re: colonize

“Stay calm and decolonize”: Part 1, Part 2

Somewhere in this house is a box full of paper — a completed first draft of a novel I wrote in the early '90s. Back then I was not much interested in exploring Mennonite matters, but the plain reality was that the only successful writers in my acquaintance were hammering Mennonite matters pretty hard, 24/7. I threw in a character who was stubbornly refusing to sell the housebarn he lived in — the last intact housebarn in the village — to the car dealer next door, who was keen to tear it down and expand the business.

It's humble but it's home: source.

Flash forward thirty years. Blue Heron Books calls to inform me that my copy of Andrew Unger’s Once Removed has arrived and is on hold for me. I bring it home, and lo and behold, Unger’s protagonist Timothy Heppner is quixotically obsessed with preserving the remaining housebarns in his rapidly “modernizing” village.

I am still in the early pages of Unger’s sputtschreft. Unger is the Putzendoona responsible for The Daily Bonnet — anyone who makes a habit of his website, or its various social media tributaries, should have no difficulty enjoying his book. But more anon, once I’ve finished it.

It’s curious that Unger and I seem to be channeling the same wavelength, somewhat. In '91 I would not have been much moved by the plight of a villager fighting to preserve the last standing housebarn at the centre of a booming agri-industrial prairie town. But I would have been decidedly less moved by a proposed carlot expansion, so my authorial sympathies were very much with my fictional holdout.

This was just gratuitous culture-signalling on my part (“Hey, but now I’m related to Miriam Toews and David Bergen, yet!”) a short episode that didn’t even qualify as a subplot in my larger work. But that I included it at all in the manner I did suggests a contemplation of a possibility that never really left me.

The possibility — the potential desireability, even — of a return to the colony.

That thing next week

If my blog is your respite from reflexive doom-scrolling, I apologize for this post. But it is remarkable to me that International Crisis Group, a high-profile preemptive deescalation outfit who typically comment on Yemen or Somalia, is issuing warnings about the risk of violence in the United States.

There is a reason for that:

“I left the colony.”

“Stay calm and decolonize,” continued.

Pop recently attended a high school reunion at the old bach. It was held in the town’s Mennonite Heritage Village, where a large “barn” serves various dishes our tribe has appropriated during our travels and travails. It was a small group, and he assured me a social distancing of sorts was adhered to.

Anyhoo, on his way out dad stopped at the museum gift shop and took a few shots of contempo Menno swag. It appears my tribe is re-branding itself via mildly ironic Plautdietsch puns.

I own a few similar items, courtesy of MJ’s Kafe (or, more accurately, friends and family who frequent the joint). They tend to generate conversation — not from my bunch, mind you, but from die enjlisch who puzzle over the strange spelling and say, “That almost looks German — what language is it?”

My kind might nod in acknowledgement. Or they might head for the other side of the street.

The one item of clothing that has prompted inquiry from a local Mennonite is a hoodie I purchased from the Canadian Mennonite University campus bookstore, during a family visit some years ago.

It was closing in on Christmas, and our church choir was struggling with the yearly cantata. Calls were made for a pinch-hitter director who might marshal a respectable performance out of us. A young woman on a family farm to the south of us had graduated from an honours music program somewhere — CMU, in fact. I was unaware of this when I wore the hoodie to her first choir practice with us. She took one look at this grizzled, gutty Lebowski embedded amongst the bassos and warily asked, “Wheeeeeen did you attend CMU?”

We cautiously played the Mennonite game until common points of reference were uncovered. “Make sure you talk to my parents at Christmas,” she said.

The Christmas meet-and-greet was pleasant, if short — the weather was ugly, and everyone was keen to get stranded at home, and not some cavernous Victorian church building. Still, the father and I had points of connection. But we were struggling with the constellation. 

He grew up Mennonite in Paraguay. In the '70s my grandfather pastored in Paraguay. I ran through some of the nationals my grandparents introduced me to, but none of the names were clicking with my new acquaintance. Finally he said, “I left the colony quite some time ago.”

Well, sure. I could have seen that. In the brief exchange I’d had with his wife it was clear she was a spirited woman with a sharp, potentially cutting, sense of humour. He was a deeply thoughtful sort, very careful with his words. I am, you could say, intimately familiar with this sort of union. Pairs of this nature tend not to suffer the foolishness that embeds itself in colony-imposed strictures.

We leave the colony — early.

“The brainwashed do not know they are brainwashed.”

I played this old CD while transporting last weekend’s turkey remains to the township disposal site. In the car, with the volume at the optimal level, I marvelled anew at the capacity for some its passages to still send shivers down my spine, all these years later.

How many years later? I checked it out. It’s been 10, pretty much to the day, since I chanced across this marvelous album by this marvelous talent and his band.

Another reason for thanksgiving . . . 

Elsewhere: Rushkoff pines for the days of yore, when WE did all the pranking. I’m reflexively wary of such nostalgia — of any nostalgia, for that matter (at least I hope I am). For my money Carlos Lozado does a better job of summing up the current scene: “The counterculture never died. It just switched sides. Transgression now lives on the right, dogmatism on the left.” (Emphasis mine.) It’s kinda what I was poking at with this KISS recollection, back when.

Transformed, by the renewing of your mind...

This won't hurt a bit...

Do not be configured to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of the intellect, so you may test the will of God, which is good and acceptable and perfect — verse 2 from chapter 12 of Paul’s letter to the Romans 

Stay calm, and decolonize — Buffy Sainte-Marie

These two exhortations take up bedrock space in my consciousness. I believe they are not far removed from each other, if at all.

Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians is a very dense and difficult read. He is striving to re-torque both Jewish and Pagan understanding of human/cosmic consequence into a new shared and mutually liberating framework. It is a bizarre and audacious undertaking, one that sets Paul and his proposed cosmology perfectly at odds with that of the reigning Roman Empire. Shortly after composing the letter Paul is arrested, and executed some time after that.

I don’t understand it very well at all. I’ve asked a couple of scholar friends to break down the rhetoric for me, and the typical qualifier to their subsequent attempts is, “First of all, there are scholars who devote their entire lives to this one letter . . .” Every now and then I get a flash of what Paul is pointing to, a glimpse of the Cosmic Wow that has him writing in circular fits. And the more I read about the Roman Empire, its class structures, and the immense burden of expectation placed on the Empire’s lowest subjects, the better I get at reading this letter.

As a child I memorized the King James Version: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind . . .” etc

Stay calm, and decolonize.

We just celebrated Thanksgiving up here. My history with the holiday is uncomplicated — by celebrating Thanksgiving we actively take part in a rite my religion requires of its adherents. It’s easy and it’s delicious.

When asked, my Metis friends (all four of 'em) say they’re cool with that — you do you, cousin. My First Nations friends (all three of 'em) just smile and say, “For us it is a little complicated.”

“Decolonize.” Man, with my tribe the only way we were going to make it through at all was to build colonies in the desperate trust that the Russian Empire, or the British Empire, etc would allow us the privilege and — who knows? — maybe even offer us a smidgen of protection in the bargain.

More remains to be said . . .

The Week, Links

Recommended long-read of the week goes to Francis Fukuyama. LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: The challenges from the left and the right begs, like the notorious essay that netted FF sustained attention thirty years ago, for a spirited Q&A follow-up, as Fukuyama piles up bones of contention like so many turkey carcasses after Thanksgiving Monday. Anyhoo, Fukuyama’s rhetorical perambulations lead to this money-quote:

I suspect that most religious conservatives critical of liberalism today in the United States and other developed countries do not fool themselves into thinking that they can turn the clock back to a period when their social views were mainstream. Their complaint is a different one: that contemporary liberals are ready to tolerate any set of views, from radical Islam to Satanism, other than those of religious conservatives, and that they find their own freedom constrained.

This complaint is a serious one.

Read it here.

Also:

• Headlines I never expected to read: Why China’s liberals like Trump; and (at Quartz, of all places!) How Trump’s presidency changed Europe for the better.
• “Times as weighty as these do not allow for easy enlightenment” — indeed. James Jiang’s profile of Eileen Chang has sent me to the lye-berry.
• And finally: Is Pandemic Brain changing your taste in music? Personally, I’ve been giving podcasts more and more airtime, but that was a trend started some years before COVID hit. Just this morning I discovered Lost Notes: a collection of the greatest music stories never told — over here. Michael Donaldson brought this to my attention over at his 8sided.blog, a reliable source of internet joy I recommend to anyone who loves music.

Returning to the subject of turkey carcasses come Monday morning — it’s Thanksgiving weekend for us Canuckleheads, so I am wishing you, dear reader, a happy Thanksgiving.

This year's Thanksgiving playlist, courtesy of...

Guitars I Dig: EVH’s Frankenstrat

Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstrat is a workhorse guitar, akin to Steve Vai’s Evo or Brad Gillis’ “shovel” — arguably the most famous workhorse guitar in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

A first in its 40 year history -- being treated with kid gloves.

EVH only made two of these babies — one in 1978, out of parts of undetermined vintage; the other in 1979 out of Charvel parts from that year. The original is the one that “took” to its maker — EVH played it hard and played it often, only retiring it recently after Fender’s luthiers produced a clone that played, to Eddie’s sensibilities, better than the original.

What I find so terrifically charming about this guitar is just how hammered it is. People who managed to catch last year’s Play It Loud exhibit at the NY Met almost invariably remarked on how beat up these iconic instruments were — and nobody’s more than EVH’s.

The Frankenstrat deservedly has its own wiki, and this guy did a remarkable job of chronicling his painstaking replication of the legendary instrument.

It is evident from both pages that EVH was none-too-gentle about getting his self-built guitar to do what he damn well expected it to do. EVH’s character is revealed in the instrument, I think. While the playing revealed his evident sensitivity, the instrument evidences his drive, stubbornness, force of will. At the end of the day, Van Halen was EVH’s band, and his alone.

RIP, Eddie Van Halen.

Post-script: EVH breaks it all down for Popular Mechanics.