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“Free your mind, and the rest will follow.” Small town Alberta singer k.d. Lang
Dancing with a concept
Everybody knows that smaller towns, or more restrictive religions, result in narrower minds. Yes but why? It’s as if, sometimes, peers and relatives can be too restrictive—while right now Russia is one vast rural sprawl, under restrictions we can barely imagine: To Putin’s delight.
Maybe, in some bizarre Stockholm-ish syndrome, censoring our tongue results in censoring our own brains. Mark Twain, who believed in equal rights for Huckleberry’s friend “N— (N-word) Jim,” thought so. (Footnote)To paraphrase Twain, from back when vital grain mills were few and far between,
“Tell me where a man mills his grain and I will tell you his political opinions.” In the following century another writer, George Orwell, would expand on “thought control.”
Arabesque
In my boyhood, as best I recall, feminism did not begin until it was kickstarted by the Women’s Liberation movement, which started up with circles of women meeting in homes to do “consciousness raising.” Because sometimes, when “they” have tried to wash out your brain with soap, you need others around to tell you, “No, you are not crazy!” At my Alberta campus, when I was an adult, there was a separate circle of women who were Mormon. Partly, I guess, because nonMormons might not understand how they kept their faith, and partly because outsiders might not understand the restrictions they grew up with. I seem to recall that years after I graduated there was a Muslim-only women’s circle.
Jete
The feminists noted, “The personal is the political” which brings me back to Russia. Well, at least the Russians public hasn’t done the violent “reversals of belief” shown in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. But then again, a witty Russian answered a social media question on Quora, first posting a pretty photograph of a city at night:
QUOTE
Misha Firer
Why did Russia invade?
Stavropol. Population: 75,000
That’s how many Russian soldiers, not counting PMC Wagner inmates and volunteers, died in Ukraine War in 2022.
What did they die for? It depends when they died.
In February, they died for de-nazification and de-militarisation of Ukraine.
In March, they died “to stop the planned aggression in Crimea and Donbas.” Thousands perished defending Donbas hundreds of miles away in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv.
In April, they died for de-Satanisation of Ukraine.
In June-August, they died for “unacceptable security conditions.”
In September, they died because of “coup and NATO expansion to the east.”
In November, they died because “West is trying to drive Russia into a corner.”
In December, they died in an all-out war with NATO.
UNQUOTE
I might add, as December became January, from Putin’s New Years Eve speech, they died because Europe made them invade. (Seriously. Read it yourself)
Modern bare foot dance
I believe in mixed motivations, meaning I can be idealistic about sacrificing for my country and also take keen delight in my own little life. As I wrote at Friday Free Fall:
What is “only natural?” Whatever it is, it takes time to discover. Artists have the advantage here, because they start out more detached from our society. Myself, I believed everything my family believed, hook, line and sinker. How surprised I was when a pretty girl attending a religious school told me, “Oh, we don’t really believe all that.”
How surprised I was one day in Amsterdam when two wholesome clean cut fellow Canadians, with no warning to me, bent over in a sunny park to inhale hashish that they suddenly produced, feeling happy to be in a free-to-inhale country.
It was an essayist on the web, Paul Graham, who said: Imagine what’s in the brain of a worldly fellow in, say, Rick’s (Humphrey Bogart) bar in Muslim-French Casablanca. Then imagine the brain of a well brought up 16 year old girl. Subtract the girl from the man, and you have a list of What you can’t say. (Essay title)
Which is why just when I get liberated about some minority group, another group emerges from the wallpaper and I have to start the process again: First getting liberated intellectually, then liberated emotionally. It takes a while for the emotions to catch up. For a good while I am like a scientist, believing two things at once.
If tomorrow I was back in the 1950’s, or a hushed church, I would know exactly how to behave, because old patterns of behaviour are never forgotten. I love romantic nostalgic fiction, but it would be only wishful thinking to believe I could ever enjoy living in the 1950’s again. That country is now a mirage, like seeing a city on the ocean. I am not acclimated anymore.
Modern wild haired dance
Of course “to understand all is to forgive all.” Surely poor Chinese and Russians thought it was just coincidence that their leaders kept legally changing laws to increase their power, including a law to make themselves “president for life,”—coincidence, I say, that they both kept increasing the scapegoating of U’s (in China) and LGBTQ’s. (in Russia)
Promenade (a slow pivot of the body, standing on one leg, looking around)
And here at home, for restrictive religions and families, supposedly it is just coincidence that the same fathers who use violence to compel thought control are also the ones who express hatred for other groups… And who, come to think of it, discourage their daughters going off to higher education.
“If you can walk, you can dance.” Hurray for jazz dance!
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Sean Crawford
Alberta,
January
2023
~In Southeast Europe, which has been Muslim for hundreds of years (without burkas or—) leaders proclaim that girls should not be educated—but then send their own daughters to quality private schools! This according to a devout Albanian I discussed religion with in London.
We both noted that while Muslim leaders teach that Europe is decadent, and west Europe the most decadent, somehow illegal migrants seem to favour the western part of Europe, even trying to cross the English Channel into the westernmost land. It must frustrate leaders how their followers raised in a religion have common sense, more sense than a new convert does.
~Since I have mentioned Misha two posts in a row, I checked: He does have a blog, a Quora-blog, with his tragic humour, and here it is: (link)
~Question: Should English classes teach about a boy learning, over the course of a long river journey, to turn his back on his own sacred culture, on his culture’s thoughts of racism, in Huckleberry Finn?
A U.S. citizen, (I think he was Black) in an essay on that question, answered “No” for high school, and “Yes” for college, despite the N-word as part of Jim’s compound name. (nigger) Partly because, as a Hemingway fictional character said, “All modern American writing comes from one book by Mark Twain…”
Blog note: My next post will be about a nation of children.
