The Whore Derv of Canada

Subscribe in a reader

Here at the invisible truth, we are embarking upon a new chapter. For the next few weeks, or until we get bored with it, or until you help me blow it up into the next interweb sensation and I can quit grad school, we will be devoting a virtual award to various Canadians who we would like to see receive a public spanking. The title of this award is the Whore Derv, a play on both the prestigious Order of Canada awards, and Hors D'ouevres, little bits of deliciousness that can serve as an appetizer for deeper thought. Plus, the award recognizes the extent to which the recipient is willing to really put his or her ass out there on the not-so-free market and compromise most things decent in humanity. The award also recognizes the Darwin Awards as a precursor, although we at the Invisible Truth think it is much more fair to mock the living than the dead, because the living at least have a chance to defend themselves. In the next week or so, I will be working on designing the icon to represent the award, like a little Oscar, only it will be a sexified slutty dervish.

No offense is intended, of course, to those hardworking sex-workers who continue to be denied legitimacy in Canada because of whitebread bourgeois pseudo morality. Too left, you say? We say you're being too stubborn or stupid to think outside of that whole ridiculous spectrum in the first place! Go left, er, I mean West, young thing. Let's not be coy about the whole situation here. You ARE a THING. As soon as you sell your labour on the market, boom! You ARE a THING among other things.

We at The Invisible Truth are looking for both suggestions and submissions. If you want to submit a Whore Derv award speech, we would love to read it and consider it, although I will not guarantee you I will publish it. And if you want to lampoon a figure on the left, that's fine too, but make it funny and intelligent.

Suggestions, queiries, and submissions (in .doc format please) can be sent to trevor.cunnington@gmail.com

Busan Marketplace

The Guitar

Subscribe in a reader

La Guitar





I am the head held high, the invasion of aspirations to become part of the world, to catch up with its spinning; I will the mysticism of movement, the self-love of grace, the lovesick bliss of moons too subtle to behold; I move not only bodies, but souls, the emotions in them kicking and straining to the sound of fingers sea-sawing across ore dredged up from the earth and stretched into strings that sing into the anti-matter of the universe and draw out its anti. The air holds the memory of each of our positions for a moment before it disappears into the warm sheath of metabolism. I am the pleasure given unto people by the empty body of trees sacrificed to the health of a community, the dark cloud spreading around the head of the player, on which we can dance to remember the reasons we are.

drawing by Cecil Carriere, Paris. Prose poem by Trevor Cunnington, Toronto.

Against Atheism, Chapter 2

 Subscribe in a reader

4. Canada was the third nation in the world to legalize homosexual marriage, and churches were important in the movement to legalize same-sex marriage, thanks to Reverend Hawkes and Cheri Dinovo, who both performed same-sex marriages before they were recognized by law. And this is far from the only progressive movement in which churches have been invaluable. Take for example, the advocacy of the Anglican Church for the Lubicon, who have had their land claims violated by the greedy pursuit of oil in Alberta. Canada has been criticized by a United Nations working group on this account. Or take the recent stance of the United Church on behalf of beleaguered Palestine against the expansionist and colonial Israeli state-enterprise. And before the knee-jerk charge of anti-semitism can be leveled against me for praising that stance, remember the Jews against the Occupation (www.jewsagainsttheoccupation.org). In other words, I think there is considerable evidence that churches have done lots of work to further the cause of social justice in the world. Pray tell, why should I, who values human rights and social justice, give credence and legitimacy to a doctrine that attacks the very source and motivation for this social justice work?

5. I cringe to think what would happen to the most vulnerable members of our own society should atheism continue succeeding in its relentless war against religion. The anti-poverty movement has constantly been ministered by churches from the founding of the Salvation Army, to countless church-administered soup kitchens. Who, after all, feeds the poor in our urban centres? In large part, it is Churches. Again, the atheist attack on religious doctrine fails to take into account the vital aspects of church practice. In other words, what churches do is as important as what its members believe. The implications of the gradual erosion of churches as social institutions are far-reaching, and I think the success of atheism in undermining churches has some very unpleasant and as yet unexplored social Darwinist and eugenic tendencies, such as the elimination of the aforementioned impoverished, vulnerable urban citizens. Furthermore, Harvard professor John Putnam has recognized that the decline in church participation has contributed to the erosion of social Capital, which McGill University ethics professor Margaret Somerville characterizes as “embedded trust” – “how much confidence people have in one another. Higher social capital correlates with fewer social problems.” (Lorimer, Gasher, & Skinner 2008). Churches, above and beyond any kind of doctrine, provide a social context for the building of community, and for that alone they are valuable.

6. Science and Religion are not mutually exclusive. This also refers to the aforementioned naïve view of history that some atheists seem to harbor. The antagonism between them is a relatively recent phenomenon. Some of the greatest scientists ever were also devout believers, among them Einstein, Newton, and Avicenna. Indeed, some of the early natural history tomes were published by Church organizations, such as The Life of an Insect: An Account of Insect Habits and Manners (1850), which was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Mind you, there is a very Christian flavor to this text, but it does feature empirical observation and experimentation as methods to treat its objects of study.

Against Atheism, Chapter 1.5

Subscribe in a reader

3. Many atheists have not even bothered to engage with theological scholarship and/or liturgical hermeneutics. This is especially true of subcultures that systematically misidentify the exoteric readings of scripture as somehow essential to religion, such as the gay press, for example. As a gay man, I certainly sympathize with their attacks on hatred emanating from certain religious groups, religious groups that usually emphasize exoteric, or literal, scriptural interpretation. But it is a false generalization to take this hate and turn it back on all manifestations of religion, rather than the specific groups that promote hate against queers. Hate has never been an appropriate response to hate very successfully. Dear gay press: such a thing as queer theology actually exists, and better than that, it is a fairly sophisticated and positive phenomenon.. Spiritual scriptures are not immune to the diversity of interpretation that characterizes all language. Furthermore, consciousness itself is historical; it does not remain static through time, and it is through consciousness that the act of interpretation occurs. Please, for the sake of peace on earth, and harmony amongst human beings, let us level our anger and vengeance against the people who promote hate, rather than hastily dismiss and vituperate against multi-leveled spiritual verse and narrative that has been utterly de-contextualized from its historical and cultural origins by both fundamentalists, who tend to take the bible literally, and some atheists, who likewise take it literally and condemn it on this literal interpretation.

Against Atheism (Chapter 1)

Subscribe in a reader

Reasons I hate atheism (from a former atheist)

1. 1. In atheist argumentation, the elevation of science to a good-in-itself, when it should never be a for-itself phenomenon, is profoundly disturbing. While the creationist’s evasion of evolution is bordering on delusional, many atheists who flog the dead evolutionary horse have a distorted view of science themselves. Science is not an ethos; it is a method. According to philosopher of science, Karl Popper, as a method science requires both verifiability and falsifiability. While I think verifiability itself is sufficient in many cases, Mr. Popper contends that falsifiability is of the essence of the method. As such, because evolution as a theory cannot be falsified in its macro-incarnations (the pop-sci dictum that we come from fishes), macroevolution evades the truth claim of the null hypothesis, and as such is not science according to Mr. Popper’s strict definition. It can, however, be verified and falsified in micro-incarnations, such as the famous moths in industrial English towns whose colour darkened and then lightened in a few generations, an adaptive camouflage according to the levels of pollution, which were sky-high by the end of the nineteenth centuries and substantially reduced through the seventies, following the cultural shift inaugurated in part by Rachel Carson’s environmental consciousness-raising classic Silent Spring. The way atheists wield distortions of evolutionary theory like weapons is distinctly unpalatable. The tendency of them to offer science as the appropriate substitute for religion is potentially dangerous in the sense that science unhampered by humanist values (which often find their origin in religion itself) has led to horrors such as the Nazi experiments, and the Japanese Manchurian human experiments, to say nothing of the atomic bomb itself.

2. 2. The stacked-deck fallacy is a structural characteristic of atheist arguments about the tendency of religion to generate conflict. That is, they point to religion as a root cause of war, which takes a very naïve view of history. That The Crusades, for example, were instigated by Christians against Muslims and vice versa is a popular bit of evidence they like to use, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the threat to the West represented by jihadist manifestations of Islam. Other motives for such conflicts, such as control over extremely strategic areas for global trade (such as Spain, Morocco, and the Middle East) are either summarily ignored or dismissed. Furthermore, the religious inspiration of figures such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has spent his life trying to heal the racial rift in South Africa and above all create peace and fellow-feeling, is conveniently ignored. That is, atheists often fail to take account of the religious inspiration taken by people who do great things for humanity, specifically with regards to creating peace rather than war. Their refusal to consider evidence that contradicts their argument is profoundly unscientific, a paradox considering their elevation of science as the appropriate replacement to religion.

The Pigeons

Subscribe in a reader

Pasek left a newspaper full of rice for the neighbourhood pigeons to peck at. His neighbour, Srinvatti, an East Indian grocer, loathed the pigeons because they shit all over the sidewalk in front of his store. Pasek understood the situation; every time Srinvatti went out and saw the cooing mass, he would swear loudly, and lately he had taken to jumping up and down on the spot and chasing the birds away with a broom.

Pasek felt only the slightest bit of remorse after the first fit that Srinvatti threw, after which he regarded his neighbour’s perturbation with an ironic smile. He didn’t continue feeding the pigeons out of spite; he merely enjoyed the sounds of their cooing close-by as he worked. That, and he was aware that birds often fell dependent on those that fed them, like the geese in the park who stayed the winter when people started feeding them, but died when the feeding sessions were discontinued.

As he went back into the store to do the daily inventory, the familiar swell of bird contentment accompanied him. He heard Srinvatti come out and start cursing his name, knowing that if he went outside right now, Srinvatti would smile his biggest “Hey neighbour, how goes it today?” smile without batting an eyelid.

He heard the invective stop suddenly. A moment later, Srinvatti redoubled his efforts to shoo the birds away with a torrent of oaths and by the swishing he heard, Pasek presumed the broom had been fetched. Pasek firmly strode to his own front door, infuriated with Srinvatti. Srinvatti had done the same thing for years, and it had never gotten under his skin like this before. Now his skin trilled and crawled with indignity. He opened his door abruptly, barely missing Srinvatti's stooped, bulky frame. Srinvatti's loose-fitting red pants swirled around the purple and irridescent vermilion speckled pigeons, erupting higgledy-piggledy in half-flights all around him.
Srinvatti swung around, his body bolt erect, and he stared sullenly at Pasek like a child caught lighting a newspaper on fire.

“Ach, why you always shoo birds away?”
“Dese piles of shit, it drives dee customers away. No one wants to step through bird shit when they’re shopping for nice sound.”
“Well I have store here too, and who could mind such creatures?”
“My customers complain. Customers always right.”
“Why don’t you come tell me you not like me to feed the pigeons?”

The corner of Srinvatti's mouth lifted in an uncertain, barely controlled sneer, but he didn’t answer. Pasek sensed that Srinvatti enjoyed madly sweeping away the small flock on some level. It never occurred to him to tell his neighbour the fondness he had for the birds.

Hyundai Department Store, Masan

Subscribe in a reader

Commerce Court SEO: Elephant in the Room

Subscribe in a reader

Freud and the Death of Celebrity

 Subscribe in a reader

Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite. The sheer volume of news dedicated to the deaths of these celebrities would sink the titanic easily. Oh right, the newspaper is dead; everyone gets their news in the immaterial world of the interweb. My laptop weighs like eight pounds. After carrying it around on my back for a year, I stopped because I was getting neck and back pains. Not so immaterial after all, eh? More to the point, what does this recent obsession with not just celebrity, but recently dead celebrity say about our hyper-mediated culture?

Michael Jackson’s death overloaded the internet, stretching its gargantuan bandwidth to the limit. Last week, 5 of the top 5, and 7 of the top 10 selling albums in Toronto were by Michael Jackson. The day he died, at least that many of twitter’s famous trending topics were dedicated to the man, the myth, the legend. The resurgent popularity of Michael Jackson pedophilia jokes aside, the outpouring of grief and love for one of the people who helped shatter the race barrier in popular music was astounding and nigh-impossible to avoid or ignore. I refuse to dispute his importance, or his talent.

Freud might say in one of his casual moments that celebrities are the externalized ideal egos of the masses. We project what we want for ourselves onto these porcelain deities to remind ourselves that our dreams our possible, achievable. Like latter-day Pygmalions, we animate celebrities with our own hopes, fears, anxieties, and desires. After this magic spell is cast, we mimic their style, hoping for a piece of their fame and glamour in our own comparatively drab lives, as the popularity of Farrah Fawcett’s Charlie’s Angels hairdo attests to. When they slip, we revel in their misfortune out of spite, envy, and ultimately because it is not us falling so dramatically. If they recover, we are reminded of the strength of the human spirit, and vicariously it gives us strength for our own personal struggles.

Yet they are not uniformly ideal egos, as the widespread derision of Michael Jackson before he died attests to, excepting of course his hordes of loyal fans. Alas, some of his fans participated in the derision as well. Or consider Brittney Spears, a perfect negative role model; we can comfort ourselves with our paltry little lives because of the deforming effects of celebrity that seem so apparent after tales of her doomed relationship with K-fed and the subsequent custody brouhaha, or after tales of Gary Coleman’s meteoric descent from household imago to security guard. Ideal egos and scapegoats for our own underachievement, perhaps?

The obsession with their deaths can range from cashing in (note the rogue venders hawking Jackson T-shirts in the streets), the will-to-immortalize our ideal egos, or another occasion to celebrate, simple and plain. However, the pre-emption of living celebrities by the dead recently, the eclipse of the vital by the moribund, suggests something a little more sinister. In the death of our ideal ego, do we perhaps recognize a piece of ourselves dying? Michael Jackson died before his comeback; before he died he tried auctioning off some of his belongings to raise money for debts in Las Vegas. The bids for his gloves remained low: $100-$500. Farrah Fawcett died after a excruciating bout of cancer; no comeback lurked around the corner for her. But we still have episodes of Charlie’s Angels on retro tv stations and the Thriller LP continues to pump out Jackson’s sublime falsetto punctuations in clubs and homes. But we have invested these porcelain deities with our displaced humanity, and gone they are. Is this a wake-up call, an invocation of carpe diem, or rather the pathological avoidance of our own mortality through the ongoing immortalization of our ideal egos? Or perhaps it is the death drive usurping the pleasure principle in and through the commodification of celebrity itself, disarticulated from the living and breathing beings that produce it.