Mallam’s Museum for Misfits by Teresa Mallam/PG Daily News

We are, for good or bad — people with a past.

There is no escaping this fact, erasing it from living memory, or rewriting our history books. 
It’s not that simple. 

No morality police squad, cancel culture club or “me too” tag team can change the fact that many men in history, who we now vilify for all sorts of reasons, were once held in high esteem.

Powerful and influential, these men did things, said things, and steadfastly ascribed to beliefs not tolerated in today’s society. To wit: John A. Macdonald, founder of Confederation  —  and architect of residential schools. 

Like a disgraced general, stripped of rank and ribbons, a statue of Macdonald was removed from its footings at City Hall, Victoria, in 2018.  Last year, his likeness was trashed in Montreal,  toppled by protest groups, its head decapitated. 

Then, in an ironically, nostalgic nod to the old adage, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” the past came back to haunt Justice Matthew Begbie.

In New Westminster, a bronze statue of Begbie, located beside the courthouse, was removed. It was voted down, literally, by city council in May 2019, following public outcry.

At issue, was the fact that Judge Begbie had presided over a trial in 1864 which led to the wrongful hanging of five Tsilhqot’in First Nation chiefs. The statue’s removal is viewed by many as a small step towards reconciliation.

So posthumously, these two men have fallen from grace, and, in absentia, have been found guilty of crimes. Not by a 12-person jury of their peers, but by a new and enlightened generation. 

I fear this modern day reckoning can be risky. In the just and noble move to make things right,  the pendulum must not be allowed to swing too far, or the clock will stop. 

More and more, I see once very fair, thoughtful, “go to” people turning into morality muppets and potty mouthed “posting pundits” — those who go online, on the attack, with their rude comments and damning opinions on just about everyone. 

What is happening to us?

I disagree with quasi grave robbers who disturb the rest of our long dead forefathers and subject them, after the fact, as if in effigy, to vile acts of vandalism, grotesque graffiti and smears of red paint. What good does that do?

I wonder if there might be a better way to dispense with unwanted public place statues, portraits and monuments of history’s men who, on revision, are deemed unworthy of tributes.

Rather than defacing and destroying lifeless statues, why not have a museum of misfits? 

All the replicas of shamed, displaced and disgraced former leaders, statesmen, historical figures and influencers (the list grows longer) could be housed together.

They could be on display in a grant-funded building in Ottawa, open to the public (during regular visiting hours) as a learning exhibit, with  scholarly explanation of why they’re included. 

There is support for such a notion.

A June, 2020 CTV News story suggests that some art historians think there’s a place for statues, monuments of famous (but flawed) luminaries, such as a museum serving as a teaching tool for this and future generations.

In my view, this is a very good idea.

And to this museum for misfits, I would add a non-lending library annex for all those banned, challenged, offending, and politically incorrect books for all ages.

In the adult section, there would be titles like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Brave New World, Lolita, Ulysses, and Satanic Verses. 

The children’s section would include The Giver, The Wonderful World of Oz, Are You There, God? and titles from Harry Potter, Babar the Elephant, along with new ones added to Hop in Pop and The Lorax from beleaguered Dr. Seuss’ books. 

Six in total. Titles no longer to be published, according to press releases this week, include The Cat’s Quizzer, If I Ran the Zoo and Scrambled Eggs; books that publishers have said contain “racist and insensitive imagery,”

As an early reader, and inhaler of many books, how I made it to adulthood remains a mystery, even to me. Maybe a time capsule will help.

Teresa Mallam is an award winning writer. Her credits include a Jack Webster Award of Distinction, BC Law Society Award for Excellence in Legal Reporting and Canadian Authors Association (CAA) award for Best Investigative Journalism, as well as several Black Press media  awards for her columns, court coverage and news features. This opinion piece was first published in Prince George Daily News.

LETTER TO EDITOR

Response by John Harris

My theory is this: We desecrate the statues, re-write the histories, and burn the books of those formerly considered virtuous, heroic and brilliant, because fashions of virtue change over time. We load sacrificial goats with the newly recognized sins of our ancestors (which are our sins because we are still benefitting from them), and we drive the goats into the wilderness.

We’ve always done it. My example above is from Leviticus 16, 21-22. Think of the Salem witch-hunters, of the Nazis burning the books of famous German Jews like Heinrich Heine and Franz Kafka, of the Taliban blowing up Buddha, of ISIL destroying the remnants of Persian, Greek and Roman civilizations, or of Victor Orban’s Hungarians taking over George’s Soros’s university and naming it after Attila the Hun (Soros being a Jew, Attila not).

Mallam uses John A. Macdonald and Matthew Begbie as local examples. They were terribly unjust towards people that our ancestors called “Indians” but that our “enlightened generation” (as Mallam puts it) refers to as First Nations. No matter the other virtues of our former heroes — Begbie ruled in favor of John Giscombe, a Black citizen of Barkerville, and Macdonald (though obviously a drunk, racist and thief) figured out how to bring the British colonies together and fence out the Americans, thus creating a safe place for Sitting Bull and thousands of American draft dodgers.

Mallam also lists cultural figures that have to be canceled — for the uninitiated, this means that you can’t in good conscience read their books anymore. They are Dr. Suess, James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. If you’ve been to university, you’d know that she could’ve added any number of other writers; postmodernist English professors started deconstructing the canon in the 1980s and it’s still going on. Shakespeare was deconstructed for racism (Othello, The Merchant of Venice), and sexism (The Taming of the Shrew). Recently, he’s on the hook for fatism too. In Henry IV, and V, he made fun of Falstaff, “the fat knight.” In fact, everyone on the traditional canon has been blacklisted; even if they escaped being sexist or racist, they are all guilty of cultural appropriation and mis-use of pronouns.

Mallam also could’ve looked at the ongoing Black Lives Matter witch-hunt, that has torched the reputations of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, both the Roosevelts, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi. Like all writers, all politicians are potentially on the blacklist.

Here’s the beauty of the Black Lives Matter approach; in the ecstatic rush of moral superiority that comes from taking down the statue of a racist, you lose your own sense of guilt. You forget that you are wearing clothes manufactured by slave labour in Bangladesh, that your car, computer, and cell are packed with rare earths mined by enslaved children in the Congo, that you eat food produced by migrant workers that regularly report (this is in Canada!) that they are treated like slaves, and that you live in a house on the unceded land of the Lheidli T’enneh, thus depriving them of their traditional lands and way of living, and forcing them to beg for alms from the government.

Therein lies the trouble with sacrificing goats and virgins, burning witches and canceling culture. Nobody is perfect. Eventually, if you acquire any success or prominence, they will come for you. That’s why Mallam’s Museum for Misfits is a great idea. As a bureaucratic (rather than violent) solution, it has a Canadian flavour. It’s also has a Canadian pragmatism to it. Our moral compass repositions; we drag all the statues and books of former misfits out of the Museum into the light of day; we drag the new misfits in; we save money.