dewline | (no subject)

Thanks to

twistedchick for pointing this essay out to me:

https://longreads.com/2020/06/18/the-long-con-of-britishness/

Good on Laurie Penny for this. She's been good for sometimes brutal honesty about the worlds we live in - real and fictional - for a few years now. This is another aspect of that work of hers.

And this comes to mind in particular:

"If you love your country and don’t own its difficulties and its violence, you don’t actually love your country. You’re just catcalling it as it goes by."

Canada's existence in its present form is another consequence of that long con, and the people living here are dealing with being consequences of that as well. Consequences for each other. We are a mess right now. We can do better. We can be better.

Whether we end up with balkanization back into what the Indigenous nations had before first contact with the European nations whose leaders wanted empires built upon the burned bones and spilled blood of the locals; into a mix of Indigenous and Settler holdings; the next conquest of the American Trumpist fascism if that survives this November upcoming; or something else hopefully unified by freely made choice and better for its struggles to accept our own ugly truths and better angels...?

I don't know yet.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's a good essay and germane.

Except for one thing. The idealised Englishness espoused in the Ur-texts for Downton and HP, like Tom Brown's Schooldays and all the pious Victoriana, was always something approaching unrealisable. Even Lancelot had his sins. Only Galahad and Percival were really worthy.

But what such a national legend does is to give honour to those who try hard to live up to the ideal. Righteous folk are respected... or at least were.

In the era of Johnson and Cummings and blatant corruption and incompetence righteous folk are now pilloried, and the corrupt get away with getting their planning permissions through backhanders; the facts are splashed all over the press and social media; and nothing is done whatsoever.

This looks like a criminal coup d'état by a bunch of chancers who gaslighted the voters into a situation where the criminal gang's moneymen can short the pound and the UK PLC; and make many billions in the process.

London Bridge. Heads. Spikes. Traditional retribution for traitors.

Because lining your own pocket at the expense of the nation is the action of a traitor.

That is a good essay. Thanks for sharing.

People get really upset when you point out how fictional Canada is.

And fiction still has its own reality to it. We want a better fiction to break the worst parts of our past reality with, and so we keep creating and telling stories of the Canada we want to become real in place of the one that exists now.

Am I making any sense here?

You do to me!

Though I think Canada manages better than most countries to maintain a tight-lipped, polite fiction. Claiming that we have no epic stories to tell detracts from the fact that there have been many, they just don't end well.

Here's to better countries for both of us.

Amen to that.