silver “tractor engine” up front next to the internal combustion one. What else could you call it but a space car? A Prius.
There’s a war on:
From a speech at a wall: “There are those who say European democracies are ‘immoral, and decadent, and weak.’ I say, ‘Let them go to Ukraine.’”
If society is to scientifically steer by consequence then truth is needed.
“One man speaking truth can bring down a tyranny,” said Solzhenitsyn.
Thirty “brave” Russian generals said nothing. Now there’s twenty.
