Midrange Weekly August 2

YOUR WEEKLY ROUND UP ON WHAT’S GOT THE MIDRANGE STAFF’S ATTENTION

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Hello friends and welcome back to Midrange Weekly. We hope everyone in Vancouver had an enjoyable, safe, but also absolutely scandalous pride weekend. One of the the most eggrigous of the none life altering effects of the pandemic last year was people couldn't really go for it during pride. This year we are more than happy to report that people sure as hell made up for it. For about 12 hours on Saturday East Van was unofficially renamed Crop Top City and we are here for it. Shout out to the one guy that had a disco ball bedazzaled face mask that made him look like The Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and for recognizing that observation as the life affirming compliment it was. There’s really no good segue out of that anecdote so let’s just dive right in.

 

The Hypocrisy Of Faith

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It’s such a strange feeling to know that when someone asks if you are religious or if you simply tell them you are, their reaction is most always of either ridicule or confusion. Sometimes it’s even both. The look you get during this interaction is one I cringe the most for. I always regret opening my mouth. 

For context, I grew up in a religious home. My mother is a born again Christian as she so often loves to protest. Her childhood, however, was very much not of this variety. My grandparents were children of the 30s and 40s. They grew up poor in chilly Saskatchewan. Believing in Jesus was a fraught ideal. Life was hard. There was no time to waste on such trivialities. 

But my mother is a free spirit. She loves the church. We went most Sunday’s while I was growing up. I even attended Sunday school. I really enjoyed it. The people were nice and they always gave out free cookies, a perk in my book. At one point in high school I was even considering going to Bible school. If you know me at all, let that one sink in. 

Needless to say, religion was in my life at an early age. My mother even sent my little sister and I to a Catholic elementary school. She wanted us to see the difference between Catholicism and Christianity. The church we attended was an Alliance. The differences were minor. There was more prayer in school, as well as mass once a week. They had a priest, we had a pastor. Overall, however, the themes of both were similar, safe for one thing, which I quickly noticed at a young age. Those who were catholic were always meaner. Stricter. More closed minded. My grade two teacher was awful. She was a nun. She was the most unkind teacher I ever had. Slaps to the hand were common. Her whole vibe was malicious. Cruel. I’ll never forget her wickedness. 

In looking back at that year and who she was, I can’t help but feel baffled. Her whole persona was out of context for what she gave up her life to pursue. As I grew older I assumed she was an outlier. A black sheep of ungodliness. (Feel the irony there?) Then I learned she wasn’t. Many were and are the same. 

In Michael Pollan’s latest book, This Is Your Mind On Plants, he spends his entire narrative centred around three topics. Opium, caffeine and mescaline. The book is a tour de force of investigative journalism into the stated uses and importance of these three psychoactive drugs within our society. In reading about mescaline, which comes from the peyote cacti, Pollan delves deep into the importance of this plant to Native American tribes in the southwestern United States in the late 1800s. Outside of use with Native American Church ceremonies, peyote cultivation is illegal in the US. The following excerpt touches on the overarching theme I’ve mentioned above. 

From This Is Your Mind On Plants (page 191):

The first white man to witness a Native American peyote ceremony was James Mooney, an ethnologist working for the Smithsonian Institution in southwestern Oklahoma in 1890–91. Mooney, who as a child had memorized the names of hundreds of Native tribes, dedicated his career to documenting and preserving Native American cultures before they completely disappeared from the earth — that erasure being the explicit goal of the government for which he worked. At the time, any Native religious practices deemed contrary to Christianity were outlawed in the United States. (Some of these prohibitions on American Indian ceremonies stood until the Carter administration.) Indian boys were being forcibly removed from their families, given haircuts, and sent off to the government boarding schools. The avowed purpose of these institutions, in the words of the founder of one of them, the Carlisle Indian School, was to “kill the Indian and save the man.”

For clarity, when Pollan refers to Christianity, he’s referring of the Catholic church. This excerpt gives further evidence of the role the Catholic church played in helping to eviscerate the Indian in North America. 

As I touched on with my grade two teacher, how can this be? 

In church you’re taught to love and care for one another. Treat each other as equals. Yet, as we continue to see, the Catholic church seems hell bent on not following what they preach. This passage details their views from over 120 years ago. You’d think they would have changed? Matured. Learned from past mistakes. My grade two teacher is a small example of how they haven’t. They believe in following God, Jesus and church doctrine, while negating the pure fundamentals of decency and what God would ultimately want. To love thy neighbour as you would want to be treated. 

From the CBC:

The Roman Catholic Church spent millions of dollars that were supposed to go to residential school survivors on lawyers, administration, a private fundraising company and unapproved loans, according to documents obtained by CBC News.

The documents include a host of other revelations. They appear to contradict the Catholic Church’s public claims about money paid to survivors.

“There are also a large number of serious accounting discrepancies that are alarming to Canada,” states one document, a 53-page federal government “factum” summarizing the evidence in a 2015 court matter.

None of the other churches involved in the landmark Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2005 — Anglican, United and Presbyterian — engaged in any of these practices. They all paid the full amounts agreed to years ago without incident.

The Catholic Church never ended up having to legally justify its activity. On the eve of the 2015 hearing on the matter, Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Neil Gabrielson approved the church’s controversial buyout proposal, and the case was closed.

Advocates for survivors say they’re disgusted and that the Catholic Church must be held accountable.

Dominating the news for several months now has been Canada’s role in trying to genocide First Nations children with the residential school system. I’ve talked about this at length a few times in the past. Canadian citizens and the world at large have woken up to the horrors of this atrocity with the revelation of over 963 unmarked graves in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The role the Catholic church played in this was integral. The grade two teacher I had was probably cut from the same cloth those young children had to endure. It happened here in my home country and as Michael Pollan has detailed, in the US as well. 

The role of religion, specifically Catholicism within western society has been dropping for decades. 

From the WSJ:

Some 25 million adults, or a third of all active members, no longer identify with the Catholic church. Most of those who leave abandon affiliated religion altogether.

The ridicule I face when I tell others that I do believe in an afterlife comes partly from the injustice we see here. People won’t follow you if you do the exact opposite of what you preach. The Catholic church is paying heavily for the sins of its past. More graves will be unearthed. But this doesn’t even touch on what the CBC has unveiled here. This betrayal of payment happened a mere 16 years ago. They were supposed to fork over $29 million dollars for the survivors of the residential school program and instead pissed away a vast amount of that allotment on fees and administrative costs. This quote says it best. 

“This is unbelievably, absolutely gross. It’s completely wrong,” said Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a former Saskatchewan provincial court judge and director of the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre in Vancouver. She reviewed the documents at CBC’s request.

“How could anyone do something like this?”

I believe we know who has and will continue to do so. 

Shame on them. - Jamie

 

What Is Patriotism In America Even Supposed To Mean Anymore?

Depending on who you ask, half of America is besieged by treasonous snakes. Ask any of those alleged snakes and they might just say the same about those that levelled such audacious derision at them. Just as sure as some are that so many of their country men and women are duplicitous traitors to their republic, so too are they wholly confident that they are true patriots. Under god, and I dunno- Reagan I guess- so many hyper partisan and radicalized American citizens have crossed ideological, cultural and most bizarre of all medial lines once thought unthinkable, and yet still are wholly confident in their patriotic bonafides. The line as drawn and redrawn by these individuals, at the behest of bad faith legislators, distressingly normalized conspiracy theorists, and online edge lords that have long since ejected any semblance of irony or sarcasm and are just owning their narcissistic personas now, is constantly moving and shifting. How then do you even define what patriotism in America means, when the term has been annexed, hijacked, and weaponized to such an acute degree?

Certainly no one needs a prosaic dictionary definition of the term patriotic. But when the term is now so broadly up for grabs in epistemological terms within American zeitgeist, a strictly defined rendering of the term might not even be functional. Sure many individuals in America and abroad still stridently clinging to things like media literacy or, you know- logic, feel they can easily identify it. A love for one’s country, an admiration for the ideals in which it was founded as optimistically and earnestly applied to today’s vastly different landscape. Maybe just taking pride in the frail but quixotic virtues of a democratic republic. But who are we to advocate for such a term when nearly half the nation has rejected it? I’m not talking about the 20th century paradigm where fascist dictators over the world were able to manipulate a logical through way and conclusion from patriotism into proto nationalism; the idea of love for one’s country being extrapolated into thinking it is better than others to the point of animus. That implies a geopolitical inclination that the greater American gestalt has largely receded from under the entropic foreign policy of the Trump years. Instead, the dichotomous and duelling definitions swirling around what denotes patriotism and its pernicious variants are directed much more inwards. Namely the area of negative partisanship- ideological proclivities defined not by what we support but by what we hate- has also infected the idea of what being patriotic means. Not what you love or what makes you proud, but what you hate and what inspires resentment. That’s a pretty scary place for a country to be in. 

The examples are abounding, and the surealness of it all is surpassed only by the permeating sense of dread that one intuits from it all. Observe Donald Trump at a recent Turning Points conference. Taking a break from his usual bilious complaints regarding the big lie that the election was somehow stolen from him (Italian satellites being the culprit are back in vogue), Trump took the time to drag the female Olympic soccer team. Advocating that Americans boo them instead of cheering them, which is what the crowd there did for Trump with an incantatory fever.

Right wing troll and Tucker Carlson clone Charlie Kirk also took a quick little tangential sojourn from pushing anti vax rhetoric to attacking Olympic Athlete Simone Biles for withdrawing from the games for mental health reasons. Let’s put aside briefly that are roughly 7 billion people on the planet who couldn’t dream of attempting the physical feats that Biles has accomplished on the regular so we should all probably shut the fuck about it, are these vanguards of American conservative orthodoxy- and self proclaimed patriots- actually preaching that Americans root against there own Olympic athletes? Yes they are. For generations the Olympics were a nation’s opportunity to proudly show off the best of their best to the world writ large, and its attendant citizens revelled in their civic duty to cheer them on. No longer if you wish to participate in the incubating toxicity of cultural conservatism that has vigorously seized and capitalized on the moniker of patriotism for generations now. 

It’s those vestigial terms that cling to the idea of patriotism that conservative media has moulded into a largely uncontested composition of what being an American patriot means: Strong, conservative, independent. That last term has mutated into a contorted and malignant ideal with conservative patriotic dogma however. Independent to a fault, and with a chip on your shoulder about it. Independent to the point where government institutions, even ones that for decades have been recognized as totally benign like the CDC (not exactly talking the senate here!) is not to be trusted. Institutions that have devoted 15 months and a lot of human resources to simply getting you vaccinated are viewed as sinister and tyrannical usurpers of god given freedom, another key tenant in the devolving understandings of patriotism in America. Consider the myriad stories of people from dying of COVID because they wouldn’t get the vaccine due to being part of a strong conservative family. Or look instead to this restaurant in LA demanding proof of being unvaccinated, as they view getting the vaccine as a treasonous act. 

Terms like treasonous and tyranny, once anathematized from the idea of patriotism have instead found a surprisingly robust comfort zone within its shifting understandings. Long have American’s contended with the stupefying paradox of glorifying confederate leaders, as in treasonous individuals so strident in their disdain for America that they actually seceded (also they were losers but go figure); now the actions of modern individuals that obliquely mirror those of the tyrannical figures that galvanized the founders into forming America in the first place are being glossed over if not celebrated. Reports broke earlier this week that in the waning days of his presidency Trump tried to pressure the DOJ into over turning the results of the 2020 election. When DOJ lawyers refused, contemporaneous accounts reveal that Trump “only” wanted the DOJ to announce the election was corrupt and he the Republicans in congress would do the rest. In other words he wanted to run a pys-ops campaign on his own people to steal an election. Such unscrupulous assaults on the very idea of democratic representation would make the old autocrats of England blush, and yet here is Trump doing it in 2021. Has he been shunned by his base as a mendacious and manipulative conman? Of course not, they still think he is the shining epitome of patriotism and to preach his merits makes one the same. 

All of these actions, subverting the will of the people, stubbornly and proudly putting yourself in danger of COVID 19 to *checks notes- own the libs, all of it is laundered through the auspices of exercising freedom. One of the foundational ideas of American patriotism was rooted in the idea of its unique exceptionalism. That was always a lie, but part of the verisimilitude of that exceptionalism was based around the idea of how free America is. But too much of American cultural acumen in this regard is based around the freedom to do things. What is missing from this taxonomy though is the idea of freedom from things. Freedom from crushing medical debt, freedom from institutional biases, freedom from minority disenfranchisement, freedom from the actions of a callous neighbour that doesn’t understand that obstinacy against vaccination has a communal effect as much as a personal one. Too often Americans root patriotic pride in the facsimile of its narrative idea of freedom when it reality they are part of one of the least free nations in the first world. 

It’s always so easy to forget that America was and still is an experiment. We may be seeing the final results of a hypotheses unfolding in real time over the course of our lives. With that the idea of the patriotic American was perhaps always going to be more mercurial than any binary understanding could accommodate. But it’s hard not to see the Orwellian overtones in the emerging connotations of what it means to be an American patriot when it involves a Floridian saying how much they hate New York, or conservatives thinking that universal health care is treasonous. They love this country; they just hate almost everything and everyone in it. Makes sense to them, and these days reality doesn’t extend much further than that. -Tristan

 

Things From The Internet We Liked

 

The New Ghostbusters Trailer Pops

Yes we are trying Ghostbusters again. Yes we are excited as all hell. Based on this new trailer how can we not be? Years from now we make think it was wild that Paul Rudd ever wasn’t in these movies. Also, while the hints are just a touch subtle, it’s really intriguing that they are putting Ivo Shandor, the rarely mentioned but literal architect of the terror and chaos of the original, front and centre.

 

Resting in the floating spaces of regret with Purr

In Avenue Bliss, NYC’s Eliza Callahan and Jack Staffen (Purr) step inside of the unknowns of love and longing. The fourth track of of there 2020 record Like New seems like an all too confident statement and that may be because the word ‘bliss’ can be subjective, if not all together ephemiral. With this sentiment in mind, Purr explore chords changes, anticipations and instrumentation that reflect a passing emotional scale from eternal love to high school heartbreak and underneath the confident but detuned rhythmic guitar parts, shifting organ arpeggiation and ever buoyant bass, there is a tone that reveals itself in full flourish. This tone is never more evident than in the fantastically dazzling chorus line. Staffens falsetto here, equaled by the shimmering open synthesizer harmony, plays in that longing space and the duality of emotional structures solidifies the existence of the scale. As an example of melodic interest and perhaps even more so, therapeutic intent, ‘Avenue Bliss’ gives us the good news that respite from confusion and pain can sometimes bring clarity. Until then, rest in the regret and take what you can from the experience.

 

The House Of Gucci Trailer Is Way More Intense Than It Has Any Right To Be

What do you get when you combine The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Succession, and we suppose some high fashion? You get the trailer for The House Of Gucci. Adam Driver expanding his already ludicrously impressive range, Lady Gaga gunning for that second Oscar, and holy hell Jared Leto looks unrecognizable. We’re keeping an eye on this one.

 

WTF is going on in this trailer for Lamb???

It’s a movie trailer kinda week over at MR Weekly. Last one up is for the -uhh we think horror?- film from A24, nebulously titled Lamb. What… is happening here? The best we can surmise is a grieving couple becomes convinced that one of the recently born lambs on their farm may in fact be their part human child, and they decide to raise it as such. As one can guess, ohhhh no the other lambs on the farm don’t like that. Is that it? This is from the studio that brought us Hereditary and Midsommar so let’s all get prepared to get mind fucked by this one.

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MIDRANGE WEEKLYdavid mcleod ringuettecatholic church, residential schools, Trump, Ghostbusters, House of Gucci, Lamb, PurrComment