Stephen Roney's Blog, page 229

Kanye West Is Not Picasso

Since Kanye West has been in the news, there has been much recent tweeting and posting of Leonard Cohen’s posthumously published poem “Kanye West Is Not Picasso.” Unfortunately, nobody seems to understand what it means.

Most people take it as a “dissing” of Kanye West. And then take sides in this imagined conflict over who is the greater artist and who is the megalomaniac.

It is, instead, although not in my view a great poem, a Buddhist meditation on the self. It is a koan.

I think, for purposes of review, it is fair dealing to quote it in full; I note that others are.




It is the mystery of the self, the ego.

The ego is, at the same time, the only thing we know; and we know nothing about it.

I meant just then to say, “we all sometimes think we are Picasso, or greater than Picasso.” But then, I do not, cannot, know that.

For none of us ever knows any ego but our own.

It is of course nonsense to say “I am Picasso.” Picasso is Picasso.

At the same time, our ego contains all things; it is truer too to say “I am Picasso” than to say “Picasso is Picasso.”

And yet that “I” is nobody at all.

Anyone, including Picasso, who thinks they are Picasso is a fool.

The ego, of course, although it is nothing, is the most dangerous thing in the universe.

It seeks war against all things.


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Systemic Racism under Every Bed!

Keanu Reeves, star of The Matrix, is Canadian. Coincidence, or ...?
Jeff McLaren, a local councilor, writes a guest column in the Kingston Whig-Standard warning of Canada’s “systemic racism.” It seems to me a model of the type. Everyone now is writing columns condemning “systemic racism.”

McLaren begins, “Systemic racism is like the matrix. It is all around us but most can’t see it.”

If we are speaking of a thing most people cannot see, we have reason to ponder whether, in fact, like leprechauns, unicorns, witchcraft, or Jews poisoning wells, it does not actually exist as a thing independent of a few people’s perceptions of it.

We who cannot see it need some evidence.

And evidence ought to be easy to find. For a thing to become “systemic,” assuming the absence of psychic powers, it must be communicated among the members of that system. We will see it in the laws and regulations that constitute that system. If there are no such written laws or regulations, asserting systemic racism requires positing a vast conspiracy. Such vast and longstanding conspiracies are, for a variety of reasons, inherently unlikely to exist. Especially conspiracies of which the actual members are unaware.

McLaren’s stated evidence is that “federal and provincial law and city bylaws … all were predominately written by white, rich, educated, Christian, men.” Surely this is true: Canada was formed by a variety of ethnic groups, but most of them had and have skin that was relatively pale. Had they intended to, they presumably could have created a system that favoured people who looked like themselves. We have seen it in other times and places: in the US South before about 1965, in South Africa, or in the Indian caste system.

But that they could have done so is not evidence that they did. For that, we still need to see actual laws or bylaws that discriminate against “non-whites.” McLaren offers no evidence of this.

Surely it is his duty to do so: not only to prove his allegation against Canada, but also to combat racism. Any such laws or bylaws are in violation of the Canadian constitution. It is the duty of all of us to bring them before the courts, and have them overturned.

Other than this, McLaren’s argument seems to be that we should not consider racism wrong: “One example of an unhelpful distortion of ourselves is the older starting point of calling out racism as a moral failing.” It is hard to read this as anything other than a defense of racism. Systemic racism, if it exists, cannot excuse us from our individual moral obligation to resist it. “Everybody else was doing it” is not a moral argument.


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All We Are Saying ....

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Peter Bruegel the Elder.

Hitler wants peace. His speeches and his interviews on this theme are constructed on an ancient formula: war is incapable of solving a single question, war threatens the extermination of the superior races, war brings the ruin of civilization in its wake. -- Leon Trotsky, 1933.

Xerxes, my regular correspondent, tells of a friend who has lost his faith in God because, “His community were pacifists. They didn’t believe that wars settled anything. But wars kept happening.”

Why did he think God was obliged to conform to his wishes? Did someone tell him God was a pacifist? The Lord God of Hosts?

There is perhaps no ideology more evil than pacifism. An evil man who aggressively does evil, and admits it, is at least brave; bravery is a virtue. Far worse is the person who does evil while pretending it is good. He or she attempts to subvert others to evil, and will condemn and discourage the good.

This describes pacifism.

To be a pacifist in the face of evil is, in legal terms, to aid and abet. The pacifist is as guilty as the perpetrator; he or she is just refusing to take responsibility for it.

Wars never settled anything? To say so is to endorse slavery in the US; it took a war to end it. It is to endorse Hitler’s extermination of the Jews; it took a war to end it. It took a war to achieve American or Irish independence.

Being a pacifist will prevent wars? That is like saying, if only there were more sheep, there would be fewer wolves.

It should go without saying that nobody wants war. Nobody wants to get shot at. Hitler did not want war, and was a vocal pacifist. He would have vastly preferred being able to annex neighbouring lands peacefully, as he had the Saarland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. He could have kept doing so happily forever.

Conversely, if there had been fewer pacifists in other lands, he might have been stopped with much less bloodshed, perhaps with none, when he invaded the Saarland, or Austria.

Pacifism kills. It kills with a knife in the back, and with a fatuous smile on its face.

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Last Sunday's Gospel: The Kingdom of Heaven

Parable of the treasure in the field. Possibly Rembrandt.
The gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass was a string of short parables describing the Kingdom of Heaven. An essential subject, yet, as usual with parables, it is hard to make out what is really being said. 

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a merchant seeking fine pearls, who having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Parable of the pearl. Mironov.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some fish of every kind, which, when it was filled, fishermen drew up on the beach. They sat down and gathered the good into containers, but the bad they threw away. So it will be in the end of the world. The angels will come and separate the wicked from among the righteous, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus said to them, “Have you understood all these things?”

They answered him, “Yes, Lord.”

This seems intentionally funny. Really? Was that all so understandable to you?

He said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been made a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a householder, who brings out of his treasure new and old things.”

Matthew 13: 44-52, WEB

Therefore? How does this statement follow from what has come before? Why are we even talking about scribes?

Now let’s back up. Start with the treasure in the field. An obvious contradiction here. Why, having discovered the treasure, doesn’t the man just take it? Why rebury it, then buy the field?

And the pearl. Is it obvious that a merchant is better off having sold his entire inventory for one pearl? Is there any reason to suppose he would get a bigger profit out of it than out of another pearl, simply because it is more expensive?

For that matter, who fishes with a dragnet from the beach? How do you drag a net from a stationary position on the beach?

These seem to be a series of riddles. Let’s try to solve them.

The field that must be bought in order to yield its treasure must have an inexhaustible yield. The pearl that is more profitable than all other pearls combined must have an inexhaustible value. The sea that yields abundant fish even standing and casting at the shoreline must be inexhaustible.

And the scribe?

The scribe, that is, the writer, genuinely does, in his regular profession, have an inexhaustible resource. He draws on imagination and memory: “new and old things.” There is no end to the treasures the mind can produce.

Jesus suggests the situation of the scribe sums up the other examples. That is, the kingdom of heaven is most justly comparable to—or is—the memory and the imagination. These are our experience of the spiritual world.

Accordingly, the association of the prior examples seems dreamlike, an association if image motifs, rather than making some rational point: a treasure in a field, then a treasure from the sea, then good and bad things emerging from the sea, then good and bad people burning in a furnace.

Together, it sounds like the imagination, like a reverie.

One implication, since this is so, is that every scribe, every writer, every artist, is a disciple of the kingdom of heaven. It is essentially a spiritual office.

One might mistakenly thing this statement weak: that the Kingdom of Heaven is “only imaginary”; “made up”; “a fiction.” Jesus denies this by his reference to the burning of souls by the angels. This world of the imagination is, he says, more consequential, more meaningful, than the world we only sense with our vegetative senses. It is where the truth is revealed, and the real values of all things.

We ignore or trivialize it at our ultimate peril.

Now, perhaps, we see it only at a distance, and indistinctly, as through a glass darkly. But one day we will see it face to face.



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An Explanation for Denial

"It is easier for most people to accept a lie, than to accept having been lied to."


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The New Moonshot

When the US ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, the reason was said to be that they were engaged in industrial espionage—specifically, trying to steal information about American coronavirus vaccines. Now I hear reports of Russian hacking into UK and US computers for the same purpose.

Why was this their focus? One would assume that different teams are sharing their information in any case, right?

Maybe not. It seems to me that the race for an effective vaccine, or else a genuine cure, for COVID-19, is this era’s space race. Whoever gets there first demonstrates technological supremacy, and the payoff in national prestige will be immense. Countries like Taiwan and South Korea have already boosted their international prestige immensely by efficient responses to the virus. Countries known to be aggressively in the race are the USA, UK, Australia, Germany, China, Canada, and Israel.


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The Global Hamburger

Chinese tonight?
I get to chat more or less daily with young people around the world. This has been my life, more or less, for the past thirty years. In those thirty years, something dramatic has happened. The world has changed utterly. And we are soon going to see its effects. 
When I started out, in Wuhan China, population six million then, I couldn’t go anywhere without drawing a crowd. I was exotic; and so, to me, was the place I had come to. Butter or cheese were unavailable, let alone such a thing as a hamburger. China might have been an extreme example, but places like Korea, or Thailand, or Saudi Arabia, or Bulgaria were also thrillingly strange. These were the adventures I had dreamed of as a boy reading Robert W. Service or Richard Halliburton.

But the internet has changed everything.

Just as the out-of-touch elites in Canada have been celebrating multiculturalism and cultural diversity, cultural diversity is disappearing everywhere else, as we all enter a vast melting pot. Thanks to the internet, aside from any other influences, young people in China or Saudi Arabia or the Philippines are now exposed to all the same cultural influences as young people in Brooklyn or Peoria. Everyone has at least a smartphone. They listen to the same music, see the same films, play the same games, know the same memes, and are regularly chatting with one another.

I ask a Chinese student what her favourite book is. Harry Potter. A Filipino toddler cannot get enough of Peppa Pig. I ask a Chinese student what his favourite meal is. Hamburger. I recently asked a student in Beijing to write an essay on the three historical persons he would most like to meet. Hannibal, Napoleon, and George Washington.

For the young, there are no longer local cultures. As the older generations die away, they will too.

It makes me a little sad; malls in Bangkok now look pretty much like malls in Sudbury. At the same time, each offers many more choices. And I have to be delighted at the visible death of the sinister folly of cultural relativism.


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Judging Thy Neighbour

From Clarifying Catholicism:

Authentic love does not involve letting people do whatever they want. In fact, it takes an enormous amount of love to courageously confront someone about a bad habit, addiction, or harmful behavior.

Christians are called to judge actions every day. In a literal sense, “Don’t judge me!” is a fine demand, since we have no authority to judge the state of a person’s soul. However, when this phrase is warped to signify “Don’t judge my actions!” the requester risks surrounding themselves with walls of pride that isolate them from the relationships that reveal the goodness of God. A criminal justice system could not function without judging actions, though it is apparent that the so-called “freedom-fighting” anarchists do not care for law, order, or morality at all. Once we relinquish judgment of actions, we too fall into a state of inner-anarchy.

If you love a drug addict, you have an obligation to respectfully confront them about their substance abuse. …. No matter how “politically incorrect” it might seem, it is your God-given task to help your friend carry their cross. … The greatest commandment is “Love Your Neighbor.” If you truly love your neighbor, you will judge their actions.

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A Journal of the Plague Year: 1832

Cholera in Quebec City: the sky os black from the smudge pots, burned to drive away the smells that people at the time believed caused disease.

Old Kingston (Ontario) newspapers are available online. I thought I’d pull up the Upper Canada Herald for the spring and summer of 1832, because that was the year for the first great cholera epidemic. And also the year some of my ancestors came over, if I recall correctly. Might be interesting to compare it to our current situation with COVID-19.

The disease began in India. It had spread to Russia and the Far East before it hit London and Paris. News from Europe was delayed about six weeks, the time it took for a North Atlantic passage.

London had gone into a sort of lockdown:

CHOLERA AND COMMERCE.—The careful men in the city, who are constantly watching the " signs of the times," profess already to see plain indications of that mischief with which we are threatened, not by the cholera, but by the absurd measures which the belief of its existence here has given rise to. Money has become within these two days comparatively scarce, because merchants perceive that an extensive demand for it must shortly arise, from the mere circumstance that shipments of gods of all kinds for the continent have been generally suspended, and that the owners will be driven to provide payment for them, without any of the usual aid from foreign remittances. The great ports of Europe, now inevitably to be closed against the Lendon trade, as they receive no goods from us, will of course send us no money.--[Morning Chron.]

This ominous note appears at the beginning of May:

EMIGRATION.—The following is copied from the City article of a late number of the Morning Herald. "We understand that the number of vessels preparing to sail for Canada at the opening of the season, both in London and the out ports, is great beyond all precedent. We are very glad that this is the case, because as has been justly intimated by a writer in the last number of the Quarterly Review, to whom we have before referred, the increasing population of the country must find a vent somewhere to escape from the grasp of want, or the nation will be involved in anarchy and confusion. The fact is the land does not raise sufficient food, as at present managed, to give in exchange for manufactured goods, and we know of no better way of remedying the evil than the bringing into cultivation our colonies, more especially the Canadas, whose interests are, or ought to be, identified with our own. At the same time, however, we feel it our duty again to call the attention of the Government to the disgraceful and cruel manner in which so many poor persons were last year huddled together, worse than negroes are in African slave ships, to serve the cupidity of the owners and masters of the vessels that bore them across the Atlantic.”

If my calculations are correct, some of my ancestors came over on one of those ships.

However, Kingston readers were reassured that the pandemic could not reach North America.

[I]t is contagious, but depends mainly for its progress and malignity on the state of the atmosphere. … [T]his state of the atmosphere, whatever it may be, does not exist at any great distance from land, and is at length neutralized on the ocean. When the United States frigate Congress visited Manilla, in the year 1820, on the evening of the 4th day after her arrival a case of Asiatic Cholera occurred, and the ship was immediately ordered to get under way for the purpose of proceeding to the China Seas. While in these narrow seas, a number of cases occurred, the last of which was on the morning preceding that on which she passed through the Straits of Sunda. After this no new cases occurred; those previously ill soon recovered; and the ship has remained from that time perfectly free from any infection of the kind. From these facts we believe it to be utterly impossible, for the disease to be imported in vessels from Europe, and that if it appears here at all, it will originate here, and not be imported.” [N. V. Con., Eng ]

So that was reassuring.

The next week’s issue reported that the illness had spread to Ireland: four dead in Dublin.

On 15 May the first ships of the season arrived at Quebec. One, the Canada, was thought to have cholera on board.



Both had violated a newly-passed quarantine law, that required ships to dock at Grosse-Ile for health inspection rather than docking in Quebec harbour.

FIRST ARRIVALS—HEALTH LAW:-On Friday night last about 10 o'clock, two guns were fired in the Harbour, and in the morning the Canada, from Greenock, and the Intrepid, from Hull, were seen at anchor off The St. Charles. They were the first arrivals from sea this season. They were boarded in the morning by the Harbour Master and Health Officer, and a yellow flag hoisted at the foremast. No communication was allowed with the port, as they bad no certificates of the Health Officer at the Quarantine Station. In the afternoon the Board of Health ordered them back to Grosse Isle, and they set sail, without landing a passenger or even the letter bags, (a step with respect to the bags not altogether necessary, it strikes us,) about 3 o'clock. They arrived at the station yesterday. The Canada had a foul hill of health, the Cholera existing at Greenock; the Intrepid had a clean bill of health. It is understood that prosecutions for violation of the Health Law have been ordered against the Captains and Pilots. The penalty is a sum not more than £100. The pilot of the Intrepid had however, we learn, wintered in England, and was ignorant of the quarantine laws.

The next week, the Rideau Canal opened. My ancestors must have been among the earliest immigrants to come through.

RIDEAU CANAL.—In a late number of the Herald we announced that this magnificent work would he completed in a few weeks, but we were not prepared, at an early a period, for the interesting scene which took place yesterday. At eight o'clock in the morning it was understood that a Steam-boat and several smaller craft would pass through the Locks at Kingston Mills, and of course a large concourse of our inhabitants hastened to the spot, in order to witness so pleasing an event. At thirteen minutes before one o'clock the Dock Yard Cutter Snake, commanded by Lieutenant Holbrook , and accompanied by Mr. Glovers Barge, and a barge belonging to the officers of the 66th Regiment, entered the first Lock, where they remained eleven minutes, —number two was passed in five minutes —number three, in about four minutes—they were in the basin three or four minutes, and entered the broad expanse of water above number four, at thirteen minutes before two o'clock. The delay in the last lock was occasioned by a small piece of drift wood getting between one of the gates and its sill. Had this not occurred, the time occupied in passing through all the locks would not have exceeded thirty minutes. After three hearty cheers, the Cutter, with the British Ensign flying at the main mast head, spread her sails to the breeze, and was soon hid from our sight by the trees that stud the margin of the serpentine channel leading to Brewer's Mills.

By 20 June, the cholera had apparently still not arrived in Kingston.

THE INDIAN CHOLERA—We have a variety of reports respecting this disorder, but the truth of which we are unable to vouch for, therefore it is best not to sound the alarm without a strong foundation, for we well know that fear operates in a frightful manner on the imagination. A person the other day informed us that he took up a book which treated on that disorder, and that he became so affected by the perusal of it as almost to turn sick, and was forced to put it down. We have published the particulars of a meeting in our town upon the subject, where resolutions were passed and a committee of safety appointed to act with the magistrates, to adopt and put in force the most effectual means to prevent the disorder being introduced, and otherwise to endeavour to stop its progress if it should visit us.

CHOLERA. At a meeting of the Inhabitants of Kingston, held at the Court House, on Thursday, June 14th, 1832, "for the purpose of taking into consideration the propriety of adopting some measures to prevent the spread of CHOLERA in the Town." THOMAS MARKLAND, Esq. in the Chair. Resolved, That whereas by recent accounts from Quebec, it appears that the disease called Asiatic Spasmodic Cholera has appeared in that city, thus affording indubitable proof that the disorder has been imported from Europe, we cannot close our eyes to the almost tearful certainty that this awful visitation of Almighty God will soon reach this Town. That as every individual is deeply interested in the preservation of the Public Health, it is the bounden duty of all to combine cheerfully in such measures as may serve under the divine blessing to arrest the progress of this scourge.

The newspaper goes on to suggest:

We would seriously ask, whether it would be better to risk a little infringement on public right, by directing the Steam-Boats crammed with passengers for the ports above to pass Kingston, or to let them come to our wharves and run the chance of introducing a pestilence amongst us when it may be avoided by so doing. We are informed that Commodore Barrie (at the request of the Magistrates and Committee of Public Safety) has ordered a boat to be stationed at Point Frederick to prevent Steam-Boats or other craft entering the port of Kingston without being examined.

By the Montreal papers received this morning, we find that the state of that city and also Quebec was truly alarming on account of the ravages of the Cholera, but we are happy to find by an extract from the Gazette that the disease has greatly abated at both places [sic—not true, perhaps inserted to reassure]. The situation of the emigrants is truly distressing, as many of them are without money, or even a temporary shelter, which is enough of itself to bring on disorders of the most afflicting nature from such exposure and privations. It is absolutely necessary to use the utmost caution to prevent the disorder being introduced amongst us. There can be no necessity whatever under the present circumstances, for the steam-boats and vessels bound above to call here, and such as are, should have a distant station appointed for them, which regulations we are informed are this day enforced.

Since writing the above we have received the following.

REPORT OF THE MEDICAL BOARD OF HEALTH. Kingston, 20th June 1832.

Cases, - - 2
Admitted into Hospital, - - 1
Deaths out of Hospital, - - 1
Remaining, - - - 1

JOHN R. FORSYTH, Secretary.

So it had arrived.

Next week the figures for June 20th were republished, and were quite different, without explanation:

Cases 48
Deaths 21

This makes me suspect that the actual number of cases was being suppressed, to prevent panic. The papers from York (Toronto) actually published no news at all of the outbreak there. The Herald laments this.

From the York papers we are unable to collect any satisfactory information respecting the progress of the prevailing disease. It is said that the Physicians refuse to report the cases that come under their notice, and therefore the public are kept in total ignorance in relation to the health of the Town.

People apparently believed at the time that fear caused disease. The paper considered it a civic duty to downplay the dangers.

We have ourselves met numbers of persons in the public streets with their handkerchiefs to their mouths, depression on their countenances, looking the very pictures of despair, afraid that with every inspiration of the air they might inhale pestilence and death!! Can it excite surprise if the amount of mortality is swollen to an horrible magnitude when people thus court disease, and solicit a passport to the tomb?—We repeat, that a careless disregard of the malady, as far as the mind is concerned, is one of the best safeguards against the attack of cholera, just as the shutting up of stores, the closing of shops, and the suspension of any of the everyday pursuits of business or the ordinary occupations of life will be found to provoke its approach.—

But there is a backhanded admission that “the amount of mortality has swollen to an horrible magnitude.”

The public was assured repeatedly that there was really no reason to worry; cures had been discovered, using ingredients close to hand. Every new edition reported a different cure that some doctor or another had found to be effective. This one is my favourite:

The Montreal Herald speaks in high terms of commendation of the "charitable and extraordinary stranger whom Providence seems to have led to our city, at the moment of inflicting the scourge; and who, besides practising gratis, has practised with some success. When we say this, we are prepared to bring forward many and very extraordinary instances of his success, authenticated by respectable individuals, witnesses of the cure. His recipe is as follows.

Two spoonsful of Charcoal, Two do of Lard, Two do of Maple Sugar.

Mix these together, and give them to the patient with a spoonful of sugar, to remove the disagreeable taste from the mouth; should this remain on the stomach one half hour after, the patient may drink a little spruce beer: chocolate may be used after the recovery of the patient with dry bread. If he has the cramps or spasms, he is rubbed over with lye of wood ashes and water, as hot as it can be borne, but not over strong. In the event of its proving ineffectual, if the spasms continue or increase, very hot brandy, of the best kind, is substituted for the lye. If the patient vomit after the first dose of charcoal, the second is administered after the lapse of half an hour. After this treatment has been used, and as soon as the patient is a little recovered, he is to take a plate of bean soup, made with very fat pork, and should drink water in which has been quenched a live coal of maple wood. He may also take a very strong chocolate with little milk, and a wine glass full of leaven or baker's yeast will help in maintaining the functions of the stomach.

As of the first of August, the epidemic had not abated, and the newspaper seems to be speaking more frankly. Perhaps the public had become familiar enough with the disease; more likely suppression was no longer possible, against the evidence of their own eyes.

The Montreal papers received this morning represent the Cholera as raging with unabated violence---The deaths being about twenty daily. The accounts from Quebec are also more unfavourable than they were last week.

The US had closed its ports to all Canadian commerce.

The epidemic raged on for years.
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It Took Seven Years

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