The All-too-convenient Indian

There has been much discussion of the Thomas King affair in my circles. I don't think it has gotten much coverage outside Canada and, even in Canada, only a few people seem to care that Thomas King turns out not to be Cherokee after decades of claiming otherwise. 

 

I don't know that King himself requires much more comment and, even if he does, I'm far from the best person to do so. But it seems to me that a lot of people starting with me should be taking a good look in the mirror. The thing that spurred me to this are the following comments:

'Hayden King, who is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing in Huronia, Ont., and is not related to the author, says the fact that Thomas King was one of the first Indigenous writers to really “break through” in Canada should compel some introspection from Canadian publishers and universities.

'“The foundational writers on Indigenous issues in Canada, some of the first were actually not Indigenous people,” he said. 

'“And I think that that provokes questions of the institutions that curate the public discussion on Indigenous issues, and which authors get platformed and which don't.”'

I'm a tiny fish who never had the power to platform or deplatform anyone. That said, I embraced Thomas King enthusiastically when he came along. I read and enjoyed Green Grass, Running Water and I tried to never miss an episode of the The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour. I was more than willing to accept the vision of Indigenous life and culture that Thomas King was peddling.

 

The thing is, I should have know better. I grew up knowing Mi'kmaq people. There was a significant contingent of Mi'kmaq boys and girls in my classes at Saint Dunstan's School. They were by far the largest visible minority at the school, with anywhere from six to ten kids per class in a school where all the classes had fewer than thirty students. I went to class with them, ate lunch with them, played hockey and baseball with them. 

 

I didn't think about it one way or another because it was the only world I knew so it just seemed normal. I noticed that Mi'kmaq students, like Acadian students, had a tremendous resistance to schooling. Looking back, I can see both groups had very good reasons to distrust authorities. Authorities treated them horribly. I can also say that while I understand, I wish both groups hadn't had that resistance. I say this because I think they would have been better off. That said, people used to say the same of my Québécois ancestors in the first half of the twentieth century. It's not surprising that people tend to ignore advice coming from people who treated them like shit in the past.

 

The Mi'kmaq boys I played with all had two first names; that is to say both their first and surname were what a typical English speaker would consider a first name. For example, one of my classmates was named "Peter Paul". Even at the time, the suspicion that wasn't his real name occurred to me but I never asked and he never said.

 

He and I talked a lot because we both loved fishing. We never managed to go together because we both came to school by bus from opposite directions and it was too long a bike ride to manage it. He told me he could catch brook trout with is bare hands. Could he? I doubt it but I knew it was possible because I had an uncle who could do it and I suspect he did too.

 

"Peter" also told me he was only staying in school until his sixteenth birthday, at which point he would be legally entitled to drop out and he planned to do that the second it was possible. If you'd asked me, I would have claimed to not like school and lived for vacation but the truth was I couldn't imagine my life without school. Looking back I have nothing but fondness for Saint Dunstan's (which, alas, has been converted to condos for many years now).

 

My family moved away after Grade 6 so I have no idea what happened to him.

 

So why did the highly romanticized stories that Thomas King pushed have such resonance with me? Well, I think to ask that question is to answer it. "Peter Paul" lived a life that was utterly foreign to mine and he liked it that way. Thomas King craved the acceptance and admiration of people like me and used his claimed Cherokee status to achieve it and we gave it to him.

 

And, let's not kid ourselves, that romantic vision was morally and politically validating for us in ways that the real life of Indigenous people in Canada is not. We so this over and over again. We take an interest in marginalized groups when it suits us and then drop them when it doesn't. Elijah Harper was a hero when people needed him to stop the Meech Lake Accord and then utterly forgotten five seconds later. All indications are he had an unhappy life but no one cared about the actual man; they cared about the seemingly heroic figure holding an Eagle feather onto whom they could project their romantic vision.

 

A lot has changed since then. My experience working in Ottawa has made me more cynical about authorities and whatever vestiges of respect I might have had for them vanished with the Covid shenanigans. I don't listen to the CBC anymore and when I visit their website it's only to see what they are saying. I can't trust the CBC as a source of news anymore—they've lied to me far too often. As a consequence, I have no idea who the likely replacement for Thomas King as official peddler of Indian lore is and I have no inclination to find out.

Two blunt moral truths

 The first is that there is no more dangerous and self-deceiving move in moral thinking than to try and act according to basic decency and common sense. As Wittgenstein might say, it's such a simple move that the conjuring trick is made before we know it. It seems harmless but it blocks all possibility for moral discussion before we even get started. If we tell ourselves we act according to basic decency and common sense, then what does that necessarily imply about anyone who disagrees with us?

The second is that seeking the approval of others is unavoidable. We all nurse a fantasy that we can transcend this by basing our moral decisions on abstract moral principles. The problem with that is that the giving of moral reasons is not a private activity. I mean, you could, in theory, sit down and quietly work out what you are going to do in terms of moral reasons but you don't. Even if you were to do so, it would be on the assumption that someone else will learn of this, that you will be giving reasons to someone later.

Don't try and act as if you don't care about others' approval. Try to act so as to seek the approval of someone whose approval is worth seeking. God is an option. 

"... that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling"

 Marcel Proust died 103 years ago today. 

Famous Blue Raincoat — the album

 "Smoky sax on the title track? It's a meditation on betrayal and revenge, not a lounge song."

That put down is quoted on the Wikipedia page for Jennifer Warnes album Famous Blue Raincoat.

Sneering at that album has been a thing since the day it came out. But I love it.

Let's start with put down quoted above. It's from Peter Gerstenzanga writing for The Village Voice. I've never heard of him and would never have heard of him were it not for Wikipedia. I'm not likely to bother learning any more about him. He plainly doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Betrayal and revenge are classic lounge music themes. (They are also classic country music themes, classical music themes, rock and roll themes ... .)

His criticism would be a stupid even if betrayal and revenge were what the title song was about. But that's a stretch because it's a song in which Leonard Cohen addresses, wait for it, Leonard Cohen. The guy who "planned to go clear", that is, embrace Scientology, was Leonard Cohen. The guy who owned the famous blue raincoat was Leonard Cohen. The guy who went to the station hoping to meet Lilli Marlene was Leonard Cohen.

Who, then, is the guy "who treated my woman" to a flake of his life and left her apparently dislodged, nobody's wife? The temptation is to read this, as Gerstenzanga did, to read this as sexual betrayal. But how to do that, given that all the references up until now have been to Leonard himself? Why would Cohen attribute things from his own life to the man who supposedly betrayed him by having sex with Jane, whoever she is? 

One possibility is that Cohen is the one who seduced Jane when she was in a relationship with another man and here he is putting himself in that man's shoes and imagining how this man might forgive him. And, oh yeah, the song ends with what is at least an attempt at forgiveness, not revenge. I find that reading awkward and presumptuous on Cohen's part but go ahead if you want. Another reading is that Cohen was in love with Jane and treated her in ways that destroyed that relationship so the song can be read as Cohen betraying Cohen. 

Leonard Cohen's big themes are love, sex, betrayal and redemption. And they are all in this song and it works really well with Warnes' loungey interpretation. It's only a problem if, and I suspect this is Gerstenzanga's problem, you're only willing to allow the original any validity. And I can respect that to a point. He has a perfect right to say, "I only like Leonard Cohen's songs in their original versions". But when he says that with his critic hat on, he needs to back it up with good reasons and Gerstenzanga doesn't. 

Gerstenzanga's objections to Warnes' version of "First We Take Manhattan" are also flawed. He first says that he thinks Cohen's voice is more suited to Cohen's songs. Which is another version of the "I prefer" line. But then Gerstenzanga slips up in a way that is very revealing:

"Also, his original arrangements—from solo-guitar bare to brass-band ironic—are more fitting than the slick stuff here. Stevie Ray Vaughan playing processed blues licks on "First We Take Manhattan"? Inappropriate"

Here's the thing, Warnes's version of "First We Take Manhattan" is the original arrangement! And Cohen took part in the recording. 

I'd add that the slicker version works in a different way than Cohen's later, more austere version. And I prefer this way, although you don't have to. The challenge this song presents for me is that it, on the most obvious reading, it's about the mind of a terrorist and I don't think Leonard Cohen is a terribly credible commentator on this or any political subject. In this slicker version, the song has Warnes assuming the role of a deluded, self-aggrandizing person who projects their own moods onto the whole world, not a terrorist, but someone who sits in their parent's basement imagining they might be one.

Warnes achieves this by emphasizing the bridge. She sings most of the song in speech-like diction. Then she just soars on the lines:

"I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes ..." 

 This has the effect of making the song into a dialogue with a single (probably imagined) interlocutor. This interlocutor is the lover that the protagonist has never had. In Cohen's version, those lines are given to the background singers. (Although it is possibly only one singer, a multi-tracked Anjani Thomas made to sound like a chorus). Warnes also only sings the bridge once, which further emphasizes it. Either way, Cohen's version is cold and inhuman, intentionally so. Warnes's version is a damaged human-but-still-very-human protagonist. Both are valid. I think Cohen's lyrics overall work better if you associate them with Warnes' protagonist. 

Warnes' version of "Ain't No Cure for Love",  also the original arrangement and written at Warnes' prompting, is actually quite similar to Cohen's in sentiment. Both versions are full of longing for someone who doesn't long back. The difference is in the singers and here we have to confront a blunt fact: Warnes is just  better singer than Cohen. Warnes sings better than Cohen the way Shohei Ohtani plays baseball better than I do. She has more resources, more power, more range and more control. Cohen's version is compelling and beautiful and, as he often managed, does incredible things with a limited instrument. That said, Warnes is really, really good.

I could go on and on but get a really good pair of headphones and just listen to her album. The good headphones are important: Warnes' album is amazingly well-recorded. This is a true audiophile record, which is not something you could honestly say of any of Cohen's albums. You want to savour every nuance. And there are fascinating interpretative touches all over it that demand close listening. For example, the opening of "Coming Back to You" features a quote from the Christmas Carol "Joy to the World". It's the line "let earth receive her King". 

 This is not just an album of Cohen songs, it's a deep interpretation by an amazing musician who sang with Cohen for years, that Cohen participated in as well as many other incredible musicians that is incredibly well-recorded. You don't have to like it but, before you reject it, give it and the people involved the respect they deserve.

Leonard Cohen

 Tomorrow, November 7 is the anniversary of Leonard Cohen's death. 

I can't think of any reason why anyone else but me should care but Leonard and I go way back. We never met. I wasn't even much of a fan before 1984. There was one song and it's a pretty clichéd song to pick.

 I was eight years old the year "Suzanne" came out. I doubt I even noticed it that year. I should be ashamed to admit this (I'm not ashamed) the first version I ever heard may have been Neil Diamond's, which came out the year I was twelve. Then again, it's one of those songs that feels like it's always been there.

I never owned a recording of the song until I was in my twenties. You used to be able to count on the radio playing certain older songs every once in a while. Suzanne was one of them and it would come on and I'd turn it up.

I remained a Catholic because of these verses:

And Jesus was a sailor 

When he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching

From his lonely wooden tower.

 

And when he knew for certain 

Only drowning men could see Him

He said, "All men will be sailors then

Until the sea shall free them."

 

But he himself was broken

Long before the sky would open

Forsaken, almost human

He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.

 That may not make sense to anyone but me. It's our fallen condition. Jesus came to save sinners. 

Anyway,

There was a time I went to Montreal because of an interview he gave in which he described the writing of that song. He said it was a simple description of what you see if you to the sailor's chapel in Montreal. The sailor's chapel is Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours.  I went. Leonard didn't let me down. It is a simple description of what you see. 

The most troublesome aspect of "empathy" for me

 Sometimes I meet "foodies" for whom the experience of eating good food is really narcissism. They talk, endlessly, about themselves and their experiences. The point is not the food but to demonstrate how devoted they are to this pursuit and how good they are at discerning minor differences in taste between, for example, one wine and another.

Supertasters are real. I have no doubt that, for example, James Hoffman really can taste the difference between coffee made in the sometimes incredibly labour-intensive ways he advocates and less serious cups. I have even learned some lessons from him that have enabled me to make the coffee I make at home better. But here is what I really like about Hoffman: he readily acknowledges that not everyone is going to want to go all the way with him. I'm not a supertaster like Hoffman so there is a point where I get off the trolley and say, "This good enough for me," and that is just fine with him. And he doesn't act like he is a morally superior being because he's a supertaster.

Shifting metaphors a bit, I did once have to sit through a public discussion that was dominated by a woman who is a mediocre musician who insisted on telling a famous conductor that she could hear tuning inaccuracies in the chamber orchestra he had just conducted. She didn't think this was a problem for others and said she was glad others were able to enjoy but she wanted everyone to know that she had philosophically endured the concert that her superior sensibility had made it impossible for her to enjoy. The famous conductor smiled and nodded along and then said sympathetic things because the woman was the head of a foundation, endowed with money her father had made, that funded the music festival where all this took place. She was being abusive.

I think a lot of "empathy" talk works like that. I think some people who are just emotionally unstable and some others who just seek power abuse the notion to make themselves the centre of attention. People are allowed to obsess over bullshit. Fantasy fiction is just fine. But if someone comes into the room and insists that the rest of us have to fund fantasy fiction or that her deep love and knowledge of fantasy fiction entitles her to lecture the rest of us on politics and morality there is a point where the appropriate response is to say STFU. A lot of "empathy", frankly, deserves the same response. They're just being abusive.

Empathy, feeling good about yourself and virtue ethics

 The church I go to has a serious problem with crime and vandalism. The source of this crime is people who beg for money outside the church. For forty years now, successive rectors have pleaded with parishioners to not give money to the panhandlers outside the church. For forty years now, parishioners have not only ignored these pleas, they've rained criticism on the clergy for making them.

 The panhandlers fall into two classes. There are people on social assistance, mostly the Ontario Disability Support Program. They use the money they collect to pay for vacations and other things that there disability payments do not cover. These people are largely harmless. They are often victims of violence at the hands of the second class of panhandlers: people who have substance abuse issues who use the money to pay for drugs. These people are sometimes harmless and sometimes violent. They are sometimes violent for practical reasons, that is to scare off other panhandlers. Other times they are violent for no obvious reason at all. Even if harmless to others, they are harming themselves. More importantly, giving them money supports crime.

Why do people continue to give money? It's not hard to figure out that none of the money collected by panhandlers is used to pay for food. The people who continue to give largely know this but manage to ignore this. They give because it gives them a good feeling to talk to these people and then to give them money.

 I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Meaning, I don't think there is anything wrong with doing good things in order to feel better about yourself. For me the issue is that I don't think people should feel  good about themselves for giving money to panhandlers. In doing so, they are actively making life worse for others. It's not a good thing to do.

I connect this to virtue ethics because too much of modern ethics is driven by duty. The technical term for this is deontology. It is the belief that you should do things based on duty and rules rather than consequences. Fans of this approach will sometimes say that a moral act is one that is done for moral reasons, meaning not for practical reasons. More bluntly, they will sometimes say that we should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

Giving money to people on the street is a quiet rebellion against this. You can pretend you're following some moral teaching, which is why people beg outside churches. It's relatively easy to make Jesus's teaching sound like it validates this choice. The truth is, though, that there are many charities that it would make much more sense to give money to if you actually wanted to help. And I know for a fact that very few parishioners avail themselves of those opportunities. What giving to an actual human being does that giving to a charity does not do, is to give you instant feedback. And that's what people want. The only feedback doing something out of duty gives, is the relief of not being thought a bad person. It's like remembering to floss. Giving money on the street, gives a person positive feedback and nothing else in the current moral sphere does that.

 Problem is, that's not empathy. We call it empathy but anyone who thought the issue through would realize they aren't actually helping anyone.  

The solution, I think, is to adopt a virtue ethics viewpoint. Why do good things? Answer: because it will make me a better person. The problem with people who give money to street people isn't that they're selfish; it's that they're not nearly selfish enough. If they thought more of themselves, they'd be more helpful to others.