The Long Shadows of 2019
That will mean people will become meaner: Your relationships will probably be at breaking-point for some of you. Decades-long marriages that have produced the requisite amount of children - but a decreasing amount of happiness with each arrival - may discover that 2019 is the final chink in the already battle-worn conjugal armour.
But what do we do when faced with losses in love and livery? We look to blame someone else. It cannot possibly be because people change, or circumstances change, and that upheaval and chaos are the norm, and our little linear lines of clueless control are just sticks of firewood to the wildfires of the world. No. Although shock can sometimes be a great sound effect to the cracking of our assumptions, our ego is stubborn. If your marriage broke up, it must be because of a family member, not you. If you're always out of pocket, you must be jinxed.
In painful situations, fear will make us shift blame to things not even there. We will pin our rage on shadows, and rail at the dying of the light - even though we are the ones that snuffed out the brightness in our lives. Anger and hatred will bubble up in the cauldron of fear we stir. Fear's best friend is hate. And both love to play hide and seek in the darkness of the human heart.
On point then is my favourite film of 2018, Roma, a Spanish-language black-and-white Netflix film, which explains well that you can never meet hatred half way. You either resist it or give in to it. We often have little choice in life but the choice to resist or yield to fear, to hatred and to the white man's version of who we are.
The irony is that otherness has always been how we define ourselves - we find out what we are like from what is unlike us, and it is the most fertile ground for connection. Looking for similarities expands understanding of ourselves and each other. "The world's otherness is antidote to confusion," Mary Oliver wrote in her moving account of what saved her life. "Standing within this otherness... can re-dignify the worst-stung heart".
Diversity gives the brain a powerful workout. And, just like a physical workout, it can be incredibly good for us. Yet, instinctively we seem to turn away from difference at the first painful pang. Take Viktor Orban, who presents himself as the defender of Hungary and Europe against Muslim migrants. He is racist, authoritarian and a frightened little man. There is a saying that often invades my mind when I see frightened boys who have failed to grow up into men like Trump and Oban, and it is this: Beware small men who cast long shadows.
The actual quote is said to be, "When small men begin to cast long shadows, it means the sun is about to set". Small not in stature, but in character. And when small minded men exercise a dangerous level of control over our lives and our world, then it's a warning sign the sun is setting on our future. Their perpetual darkness of the mind slowly turns off the light in the world to replace it with fire: Oban's fear of rising immigration has spread across to right-wing groups to spark off on Belgian streets. The stench of charred shop fronts is the stench of fear and loathing. That stench marks the edge of the precipice where you nosedive into madness.
But you cannot argue or persuade people riddled with fear off the edge of their insanity: Like hatred, there is no half way. If white people in Europe want to make a "white only" continent (as if it ever were possible), then only when it is their turn to be on the other side of the wall, will they understand how hopeless it is to divide the world on lines of race. History tell us that the far-right, too, will one day find themselves on the wrong side of the wall. Walls have a habit of not only keeping others out, but keeping you locked in.
Ironic, too, then to be aware that it is their whitewashed and fearful version of the world slapped across our eyes that has blinded us to embrace others different than ourselves. Lives of colour - still owned by the shackles placed by slaveowners centuries before - have had no place or part in human history and art: They have been trying to fit in, when instead, they should have been trying to break out. One of my current favourite authors scored big with me when she said recently:
Overrated books are often written in English and repeatedly celebrated in anglophone media. It’s the result of an imperial past and the fact that English is the current lingua franca. Lists of so-called “most important books in the last 100 years” always comprise mainly books written in English. This is a very unhealthy and lazy way to view our literary history: it treats Arabic, Asian and African literature as secondary. Charles Dickens is my favourite case of an overrated writer. Almost all of his books are sentimental, clumsy and lack poetry."
- London-based Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo
And I was huge a fan of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, which is 175 years old this year - the most perennially popular festive tale of all. But I've realised that it's not my childhood reading - which defined my edges - that means more to me as I grow, it's the new discoveries that shift my edges that gain importance as I mature. I want to immerse myself in literature and film that takes me on journeys and crosses over boundaries I didn't even realise existed.
To me, art is proof positive walls are meant to be climbed over: I want to read and watch lives that are not about me. In recent years I have focused on addressing the fact I am reading or watching for my demographic - a straight male outlook locked in a white culture not of my choice - to purposely look at art that is filled with different voices, who don't sound, or think or act like me, or the white culture I have been subjected to and is an anathema to humanity: The homogeny the far-right craves for kills intelligence, dampens feeling and blinds foresight. It renders you a blind, dumb animal locked in fear from the approaching headlights in the night.
Let the far-right crash. I'll take a swerve: Thankfully, I'm getting the opportunity to read and see other people's lives on the page and on the screen, and I'm realising that my tastes were dictated by a white culture that never represented me, nor really spoke to me. My demographic didn't exist, or if it did, it was a lie. I wouldn't be alive in Dickens' Christmas tale, and besides it was meant to be a stocking filler; it IS sentimental trash literature that still defines how Christmas is celebrated - a holiday stolen from Yule celebrations to crush paganism and replace it with Christianity.
I've also realised that just by celebrating Christmas, I am treating the religion it has quashed during this solstice as secondary. Yet, Christians have the affrontery to suggest they should be offended for the festive season being inclusive enough to be called a holiday (!) when it is pagans who should be offended that their original holiday was taken over by the myths of Christianity. This is the shit we're having to deal with on the verge of a new decade.
This isn't "white-man-hate-mode" - no one could do hate as well as the white man. Moreover, the state of the poor in a Dickensian Christmas is slapstick compared to the real poverty of knowing that your value is not merely monetary, but dependent on the colour of your skin. Be black and act as abhorrent as a white person, and suddenly mercy does not "drop as rain from the heavens" (to steal from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice). Your actions represent your race as a whole, and you are condemned, not for your actions alone, but another person's bias. And not just any person, but the one who wrote the rule book.
In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock was right to query the white man's justice, when he asked why he had to accept their shit, but not throw it back. Christians had been taking a pound of flesh off Jews for centuries, why should one Jew not take his due now? Show mercy to the merciful, and return abuse for abuse: that's not just Old Testament, that is today's testament of America.
Trump does not turn the other cheek, and he would not be where he is were it not for his wealth. Money is one of the few ways to do or say anything with impact in America: A Border-Wall GoFundMe campaign from an amputee Iraqi war veteran says terrible things about America - and the $12m it has already collected. As long as the economy stands, so will Trump, because America protects the wealthy - as long as they're white.
Sacha Baron Cohen revealed this year that he discovered what he believed could be a paedophile ring while filming Who Is America? in Las Vegas, but when Cohen and his team of producers immediately handed their footage over to the FBI, Cohen says they "decided not to pursue it". Had any of the players been people of colour, you know that would have played out differently. So, why should I celebrate something that tells me, somehow, when the perpetrator is male, white and Christian, persecution, perversion and even paedophilia can be forgiven (read: ignored)?
On that score, Netflix, too, gets wrong as much as it gets right. The streaming service made a show of Robin Wright inheriting the final season of House of Cards in its teaser: Her character declares "the reign of the middle-aged white man is over", as if this were the plan all along and not a shift necessitated by the disgraced, disappeared Kevin Spacey.
This is why Buzzfeed's Alison Willmore has had trouble buying Hollywood’s version of girl power: Because the output is not art by and for and about women that doesn't feel the need to prove it can keep up with the boys or worry about what the boys think. Some of the output is worse: It's what white men think women want, in order to "placate" the female until the male can go back to his old ways before he was caught. It doesn't signify change, only changeability.
Similarly, white Hollywood embracing people of colour means simply leaving them to fight for a creative space on a white canvas. And what about gay characters being portrayed by straight actors, while openly gay actors have largely been ignored? Why is this any different than a white man playing in blackface? Or can only straight white men act? If not, then why haven't we seen more gay actors in straight roles?
No openly gay actor has yet won an Oscar, but straight actors playing gay characters have won the accolade - suggesting Hollywood believes being gay is just a vehicle to give a character depth. In total, 52 straight people have been Oscar-nominated for playing gay characters. By all means, award a straight actor for going to such lengths as kissing a man for his craft, but finding a gay man in a heterosexual role as unbelievable is just a shameless case of double standards.
Prejudice is a potent presence, so potent its expressions are powerful enough to mould our thoughts and actions. But the more white people embrace diversity, the less they will come to fear it. The less they fear, the more they will look to themselves for the blame they seek to place elsewhere in troubled times. Here, then, is a final irony: Once you see inside those you hate, you see them differently, because you see they are really not so much different than yourself.
posted by Tarkan Deluxe at 8:53 am
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