GUYS!

Remember that hilarious story about the Parkdale gentrifiers? Did you think that after Jesse Brown tweeted the Parkdale Tinies that the story couldn't possibly get any funnier?



How long can Toronto keep a thing going, you might wonder. Surely not this long...

How my family came to be the most hated family in Toronto (at least for 24 hours)

By Julian Humphreys


You owe it to yourself and your lulz to click that link and read the whole thing. It is GLORIOUS. It is 10,383 words long. It quotes ADORNO AND GOETHE and my buddy Todd and I can't breathe through my tears. It is full of not-very-subtle digs at his wife and even worse digs at his editor, who really can't be blamed for not turning down this pile of comedy gold because tbh no one was really reading Toronto Life before and now everyone is in the hopes that there will be more of this kind of thing.

Some choice quotes:

"Back when I was in academia and enamoured by writers like Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, I was particularly in to the idea of origins, and where exactly we can trace origins back to."


"My mum emigrated to the UK in 1939 from Germany. Yes, that’s right, she was a Jew, or at least somewhat Jewish."


"[My counsellor] then proceeded to give me a lecture on cell biology, including how many bookshelves it would take to hold all the information contained in a single human cell. The lesson being, we are endlessly complex beings, and attempting to oversimplify both ourselves and the world is foolish."


"I did try to clean myself up at one point, attending a 10-day silent retreat in Southern Thailand. But the switch from partying on a Thai beach to sitting quietly for 12 hours a day in a Thai monastery was too dramatic, and I only lasted 5 days before I was back to Bangkok and their opiated grass."


"So let me explain what really went down during our reno from hell. Not that my wife mis-represented the facts – for the most part, she didn’t. But a) she was at home looking after our newborn for most of the year of our reno, so doesn’t know first-hand what really went on; b) she was constrained by a word limit of 4000 words; and c) she was working closely with an editor at Toronto Life, who clearly had his own agenda that overwhelmed her own."


"I had concerns about how I would come across in the piece, but I was prepared to put my ego aside for the sake of a good story and in support of my wife’s career. "


"Looking back on that telephone conversation now, I realize that Malcolm never did assure me that he would look out for my wife’s best interests."


"Although I could see the literary merit of these additions, a mean-spiritedness was entering into the article that was not in the original draft."


"I also didn’t like the photo because in reality my wife is much more attractive than she appears in that photo."


"Criticisms of capitalism presented by the bourgeoisie are nearly always duplicitous, masquerading as in solidarity with the proletariat while cutting off real protest at the knees. And this was exactly what was going on here. By seeming to sympathize with the downtrodden, Malcolm was hoping to humanize us just enough to avoid a revolution, while dehumanizing us enough to garner clicks."


"We could have called an ambulance, I guess, but that, in my mind, would have been a gross invasion of his privacy."


"My wife does, however, say that we were ‘a young family without a lot of money’ and whether this is true or not depends on what you consider ‘money.’"


"[O]n the one hand yes, I made some bad decisions. And yet we came out ahead. Was this luck? Or strategy?"


"It’s better to move forward without all the answers in place than to not move forward at all, an assumption best expressed in this quote attributed to Goethe..."

"His gift substantially changed my life, and I show my gratitude by honoring his generosity as best I can. I could have snorted $100,000 of cocaine, but instead used it to prepare myself, however tangentially, for a career in which I feel I make a positive difference."

Oh, just read the whole thing, trust me.

Bonus: Here is his Twitter.

Allow me to opine, if I might, on the deplorable state of the White workingman in our former colonies. With the abandonment of such venerable institutions such as the poorhouse and indentured servitude, it is apparent to all men of standing that the lower classes have forgotten both their place and their manners, and have become a species as alien to their betters as the Chinaman from the Orient.

Of late, the anarchist subversives have found sympathetic ears and blame the disparity between their sort and the propertied classes on the distant and uncaring attitudes of said propertied classes, but any man of decent breeding and education will recognize the treasonous mendacity of these statements. The problem, as always, lies in the moral degeneracy of the labouring classes. It may be illustrated in the poor habits of these unfortunates, who would sooner attend a cockfight or den of iniquity than a church pew.

I speak only of the White labourer. While it is true that the depravity of the Negro is an affront to our civilization, the affairs of the lesser races do not concern us. No, good sirs, it is the White workingman whose piteous plight I shall examine below.

Matrimony: In my day, a good number of Whites were married. It is most troublesome that, while gentlefolk continue to marry, the poors are content to engage in vice outside of the sanction of the Church.

Bastardry: The labouring classes continue to breed, whether joined in holy matrimony or otherwise. The result of this licentiousness, naturally, is a teeming mass of bastards living in squalid conditions in the slums, a problem compounded by misguided Child Labour laws that forbid factory owners from putting these unwanted wretches to work. Few among the fairer sex have even the common decency to perish in childbirth.

Industriousness: It seems to me that the poors in my day were a good bit more industrious. Why, in my sawmill, they would labour a good 16 hours a day for five shillings! There were never any complaints. When one of my employees severed a finger in his machine, he plugged the bleeding stump with cotton and kept on working, lest he be docked half an hour’s pay. The workingman of today expects a lunch, and even basic safety standards, and denied these, will kick up his feet and refused to work at all.

Crime: Possessing no industriousness, the workingman has become indistinguishable from the criminal rabble. It is my studied observation that the rate of crime is greater in the slum neighbourhoods of the labourer than it is in the estates of the gentry.

Devoutness: The workingman will no longer listen to his betters, or to the Good Book. Many labourers have ceased to attend church altogether. It is clear that the dire predicament of the lower classes owes much to the paucity of their prayers.

*

In my day, the workingman and the gentleman were not so different. While we lived in mansions and they in crowded tenement houses, and while they were far more likely to perish of consumption, the fabric of our great civilization remained intact. The degeneracy of the upper classes may, I daresay, also contribute to the cleaving of our social order; a good many of them have adopted curious habits no doubt borrowed from nefarious foreign influences. This lapse of judgment is most apparent in their exotic victuals, such as yoghurt and muesli.

*

What is the cause of this state of affairs? While the Whigs may lay blame squarely on the avarice of the aristocrat and businessman, it remains self-evident to any right-thinking gentleman that, rather, it is the workingman who is to blame for his own predicament. His decline has been aided by the folly of the suffragettes and reformers. His soul is in desperate need of salvation, a salvation that can be brought about only by the grace and wisdom of his betters. We must shun him for his vices and, in doing so, lead him back to the bosom of the Church. Only in doing so may our beloved colonies be redeemed.

Charles Murray on the "New American Divide." I may have paraphrased a bit.

Say what you like about public schools, ideological and historical underpinnings of, they are kind of useful institutions. They provide a basis of shared knowledge, and they bring together diverse social classes, ethnicities, and cultures. They allow working class parents to, well, work, and ensure that they don't go bankrupt funding their children's basic education. They're not perfect by any means, but in terms of social policy, they're a move in the right direction.

This seems so apparent to me that I'm always shocked when I have to defend the idea that there's such thing as a right to public education, or explain that there are powerful forces attempting to undermine said public education system, and supposed "compromises" like charter/voucher schools are part of that agenda. If more well-off kids are pulled from the public system, if two tiers or more tiers begin to form, then it's always the poorer children who suffer. One sees this all over the States, where the response to failing schools has been increased privatization, attacking the unions, and mass-firing teachers. Amazingly, this has not improved the public education system in the States. Funny that.

It's also a revelation, apparently, that propaganda films like Waiting for Superman* are part of the aforementioned agenda, or may have been funded or promoted by interests for whom the education and welfare of poor children is not actually a high priority. It's not difficult to see the links here—an educated, critically thinking working class is not really in the interests of the ruling class. And the education of rich children—the children of policy makers—will never be in any sort of real danger.

But there's a lot of noise and hand-wringing out there. So it's nice to see articles about the people who are generating this noise. Like—this is totally going to shock you—rich people.

Bill Gates, for example, has been spending quite a bit of money on standardized testing:

The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which developed the standards, and Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization coordinating the writing of tests aligned with the standards, have each received millions of dollars.

The Alliance for Excellent Education, another nonprofit organization, was paid $551,000 in 2009 “to grow support for the common core standards initiative,” according to the tax filings. The Fordham Institute got $959,000 to “review common core materials and develop supportive materials.” Scores of newspapers quoted Fordham’s president, Chester E. Finn Jr., praising the standards after their March 2010 release; most, including The New York Times, did not note the Gates connection.

In fact, billionaires seem to be quite active in promoting privatized education:

This rapid expansion of voucher programs is not occurring simply because of some grassroots uprising. A small clique of wealthy individuals and their foundations are pushing these pieces of legislation. The most prominent of these individuals are Dick and Betsy DeVos, the power couple who inherited their fortune from billionaire Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, Sr. In a speech before the Heritage Foundation in 2002, Dick DeVos explained that conservatives should start referring to public schools as "government schools" instead to undermine public support for them. The DeVos family has poured millions of dollars into the school choice movement, launching a variety of front groups, including but not limited to Children First America, the Alliance for School Choice (ASC), Kids Hope USA, and the American Federation for Children (AFC). AF C spent $820,000 -- the seventh-largest single PAC spender during the election -- in Wisconsin during the last election, a huge sum which included $40,000 donations to each of several Republicans who were elected and then proceeded to champion radical voucher legislation. Its clout was strong enough to bring Govs. Scott Walker (R-WI) and Tom Corbett (R-PA) together with former D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee together for a school choice event in Washington, D.C.

Needless to say, the "school choice" movement doesn't even do what it claims to do: raise educational standards. The article I linked to above cites statistics that suggest charter schools don't outperform public schools. This, even though they can cherry-pick students to weed out the very poor, the learning disabled, and English Language Learners. Lots of charter school success stories just so happen to take place in white, affluent communities. In a public school, the right to education for all students is the highest priority—it's incredibly hard to kick a kid out of a school, even when he or she doesn't want to be there, is disruptive, is violent, is failing, and so on. We are obligated to help everyone, and so, yeah, that drags down standardized test scores a bit. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile, or that we can't sometimes turn a struggling student around. Having that mandate, and that freedom, means that we can help ELL kids write and speak English fluently and help learning disabled kids work around their various challenges, even if they flunk the standardized tests a few times, without fear that if we keep them in our school, teachers will be fired because our average test scores are too low.

But Canadians just can't resist adopting models that have clearly failed in the U.S., so now Toronto is quietly considering bringing in "boutique" schools and even private-public partnerships, a way of quietly undermining public education that looks a bit more palatable to taxpayers. Our public schools are falling apart. There isn't enough money for books or computers. They're closing schools every year. Somehow, though, there's enough money for boys' and girls' academies, sports schools, and vocal music schools?

Thing is, there's an answer to pretty much every educational crisis. Our schools in Ontario never recovered from Harris' cuts in the mid-90s, and, like cuts to welfare, education funding never caught up with the costs. We know what improves education, for both rich and poor kids: smaller class sizes, more resources. It's a simple formula, but there isn't the political will to make it happen, and there are powerful interests hellbent on ensuring that it doesn't.

I feel like I'm stating the obvious here, but otherwise progressive people seem to have a blind spot (and even more so when it comes to wealthy North American philanthropists funding private schools in other countries—who is running those schools, anyway, and what are they teaching the kids there?) where charter schools are concerned, and incapable of asking very basic questions. Who is paying? Who is profiting? If charter schools are so effective, why does Bill Gates need to find AstroTurf organizations to make them palatable to the public? And why, if they aren't so effective, do people want to bring them here?

* Which, I confess, I haven't actually seen. I refuse to give those people money.

I stood in the cold and dark, shivering, telling myself that I ought to probably walk to the subway station rather than taking the streetcar. That's what I'd been doing until the weather turned, and it wasn't that horrid out. But the St. Clair streetcar is normally quite fast, and I'd recently been ill, and so I gave in. A distant part of my brain noted the blue flashing lights up ahead, but this was Toronto, a large and relatively civilized urban centre, and there are frequently blue flashing lights that have no impact on my life or travels whatsoever.

At last, the streetcar arrived, and I piled into one of the seats, turning up the volume on my trusty Ministry of Culture. I was so engrossed in listening to Of Montreal and losing a game of Solitaire that I barely noticed that the streetcar had stopped moving. Several people stood up and walked to the front of the car, having an animated discussion with the rather weary looking driver.

"...about 15 minutes," I heard, which is never what you want to hear on public transit. I tugged out one earphone.

"Can you let us out to walk to the subway?" As I mentioned, it wasn't far.

"Can't open the doors," the poor driver said (I realized that he had just been asked this question multiple times). "It's a garish parade of inbred parasitic Nazi-sympathizing douchebags.*"

"We're stranded here until they go by," a woman told me.

"This is the third time it's happened to me tonight," the driver added. "They've got secret service cars and motorcycle cops and it's a mess from here to Weston."

"Jesus," I exclaimed. "Your tax dollars at work!"

"I can't believe they need this many cops," the woman added.

"You know," I said. "At my school, we can't even afford to have textbooks for every kid. And yet we can afford this farce?"

"You'll get no argument from me," she said. "I'm no monarchist. One bulletproof car wouldn't have been enough?" (Monarchists, of course, do not take public transit.)

Just then, the scum-sucking scions of a decaying empire cruised past. You could tell by their hair. We were trapped in a royal traffic jam! I am fairly certain there were inbred idiots in the pissy little backwater where I grew up (you don't need to import them all the way from England) but no one ever halted St. Clair to let them through.

"It's not like anyone's going to take a potshot," I added. "This isn't the 1800s." Unfortunately.

"What do they do exactly? What contribution do they make?" a man asked.

"Nothing," I said, "they just take." My fellow stranded travellers nodded in agreement.

Finally, we were allowed to go. We bid each other a friendly goodnight. I was disgusted at this opulent display, but my heart was warmed by the fiery righteous outrage of the good people of this city.

And that is how I came a stone's throw away from the bloody royals, but was unable to throw a stone.

* I may have taken some liberties, gentle readers, with our good driver's phrasing. He probably just said "it's the Royal Family." But his tone said everything.