Walk On By

"It has been said that anyone who gives people the illusion that they are thinking will be loved by them, whereas anyone who actually prompts them to think will be hated."

― Glenn Tinder, "Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions"

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Dear Kate,

If I am to be handcuffed and taken away from my home today, I won't depend on my kids to know what's happening, let alone to fight for my freedom.

No, I am not making a confession here.  I have done my share of stupid things in life, but not enough to have tax money wasted on me this way.  Not yet.

There is always the possibility.  There should always be.

The alternative is to live a muted life, playing along.  To live an "ordinary life" and pretend our purchasing decisions are the most important ones for us to stay our course, and on an even keel, and so it is for everyone else, for our society to flourish.  A good summer so far, we say. "Back to normal," soon enough we hope.

One day, a day that is not necessary but will necessarily happen as how the human story goes, the lure of an authoritarian state will become too seductive even to these friendliest neighbors to your north, and these letters I've been writing will be dug up like buried treasures to tyrants, not because my writing is powerful enough to make any difference, but because it's accessible, using it a most convenient way to get rid of a mild nuisance--a self-incriminating one, with his own words.

"Are you the king of the Jews?" Pilate asked Jesus.   Not because he was interested in the answer.  It's just the easiest way for Pilate to close the book, shut a face (God's?), and move on with his "ordinary life."  A Roman governor he might have been, but his wife, like any, had nightmares too, for him to attend to.  Let's keep life simple and judge matters as we know how matters should be judged.

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I still have the first edition of Neil Postman's "How to Watch TV News," one of the first books I bought when arrived in Canada, back then when every teenage penny earned was every tiny penny counted, and being an ESL it wasn't exactly an easy read to me.  But then I had just finished Postman's most well-known work "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" and couldn't stop there.

Both books are now outdated, of course, as they should be, speaking about changing technology, much more rapidly as it has ever been.  But what remains true is what has been prophetic in the words' utterance.

News, the best entertainment, keeps us engaged to the bigger world, so that we can stay small in our own.  It's probably necessary, for how can we properly respond to everything taken in?

"Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge."  (I think Jung said that.  I am sure someone else said it to him first.)  And to be entertained by news is to have our thinking done for us already.  All that it asks of us is to judge likewise, according to truths that should be thought through by humanity by now, assumptions that we should be enlightened enough to know not to question any more.

On Canada Day I was in downtown Vancouver, and saw people gathering in front of the Art Gallery, all dressed in orange, many with banners and placards.  There were angry talks, all angry for the time I was there, all sounded apocalyptic, not unlike those at other street corners for different purposes and on other occasions, ready to take history to its proper end.

At a very busy street corner sat a few indigenous men and women, strange enough themselves not in orange, stranger still were calm and whispering to each other, almost silent--considering the commotion around them, carried out purportedly on their behalf, for their good, with burning anger that should be first theirs.  I saw one protestor after another, many of them a solitary soul with singular indignation in their eyes, walked past the group, around them, circumvented the people they proposed to support, to defend, even to love.  It reminded me of a certain very famous parable of Jesus'.

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To think is to imagine, to gather information only the first step in our moral imagining.

If you want to know what a person is going to do with the "information" he has gathered, ask him about the last novel he has read, the latest narrative entertainment he has "consumed," the last time he has let the story of people at a street corner interrupt his "ordinary life," busy on his way to freedom and prosperity, to set the world right and the score straight.

A person who has no ear for a long story well told is out to betray everything she alleges to be true, even that about herself.  And when she speaks about politics she is a demagogue, not always angry, sometimes with the greatest Canadian smile, but would always obscure and manipulate to make herself look good.

A tyrant is an emperor in his old clothes, made new again by how we want to be perceived in the reign of his nakedness.  Canada is not there yet.  I am not smart enough to know if I will live to see that day.  But that day will come, the day when your friends would gather around a warming fire, in a cold winter night of your trial, and claim to not know what you've been up to or what the hell you are talking about now.

Yours, Alex