Word of the Day: “Appropriation”

The latest catchphrase from the “trigger-warnings” crowd  is:  “cultural appropriation.”   Snowflakes are melting in the heat of the phrase.
The current epicenter of this kerfuffle is Canada.  Since Canada doesn't get to be the epicenter of all that much, we'll put the maple-leaf links front & center:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/writers-union-of-canada-apology-cultural-appropriation-1.4109186

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-cultural-appropriation-should-be-debated-too-bad-canadas-writers-union-instead-chose-to-debase-itself

http://www.newsweek.com/cultural-appropriation-outcry-succeeds-cancelling-gallery-show-white-painter-594924

Additionally:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-lefts-misguided-obsession-with-cultural-appropriation/2017/05/12/59e518bc-3672-11e7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html?utm_term=.f04e49efef68

Bad, bad  Bard !

Take an example: Logically, if an author is male, there could be no female characters in his book.  He couldn't possibly present their inner truth -- and if he did, it would be even worse:  appropriation.

Quickly running the classics through the mind, the only novel that passes the test is Moby Dick.  All others, by male authors, must be burned.

It's okay -- a male whale

 

For more about our lovable subaqueous sea-chum, try these

~ Moby-Dick monostichs ~

[Update] This just in:  PETA has demanded the censorship of Moby Dick.

HarperCollins is preparing a new P.C. edition, minus the whale.

(/ satire.  Not worth analyzing.  We have not to get down in the sandbox with the bisounours, to wrangle over such notions.  As Hegel (or someone) once wittily put it:  “When you hear the terms ‘safe space’ or ‘appropriation’ -- entsichern Sie ihren Glock.”)

~

A generation ago, a somewhat related notion was that of coöptation.   The Establishment (that was the “They”, back Then) would dangle a carrot; and if you took it, you’d been co-opted.

~

Although lists of huffy demands by aggrieved poetical Eskimos  have little resonance outside a certain milieu, there is a deeper and much more general issue hiding behind it, one discussed  over the decades  under such rubrics as “The Uses of the Past”.

An especially subtle one is offered by the historian Tony Judt, in his wide-ranging pre-post-mortem exposition Thinking the Twentieth Century.   Here he refers to the “misappropriation” of the Holocaust narrative, by a motley assortment of factions.

~

Related vocabulary:

Film critic Anthony Lane, recalling Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie”:

… Hoffman playing an actor playing an actress.  That isn’t mimicry, it’s an identity heist.

-- “Folies à deux”, in The New Yorker, 1 June 2020, p. 71

День Победы

Remembered Victory

The media have,  justly,  been giving ample coverage to today’s Victory Day celebrations in Russia, commemorating the defeat of the Axis in World War II.   The coverage of this largest-ever patriotic-military display  has been better than perfunctory, examining in addition  the political undercurrents which -- more than a typical Fourth of July celebration in the States these days, say -- deeply color this year’s remembrances.

There is one aspect of the generally unisonous coverage  that I wish to take issue with, however.   The tone of the presentation in America -- and this, through no fault of the Russians -- has been skewed by the increasing hegemony of sentimentalist victimology in the American media’s treatment of just about anything.   Again and again, the reporters intone:  The Soviet Union suffered 27 million dead over the course of that conflict.  An enormous (key word) “Sacrifice”.

Now, a funeral is not the time for the historian to step into the pulpit;  but these deaths happened seventy years ago;  moreover, they are being cynically instrumentalised by Putin  to revive the cult of Stalin -- and thus, of Putin himself.  (Kudos to the media for having reported the recent law making it a crime to criticize the USSR’s behavior in that war.)

First, a bit of moral clarity, to clear the head of the fumes of sob-story sentimentalism.   If, seeing someone about to drown, you leap into the pounding sea to save them, and so doing, die, then you can properly be said to have sacrificed  your life.   (Note:  A sacrifice can be in a good cause or a bad one;  that is not the point.)  But if you are simply sauntering down the sidewalk chewing gum, and you get squooshed by an asteroid -- that is not a sacrifice;  that is just bad luck.

Similarly:  If you spot someone being beaten or robbed, and intervene, you are sacrificing your own safety.   But if you yourself have been backed into a corner and are being pummeled with murderous intent, your fighting back, while courageous or prudent, is hardly a “sacrifice”.

Now:   What the USSR suffered in the war was, morally, closer to bad luck than to sacrifice (as we shall show), nay indeed was worse than the mere bad luck of the stroller in the parable, who after all did not provoke the asteroid in any way -- did not shake his fist at Olympus and cry “Bring it on!”  But the Soviets, to some extent, indeed Brought It On.

(1)  First, by the Stalinists’ instructions to the Comintern.   Although the KPD had no love lost for the Nazis, they nevertheless, on instructions from Moscow, during “Third Period” Stalinism (inaugurated 1928) objectively treat the SPD and other labor/reformist parties as the main enemy of the moment (the Nazis presumably to be mopped up later).   Had they formed (as the pejorative catchphrase had it, back in the day) a “United Front from Above” against the Brownshirts, Hitler might never have come to power.

To be sure, one he did come to power, and all moderate or progressive forces had been crushed like a bug, such Kommunisten as remained did, belatedly, try to oppose the Nazis, faute de mieux.  But it was way too late, and partly their own fault.

(2)  Second:  For several months prior to the outbreak of world hostilities in September of 1939,  France and Britain had been courting Stalin to form a pact directed against potential further aggression from Germany, in particular in preventive defense of Poland.  Stalin toyed with them, then let them drop.  Instead -- stunning the world -- he signed a pact with Hitler.  That was the signal for Hitler to launch his Blitzkrieg.  As for Poland, Stalin and Hitler carved the thing up between them in advance (along with much else along Spheres-of-Influence lines).  Had Stalin not done this, WWII might never have occurred, or might have been quickly decided quite differently if it had;  for Hitler was, tactically, more cautious (in the early days) than most folks are aware of.  (Cf. his gingerly occupation of the Ruhr, the plebiscites in Sudetenland and the Saar, etc.)

Presumably, those events are among those that are now illegal to criticize.

As for the Komintern … during the Popular Front that succeeded the Third Period, the various CP’s did form anti-fascist alliances.   But the instant Stalin inked his Nazi pact, they all turned on a dime and began denouncing the democracies instead.  So much for anti-Nazi steadfastness.

(3)  During the purges that began in earnest in 1937, Stalin choreographed the legal murder of the flower of the early leading Bolsheviks.   In itself, that is not germane to our tale.  But he followed it up with the decapitation of the Soviet officer corps, thus greatly weaking his army on the eve of world conflict.  Worse than imprudent -- reckless.

(4)   True, the Soviet Union did eventually fight the Nazis; and it may well be that the average Soviet soldier was unusually valorous, I don’t know.  But Stalin did not turn against Hitler until Hitler turned on him -- to Stalin’s astonishment.  Stalin had even had advance warning of Unternehmen Barbarossa from a well-connected spy in Tokyo, but discounted the warning:  he just couldn’t believe that his good buddy Adolf would do that.

In short:   When he had a free and unforced choice whom to ally with,  Stalin chose Hitler.   Only when backed into a corner did he fight back.

So:   Not to be churlish, but to depict the events being commemorated today as a noble “sacrifice” on the part of the USSR, is to be blinded by the Care Bears version of world history.   Putin has been working towards reviving the cult of Stalin as part of his pursuit of the “Total Vertical”.   The West should not be his cheerleader in that plan.

~

As for genuine sacrifice:  Britain and France get at least half credit.  True, they tried apeasement for several months;  but knowledge of the futility of this  is due to hindsight.  Indeed, if Hitler had succumbed to one of the various assassination attempts, or had choked on a grape-pip, history might commend the Munich Pact as having spared the continent another war.   Only after Hitler invaded Poland -- while still making irenic gestures and cooing noises towards the West (noises that had become all too familiar, and to which the West was now immune) -- did France and Britain realize that it was only a question of sooner or later, and the longer they left it to later, the stronger Hitler would be when he eventually turned on thém.   So, they hadn’t been driven into a corner yet, but they could foresee the corner:  thus, at that point, declaring war on Germany was a matter of enlightened self-interest, not sacrifice.   Still, the general public was not widely aware of that, and grumbled at “dying for Poland”.  Also, none of the various other European states and statelets  came to their aid;  so, kudos, as far as it goes.

On the other hand, full marks go to Canada, which got into the game early, ramping up arms production to (prospectively) support Great Britain, and punching well above her weight in the war, when it came.  This, though Canada hadn’t been attacked, and was not likely to be.

(The U.S., of course, stayed out of it until Pearl Harbor forced their hand.)

~

In Washington,  the festivities were, by contrast, non-political, and much lower-key:  an Antique Airshow -- A Good Time Was Had By All.   (In fact, I wasn’t even aware of the Washington celebration, though I listen to a D.C.-based radio station;  they gave much more coverage to the event in Russia.)

Basically, for better or worse, Americans don’t pay a lot of attention to world history, and certainly do not ‘get’ the deep psychopolitical currents that roil the Old Continent.   Thus, here an original twist on the commemoration, from Berlin, at which Americans would merely blink:

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/44/44886/1.html

Reichsbürger scheitern beim Sturm auf den Reichstag

Rechtsextreme Demo am Hauptbahnhof - aggressive Stimmung gegen Journalisten

Der 8. Mai als Tag der Befreiung vom Hitlerfaschismus ist ein Tag, der an die grausamen Folgen von Nationalismus und Faschismus erinnern soll. Doch in Berlin nutzen Rechtsextreme, Reichsbürger und braune Esoteriker das Datum für ihre eigenen Zwecke. Auf zahlreichen Demonstrationen stellen sie ihr völkisches Weltbild zur Schau - welches sie selbst als antifaschistisch verbrämen. Unterstützung erhalten die Extremisten von den Nachtwölfen aus Russland.

We cum 2 celebrate with U

~

In eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists put on a demo similar in sabre-rattling tone, though not in scope, to that of Putin.

In Kiev, no military parade at all:  Just a laying of a bouquet at the tomb of the unknown soldier.

~

Yet another layer beneath these nation-specific undercurrents, lies another, inchoate, and more obscure, which spans Europe.  

(1) Visible and above the depths of public sentiment,  there is one hegemonic ideology reigning in “Europe” -- “Europe” in the European sense of the ECC:  the Eurocrats.   These answer to no constituency, but carry on merrily, demanding this and legislating that.  The overall silhouette of their proposals is to abolish traditional European national cultures, and to let go even of much (like Christianity, traditional marriage, or masculine valor) that has long spanned political boundaries,  and allow the European peninsula (for so it suddenly appears, exposed and frozen, on the map) gradually to melt into the African and Middle-eastern landmass, without resistance.

(2) In antithesis to this, are worries whether that is such a good thing.  Nervous glances at what-all is happening throughout Africa and the Middle East, are not reassuring.   Such worries churn the gut of das Volk, of la France profonde, but are scarcely permitted to disturb the Narrative in the bien-pensant media.   So soon as a Swede, or a German, gives voice to qualms, he is shushed up and branded a Nazi;  and we have already disposed of them.

And this is where Putin comes in:  not from stage left (Stalin), but stage right.

[No time to develop this analysis further here;  meanwhile, the catchword for this countercurrent is:  Eurosibérie.]

Putin and his biker buds

[Update 11 May 2015]  Can’t make this stuff up:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2015/05/11/01003-20150511ARTFIG00216-poutine-rehabilite-le-pacte-molotov-ribbentrop.php

.

So Canada has crazies too…

Since I try to keep clear of current popular culture to the extent possible, it is sometimes by a roundabout route that I learn of some stateside trend. 

This evening, sampling the excellent offerings of that fine site Medi1 (a joint Franco-Moroccan venture) I was listening to the following audio essay:

Les réptiliens: crise, complot et dinosaures

Bemused at this report of a mass movement centered in the United States, of which I had been unaware, I clicked around a bit, and learned that as many as one out of twenty-five voters in these parts  believe in the conspiracy theory that many world leaders are actually extraterrestrial reptiles in disguise.  No no -- funny, of course;  but the point is, these people believe it.  And they are joining the Tea Party, which at the moment holds the health of the world economy in its Twinkie-stuffing-smeared fingers.

The point here, though, is not to lay yet another charge (coals to Newcastle) at the door of the Repo troglodytes, but to notice that (as one further click revealed) a similar psychosis is corroding Canada:

Eves attacked Dalton McGuinty for voting against a bill to protect taxpayers from increased taxes, when it turns out McGuinty in fact voted for that bill. Finally, on the Friday of the second week, the Eves campaign issued a bizarre press release calling Dalton McGuinty an "evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet". This moment would prove the defining moment of the campaign. First, it was so memorable and unusual that it served to attract the attention of all Ontarians, including those who do not pay attention to a campaign until its final days. Second, the over-the-top negativity brought to life a key critique of the Liberals, that the Harris-Eves Tories picked fights for no reason and went too far. Third, the hysteria around the comment put the Eves campaign on the defensive in the media at a critical point and prevented them from regaining their footing after a difficult week. Fourth, it polarized the election around the PCs and Liberals, and left the NDP on the sidelines. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Eves team was instantly at each other's throats over who would take the blame for approving the press release.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_reptilian_kitten-eater_from_another_planet

This meme of insidious shape-shifting  reptiles had its birth in science fiction.   But such fantasy worlds have a way of bleeding into the lives of hapless mother’s-basement-dwelling masturbators:  witness the Star Wars conventions.  The first canny marketer to realize that one could make big bucks out of such stuff, was sci-fi penman Ell R*n H*bb*r\d (name touched up a bit to escape the trolling of that litigious sect), who parlayed his tripe into a scam -- later promoted (for tax purposes) into a “religion”.   And now some humanoid named (appropriately) Icky (again, modified to thwart the crawling spiderbots) has turned the reptilian meme into a going and growing concern.

Weep, deeply weep, for the Republic.

No-Go Zones

 

I used to be Editor-in-Chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.  We specialized in educational materials, especially dictionaries.   Under the invigorating if sometimes idiosyncratic leadership of its CEO  Mort David, the company undertook to revive the bankrupt Franklin Computer (which made Apple clones, and was slain by Apple in the courts, in a classic B-school case, bearing certain interesting parallels to the Stuxnet virus -- but that would lead us into deeper waters), debuted the “Spelling Ace”,  basically invented the E-book before the term was coined, and eventually hit the skids, in part owing to a sophisticated but overambitous and premature (“before its time”) project for a general handheld reader platform;  had it succeeded, we would all be saying “Bookman” instead of “Kindle” (or, if I had had my way at the christening, “Koala”:  interesting that Amazon eventually came to a similar conclusion, cf. Kindl, Austrian for ‘little child’ -- i.e., koala).  But in the meantime, the company undertook some quite innovative projects, never simply plunking an existing work onto a handheld electronic platform and allowing you to scroll, but bringing to the table a wide range of linguistic value-addeds, and occasionally even authoring a work, if such did not exist in print.

One such -- or rather, family of such -- involved the Oxford ESL dictionaries: the Oxford Students Dictionary, and the flagship OALD.   We began by licensing the former, and then targeted them to specific audiences by adding translations in Arabic, Persian, etc.  I oversaw some of these efforts.   The Arabic went smoothly and sold well.   The Persian … well, I don’t know Persian, so that was more difficult.   A Princeton resident myself, I wrote to a Princeton professor of Persian, asking for recommendations for local translators, and in reply received hate-mail:  IT’S NOT PERSIAN YOU IGNORAMUS IT’S FARSI.  (Or perhaps it was the other way around:  perhaps I called it “Farsi” and that pushed his brightred hotbutton, who knows or cares.)  So I had to wing it, hiring a Farsi-speaker -- educated and intelligent, but not a trained lexicographer -- and had him submit a sample.  Then, as quality-control, I hired a second such native-speaker to evaluate the efforts of the first;  and was informed that the first translator was an illiterate non compos mentis; she then submitted her own counter-sample.  Disheartened, I hired a third to evaluate both these efforts, and was told that their combined ignorance was like Pelion piled upon Ossa, or Ossa upon Pelion (I can never remember which).   As the proverb has it:  Two of a trade  do not agree.

Anyhow -- longstoryshort -- the project was eventually completed, but never turned into a product, because of the ban on trade with Iran.   There were certain exceptions, but we wound up not qualifying.   Now, this was bone-headed:  how could it possibly not be in our national interest to teach English (and, along with it, English cultural assumptions) to Iranians?  But so it fell out.

After that fiasco, I paid a bit more attention to the legal language surrounding our efforts.  And one odd bit that kept coming up was that our products, offers, etc., were valid pretty much throughout the known universe, with the exception of …. Hades; Planet X; and (my memory may be a bit off on those, but not on the memorable next one) “Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan”.

Wh- wh-  whhhhaaatt ???

-- Sic.  You were perfectly at liberty to sell our electronic reference products in Afghanistan, thus spreading far and wide the message of American free enterprise, and disseminating knowledge in the form of dictionaries, Bibles, and encyclopedias;  but before you could close the deal, you had to ask the headman of the particular village you were dealing with, “Um, who controls your hamlet?”  And if he replied:  “The Nazis”, or “The Illuminati” or “Giant Reptiles from Mars”, you were good to go.  But if he replied “The Taliban”, then no dice.

Now, at that time, there were many regimes on the globe, more evil than the Taliban -- the Taliban being, after all, sincere if extreme representatives of one of the major Abrahamic religions, and who  if nothing else  did keep the heroin production down -- yet these were singled out.  Why? 

I’ll hazard a guess -- subject to correction, but it is seldom you will see anyone comment upon this strange embargo, let alone explain it --  :  the Taliban had ticked off American feminists.    The issue was obscure enough that the Bryn Mawr lobby could have its way, unopposed and almost unnoticed.

That would all be but a footnote to farce, but for the circumstance that Usama bin Ladin subsequently pitched his tent on Afghan soil.   His band of carpet-baggers had never been sponsored by the Taliban, with whom they lived in uneasy coexistence (al-Qaeda tends to screw up any nation it enters), yet, when we (justly, and inevitably) retaliated for 9/11, instead of zooming in on al-Qaeda, the Bush administration allowed them to escape, and instead ousted the Taliban, thus eventually restoring Afghanistan to its coveted place as #1 supplier of opium to Europe:  as though Hillary, rather than Condaleeza (though perhaps her too) had been the éminence grise (or: éminence rose) behind this folly of a policy.

~

What prompted these musings and effusions  was actually this morning’s New Yorker, in their wonderful “Cartoon Caption Contest” section at the very end of the magazine (a tasty dessert, saving the best till last).   The cartoon, offered captionless in an earlier issue, was of Noah and his wife on the Ark -- which was filled to capacity with nothing but giraffes.  Clearly the best in the roster of proposed captions was one from  Ms. Mary Newell, of Gainesville, Florida:

“Mistakes were made.”

This naturally put me in mind of the sorry legacy of the Dubya administration.   But what really caught my eye  was a startling geographical restriction on entering or even voting in the contest:

“Any resident of the United States, Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland…”

So, Quebec is to Canada what the Taliban-controlled regions were to Afghanistan.

But look more closely at this list.  Roughly, it corresponds to the Anglosphere.   But so, roughly -- and very politically -- does the territory known to the IC as “Five Eyes” (or at least, so I was told by a friend who heard it from a guy who thinks he maybe saw it on the Internet).   But with this difference:  the addition of the Republic of Ireland, and the exclusion of New Zealand.  …

Excluding Ireland from your intel distro  sort of makes sense -- the place is overrun by excitable unreliable Irishmen.  But why play favorites in a frigging Cartoon Caption Contest?  There aren’t even any cash prizes, just boasting rights.    Moreover -- Would it really be so terrible if some Dane or Dutchman were to enter the contest?  Most of them speak better English than we do; but if, perchance, their entry were linguistically limping, it simply wouldn’t win:  no harm done.

Try as I might, I can conceive of no picturesquely sinister reason for The New Yorker’s oddly gerrymandered geographical limitations.    So the best I can do  -- if it’s dark conspiracy you desire, wheels within (wheels within) wheels --- is to point you to a vast tentacular plot, so clandestine that it has not a name, nor even a covername, but only an alias for a nickname for a nom de guerre of a coverterm:

      The Riemann Conspiracy

Enter those who dare …

[Bonus tidbit]  A near-synonym of “no-go zone”, current in the IC, is:  denied territory.   Impress your friends!