Monthly Archives: August 2017

Beware the Witch Hunter

1 Reply

“I am against justice … whenever it is carried out by a mob.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Most of us have seen this happen.   The old smear train tears through social media with nary a warning. Its rallying cries are generally unoriginal.  It is a simple recipe of character assassination, hearsay, bigotry, exaggeration, dehumanization, pettiness, hyperbole, misrepresentation and prejudice.  It’s seldom surprising, but always devastating for the target and anyone else in its wake.

 

Social media is prime terrain for these kinds of reckless ventures.  Its algorithms are honed to deliver pleasure inducing neurochemicals like dopamine and adrenaline as a reward for manufactured scandal. The fact that most of the witch hunters often do not even know the targeted individual or members of a maligned group lends it to enjoying an even greater success.  After all, anonymous acts of viciousness are far more easier to carry out and get away with.

 

At their core all witch hunts are emblematic of a deep sense of self loathing.  They are a vestige of puritanical thinking and the byproduct of jealousy and dissatisfaction with ones own life.  This is why they appeal to the sensibilities of the mob.  Carrying torches, real and figurative, that alight some pseudo-sense of self righteousness is a temporary balm for the tortured soul.  For a brief moment, they feel as if they are not alone.  They serve the purpose of momentarily obscuring the disappointments, banality and everyday terrors of life via the frenzied lynching of the other.

To the witch hunter the perceived imperfections of human beings are most often held in contempt. Difference is considered perverse or dangerous. This is reflected in fascist art which so often uses lynch mobs to further its ideology.  While it demonizes its opponents it blots out those characteristics it considers defects in humanity at large.  It uses human weakness and fragility as a bludgeon on anyone it considers strange or deviant.  It inflates a pseudo sense of supremacy while it unites people in cause against some contrived external injustice or existential threat.

 

But buyer of such noxious crusades beware!

 

Witch hunts can entice the unsuspecting by their facade of seeking justice, but they are notoriously mercurial in nature, and frighteningly subject to the ever changing winds of collective paranoia and animus.  Scapegoating becomes an end in and of itself.  And those winds have a tendency to blow toward many torch bearers in an instant, scorching them with the same priggish flames they once thought of as trusted companions.

 

Kenn Orphan 2017

Jellyfish Chips and Making Biosphere Collapse Trendy

1 Reply

In a recent puff piece by National Public Radio (USA), Danish journalist Sidsel Overgaard gushed over an upcoming trend for exuberant foodies: “jellyfish chips.”  Overgaard extolled them as an answer to falling fish stocks and the concomitant explosion of jellyfish blooms around the planet thanks to global warming.  Puerile?  Perhaps.  But the normalization of climate change and our existential crisis has become all too common in recent years.  And the trend to make it profitable is even more disturbing.

It may be a symptom of oversimplification and the pervasive nonsense of an aggressive, irrational and willfully blind optimism; or a byproduct of the corporate mindset and the repressed angst that accompanies late stage capitalism. But the curse of positive thinking has aided in creating huge blind spots that allow us to ignore the impending collapse of the biosphere that sustains us all.  It is not to say that we should all be pessimists of course. Far from it. But ignoring reality or greenwashing it with trendy alternatives will not make the looming catastrophe vanish either.

 

The prevailing and dominant economic model based upon industrial scale consumption and neoliberal (free market) capitalism has ushered in an age where when one species is decimated another, “previously less desirable,” one is turned to for unbridled exploitation. Haddock, cod and tuna were ruthlessly harvested until their numbers crashed catastrophically, so fish like farmed tilapia were “up marketed” to replace them. And this is not only true of fish populations.  Forests and farms have also suffered from insatiable plunder of more profitable timber or the “monoculturing” of crops.

Industrial scale technology fed the all consuming, insatiable monster of global capitalism.  Today all life is being rapidly commodified for fast profit and easy disposal.  But this scale of industry demands the burning of the earth’s deadly, primordial blood and a livable climate can only withstand so much.  Global biodiversity is now in a staggering state of free fall, out doing the speed of the previous five mass extinction events in the earth’s geologic history.  Climate change is wreaking havoc on the world’s oceans.  Acidification, coral bleaching, plastic pollution, dead zones, toxic and radioactive chemicals are all contributing to the mass extinction of scores of fish species and other marine life.  It is a human driven carnage that is off the scale.

 

But don’t worry. According to some enthusiastic foodies we’ll have tons of jellyfish chips to feast on in hip bistros when every other lifeform in the sea is gone forever.

Kenn Orphan  2017

Emblems of Supremacy

2 Replies

The controversy over Confederate war memorials and statues that has ignited protests and a resurgence of violent white nationalism cannot be understood outside of the historical context in which these and other monuments in the United States were erected. Many white Americans are unaware that these were the consequence of coordinated efforts to enshrine white supremacy. They do not exist to preserve history or heritage, but to ensconce the notion of white dominance over previously enslaved or ethnically cleansed groups of people. One way this was achieved was in placing them in gentrified neighbourhoods which displaced local black communities or desecrating the sacred places of native peoples forced off their ancestral lands.

Surges in their construction were seen in the 1910s through 1930s following Reconstruction and a rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and in the 1950s and 60s as a racist answer to the Civil Rights Era. Concurrent with the dedication of many Confederate war memorials were the horrors of lynching and Jim Crow. And there was a coordinated effort to whitewash history in these eras as well. Examples of this include the notoriously racist film “Birth of a Nation” and the puff piece “Gone with the Wind” which sought to cast the Antebellum south in a noble light.

In truth, most statues and monuments in the United States are emblems of white supremacy. Even the much beloved Mount Rushmore is little more than a testament to ethnic cleansing. On it the images of four US presidents were carved into a sacred mountain for the Lakota by Gutzon Borglum, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, from 1927 to 1941. The choice of presidents was no accidental message either. As Ron Way, a former official with the Department of the Interior and National Park Service, put it:

 

“George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln famously emancipated slaves, but he supported eradicating Indian tribes from western lands and approved America’s largest-ever mass execution, the hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato for their alleged crimes in the 1862 war along the Minnesota River. Teddy Roosevelt, in his “The Winning of the West,” wrote: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are … .””

 

Many of the monuments we see festooning city parks, on university lawns or looming over government buildings were designed to obscure the people’s record, not enhance our understanding of history. When the Spanish built cathedrals over razed Aztec, Mayan or Inca temples and replaced imagery of native history with statues of Catholic saints and European “explorers” they were sending a clear message of dominance and demoralization to the indigenous population. They understood the ruthless power of erasing a people’s history. Similar actions have been taken all around the world where one group dominates another.

And the same can be said of the many statues that elevate racists, slave owners and military generals to a place of honour dotting the American landscape. They are not remembrances of fallen soldiers, most of whom did not own slaves and were poor, but tributes to the powerful who launched wars and military campaigns of conquest to maintain their ill gotten privilege from coerced labour. They are not a celebration of ethnic heritage, but painful symbols and daily reminders of the brutal oppression people of colour have endured and continue to face under a tenacious, violent and persistent societal racism.

 

Removing statues from parks or university plazas is not burying history, not by a long shot.  It is in fact correcting an egregious and gross misrepresentation of it. The best these emblems of supremacy deserve is placement in museums of tolerance or history where everyone can discuss and critique their impact on society today. As for Mount Rushmore, returning the entire mountain to its rightful owners and letting them decide can be the only just solution.

Kenn Orphan 2017

The Only Answer to Fascism

1 Reply

What happened in Charlottesville this past weekend was more about racist fascism than an alienated white “under class.”  To say such is a smack in the face to the millions of working class whites who struggle side by side with their black and brown counterparts everyday.  They raise each other’s children, share each other’s health costs, weep at each other’s weddings and funerals, all in the fight to survive in capitalism’s cruel game of manufactured competition.

Many of the racists who came to Charlottesville drove in on SUVs from other states wearing Louis Vuitton sunglasses.  They are weak kneed reactionaries emboldened by tiki torches and idiotic speeches by rockstar bigots like Milo Yiannopolis, afraid of losing the ill gotten privilege they enjoy thanks to their skin hue, sexual orientation, gender and religion.  It is true many are saying class warfare had something to do with this and they would be right; but equating the millions of the working class with this kind of raw racism and social hatred is inaccurate and beyond insulting.  And they deserve better than that.
As for the fascism that was on display in that small, college town in Virginia there can be only one answer.  There is no compromise to be made with fascism.  No common ground can be found.  No bridge built.  No excuse made.  For fascism is at its core an ideology of death.  And if it is allowed to flourish, if it is permitted to prevail, it will most assuredly spell out a chapter of misery that will end with our epitaph.  The only answer is a resounding NO!

Kenn Orphan  2017

Dedicated to the courage and memory of Heather Heyer who paid the ultimate price for standing up against racism, social hatred and fascism.  May she rest in peace.

The Day Before Parting

2 Replies

“The Day before Parting” 1862, Jozef Israëls (Dutch, 1824–1911). Oil on Canvas.
Jozef Israëls was a Jewish Dutch artist who became one of the most celebrated artists of the latter half of the 19th century. His art was admired much by Vincent Van Gogh who said of him “in Jozef Israels, the precious pearl, the human soul, is even more in evidence and better expressed, in a noble, worthier, and if you will allow me, more evangelical tone.”

Israëls work was mostly landscapes, but he had a tremendous ability for capturing the most fragile and beautiful features of human suffering and had a particular affinity for the working poor. This painting poignantly shows the grieving widow of a fisherman the day before her husband’s funeral.

Grief is a universal response to the loss of a beloved. But in our times it has become poorly articulated thanks to the alienating culture of consumerism and mass media.  Regardless of this, artists from all generations are drawn to its depicting its expression and honouring the role it has in deepening our experience of love and grace, and its unmatched transformative power.

Kenn Orphan  2017

Dedicated to the memory of my aunt, Elizabeth “Betty” Orphan (4th July, 1927-2nd August, 2017).  You were a star to me, once on earth, now in the sky.  I will always remember the spark you had for living, your “New York” wit and humour, and your embrace of adventure.  You will be deeply missed and forever loved.