August 14

I played a “best of the open stage” feature at the Free-Love tonight, as one of four acts.

The room seats around fifty people, and was absolutely packed. A trio of girls from Woodsworth who came there specifically to (platonically) hear me were lucky to get the last table.

Those monthly “best of” nights don’t typically draw such an impressive crowd, but half of the audience was there just to hear their relative sing, in Spanish.

Since we wanted to keep them all around for as long as possible (for upping the venue’s food and drink sales), the host and I decided it would be best to put the Hispanic guy on last.

What that meant was that his numerous, obviously fertile relatives, of all shapes, sizes, and ages—including one baby, and a couple of teenage hotties—had around an hour and a half in which to eat, drink, and be merry, before their “native son” came on.

There are, in hindsight, predictable differences between the respectful folk-music audiences one typically encounters in whitebread North America, versus a roomful of cheerful, boisterous Hispanics (and their remarkably vocal baby) who are really only there to sing along with one of their compadres. In Spanish.

I went on as the third act, and basically, I could hardly hear myself play.

The host tried to compensate, but if he turned the house volume up too loud, it started screeching feedback. So then he cut the high frequencies down, which prevented our ears from exploding, but also kept the muddy sound from being audible above the roar of a room half-full of fertile immigrants/tourists Spanishing (and crying) at the top of their lungs.

As Basil Fawlty once said, “God only knows how they ever got an Armada together.”

So I just did seven songs, and then went to have a couple of beers and dinner—in that specific order—in the front room.

But hey, that’s Hispanic culture; and in a multicultural society, what can you do but admire and respect it?

Even if they don’t return the favor.

At least they bought lots of food and drinks to support the venue, tipped well, and put a lot of money into the Pay What You Can jar, though.

Kidding! The recommended donation was $5; each of the four acts went home with around $10 in change. My guess is that if the crew of the Santa Maria paid out at all, they just did it privately afterwards.

But hey, that’s “their culture.” And we’re multicultural.

Multiculturalism has actually been an official policy of the Canadian government since the early 1970s.

Have you ever wondered why?

The bill which brought that policy into law was really just a ploy by our fox-in-the-henhouse prime minister, Pierre Trudeau (when his flower-girl wife wasn’t busy partying with the Rolling Stones), to diminish the “distinct society” claims of the French-speakers in Quebec, by enshrining the distinctiveness of all cultures. Trudeau actually thought so little of the “accomplishment” that he didn’t even mention it in his memoirs.

If you want to know why multiculturalism, even in principle, creates conflict rather than tolerance and acceptance among its culturally distinct groups, just read up on Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment.

Robbers Cave? Wuzzat?

In 1954, Muzafer Sherif performed a classic social-psych study called the Robbers Cave Experiment, in a Boy Scout camp in Oklahoma.

With Sherif and his associates posing as the camp counselors, they brought two buses up, with eleven boys on each, and placed the youths in cabins far enough apart that each group didn’t even know the other existed until the evening of the sixth day at the camp. The two groups of randomly assigned, middle-class white Protestant boys spontaneously and independently decided to name themselves, choosing the names “Rattlers” and “Eagles” for their groups.

Even prior to having met their “enemies” face-to-face, the tribes each developed their own status-hierarchies, and their own cultures and traditions, with conformist pressures being exerted on their members to uphold those. The Rattler group further “speculat[ed] with resentment that ‘outsiders’ had been” using their hideout, i.e., were encroaching on “their” territory.

In the second week, Sherif deliberately brought those two tribes together in a “friction phase,” of team sports and other competitive activities. Additional intergroup conflicts quickly emerged in that competitive environment—ranging from simple name-calling to vandalism and fisticuffs ... and up to the request for “separate but equal fireworks for the Fourth of July.” As Sherif and his colleagues observed:

When the groups competed for goals which could be attained by only one group, to the dismay and disappointment of the other, hostile deeds and unflattering labels developed in relation to one another. In time, derogatory stereotypes and negative attitudes toward the out-group were crystallized.

As David Berreby further notes, in Us And Them:

Even though they had never heard of Rattlers and Eagles until they invented the names, the boys attached a full array of moral feelings to the human kinds they’d made. At the height of their war, campers in each group saw their enemies as cheaters and cowards—not as kids from another team but as kids from a different morality....

Robbers Cave was a microcosmic version of twentieth-century political life, its two cabins arranged like the two races of America’s color line or the two sides of the Cold War.

All you have to do is replace the “Rattlers” and “Eagles” groups with “Red and Yellow, Black and White” ones, to see how little sense it makes to encourage the members of those classes to retain their group-identities (i.e., their differences) as points of pride. For, that will only create conflict, even without any explicit competition, and even when the groups have plenty of opportunity for “communication” and goodwill contact. That has nothing to do with race or ethnicity or culture as such; it’s just inherent in-group/out-group dynamics. (Any racial, ethnic or cultural tensions will certainly make the situation worse, but it was already more than bad enough in Sherif’s experiment even with just a couple of groups of monochromatic white youths.) All of that has been known since the mid-1950s!

How did they get the two groups of boys back on good terms with each other? In the same way that the British Labour party was formed, in 1906: By having them work together in cooperation to achieve a common goal that they couldn’t accomplish on their own. The Scouts had to work together to unblock the water supply, pull a broken-down truck back to camp, and pool their money for a movie they all wanted to watch. Comparably, in the case of British Labour, “representatives of its warring factions spent an hour moving their conference table into a larger room.” And thus, the Labour Party was born.

If it hadn’t been for that table....

Yet, those British politicians a century ago still had it easy: they were just a bunch of white males cooperating, so they didn’t have to face any additional big hurdles in racial or sexual (or religious) diversity, in the momentous task of moving a table from one room to another. It’s not so easy to avoid letting stereotypes and prejudices get in the way when you throw blacks, Asians, women, Jews and gays—with each group being fiercely proud of its origin and orientation—into the mix. So how do you do it?

More successful than telling children not to be prejudiced against, say, the Christian kids, is persuading them not to see Christian kids [or “Eagles,” or “Rattlers”], because another set of human kinds [i.e., a different set of criteria for establishing in-group/out-group membership] is more relevant. In the 1970s, the American social psychologist Elliot Aronson devised the “Jigsaw classroom.” His approach places students in small groups and forces them to work together on tasks, for example, learning about twentieth-century history. Racial, ethnic, gender, and school-clique boundaries don’t count for the task: The kids must work together to master their subject. The idea is that these preclass human kinds fade in importance and the kids’ shared work comes to the fore.

One of the few places in this world where you naturally get an approximately Jigsaw-classroom approach is on the sports field. There, no one on any given team can win unless everyone on that team does well, and people are seen foremost not for their race or ethnic background but rather as the human-kind of “football players,” etc. That sort of thing is the only way to reliably build cooperation rather than mere in-group/out-group competition, regardless of the criteria being used to separate the groups.

If you want to find the landmarks for racial integral in North America, look for when the color bar was broken in each of the major sports, starting with baseball in 1946. That may even have begun as just a rich white, constipated team-owner figuring out that he could win more games with the best (e.g.) second-baseman from the Negro Leagues this season than with the old, marginally skilled white guy at the same position. As the Dodgers’ manager Leo Durocher put it, speaking against resistance to the inclusion of Jackie Robinson on his team:

I don’t care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin’ zebra. I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you can’t use the money, I’ll see that you are all traded.

Those free-market pressures of competition made it too costly for baseball’s owners and managers to keep discriminating against skilled ballplayers on the basis of their race. More importantly, though, the same racial integration brought the sports fans—and what male in North America isn’t a fan of some major sport?—into a position where, if their team was to win, the “black guy at second base” had to do his job well. So, to cheer against him, or spitefully hope for him to fail, would have meant “cutting off their noses to spite their face.” Even if the black guy wasn’t a “hero” for them to identify with—and generally speaking, he wouldn’t have been, especially for white adults half a century ago—they had to hope that he did well, if their team was going to win.

The nation-wide effects of that cooperation, and of “our team” in-grouping on the sports field, cannot be overestimated.

In contrast to the Jigsaw classroom and the sports field, and far from teaching us not to see Christians, Jews, blacks, Chinese and Muslim people (etc.) in the world around us, one of the essential points of multiculturalism is that we should see each of those groups ... and then simply respect and tolerate them all equally. Well, good luck with that dream! Obviously, it’s not going to work!

Equally obviously, one could draw the in-group/out-group boundary based on any shared/excluded characteristic. But the very first impressions we get about others typically come through our sense of vision—we see them on the street or across the room before we hear, smell, touch or (after a few dates, if all goes well) taste them. (Hmm, I wonder how Jennifer’s doing....) Those initially noted characteristics therefore include their skin color, ethnic group, sex, and body type.

When your country has an official policy which actually encourages you to see others in terms of any of those shallow attributes, it is basically a policy of “first impressions.” And that immediately gets in the way of looking beyond those external characteristics to see an individual rather than a stereotypical member of a group:

Depending on stereotype, ensuring that ethnic groups will preserve their distinctiveness in a gentle and insidious form of cultural apartheid, multiculturalism has done little more than lead an already divided country down the path to further social divisiveness.... [It has] heightened our differences rather than diminished them ... and it is leading us into a divisiveness so entrenched that we face a future of multiple solitudes with no central notion [e.g., of a common nationality] to bind us.

Because, you see, you’re not “Canadian,” you’re rather “Chinese-Canadian” or “Caribbean-Canadian” or “Irish-Canadian.” That is, whether you like it or not, you’re pigeon-holed into a group based merely on your race or ethnicity—which you can’t do anything about, even if you wanted to—rather than your shared national identity, or your value as an individual.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, we’re now being encouraged to divide ourselves by religion too. At least, that’s what the term “Muslim-Canadian” seems to indicate.

By parity of argument, then, we must also have Catholic-Canadians, Jewish-Canadians, Baha’i-Canadians, etc. Or, more accurately, Irish-Catholic-Canadians, Italian-Catholic-Canadians, and the like. Each of them a “distinct culture,” worth preserving.

I’m an Agnostic-Canadian myself, some days even tending toward Atheist-Canadian.

I used to be a Yogi-Canadian, but that was back when I was following an East-Indian-West-American guru, who ironically believed in uniting Kipling’s East and West—albeit on the basis of a wholly fraudulent, woo-woo spirituality—rather than splitting them farther apart.

And what follows, completely predictably, from such a divisive multicultural policy, coupled with excessive levels of immigration (and hence, cultural dis-integration)?

Canada, long considered a model of integration, won’t be forever immune from the kind of social disruption that has plagued Europe, where marginalized immigrant communities have erupted in discontent, with riots [by black Muslim “youths”] in the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005.

To which one can only wonder out loud: “What Would Ann Coulter Do?”

Honestly, when new minority immigrants are being encouraged to retain their traditional “Rattler” cultural identities in the midst of a majority “Eagle” group at our national “summer camp,” rather than to identify as all being “Camp Wobegoners,” how much knowledge of half-century-old, freshman social psychology does it take to predict that they’ll end up feeling excluded and marginalized, and ultimately react violently? Out-group exclusion and marginalization are significant enough problems with human beings in any context. But when your country’s official policy can only act to support those same dynamics, you really are asking for trouble.

Official multiculturalism, the automatic classification of citizens according to race and ancestry, was a bad idea in the beginning ... and in time will probably be seen as one of the gigantic mistakes of recent public policy in Canada.

The American “melting pot” idea was always a better way of doing things, even if it only “really worked” for WASPs immigrating to the U.S., and even then for much lower annual percentages of immigration than the United States and Canada currently have. At least it forced people to assimilate and learn English rather than taking easy refuge in their transplanted “traditional” communities. But neither approach can work to produce an integrated society if the country’s level of immigration is too high, as Canada’s is.

Vancouver right now has Chinese enclaves where the parents commute to work in other parts of the city, being very well integrated into the existing society. But their children still all go to the local school, where they talk to each other only in Chinese. So, we have second-generation Canadians growing up today who aren’t learning English in school. What kind of future do they have in this country ... unless they want to try and grow that Chinese-only enclave even larger?

Our Liberal Party supports high levels of immigration because they think it ups their voter base. The Conservatives support high levels because it drives wages down. And the feel-good, social democratic, union-backing NDP likes it because they’re so economically incompetent they (i) don’t understand that it’s transferring income from poor workers to rich employers, and (ii) don’t even realize that companies will contract-out to cheap labor rather than deal with unions full of people who are too stupid and too lazy to work real jobs for a competitive wage.

Picture a bunch of sleepy teddy bears getting together on a lazy Saturday morning for a tea party ... and deciding to start a political party instead. That, right there, is the level of intellectual rigor you should expect from the NDP.

So it’s not just the I.T. industry in Canada that’s gotten fucked by our politicians; it’s happening right across the board. In fact, less than 25% of new immigrants to Canada today are skilled workers; the rest are unskilled relatives. It’s called “family reunification,” and it’s killing Canada just as surely as it’s killing America. (The U.S. has the same foolish policy.)

The Liberals and the NDP believe we should be accept-ing new immigrants corresponding to 1% of the country’s population, annually—i.e., a whopping 23% over 25 years, or roughly one generation. Those sheer numbers, as with the influx of legal and illegal Mexicans into the southwestern states of the USA, are a guaranteed way to end up with a very conflicted and non-integrated society, even outside of official multiculturalism. That would be true even if the bulk of our (and the Americans’) new immigrants were the cream rather than the lowbrow dregs of other countries.

Worse, most of those new Canadian immigrants move to only one of three major cities—Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto—with 43% of new immigrants moving to the Greater Toronto Area. Thus, three-quarters of T.O.’s population growth comes from (mostly unskilled) immigration. And, although it would surely surprise the loveable teddy bears running the NDP—their heads all full of stuffing—that has the rather predictable effect of simultaneously driving housing prices sharply up, and wages down, for both skilled and unskilled workers in the GTA.

Of course, the influx of young immigrants keeps our aging population young. Except that younger immigrants make up only a small proportion of the total population, so they don’t actually have much of an effect on the average age.

Still, immigrants create jobs, and just by being here they increase the demand for goods and services, and for people to make and deliver those goods and services.

But, um, they also occupy many of the jobs they create. So the claim that “immigrants create jobs” is actually pretty meaningless. And if they’re working for minimum wage, they’re not gonna have a whole lotta discretionary moolah to blow on non-essential goods and services. Plus, the funding for their free health care has to come from somewhere, and it’s not coming from their welfare checks....

Nevertheless, the real value of unskilled immigrants is that they do the jobs which no one else will do.

No, wait—they don’t do that either. They just work menial jobs for less than our native-born dropouts would do them for. And by doing that, they not only put our own low-IQ pig-fuckers out of work from their slaughterhouse and construction jobs, they also hinder the introduction of machines which could automate the same category of work (e.g., picking oranges, taking tickets in parking garages, etc.). Which, of course, also retards the creation of the medium-skill jobs that would exist for manufacturing and maintaining those machines, and the high-skilled work of designing the tech toys in the first place. That is, cheap imported labor decreases the pressure on us to become more productive.

Overall, if immigration created jobs and wealth, wouldn’t Toronto be the wealthiest city in the world, with the lowest unemployment rate anywhere on the face of the planet? Well, it isn’t.

But at least we’re only screwing up our own country with hopelessly naïve ideologies and politically correct policies that can’t possibly work, right? Ah, unfortunately, ‘tis not so: Australia’s multiculturalism policy (instituted in 1973) was inspired by Canada’s (1971).

You know you’re in bad shape, Oz, when you can’t even come up with your own foolish ideas, and you instead have to go around borrowing dismally wrong notions from others.

We will also, as of 2009, have a “black-focused alternative school” in Toronto, teaching subjects from an Afrocentric perspective rather than the traditional “Eurocentric” one. (The plan is for it to not be technically segregated along racial lines ... except that who but a black kid who was flunking out of the regular school system would want to go to a school with an explicit Afrocentric bias?)

No word yet on whether the curriculum will include the established “fact” that Jesus was black; but with an “Afrocentric” slant to their history, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if it did.

Of course, if the “separate but equal” Afrocentric schools for black kids in Toronto work out, the next step really should be “separate but equal” Afrocentric seats for them in the back of the city buses. Where, you know, they’ll be free to cultivate their self-esteem, and feel pride in their heritage, without interference by hegemonic, successful whites, Asians or Jews, etc. You know, the ones who didn’t need to go to a “special school” to make it through grade twelve.

The thing is, where I went to school in the ’70s it was only the coolest kids who got to sit in the back of the bus. In fact, if you could manage to sit in the rear couple of rows, behind the tire hump, that’s pretty much how you knew you were cool.

So I personally don’t see what was so bad about making Negros sit in back in Mississippi, etc. On the contrary, if someone had forced even the cool whites to sit at the front with the rest of the dorks and geeks, I can see how that would be humiliating.

But that’s just the white, Christian culture I grew up in. And thankfully, because we live in a multicultural society, its values are widely recognized today as being as good as those of any other culture.

Aren’t they?

Regardless, with any luck future, segregated high-school sports meets in Toronto will prepare our city’s disadvantaged black youths, if not to function in a mixed-race society, then at least for baseball’s Negro Leagues, where they may look forward to long and fruitful careers, barnstorming through the South. Satchel Paige would be proud.

Outside of the sports field, there’s actually at least one other situation where you can get an approximately Jigsaw environment: In the military, during times of war. There we’re all on the same team, and we need each other to do well and to discover and share information competently and freely, regardless of our respective races or ethnic ancestries. It’s the only way our team can win against a real foe.

As usual, though, multiculturalism throws a wrinkle into the game. Because, should Canada ever find itself in a global war, many of our Chinese-Canadians would go home to China, our Russian-Canadians would go back to Russia, and our Iranian-Canadians would return to Iran.

And with that predictable outcome of an irretrievably stupid federal policy which encourages our visible minorities to keep one foot in Canada and the other back in their native culture and homeland—or at least in their ancestors’ homeland—a significant chunk of our population would end up fighting against us.

How’s that for gratitude? Not exactly what the people who founded this country and defended it in two world wars had in mind, is it?