A Perfect History
Meeting Children With Truth and Hope
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In the book Performance in the Place of War the author lays out three types of ‘performance’ that happen in war time. Pro-government (propaganda), anti-government (protest) and a ‘resting place’ (wherein art can exist for it’s own sake and people make work on commonality of their human story.) I am familiar with this book because the project I worked with in Sri Lanka, The Butterfly Peace Garden, is featured, as an example of the ‘third sort’. Children who were facing the devastation of war were able to ‘escape’ and ‘play’ in the midst of conflict.
Rather then disaster education which starts with the premise that the world is broken and unfixable through it’s anti-racism, wrong body ideology, climate terror and a host of wars to fight, the ‘common art’ serves as a place for communion and building in the midst of (and in spite of) chaos. (I often reflect on this as adults intentionally introduce children to the horrors of current global conflicts & think how much parents in these war torn areas would pay to free their children from the ‘privilege’)
There is no ‘perfect history’ and no ‘perfect time’ and no ‘perfect person’ but we can strive to operate to our highest ideals even in times of profound and utter devastation. I am reminded of the film ‘Life is Beautiful’ wherein even once in a concentration camp the father works with all his might to preserve the innocence and hope for his little boy.
Largely I think most parents still feel the same way but for some reason that’s not how our political and cultural class chooses to operate, stealing the most precious gifts from our young cohorts with enthusiastic virtue.
As a perfect example - director, Leonnie Rae Gasson made a performance piece with children involving sex toys at the Traverse. Imagine that. (or don’t).
We are better then this. One could argue easily this never should have happened. But then again our public bodies are letting it happen. If the kids are not alright, as in my previous post, it’s a collective effort really. Stuart Waiton, Chair of the Scottish Union for Education speaks of the need for a ‘gray haired revolution’ and I don’t think that’s far off. Society needs some grounding.
Sometimes when I look at the landscape of the Scottish Arts scene I can hardly believe any commonality is left, in our pursuit of ‘diversity and inclusion’ we have bred an incredibly myopic and fractured sector. Everything seems to be geared towards a critical theory quasi religious viewpoint, with little deviation from the script or you are punished as seen in the case of Rosie Kay, Jenny Lindsa, Magi Gibson and me -amongst others.
This week sees the most recent bomb to hit the headlines regarding our utterly out of touch arts sector - the updated story on the Creative Scotland funded Porn Project ‘Rein’ by self styled art/porn director Leonnie Rae Gasson. Turns out Creative Scotland high heejans were lying all the time, they did, in fact, know that REAL sex was going to happen, and publicly, and in receipt of this knowledge funded it with our tax money regardless.
Under the FOIs obtained by journalists the application states “Performers would have been paid for filming as well as for rehearsals and training with a "kink and BDSM educator”. Also “development would involve "a sex scene with genital contact" involving three members of the cast”.
Lordy me.
Yet Creative Scotland lied, despite the evidence (eventually) available to our own eyes.
I’m stuck between Orwell and Havel at this particular moment in relation to Scotland - as the lies flow so easily from our political classes’ lips one has to wonder if we can trust them with anything at all.
And lying seems to be the defacto position at this moment. Just as I type another two stories hit the press this week also based on lies coming to light, the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Tribunal with trans identified manager Mridrul Wadhwa leading a ‘heresy hunt’ on anyone deviating from “her” (ie. his) truth.
We see Nicola Sturgeon pictured here which is ironic given she is also currently demonstrating a remarkable ability to rewrite history with herself as the hero come victim as she embarks on her book tour. Ah Nic, where to begin... the lies and the lies and the lies….
I have written about lying before. When the trans nursery worker was hired by Glasgow City Council, children were being coaxed to follow the lie the individual was female - when before their eyes they could see the individual was male. Where does embedding lies and becoming comfortable in lies leave us morally, culturally, socially, spiritually?
And for children who are developmentally immersed in the world of imagination this is the most devastating. If we undermine their reality (that is THE truth, not MY truth or YOUR truth) then it interferes with their instinct. And our instincts keep up safe.
LIES LIES LIES!!!
Yet as shown in above examples lie-telling seems to be the de-facto position these days- across the whole of the public sector. Where and how do we assure accountability?
I ‘went’ to the Scottish Union for Education zoom the other night with Frank Furedi writer, academic and thinker.
Frank said quite beautifully:
‘we must love the world enough to take responsibility for it’.
He spoke of the importance of history which got me thinking about the stories we tell, and truth. And the gray haired revolution, as Stuart Waiton so aptly put. History is not an activity merely positioned in a classroom but in the interactions we have in our day to day. And the awareness of this could do a great deal of good for our ever broken and healing world. In particular for parents.
When I was a kid I loved tagging along with my Dad here there and everywhere. My father is a FONT of information. Specifically architectural and social history. We could not drive down a motorway or a lane, a city boulevard or a suburban enclave without a running commentary on what we were seeing. The large brick homes that were built in West Philadelphia for the new artisan class coming from Germany in the late 19th century, with floors for the extended families. The remnants of the rail line that used to transport goods from Amish farms in Lancaster to markets in Philadelphia until the mid-1900s. The new builds and motorways that covered what was once country fields and orchards wherein my father would escape with his pals for long summer days in the 1950s eating peaches right from the trees. Not a window shape, a stone material, a housing style could be looked at superficially. These were not merely edifices for use, they were our human heritage.
My Father loves history and architecture and this love also seeded me with a love for history and architecture, curiosity… and responsibility.
I wrote a paper in 10th Grade (S3, 15 years old) in 1989 called ‘Our Architectural Heritage’. I quoted the 1966 book by Albert Rains (this was from my local library can you imagine)
“A nation can be a victim of amnesia. It can lose the memories of what is was, and thereby, lose the sense of what it wants to be. It can say it’s being '“progressive” when it rips up the tissues which visibly bind on strand of it’s history to the next… what it does…. once it has lost the graphic source of its memories, is to break the perpetual partnership that makes for orderly growth in society”.
And therein lies an answer to our problem. We must not forget our stories, we must continue to look around us at our physical world and it’s people in all it’s complexity and we must tell truth. Through this we can ennoble the younger generation with our love of these stories, like my Dad reinforcing the commonality we all share via our architectural heritage. I shall always see the world with his imprint on me, and that continues to enrich my world.
Lastly I share with you a book review I did for the Scottish Union for Education Newsletter #29 - 17 August 2023, Stolen Youth speaks to parents role in this crazy landscape we now find ourselves in. I found it quite heartening. We are not alone.
Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation
Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz, DW Books, 2023
If you are like me and feel like you are in a constant state of WTAF (!?!?!) regarding your child and his or her life in school and beyond, then Stolen Youth is the book for you. No, you are not crazy: your instincts were right – there has been a steady assault of politically motivated content into your kid’s life which is stripping them of the very things that make childhood, well, childhood. And you are not alone.
Authors Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz, both mothers and journalists, dive deep into the ‘woke phenomena’ overtaking children’s lives. They interrogate the subjects of gender and critical race theory, climate activism and Covid lockdowns, asking vital questions about their motivations, role and efficacy. They look at how these things are in schools, libraries, the doctor’s office, and on your screens. They trace the roots of these movements, drawing parallels to other politically motivated (and ultimately violent) educational reforms in China and Russia.
Karol Markowicz emigrated from Soviet Russia when she was a child and lived happily in the liberal enclave of Brooklyn, New York, for the next two plus decades, becoming a wife, mother and journalist. When lockdown happened, she started to experience cognitive dissonance with the world around her. Why were all her ‘liberal’ neighbours taking off to the comfort of the green Hamptons while campaigning for schools to stay closed, which kept her less well-off neighbour’s children locked up?
Then came the online lessons. The undercurrent of social justice shared too many resonances with the Russia she and her family had escaped from. This awakening led her to use her journalistic skills, partnering with Mandel to write a forensic and impeccably researched book into the myriad ways in which childhood is being eradicated in America. Looking at the roots and aims of everything from Covid hysteria to gender theory, so-called ‘anti-racism’ and climate justice, she found a shared undercurrent – the aim of societal transformation at the expense of the child. In it, she makes a compelling case for our collective robbery of children’s lives and the imminent damage we are doing to not just the children, but society. Towards the end of the book, the authors provide examples of what parents can do to protect their children.
An easy (but not) read for those looking to pull the pieces together about the hard activism taking shape in children’s lives. Although told from the American lens, it unfortunately is a familiar story of how education is being directed in western societies.`
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