Quite a Week for Wokeism

Virginians decided this month that wokeism is so offensive they want a governor who will eradicate it from schools.

Of course, these are citizens of the same state that hanged the rebel Nat Turner, then cut off his head, disemboweled him, flayed him, and sold souvenir purses made of his skin.

They don't cotton to upstarts.

Wokeism is certainly all about being an upstart.

Upstart is a 16th-century word denoting "one newly risen from a humble position to one of power, importance, or rank; a parvenu." It was borrowed from the Old Norse upp—meaning "to a higher place"—and the German stürzen—meaning "to hurl."

Wokeism is about being hurled to a higher place.

This has been quite a week for wokeism.

On Tuesday, during a guided tour of the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, I was informed by the docent that the home was "built on the backs of five slaves," an absurd claim given the owner was an extraordinarily enterprising merchant seaman. It was the seaman's wealth that built the lavish house—and that allowed him to own five slaves. The slaves were the seaman's house servants. He didn't involve slaves in his business.

On Wednesday, The Women’s March formally apologized for a fundraising email it sent donors. "We apologize deeply for the email that was sent today," the organizers said. "$14.92 was our average donation amount this week. It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving." The apology comes so close to mockery, it defies explanation.

And today, the Tate Britain had to defend itself against critics who accused it of "cancelling Hogarth" and promoting "wokeish drivel." The museum's new exhibition, Hogarth and Europe, features wall labels which insist that Hogarth's art was only made possible by the slave trade. Hogarth in fact earned most of his keep selling political cartoons. He disdained slavery.

I'm all for hurling POC to higher places; but wokeism sometimes sounds just silly.

It's silly to attribute everything to slave labor, just as it would be silly to attribute everything to the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the domestication of horses, or the heroism of St. Paddy.

Shit's more complex than that.

Consider, for example, the steps our Founding Fathers took to end the slave trade:

• Northern states abolished slavery in the 18th century. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777; Pennsylvania, in 1780; New Hampshire and Massachusetts, in 1783; Connecticut and Rhode Island, in 1784. By 1860, free states outnumbered slave states.

• Washington enacted the world's first national anti-slavery law. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 prohibited the outfitting of ships for slave transit in any US port.

• Adams strengthened the law. By signing the Slave Trade Act of 1800, Adams prohibited the transit of slaves by US flagships and US citizens aboard foreign flag ships.

• Jefferson stopped the importation of slaves. By signing the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves in 1808, Jefferson ended the trade altogether.

• Monroe criminalized the slave trade. By declaring the trans-Atlantic slave trade an act of piracy, Monroe sought to punish illegal slave-trafficking.

• Tyler pledged to use the Navy to stop slave traders. By signing the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, Tyler agreed to use US Navy ships to interdict slave traffickers.

These are only a few of the "inconvenient truths" wokeism can't abide.

There are a whole lot more.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to historian Glen Williams for citing, via email, the Founding Fathers' anti-slavery legislation.

Mary Had a Little Turkey

If I may talk turkey, let's give credit where credit is due. 

The author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was also the author of Thanksgiving.

Sarah Hale was an early feminist and the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the most widely circulated magazine in America before the Civil War.

The war, when it came, incensed Hale, who took it upon herself to write President Lincoln a letter in September 1862 stating that only he had the power to proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday and “permanently an American custom and institution.”

Heeding Mrs. Hale, five days later Lincoln ordered that, henceforth, the fourth Thursday of November would be marked by the national observation of Thanksgiving.

Turkey Day had long obsessed Hale, who grew up observing it in New Hampshire. 

For more than a decade, she had written yearly editorials in Godey's about the holiday, imploring government officials to fix it forever on the country's calendar.

She believed the national holiday would smooth the bitter rift between the North and South.

It took a bloody war to make Hale's dream come true.

Thanksgiving has fallen ever since on the fourth Thursday of November, except in the years 1939 and '40, when, as a means of combating the Depression, FDR moved it up a week, to extend the Christmas-shopping period.

He caved to criticism two years later, and moved the holiday back to the fourth Thursday of November.

POSTSCRIPT: Did you know "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was based on actual events? As a young woman, Sarah Hale taught elementary school near her home in New Hampshire. A student named Mary brought her pet lamb to school one day, inspiring Hale to write and publish the poem. Forty-six years later, a Mary Elizabeth Sawyer of Sterling, Massachusetts, emerged to claim she was the Mary of the poem, and that a local boy had written it. Sawyer was quickly proven a fraud, but not until Sterling had erected a statue of a lamb in the town center.

A Bathtub Full of Baloney

A wise man proportions his belief to his evidence.

— David Hume

"Minds do not create truth or falsehood," philosopher Bertrand Russell said. "They create beliefs."

The same might be said of social media platforms like TikTok.

A new belief making the rounds thanks to TikTok—one particularly appealing to anti-vaxxers—holds that, if you take a "detox bath" in borax after you're inoculated, you will remove all the radiation and government-implanted nanotechnologies the shot delivers.

Now, before you cue the theme music from The Twilight Zone, take a moment to consider that millions of your fellow Americans accept (or are disposed to accept) this baloney as fact.

The baloney-maker is the well-known crackpot Dr. Carrie Madej, who a year ago was called out by Reuters for erroneously claiming that an organism in the Covid vaccine was pointing its tenacles at her. (She was observing house dust on her dirty microscope.)

Where wackos like Madej once had to stand on a box in the park to reach an audience, TikTok gives her a pulpit that faces millions of viewers, many as gullible as two-year-olds.

As a self-described "child of God and believer in Jesus Christ," Madjef ought to remove herself from TikTok and, like her rabbi, find a mount in the desert somewhere from which to deliver her sermon.

A desert on Mars would be perfect. (I hear the radiation problem there is awful.) 

At least one platform provider, Twitter, has kicked Madej off this week for praising borax baths. Hallelujah!

But while TikTok removed Madej’s video last month, the platform permits it to be viewed through a sharing feature called "Duet."

Madej's baloney can also be consumed on Facebook and YouTube.

So where's the issue with baloney? It's a free country. Can't I believe anything I want? 

The issue is fraud.

Madej is defrauding her audience, either knowingly—and therefore recklessly—misrepresenting the facts; or unreasonably—and therefore negligently—misrepresenting the facts.

Either way, it's fraud, and makes Madej a fraudster. 

Trapped

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

— James Baldwin

My favorite line by my favorite writer, William Faulkner, goes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

But Americans are blind to the past.

White people, content with the now—consumption, recreation, and a middle-of-the-road lifestyle—believe the past is all folderol and "forgotten politics;" sound and fury signifying nothing.

People of color believe the past is unknowable and imponderable and—being little but a trail of injury and injustice—too maddening to reconstruct.

Neither group wishes to grant the past's deterministic nature; that it isn't dead—or even past.

To their way of thinking, they owe the past nothing.

Not everyone on the planet thinks that way. Europeans, for example.

Last evening I saw the movie Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's auteurish childhood memoir.

Like an Irish Tolstoy, Branagh makes clear that he owes his entire life's journey to the past; that the path he took through life was ordained not by personal decisions, but by history's forces.

In Branagh's case, those were "The Troubles"—even though his family members were neutral bystanders in that 30-year war between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists.

Even today, the grievances that rocked Northern Ireland in Branagh's youth echo in Irish politics, as the opening scene suggests.

"Forgetting a debt doesn't mean it's paid," an Irish proverb holds.

If only Americans were more like the Irish.

We'd remember our debt to the past.

Helluva Way to Run a Railroad

This is a helluva way to run a railroad.

— Leonor Loree

When civil engineer Leonor Loree took charge of the dilapidated Kansas City Southern Railroad in 1906, he stood before investors and described the railroad's broken-down operations in detail.

"This is a helluva way to run a railroad," he concluded.

I can now say the same of the online art-supply retailer Jerry's Artarama.

The company recently misdirected a $66 shipment of supplies I ordered.

The shipment was sent to my former address (by default), and when I phoned customer service—within two minutes of placing the online order—I was told Jerry's could do nothing to reroute the package. The package wouldn't ship for days, but, when it did, it would ship to my old address. Like it or not, that's they way the system works. Get over it.

I was on my own to recover the goods, too, I was told. Jerry's was officially out of the loop; and if I involved the company further in the matter, there would be hefty fees billed to me.

I have since located and the misdirected package and it has been returned to Jerry's; but no refund has been issued. I'm out my time and trouble and $66.

Every contact with the company's frontline employees suggests to me that Jerry's corporate culture is toxic.

At Jerry's:

• Everyone clearly is a helpless slave to internal systems, hidebound policies, and an iron-fisted supervisor;
  
  
• Problems must not be acknowledged;
  
  
• Customers—even so-called VIP ones—are annoying, not to be trusted, and always in the wrong.

In the past three years, I have spent several thousand dollars with Jerry's. You'd think someone would know that, in the era of CRM. Perhaps someone does, but doesn't care.

In any case, henceforth I'm a loyal customer of Jerry's competitor, Blick. 

Jerry's is on my s-list.

Forever. 

I plan, as well, to tell fellow artists about my lousy experience with Jerry's at every opportunity.

Helluva way to run a railroad.

POSTSCRIPT: Goodly subscribes to the fairness doctrine, and in that spirit will afford the president of Jerry's Artarama, Mr. Ira Goldstein, his two cents. 

He kindly wrote today in response to the above:

"I am very sorry for the events that occurred that have left you unhappy with Jerry’s handling of your recent order. I assure you that I take all of customers' concerns seriously. 

"I have reached out to our customer service director Steven Gilmore to look into your order and find out where the disconnect was that derailed your shopping experience with us. Steven will reach out after looking into the details.

"Jerry’s tries to set ourselves apart in artist product offerings, our prices and most importantly our service. Sometime things occur not by design and your email will help us to fix what occurred in the future and right this for you to the best of our ability. I would like to thank you, for contacting me will help us make sure this does not occur in the future."

POST POSTSCRIPT: Mr. Steven Gilmore phoned me to apologize for the customer-service failure and suggested that Jerry's computer system sent the package to my former address out of "overzealous fraud protection" and that Jerry's employees could not redirect the shipment once the system decided where it would go. He promised I would receive a refund of my $66.

UPDATE AS OF NOVEMBER 28: Jerry's has refused to refund me the $66. I contacted the company by email to tell them to keep it and buy the CEO a box of cigars.

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 14: I shared the post above with famed marketing guru David Meerman Scott, who reacted forthwith: "Customer service should be an opportunity to build fans. Clearly Jerry's is not doing a good job."

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 25: I received a full refund from Jerry's. Unsure why, but I have no complaint. Perhaps Mr. Scott's remark sped it along. Looks like there is a Santa Claus!