NOT to draw any parallels…

I was elucidating agreement with this statement, mainly, Pete – because it’s *true*. As a feminist, suddenly every crackpot who claimed that label is your mouthpiece. I’m sure it’s the same for conservatives in some contexts!

But as a GEEK, people fall all over themselves to get to know you.

The difference, I find, between big cities and small towns – and I have lived in both – is that in the latter is forced to interact with people who are not like you, or become a hermit. So you learn to tolerate your differences, not take them so seriously, and accept people for who they are.

For instance, a friend of mine is a gay musician and playwrite who wants to turn Tyranny of Nice into a musical. He hates government censorship, noting that gays are traditionally the first people censored in any community, and appreciates Steyn’s work as a music critic.

I once asked him why he didn’t move to Toronto, where he would have much more opportunity to pursue his talents.

“Hell, no,” he said. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation if I was living in Toronto. I would have to be gay 24/7, and they would try and drag me into all their squabbles. There’s nothing more fractious than Toronto’s gay community.”

“Then you haven’s met Toronto’s pro-life community,” I said.

We spent the next twenty minutes commiserating about the various incidents while visiting the big city in which we had run afoul of the identity group police. It was uncanny how many of the patterns and our complaints overlapped.

Another example with the same gentleman. He suffers some serious health problems that keep him out of class for a month. Besides the fact class discussion is boring without his colorful comments, I’m worried because he’s not answer his phone or emails, and nobody knows why he’s missing.

Finally, five minutes before class, he walks through the door, comes over to my seat, explains what happens, and apologizes. I’m simultaneously relieved, because he’s safe, and annoyed, because he didn’t tell anyone why he was missing.

“You’re Catholic,” he says. “I assume you’d forgive me, or is forgiveness only something you speak about?”

“Oh just give me a big gay hug,” I said. “But no touching anything private, even though I’m glad you’re safe and feeling better.”

“One big gay hug for my favorite Catholic homophobe,” he said, before putting his arms around me and lifting me off the ground.

Our classmates laughed, the prof said she was happy to see us re-united and was looking forward to watching us go at it – especially as Oscar Wilde was the topic of today’s class. But during class break he and I both mused that our little expression of friendship probably would have been politicized into cross-accusations of intolerance and hate-mongering, had it taken place in a more populous milieu.

I’m part of groups that are disparaged as a monolith as Pete Vere says, but also part of a group where everyone attempts to laugh at our jokes – even if they’re not particularly amusing, you know, from a different context.

Geeks, as a group, have litigious folks and outlaws, pirates and hackers on the uncharted frontier, and people who will ruin your enjoyment of a movie by bringing their expertise and ideology to the table. (ie: Not by providing feminist analysis, but by providing analysis of not controlling for the gravity effect. Or, for example, I simply can’t handle the darkening the sky in The Matrix as a plot point, or the inefficiency of the lossy human body as an electrical source. I MUST MENTION IT.
John and I laugh at ourselves when we go off and rant… Like, we can suspend disbelief for any number of mythological tropes in a story, but the fact this guy’s got access to a cel network on a mountain is TOTALLY FAKE.
But there is a basic ideology at play motivating us.)

Anyway, it’s a weird place to be. I mean, even the most out there creationists TRY to play hip by co-opting the scientific dialogue and laughing like they get the joke. You know? Less likely that’s going to happen for, you know, “Manifesta”.

A first, well recognized basis of humour is that it should contain an element of surprise – which, unfortunately, is simply not true with the remixed works of Henny Youngman popular at the Yuk Yuks. (Non-profit idea: We should send a phalanx of divorce lawyers to comedy clubs to help liberate the middle aged comics who haven’t enjoyed their marriages since the day after their honeymoons. It’s a public AND personal charity.)

A second, less known rule of comedy is that it has to be humorous enough to have staying power on a T-Shirt. You should be able smile on the eight or ninth viewing, because the incongruity, although learned, is unexpected enough to contain a small memory of the original thrill. (Although not enough to justify continuing remix Henny Youngman in a world containing divorce lawyers. Ba-dum-cha!)

Most people are incredibly humourless: they rarely laugh at my binary Thinkgeek t-shirt.

Two unlikely sources occured to me (unlikely as a combination, that is). One was Sandra Shamas, who joked during her last show about one of the benefits of crossing the great demi-centennial divide. You know what I like most? she said. I don’t give a fuck. All the stuff that used to get me so angry – every argument that was a life and death struggle, every battle of egos that I had to win, every election, every quiz in a magazine – you know, nowadays, I just don’t give a fuck.

I knew exactly what she meant. It’s not that you care less, or work less hard to achieve whatever social or political vision you’re committed to: but it’s somehow calmer, with less emotion – maybe just less ego – invested in each outcome. After the tenth election Your Side loses, you realize that somehow the world will continue to function – in fact, not much actually changes.

The other source that occured was dear old Screwtape, who advised his apprentice tempter to use pride to help his victim disregard sermons or advice from clergy he could dismiss as insufficiently educated, or urbane, or sophisticated. The point was wonderful one – it’s very seldom that a sermon, or political tract, or editorial, if it’s a sincere expression of a person’s heartfelt views, is utterly devoid of merit. (Which DOESN’T mean I am going to buy that damn book. But if you want to swap a copy for a commercial DVD I made about diving in the Caymans, you’re on. )

The radicalization of first and third generation immigrants of any culture is pretty common. I personally think the trend is exacerbated by the Steyns and Levants, whose Us Vs. Them bugles summon us all into camps rather than the Agora.

At which point I asked Syed: “You just explained to me how Canada’s Muslim community is experiencing a bit of a generational gap. Have you considered the possibility that other faith groups in Canada are experiencing a similar gap between generations?”

I could see the light bulb go on in his head. He’s not a stupid man. He has a doctorate in engineering if I am not mistaken. But there is often a tendency to recognize divisions in our own faith community, while assuming complete homogeny in others.

And this cuts across ideological lines as well. For example, all of my least favorite university professors were middle-aged big-city feminists. They take themselves and their ideology so seriously that I find myself too tightly-wound in their class room to learn anything.

On the other hand, I’m finishing up a fine arts degree at our local university – the newest and smallest in Ontario – where my two favorite professors are feminists in their 30’s. One is a nationally-renown eco-feminist poet, while the other heads up the local Wiccan community and has acted as the spokesperson for the local pro-choice community. As you can imagine, we have the wildest conversations in class – and even after class on occasion. These discussions are often offensive, but that’s the price of good debate.

However, they’ve actually complained to me when I’ve missed class, telling me it was a little dull and reassuring me (jokingly) that they won’t call the Human Rights Commission on me.

And none of us take ourselves and our ideology so seriously that we cannot have fun in class. For example, one of these profs helped me write an ode to Ted Nugent hunting bear in the style of Marlatt’s ecriture feminine.

But this is the type of fun and creativity we have in small rural communities that big city folk would find offensive, and could easily lead to human rights complaints.

Having worked for a mercifully brief time within the bureaucracy (a penance I think should be required of everyone before they’re permitted to work with or write about government), I understand the tendency of bureaucracies to gather, consolidate, expand and protect power – the Catholic Church, Human Rights Commissions, or the CIA. They should all be subject to rigorous oversight, frequent review, and evaluation of their outcomes against their real-world goals. In the aforementioned “real world”, no-one EVER gets it right, however, and these entities run a wobbly course, lurching towards extremes and triggering a corrective response when they approach them too closely.

There seems to be a consensus that one such response may be called for now. But one of the disservices that Steyn et al have done us in this instance is to amp up the hysteria and self-important martyrdom to the point that it’s almost impossible to actually determine whether such a consensus actually exists, or whether it’s simply a campaign to keep Ezra in the papers and Kathy selling manifestos.

Like Dawg, I’m a tweakist: before tossing something out, I like to examine the degree to which the social need an instrument was created to address still exists, to look at the effectiveness, strengths, weaknesses and actual results (intended and unintended) of the current instrument, and THEN to determine whether the instrument requires adjustment, maintenance, redesign, or the junk heap.

I also came to wonder whether there wasn’t a kind of generational split here. If your formative years were the sixites and you approach this issue through the prism of the holocaust or Jim Crow or the treatment of aboriginals, you see it quite differently than someone for whom it’s all about priggish teachers forcing you to write boilerplate essays and speeches for “Equality Day” when you know which side he/she will automatically run to in the event of actual inter-racial conflict or charges of racism.

That said, there is no doubt this has unleashed some awfully vile stuff passing as political expression and the free-speechers are naive if they continue to insist there is some absolute, easily discernible division between words and action. If the Americans want to have neo-Nazi marches through Jewish suburbs, bully for them, but we don’t and never have, and I’m out of patience with those who say that means free speech is dead in Canada, which is outrageous. Like you, I’ve wondered why Steyn has allowed himself to associate so closely with the ranters. He made his well-deserved name and fame during a climate of crisis, but now he may have succumbed to a desperate attempt to keep everyone at a fever pitch in subtler times. Sort of like listening to Churchill give his “We’ll fight on the beaches…” speech in 1951.

It’s a classic Canadian cop-out to call for a royal commission, but this might be one time we could use one.

We once discussed asking new arrivals to provide a little information about themselves – age, political affiliation, intelligence, emotional state, literacy level – but Stage wisely pointed out that you can figure all that out from their first post – in this case, from the first sentence of their first post. Twenties or lower, Conservative, medium-low, a little drunk, Grade 6.