Showing posts with label Diversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diversity. Show all posts

Sunday, November 25, 2018

Diversity in Writers: Will the Real Jeeves Please Stand?

The article below is from my Camera Lucida blog posted on December 7, 2005 (twelve years ago).

Then, I started to examine what multiculturalism meant to non-White Canadians (Americans, British etc.) and my views have remained exactly the same today as shows my article a couple of days ago Thanksgiving.

Note: The links to the Amazon.com book lists are not current. Ishiguro, Smith and Rushdie are prolific and have produced books through 2018, and they continue to write in the dystopian style they adopted early in their careers. I recommend changing the Amazon.com search by "publication date" to see their current activities, and the rave reviews all round, including:

- Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, published in 2015:
Ishiguro has created a fantastical alternate reality in which, in spite of the extremity of its setting and because of its integrity and emotional truth, you believe unhesitatingly. - The Financial Times, February 2015
- Salman Rushdie's 2017 The Golden House, published in 2017:
The Golden House” has been billed by its publisher as Rushdie’s return to realism. Yet the New York City on offer is so gilded and remote that the novel reads like what one’s impressions would be if all one knew of it came from back issues of Vanity Fair magazine. - The New York Times, September 2017
- Zadie Smith's Feel Free:
“…You will have to take liberties, you will have to feel free to write as you like…even if it is irresponsible. - Zadiesmith.com

(Note: Rather than use "truth" as the target, Smith, like all dislocated people, who gravitate towards dystopia - and violence - choses "irresponsible" instead. She knows words and her word choice is not an error.)
All have won various prizes and perhaps the most prestigious is Ishiguro's Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017:
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017
[...]
Prize motivation: "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." - The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017
Jeeves of course died in 1975 (born in 1881), and his ghost did not write the 2018 listed books. Rather, they are contemporary reprints which probably do not do the aesthetic credit that the older versions did to his craft.


First edition
Author: P. G. Wodehouse
Publisher: George Newnes
Publication date: May 1919
[Source]


Diversity in Writers: Will the Real Jeeves Please Stand?

England has witnessed several years of non-English authors who keep winning literary prizes, or just literary acclaim. Zadie Smith was recently in the headlines, Salman Rushdie has managed to outlive his fatwa, and another less famous but prolific writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, has written yet another book from those fair British Isles.
I’ve read books by all three, even tried more than one of each. And all leave me less than enthralled, slightly confused, and struck by a lack of authenticity. I find their characters to be caricatures. Both Rushdie and Smith go for hyperbole, while Ishiguro goes for exactly the opposite.

I’m beginning to wonder if non-British writers, however much they were born on the Island, can really capture the spirit of the land.

“Remains of the Day” by Ishiguro has a gloomy, undecipherable, remorseful butler try to recapture something of what he’s lost during all those years of selfless service. Actually, I recant my observation about Ishiguro’s understatement. What could be more of a hyperbole than this?

Then there is P.G. Wodehouse, with the inimitable Jeeves. His adroit butler who really always does save the day, after a lot of scampers and near-disasters along the way. And he does get to have his day at the sea-side also, and quite frequently.

I think Wodehouse captured his character with affection as a butler who certainly is not going to be bossed around by any Lord! No remains for him to collect.

Sometimes I wonder; if you don’t have your full emotions invested in a place, how can you write positive things about it? Like Rushdie, Smith and Ishiguro, who seem to deny a possibility for a future in their books, and press on with their circular exaggerations trying to find meanings for themselves.

Ishiguro’s 2001 book “When we were orphans” is about an Englishman who mysteriously lost his parents as a young boy in Shanghai. He returns as a professional detective to solve that ultimate mystery. It reminds me of these writers, trying to find clues about their past by digging into words.

Ishiguro’s latest book forfeited the unapproachable Far East, and his ancestral home, for something even more alien. It seems like he’s completely given up on ‘his’ England. “Never let me go” is about a Utopia (or a dystopia) on cloning. No more real people, real places or real stories for Ishiguro in the advent of the 21st century.

Why doesn’t this progression of his thoughts and stories not surprise me?

Quote from an interview with Ishiguro on "When we were Orphans":
There's a certain kind of branded, packaged atmosphere of Shanghai: this exotic, mysterious, decadent place. The same in Remains of the Day. It was a case of manipulating certain stereotypical images of a certain kind of classical England. Butlers and tea and scones: it's not really about describing a world that you know well and firsthand. It's about describing stereotypes that exist in people's heads all around the world and manipulating them engagingly.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Portrait of Mississauga

Our newest public art installation is underway! (See photos below.)
Portrait of M highlights the cultural and demographic diversity of Mississauga and seeks to communicate the stories of its residents [Mississauga Culture Facebook].
I thought I was being paranoid, but not any more.

I was taking photos of the "public art" banners (see description above) along the street by Mississauga's City Hall when I noticed a security guard walking back and forth near the entrance steps.

It was getting kind of obvious that she was watching me despite looking down at a phone gadget.

When I was done with the pictures, I walked towards the City Hall to take a shortcut through to the Mall. To do this I have to go past the Art Gallery of Mississauga, although nowhere close, and with no intention of going inside.

The security guard slowed down a little to make sure (!) I wouldn't go in. She then, I assume, went into the security guard's office, which faces the street with the banners. She must have seen me from there and come out (I'm not that hard to miss with my big orange summer hat!).

"NO INCIDENT" would be what she would write in her log book!

The banners are a perfect example of the "art" of Mississauga following the agenda of the AGM to be "multicultural" and "diverse." The faces on these banners are of all kinds of people: young and old, male and female. But I counted three whites in the dozen or so portraits.

That is diversity: whites slowly and surely getting pushed aside and away.

The AGM logo is circled in red (see third image down).








[Photos by: KPA]

"Immigration Is Killing Ontario's Small Towns"


Barrie, Ontario
Collier Street, with view of Lake Simcoe
[Photo By: KPA]




Immigration Is Killing Ontario's Small Towns
by Maggie McDougal
Council of European Canadians
Thursday, 23 November 2017

I was on my way to work one morning around the beginning of March, when I decided to stop at MacDonald's for a morning coffee, one of the few luxuries I can afford, despite having trained for four different fields of work throughout my life in Ontario, Canada. At my current job, I am by far the highest educated worker, with vast training, including a graduate degree in the chief public service that the organization provides: human services. Yet, I am employed on contract at the lowliest clerical job, with the poorest status, and wages and without benefit, not even vacation time (only money in lieu of vacation). That in it-self should raise the eyebrows of the handful of critical thinkers that still exist in this nation.

Immigration is a working class issue, make no mistake about it. If you were waiting for the wealthy to intervene and to try and stop immigration, that isn't going to happen — ever!

At this point, the immigration tap doesn't need to only be turned off, we actually need restoration efforts to make up for the losses sustained by Canadians proper — restorative justice.

I waited for my coffee, which was being poured by a long-time Canadian such as myself. Likely he was forced to take any job in order to continue to live in this town, like citizens in so many other small Ontario towns, which have suffered for decades as the jobs left for nations where products could be manufactured at a lower cost to create a product of poor quality to sell back to people like us.

I reached for the newspaper rack, and ended up with a newspaper in my hand, which I have learned through the application of my critical thinking skills to distrust and despise. Yet, it was in my hand, so I read the headline, "The Future Of Ontario's Small Towns Is Immigration."[1]

I was served my coffee and I gulped it down, not paying attention to it, but rather the headline and burning my mouth and throat in the process. The pain was no comparison to the raw feeling of acid burning in my gut as I continued to read the front page newspaper story, which the low wage workers serving me would likely never even get a chance to glance at throughout their stress-full day at work.

Imagine having watched your entire community being fed a steady diet of raw potatoes and turnips for thirty years, and in order to survive you've swallowed it, but not because you liked it, but because you had been led to believe it was the only way to survive. And then one day you discovered that you could have been eating steak and lobster, and it was all a grand farce, because the joke was on you and the rest of the folks in your towns and communities all across the nation.

Reading that Toronto Star article, on that freezing cold morning in March, I recognized that "we" the working class had all been made complete fools, not once but again and again and again, as lie after lie was unveiled for us by grinning political shysters.

Immigrants resent me for being Canadian

I am an environmental refugee, having twice fled the shameless and unnecessary destruction of the green spaces in and around central Ontario, in the name of atrocious and unnecessary development projects which include row after endless row of cookie cutter housing for immigrants. At forty-five years of age, I have watched the replacement of Canada's host population with nothing but wall to wall immigrants. I have experienced deep hate and racism from immigrants in the workplace and in the communities I have lived in. The hate they direct at me is called "internalized oppression." They resent me for being Canadian. It has been vicious abuse from them and nobody is interested in hearing my story, and seems like nobody ever will.

I came to live in the community my husband spent much of his youth in, and which is a two and half hour drive from Toronto. One would think that I had travelled far enough to escape, but not so. In the decade since coming here, we have watched the community emptied out of working class Canadians, many of whom were in tears at having to return to urban centres such as Toronto and surrounding communities. Like all of us, they had to go where they could find work. As if that wasn't enough, to further aid the destruction of the community the provincial government has mandated the closure of small hospitals in all small Ontario communities, as they move to a centralized model for healthcare. They have also closed high schools and junior schools to ensure real estate opportunities for the new, wealthy immigrants.

There is one common theme for people who live in Central Ontario, north of Toronto, "Good luck finding a job, eh!"

Most of those who are able to live here and find work have to accept that their children will have to leave and come home only when they have a long weekend. Most of these children would love to work and live in the communities they were raised in, and have deep roots in, but they can't.

With no jobs for us, where are the jobs coming from for the immigrants?

Apparently, while this exodus continues all around us, the Toronto Star, for some reason is assured that the future of our small towns across this province is immigration. The logical question, which media outlets such as the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) will never pose is: How can the future of Ontario's small towns be immigrants, when there is no future here for Canadians?

I want to jump to the heart of the matter: Where are the jobs coming from for the immigrants when there are no jobs here for Canadian citizens and their children?

One has to accept that assertions such as this one, made by mainstream media are steeped in knowledge of a strategy at-work, one which includes many sectors of society working together to ensure high employment rates amongst immigrants and not citizens, no matter how educated. Such a duplicitous strategy is often referred to as a conspiracy or elites breathing together for their own gain.

As a human services professional I have become aware over the past decade of the agencies that are funded by the government to find immigrants jobs, and which provide incentives to their staff to do so. The Local Immigration Partnerships which exist in every single community in Ontario and which are working with private enterprises and local social service agencies, to ensure new immigrants find jobs, but not us. We are not the future, we are ghosts walking around remembering amongst ourselves about what was, but which we cannot celebrate any longer, for fear of being labelled and losing what few options for employment we still have.

There is a vast network of immigration lobbyists that have lined their pockets with gold, as they lead Canadians to believe that we must remove the shirts from our backs, and leave our home communities, in order to make way for the immigrants, lest we be accused of our lack of humanity.

Last week, CBC Radio aired a live phone in program called Disappearing Life Lines and it exposed some of the different stories not being heard from small town Ontario. It basically spelled out for us the death of Ontario's small towns. The guests on the program cited the unnecessary closure of high schools and hospitals in towns such as the one I live in, as a final death knell and guarantee of population decline. Yet, the pro-immigrant CBC Presenter made no connection between this and the Toronto Star's assertion that the future of Ontario's small towns is immigrants. If these towns are brimming with so much opportunity, then how come Canadian citizens have been so hard pressed to find any? Why would they leave if there are opportunities?

First they let our jobs disappear by allowing industry to flee to the Third World, causing a dramatic decline in the population of Ontario's small towns. They could have simply applied protectionist policies to protect Canadians from greedy corporations — of course they couldn't do that because protectionism is a taboo word in globalist circles. Then they over-populated central Ontario through immigration, and now they are going to re-populate our beloved small towns with wealthy immigrants, when the Canadians who long to live in these towns can't afford to stick around!

One immigrant is quoted in the Toronto Star article as stating, "A smaller community makes the transition easier. There is no hustle and bustle, and people ... It would have taken me much longer to settle down in a big city like Toronto," said the 35-year-old from Bangalore, a metropolitan city in India with a population of nine million.

"There are more opportunities and less competition here. The salaries are not as high as in the big cities, but the cost of living is lower," said Joseph, who works as an operation and planning co-ordinator at an area trucking company.

Joseph states exactly what we Canadians like about our small towns, and the way we would like to keep them, but there is no opportunity in these communities for most Canadians, so exactly how does he come to find it?

The article goes on to state: According to the latest census, populations fell between 2011 and 2016 in one in four of Canada's 723 municipalities with 5,000 people or above, with those further from urban centres more likely to show a decline in population than those close to a larger city.

Neither the Toronto Star nor the CBC haven't wasted their time interviewing Canadian Citizens who have been forced to leave small towns for the urban centres, because we don't ever want to get near the heart of the matter, lest some truth be revealed to the general public.

Finally, the new measures instituted by Ontario politicians to bring the price of houses down in Toronto, brought UP the price of houses in small communities across the rest of the province, which in my mind is more evidence of a larger strategy at work, not to control an out of control market, but rather to spread the "out of control" aspect of it to the impoverished working poor who are clinging to life in small town Ontario.

Employment agencies do not advocate for Canadians and place them into jobs

In the town I live in, a Syrian refugee family was given a handsome house to live in, while a homeless guy spent the last two winters in a cardboard hovel tucked into a corner of the local cemetery. He is a nice man, whom I am sure could be placed in to do a good job, but that's not ever going to happen, is it? Government funded employment agencies are not in the business advocating for Canadians and placing them into jobs. They are only good at collecting government money and engaging in nonsense such as the resume critique.

One million wealthy immigrants are on the way and will be enjoying the good life here in Canada by 2020. Millions of Canadians will most definitely be displaced by them including in the area of jobs, housing, business opportunities, political opportunities ... the list goes on and on. The best part is that the Trudeau government has made it clear that the one million are not headed to Canada's major cities. Oh no, these immigrants are going to be provided with INCENTIVES to settle in our small towns. The same small towns the host population can only dream of living in and which most Canadians have to wait until they retire to live in.

I have lost everything, at this point, I don't feel there is a future for me and what is left of my family. I missed the chance to have children because I wasn't able to afford to and now there is nothing but hollowness inside of me. I don't know what I will do with the rest of my life, but it is very sad to think of the future. I don't know what I risk by writing this letter, or what they will do to me, but I just had to write it.

There is an alarm belling ringing, and it is warning us about the future, and it is time to listen to it.


[1] The article I read on the front page of the Toronto Star was titled, "The Future Of Ontario's Small Towns Is Immigration," but the version I found online is titled: "For Small Towns On The Bay Of Quinte, The Future Is Immigration." Maybe there was a virulent reaction to the original title, or at least we can hope.

Saturday, May 12, 2018

The Covert (is there any other way?) Satanic Imagery in the New
Art Gallery of Mississauga Exhibit

Once again, this is a long project which I will be studying and researching.

But for now, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, like all modern (contemporary) art institutions is projecting Satanic influenced imagery in its current exhibition.

The Gallery's curators spend hours researching potential exhibitors and know the fine details of their professional lives and outputs. So they understand very clearly the artistic and cultural positions of their exhibitors.

Lotte Meret Effinger, a German artist, has a video projecting at the AGM's seeping upwards, rupturing the surface exihibt.

The video exhibited is titled Surface Glaze and is part erotica (a mouth consumes an orchid), and fully a nihilistic deconstruction of image (and life). All we're left at the end of the video, as the "glaze" subsumes the screen, is a dry matter encrusted over its leftovers.

But it is her video Supernature (not exhibited at the AGM) which clearly presents her artistic and paranormal beliefs. Here, a zombie witch (whose gender is nonetheless not clear) sits in a forest as she (it) genuflects its arms around its grey hair (casting spells?). Later in the video, this zombie witch joins other creatures as they run through the forest, two which are horned, and another a more "conventional" witch with a haggard grey face and decayed teeth.

This is no late night horror movie, but a call of spirits, an invocation of Satan.

Effinger, in an interview, talks about her witch imagery, anchoring her satanic force with feminist ideology:
The witch has long been portrayed as the outsider, whether as a monster or as a resistance fighter. Many political, religious or social movements used this figure to establish their identity by defining the “other” and it is amazing to see how these various interpretations reach out to the contemporary use of the word “femininity” in regard to emancipation. This recalls the complex process of defining gender, power and desire.
The Art Gallery of Mississauga has been skirting towards paranormal imagery for some time now. I first noticed it with the Homer Watson exhibition in 2014 when I wrote:
Part of Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape's purpose was to present Watson's landscapes as though they were infused with ephemeral supernatural beings. The AGM's curators obtained this notion of "spirits" from one aspect of Watson's life: his questions regarding his deceased sister and whether she could be "visiting" him. “Could it have been? Or was it a delusion?” he asks of a "vision."

Nothing is defined about Watson's belief in spirits, but it makes for an interesting exhibition.
I believe now the beautiful work by Watson, filled with southern Ontario landscapes, attracted Kendra Ainsworth's (the curator of the exhibit) attention because it tied so well wth these "ephemeral supernatural beings," so alien to the Judeo Christian origins of Western art, whose origins are grounded in the non-ephemeral supernatural being of God.

In a Godless universe, or a world that rejects God, other "spirits" compete to fill in the gap, as Satan did so prophetically in the very first chapter of the Bible.

Perhaps that is the reason that the AGM staff went after me so viciously, threatening to have me treated as a criminal for simply saying the Truth.

Last year, at a lecture on the Homer Watson exhibition, I asked clearcut culture and technique related questions. Mandy Salter the director of the AGM emailed me:
If at any point in the future, you visit the AGM and create an unsafe, critical and or threatening space, we will contact security who will request that you leave the premises.
And this year, about two years after that email, about a week ago, I felt it important that I see this exhibition in person (and I had caused no "incident" at the gallery which I had never entered since the email).

Salter sent me another email. (I actually met her there and greeted her (as did she greet me) pleasantly. She didn't even remember me!):
I had emailed you some months back expressing the AGM’s concern with the nature of your reviews and commentary for the AGM’s programmes, staff, artists and community. I had clearly articulated at the time that if the hateful and insulting tone of many of your blog posts, in regards to AGM content, staff and or community did not cease, you would be no longer welcome at the AGM. While you certainly have the right to freedom of speech, the AGM also has the right to not be defamed and or the recipient of hate propaganda.

As you have continued to criticize, defame and generally create an unsafe space for many at the AGM, you will no longer be permitted to enter the AGM premises under the Trespass to Property Act, RSO 1990, c. T.21 - Ontario.ca

If you are to enter the AGM premises at any time in the future, you will be escorted off the property immediately by City Security.

Mandy Salter
Of course Salter never made any reference to any of my blog posts at the initial "warning." Nor did she reference any in this recent one. Her reference to the "unsafe, critical and or threatening space" I may create, I assumed in the initial communication, was to the "difficult" questions I had asked the artists at their presentation's panel.

As I said, there is a lot to dismantle here, including the "hate propaganda" that Ainsworth and other participants in the AGM's activities subtly display towards Western art and Western artists, for which I have dedicated my entire Reclaiming Beauty website. I consider myself an expert on discrimination against Western art and culture, and have made public presentations on such a topic.

And since when is being "critical" a criminal offense!

Hate is "hate" only one way, is The Canadian Multi-Culti Way.

At first, I thought it was fear of my derailing their funding projects that induce them to take (or threaten to take) such harsh measures against me. But now I believe it is far stronger than that: They fear me, or more precisely, they fear the Truth.

All of us are sinners. But rejecting God has never been my sin.

By giving exhibition space in the AGM to such ideas and beliefs as Effinger's and the many similar others where in the last two years foreign and alien gods have been given artistic reverence in the AGM's exhibits, Ainsworth and her colleagues could then begin to carry on with their societal revolution: The annihilation of Western art, primarily through the annihilation of our God. That racist, oppressive civilization, they would say, while the truth is it is their abhorrence of the God who has directed this art for centuries that guides their mission. As they can kick out God(!), they can continue with their multicultural (non-Western) mandate and bring in those gods to fill in The Space.


The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain
Duccio di Buoninsegna (ca. 1255−ca. 1319)
Date: 1308−11
Medium: Tempera on poplar panel (cradled)
Dimensions:17 x 18 1/8 in. (43.2 x 46 cm)
Purchased by The Frick Collection, 1927




Saturday, June 3, 2017

Brief Book Review: Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It



Below is a brief book review I wrote on James Kalb's Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It.

He mentioned my contribution here on his website.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Brief Book Review: Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It
July 30, 2013

I hate to copy full texts from any book, especially one newly published, but sometimes that is the best way to make a point.

I've got Jim Kalb's new book Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It. It arrived at the bookstore where I placed the order far quicker than I expected (about four days). I think that is faster than Amazon.com's delivery time, unless one pays extra for overnight shipment.

In any case, I went to the table of contents first, and found in Chapter 10:
Making it Real
Difficulty of the Struggle - Towards an Anti-Inclusivist Right - Fundamental Needs: Ideals (The True, The Beautiful, The Just and Good, Religion); A Favorable Setting - Making the Case - Limits
I went to the "The Beautiful" section on pages 170-171, and below is what I read:
For modernity, beauty is no less a problem than truth. Since it makes man the measure, the scientistic view assimilates beauty to personal preference. It puts beauty in the eye of the beholder, and so makes pushpin as good as poetry. Such a view is contrary to all intelligent experience. Beauty is evidently part of how things are. It forces itself on us as something of indubitable value that cannot be reduced to personal preference. That is what it means to recognize it as beauty. Our perception of it may depend on taste, but a personal element does not make a perception merely subjective any more than the dependence of knowledge on qualities such as intelligence, experience, and good sense makes truth merely subjective (5).

Beauty falsifies the dogma that denies reality to whatever is difficult to analyze and impossible to measure. It connects the material world to something beyond itself and gives us an immediate perception of something transcendent that is worthy of our love. It gives pleasure, so it attracts and pleases, but it is no less at odds with the technological outlook than fasting and prayer. It cannot be forced, and technique serves it, but does not create it. You have to wait on it and let it be what it is.

So anti-technocratic education must emphasize the beautiful. When those who appeal to tradition and the transcendent lack a sense of beauty, what they propose seems less an absorbing way of life that leads us to a grasp of the reality of things than one arbitrary ideology among others, a matter of rules, team spirit, and group dominance and not much else.
5. For a ground-breaking study of the objectivity of aesthetic valuby by a scientifically-trained architectural theorist, see Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.
I think beauty is even more problematic than truth. There is truth, based on facts, objective, scientifically obtained facts, but how does one objectively establish beauty?

The problem may be less difficult for scholars and (honest) artist, but how does an ordinary person identify and accept beauty?

One's children are "beautiful" however ugly they may be in reality. One's religion is beautiful. Look at the beautiful mosques that Muslims build to express the beauty they see in their religion. One's language has beauty, however gutteral it may sound. An ugly outfit designed by a prestigious designer is considered beautiful by the high-society woman who wears it.

Yet, these same people will recognize truth, and reject lies, if they are truthful to themselves. An ordinary person can identify truth and lies, and will often discern lies even when sugar-coated with what seems like truth.

Beauty, in modernity, is far more problematic, and far easier to misidentify, than truth. It requires a different level of discernment. It may indeed really be the territory of experts who can identify it, and who relay that information to others. People can live without beauty for a longer period than truth, as long as they have some basics fulfilled like a family life, a comfortable income, shelter and food, and even find it acceptable to live without beauty.

But, ultimately, lack of beauty is far more insidious, because it drains people's objective reality slowly. One can fight against an obvious lie, but how does one fight for beauty? Walking by an ugly building, day after day, will numb the soul. Perhaps we can be saved by small acts for beauty, like Winston in Orwell's 1984, when he bought a paperweight simply because he found it beautiful amidst the soul-numbing ugliness around him.
Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr. Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly outof the half-darkness...

[Julia] brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.[1984, Part 2, Chapter 4]
And here is the seemingly innocuous paperweight being smashed to pieces by the thought police:
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands...

There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!...

There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr. Charrington came into the room. The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in Mr. Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.

'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply. [1984, Part 1, Chapter 10]
Charrington knows that beauty is revolutionary. It can ignite the rebellion of the weakened and submissive, like Winston. Once Winston realized the possibility of acquiring beauty, he started to gain some strength.

Kalb makes similar observations about the re-creation of language and meaning in liberal society in his new book:
To some extent, the new standards are based on the view that the old ones were bad, because they had to do with the non-commercial and non-bureaucratic arrangements of the old society. Reversing and violating those standards has therefore become a virtue. Central and marginal have changed places: Islam has become a religion of peace, homosexual couples stable and loving, blacks wise and spiritual, immigrants the true Americans. In contrast, Christianity is presented as a religion of war and aggression, Middle Americans as violent and irrational, Republicans as the Taliban, and traditional marriage as hateful, oppressive, divisive , and pathological. When women and minorities do well, they deserve the credit, when they do badly, white men deserve the blame. Any flaws in the groups promoted from the margin to the center are whitewashed, the more glaring the flaws the thicker the coating. [P. 8]

Thursday, June 1, 2017

Double Whammy Discrimination: Diversity at all Cost Even if it Means Empty Museums











In our postmodern era I would be defended as a discriminatee.



My non-White, Third World background would automatically place me in the "victim" pigeonhole where my word against my white "antagonist" would preside, NO MATTER WHAT.



That is, until I start to defend this "white" monster and say he is the one being discriminated against.



Then the wrath, slow though it may come, is full on!



Especially if it is a white women who is regulating the discrimination channel.



This happened to me recently after I attended (and participated in) a lecture at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, where a group of artists were to discuss the works of Homer Watson, a late 19th early 20th century painter from southern Ontario.



I wrote about the exhibition and the panel discussion here: Homer Watson, Native Son. But I left out my questions to the panel.



As wrote in my post:

Last year, I attended a panel discussion on the exhibition Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape at the Art Gallery Mississauga. I had visited the exhibition numerous times, going through Watson's work one by one, to study his technique, his evolution as an artist, his views, his concerns, and his Canada.



The exhibition also displayed works by contemporary Canadian artists to bring this pine "narrative" to the fore. Some were reasonably good, but none reached the overall skill and beauty of Watson's paintings.
I was gong to leave it at that, just a personal observation (not naive or untutored, since I have a solid background in the arts), hoping that I would gain some insight from these artists.



But I should have known better.



The catalogue the AGM produced for this exhibition prefaced with this objective:

Contemporary Canadian artists looking at landscape must also find a way to access the ‘truth’ of a subject that is not only strongly represented in our national artistic history, but one that is both deeply political and personal.
So the "truth" of a subject is now mandated to "represent" not just our nation "objectively" but has to incorporate political and personal views as well.



A tree is not a tree is not a tree, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein .



I asked Reinhard Reitzenstein, one of the panelists, who is a pretty good sculptor (and who is white), if he believes that Homer Watson's standards, and art, set an example for artist in general or if his English (Western) heritage is insignificant. This was of course not what I was asking, as Reitzenstein clearly understood. I was asking him if he thought that Watson's work was good, was superior.



Reitzenstein talked for a bit and finally admitted that he doesn't want to emulate the now archaic art of Watson. We are in the modern age after all!



So, irrespective of technical expertise, artistic beauty, or individual ingenuity, as long as an artist follows the archaic art of Watson, his work can not be deemed "good."



This is the tired discussion of art which has reached now such a comical zenith that works are exhibited in museums and galleries simply based on their mockery (and not simply rejection) of this western tradition. And many artists have become wealthy doing so.



But the public isn't with the program, which is why the Art Gallery of Mississauga has to go through loopholes to get people to visit its exhibitions, including set up committees and workshops to "study" this lack of museum attendance.



I received a "newsletter" email about a year after this exhibition from the AGM, one of the few I have received from them to invite me to participate in two workshops ttled: Collections Through The Prism of Diversity Series (here are day one and day two of the schedules):



But I was given about a week's notice for a two day workshop, where would have had to pay $250/day to attend. My first reading of the email, before I saw the dates, was to figure out ways could come up with the sum, including asking for a reduced fee. Soon after, I realized that I was put on the list as a "visible minority" participant.



Here is the email I sent the gallery:

I can only surmise from this late notification that the AGM is getting some kind of monetary benefit from this "email list" which it seems to use haphazardly to meet with its program mandates.



In my case, the mandate appears to be that of a minority female artist who can participate in the discussion on how to add more "diversity" into the art collections of the region.



Through your lack of appropriate notification, you indeed lost the participation of a minority female artist (myself) who would have made a unique and substantial contribution to this discussion.
And the reply I received from Mandy Slater the director:

The AGM prides itself on its high professional standards and its strong relational manner. We provide a safe and accountable space for our diverse staff, volunteers, artists and audience. All of this supports the democratic nature of the work we do at the AGM.





Moving forward, if you are able to visit the AGM in a congenial and supportive way I encourage you to do so. If at any point in the future, you visit the AGM and create an unsafe, critical and or threatening space, we will contact security who will request that you leave the premises. If you do not comply they will be entitled to further legal action under the Ontario Trespass to Property Act. I have cc’d senior Security Officers at the City of Mississauga on this and other incidents regarding inflammatory and false statements made by yourself.



The AGM prides itself on embracing diversity and inclusion as a core institutional value. We strive to create an accountable and inclusive space that supports like-minded individuals.
Diversity counts at all costs, even if it means getting the "diverse" complainant out the door!



The irony of the AGM's position of course doesn't occur to its staff: that they are discriminating against me (shutting down my "voice" ) in order that they might continue with their program is exactly what they are accusing the white inheritors of Homer Watson.



This time though, they have found a whole different story: An "ethnic minority" who supports a white tradition!

Friday, May 5, 2017

Monday, May 1, 2017

Diversity or Community?


Image source

Diversity or Community?
By: Mark Richardson, blogger at Oz Conservative

You might remember that a decade ago an American professor, Dr Robert Putnam, released research showing that an increase in diversity leads to a decline in social solidarity:
In highly diverse Los Angeles or San Francisco, for example, roughly 30 percent of the inhabitants say that they trust their neighbours 'a lot', whereas in the ethnically homogeneous communities of North and South Dakota, 78-80 percent of the inhabitants say the same. In more diverse communities, people trust their neighbours less.
Professor Putnam summarised his research as follows:
Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.
This effect was seen for both conservatives and liberals.

Now another major study, undertaken by two Michigan State University researchers (Zachary Neal and Jennifer Watling Neal), has come to similar conclusions:
Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”

...After 20 million-plus simulations, the authors found that the same basic answer kept coming back: The more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, while the more homogenous or segregated it is, the more socially cohesive.
It seems that you can have ethnic diversity or you can have a close sense of community - you just can't have both together.

So why then are liberals so wedded to diversity as a moral aim? The reasons no doubt intersect. First, liberals believe that the goal of politics is to maximise individual autonomy, meaning a freedom to be self-constituted or self-defined or self-directed. Therefore, a predetermined quality like our ethnicity is thought of negatively as something that constrains us and therefore has to be made not to matter. Liberals therefore don't want to discriminate on the basis of ethny or race, even if it is for an important purpose such as maintaining community.

A related reason is that liberals think of the act of individual choice as being the key expression of morality, rather than what is actually chosen. There is no moral "outside" for liberals, only the act of choosing and allowing others to do likewise. Therefore, liberal morality is based more on qualities that demonstrate a willingness not to interfere with the choices of others (except for those who fall outside the liberal schema), such as non-discrimination, tolerance, openness and support for diversity.

It's also the case that liberals tend to want to manage society in a "technocratic" way, either through the markets or state regulation, and this is more readily achievable when people are stripped of "opaque" loyalties, such as those to family or ethny, that provide direction and authority outside of the technocratic systems. In a liberal society, people tend to become interchangeable units of the markets or bureaucracies, and obviously those with power in these systems feel comfortable with this outcome.

It's also true that diversity can be used as a weapon against whoever is the existing majority ethnic group. It can be used as such either by disloyal members of the majority group or else by members of minority groups.

So what can be done? One important achievement would be to undermine the dominance of liberalism as a political philosophy in the West, as this is a significant source of the idea that diversity is a moral aim. Another achievement would be to undermine the dominance of the corporate and bureaucratic elites. This can be done by making people aware of the bias of these elites (a process already partly completed) and by building up alternative sources of media, education and culture.

Finally, the research of Jonathan Haidt shows that liberals do care about the "harm" principle of morality. So it might also have some effect to show that individuals are harmed (by a loss of community) when diversity is forced upon communities.

Friday, December 23, 2016


Ishiguro photographed in an English countryside.
[Photo credit: Andrew Testa]

Here is a tweeter who writes:
[R]umour has it that @SalmanRushdie was hiding post fatwa in this house in Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire.

and a tweet reply:
@wodekszemberg @SalmanRushdie is there supposed to be any significance in this being next to a graveyard?


Ishiguro has a daughter Naomi with his English wife. Here is photo of her with a school friend from 2008.

As luck would have it, the mansion in front of which Ishiguro is posing is in Camden. So we can conclude that Ishiguro lived in Camden, and is now a Londoner according to his Wikipedia entry.

That is a strange coincidence that he lived n the same region in England as where Rushdie was rumored to have stayed during his fatwa. Or maybe not. Possibly, Ishiguro arranged Rushdie's secret accommodations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is more on the location of the photograph in the beautiful Cotswalds made to look like some abandoned barren land:
Kazuo Ishiguro, a novelist, in Chipping Campden, England, Jan. 26, 2015. Ishiguro’s new novel, “The Buried Giant,” is the riskiest and most ambitious venture of his celebrated career, a return to his hallmark themes of memory and loss, set in a ogre- and pixie-populated ancient England. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Ishiguro said. “Will readers follow me into this?” (Andrew Testa/The New York Times) - XNYT109

Below, I have posted and artcle I wrote at Camera Lucida in 2005 (!) where I clearly understood the perils of "diversity:" Diversity in Writers

Update (December 22, 2016) on Zadie Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro:
Smith continues with her theme of race/multi-race/mixed-race/ and some sociopolitical commentary about racial divides and biases often subtly elevating the "black" side of her own mixed-race "heritage." Here latest book is Swingtime which I have reviewed and will post soon.

Ishiguro abandoned the silent Butler narrator of a very real British household a while ago and started to write science fiction, not C.S. Lewis' Christian-based allegories, nor Tolkien's adventure sagas (also religious allegories) but dystopia fantasies of the world, or lives, falling apart. Although should add that The Butler had this creepy ghost-like aura. Ishiguro's latests, The Buried Giant:
Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge and war. [Source]
As wrote (full post below):
[If] you don’t have your full emotions invested in a place, how can you write positive things about it? Like Rushdie, Smith and Ishiguro, who seem to deny a possibility for a future in their books, and press on with their circular exaggerations trying to find meanings for themselves.
Non-allegorical, dystopian science fiction fits that creative void.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Diversity in Writers
Will the Real Jeeves Please Stand?

England has witnessed several years of non-English authors who keep winning literary prizes, or just literary acclaim. Zadie Smith was recently in the headlines, Salman Rushdie has managed to outlive his fatwa, and another less famous but prolific writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, has written yet another book from those fair British Isles.

I’ve read books by all three, even tried more than one of each. And all leave me less than enthralled, slightly confused, and struck by a lack of authenticity. I find their characters to be caricatures. Both Rushdie and Smith go for hyperbole, while Ishiguro goes for exactly the opposite.

I’m beginning to wonder if non-British writers, however much they were born on the Island, can really capture the spirit of the land.

“Remains of the Day” by Ishiguro has a gloomy, undecipherable, remorseful butler try to recapture something of what he’s lost during all those years of selfless service. Actually, I recant my observation about Ishiguro’s understatement. What could be more of a hyperbole than this?

Then there is P.G. Wodehouse, with the inimitable Jeeves. His adroit butler who really always does save the day, after a lot of scampers and near-disasters along the way. And he does get to have his day at the sea-side also, and quite frequently.

I think Wodehouse captured his character with affection as a butler who certainly is not going to be bossed around by any Lord! No remains for him to collect.

Sometimes I wonder; if you don’t have your full emotions invested in a place, how can you write positive things about it? Like Rushdie, Smith and Ishiguro, who seem to deny a possibility for a future in their books, and press on with their circular exaggerations trying to find meanings for themselves.

Ishiguro’s 2001 book “When we were orphans” is about an Englishman who mysteriously lost his parents as a young boy in Shanghai. He returns as a professional detective to solve that ultimate mystery. It reminds me of these writers, trying to find clues about their past by digging into words.

Ishiguro’s latest book forfeited the unapproachable Far East, and his ancestral home, for something even more alien. It seems like he’s completely given up on ‘his’ England. “Never let me go” is about a Utopia (or a dystopia) on cloning. No more real people, real places or real stories for Ishiguro in the advent of the 21st century.

Why doesn’t this progression of his thoughts and stories not surprise me?

Quote from an interview with Ishiguro on "When we were Orphans":
There's a certain kind of branded, packaged atmosphere of Shanghai: this exotic, mysterious, decadent place. The same in Remains of the Day. It was a case of manipulating certain stereotypical images of a certain kind of classical England. Butlers and tea and scones: it's not really about describing a world that you know well and firsthand. It's about describing stereotypes that exist in people's heads all around the world and manipulating them engagingly.