Burying the lede

Cakes and cars are killers. So are Nazis.

View from a starboard window of the Salish Eagle ferry, December 13, 2023

1.

At a housewarming party last week in an apartment overlooking New York Harbor, the buffet dinner, which my son catered (BC smoked salmon bites, pakoras, sausage rolls, roasted vegetables with tahini and Caesar sauces, baked Polish grandma ham with Russian mustard, spicy-topped macaroni and cheese, and my offer, a pomegranate kale salad from Emily Nunn’s indispensable Substack The Department of Salad) was followed by an ironic selection of Canadian candy bars, most of which I hadn’t tasted or even thought about for almost a half-century.

Caramilk. Smarties. Crispy Crunch. Coffee Crisp. Mr. Big. Eat More.

The bars elicited vigorous debate. Canadians in attendance claimed they were superior in taste and texture to their American counterparts, which they found “bland” and “chalky”. They said additives used in the American chocolate bars made them “coarser” and “waxier”.

Some Americans agreed. Most, however, were offended.

2.

I’m on the west coast of Canada now, in a carrel on the main deck of a ferry sailing through a channel in the Gulf Islands no wider than the Acheron.

The channel is called Trincomali, after the HMS Trincomalee, the British naval ship that charted these waters from 1852 to 1856. Trincomali Channel is in the Salish Sea, which is partially divided from the rest of the Pacific Ocean by Vancouver Island in British Columbia — our final destination — and the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The name, according to Wikipedia, is relatively new:

The first known use of the term "Salish Sea" was in 1988 when Bert Webber, a geography and environmental social studies professor emeritus in Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, created the name for the combined waters in the region with the intention to complement the names Georgia Strait, Puget Sound, and Strait of Juan de Fuca, not replace them. The adoption of the term, he said, would raise consciousness about taking care of the region's waters and ecosystems. Webber's efforts are credited with the official recognition of the term in Canada and the U.S.

Salish is an anglicization of Séliš, the native name for the Salish Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. The term is used to denote the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and their languages, which are believed to have been in continual use — despite efforts by governments and churches to force indigenous peoples to abandon them — for 3,000 to 6,000 years.

3.

The ferry is called the Salish Eagle. On its hull is a 400-foot design by John Marston of the Stz'uminus First Nation. In the boat’s gift shop, you can buy shirts, hoodies, coffee mugs, key chains, pens, sno-globes and wall art emblazoned with similar patterns. This was true when I lived on this coast thirty years ago. Back then, however, most of the designs were done by anonymous graphic artists, not by First Nation Artists.

4.

We are about to dock on Mayne Island, which is named after a lieutenant on the HMS Plumper who conducted hydrographic surveys on this coast from 1857 to 1861. Mayne's book “Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver Island: an account of their forests, rivers, coasts, gold-fields, and resources for colonisation” was published in London in 1862.

Before taking on Mayne’s name, the island was known as Halliday Island, the name given to it by the Hudson's Bay Company. Before that, it was known as Skwanchenum, or Sktak, in Senćoten, the language of the W̱sáneć people who inhabited the island before European settlers arrived.

5.

Sailing again now. The island portside is Galiano, after Dionisio Alcalá Galiano, an eighteenth-century Spanish explorer. Galiano is in the traditional territories of Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Tsawwassen First Nations, and other Hul’qumi’num-speaking peoples. According to the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, who recorded a story about the island in the 1890s, its previous name was Swiikw, a Hul'qumi'num word whose meaning is no longer known. Today’s Hul’qumi’num-speaking peoples do not recognize it as a term for the island, any place on it, or any place adjacent to it. It is thought that perhaps Boas was referring to skw'ith'i, which means “green sea urchins.”

If you do not know of Franz Boas, I recommend you look him up, not just for his story and legend collections and pioneering work in anthropology, but for his well-argued opposition to antisemitism and “scientific racism”, the pseudoscientific biological concept that human behavior and intelligence are best measured through a distinct typology of “races”, and that empirical evidence exists to justify racial discrimination.

6.

When I was in high school, I often camped on Galiano Island, on an outcrop of exposed coastline surrounded by Crown Land near Montague Harbour. There were usually four or five of us, very close friends, one of whom recently took his life. We drank warm beer and Southern Comfort, dropped acid, caught and fried fish, and boiled undersized crabs in aluminum ashtray bowls that we stole from the ferry.

There was a sheer rockface near Montague that we called Mooney’s Mountain, as I was the first in our group to successfully scale it. On a later trip, while tripping, I pretended to be frozen with fear halfway up its face. The reactions of my friends convinced me that I wasn’t pretending, that I was indeed in mortal danger of falling. Ever since I have been deathly afraid of heights.

7.

In 1863, after a British serviceman, Charles Glyddon was killed on Kuper Island when his ship, the HMS Forward, under a Commander Pike, exchanged fire with Lamachas (now known as the Hwlitsum First Nation), a man named Ot-cha-wun was charged with his murder. The Forward had come to find other men suspected of murdering settlers. Ot-cha-wun fled along with four or five other Lamalcha men. The Forward’s crew under Pike tortured Ot-cha-wun's father-in-law, uncle, and wife until they divulged the location of the fugitives. E. Hardinge, Commander of the HMS Chameleon led a mission to Galiano Island, where he found and captured the men near Montague Harbour, close to where we camped as boys.

8.

On 4 July 1863, Sir James Douglas, the first Governor of British Columbia, wrote in a dispatch to Henry Pelham Fiennes Pelham Clinton, the fifth Duke of Newcastle.

The accused Indians were tried at the Assizes held on the 17th day of June 1863, and a conviction obtained against five of them for the Murder of one Marks and his Daughter, for the Murder of one Charles Glyddon, and for Manslaughter. The last named was indicted for the murder of a white man, name unknown, about 5 years ago. He admitted the truth of the evidence as to the killing, but stated that one, since killed by Indians, was the instigator of the deed, and that it was only when he was being worsted by the white man that he had gone to his assistance. Even then it would seem that the unfortunate victim would have overcome both his assailants, had not the wife of one of them seized an Axe with which she struck the white man in the back and disabled him. He was then stabbed. Ot-cha-wun has been sentenced to Four years imprisonment with hard labour. He is an old man and may not live to serve out the term. The other four Indians convicted of the Capital crime were sentenced to death, and were hanged this morning at 7 O'Clock in front of the Police Barracks at Victoria. These prompt and vigorous measures were necessary to address an apparently increasing mania amongst certain Tribes of Indians to become great and noted by the commission of crime. I am satisfied that the whole proceedings from first to last will not only tend to uproot such evil passions, but will materially conduce to the future safety of the white population, whether scattered in settlement around, or passing in solitary journey the Coast.

Pages from Douglas’s 4 July 1863 dispatch.

9.

According to a book I read on Salt Spring Island, our next stop, Ot-cha-wun and the other men were not given a fair trial, nor legal counsel. Their trial translators spoke Chinook Jargon, a pidgin trade language in the Pacific Northwest too simple to express complex British legal terms.

Ot-cha-wun claimed he never fired at the Forward; this claim was supported by eyewitnesses who testified in court. Nevertheless, the jury presented a guilty verdict, recommending mercy. The men were sentenced to death as a warning to other First Nations people to not rebel. One hundred and fifty citizens of Victoria signed a petition to commute the death sentence, due to the unjust way their trial had been conducted.

The book is The Terror of the Coast: Land Alienation and Colonial War on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, 1849-1863. Its author is Chris Arnett, an archaeologist, researcher, and writer who I used to know in the 1970s as the lead singer of Vancouver’s first punk band, The Furies.

10.

James Douglas was born in Guyana to a Scottish father and a “free-coloured” mother. He is celebrated for having plotted to take advantage of the US Civil War to invade and conquer the state of Washington, and for having assured the emissaries of a group of persecuted Californians of African descent that they were welcome to settle in Canada. Douglas allowed 35 of them to settle on the north end of Salt Spring. The south end was settled by “Kanaka” Hawaiians. Other settlers were from Portugal and the British Isles.

This was in 1858, after California passed discriminatory legislation against Blacks and Asians.

Salt Spring had been so-named, after its fourteen saline springs, three years before the African Americans’ arrival by officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Before that, it was known as Ćuán (“Chuan” or “Chouan”) Island. It was the first Gulf Island where people other than the original inhabitants settled, and the first farming community in the Colony of Vancouver Island that did not belong to the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Between August 1867 and December 1868, three Black men were murdered on the island. The Indigenous community was blamed for the murders. The cases were never solved.

There were 77 Japanese-Canadians on the island at the outbreak of World War II. All were displaced and interned. Their lands were sold off at below-market prices to returning veterans.

Salt Spring Island's Central School class photo, 1929.

11.

In my mid-twenties, under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms, I spent an entire day building a patio out of giant stones on the north end of Galiano with two brothers, one of whom is now my “virtual” brother-in-law.

(The term is his).

We worked late into the night, clawing the massive rocks out of the ground with our bare hands and rolling them into place using brute force.

This is what it looks like today.

My virtual brother-in-law, who I prefer to refer to as Tim, was born in the Anua Uyo district of Nigeria and raised in Billericay, England, where Ian Drury was from.

Tim moved to Vancouver when he was 14. I met him on his first day at school. He was wearing a traditional schoolboy’s uniform: short trousers, blazer, pullover, cap, and tie. I’d like to think that I was not one of the boys that bullied him for this, or for the way he pronounced the film “Jaws”. But I’m not sure I was that broadminded back then.

Tim has since become, largely I’d like to think because of that earlier psychotropic experience, one of the West Coast’s pre-eminent stonemasons.

I’d like to tell you more about this but I feel compelled to devote the remainder of this Substack space to something else.

The Nazi question, which I’ve purposely hidden down here.

Most of those still reading don’t know that Substack has a Nazi problem. Many are unaware that Substack even exists. Ninety-nine percent of my subscribers receive their weekly Hexagon post as an innocuous e-mail. Each Sunday, they nap in front of their screens awaiting signs of its arrival — the car pulling into the drive, the footsteps up the back stairs and across the sundeck, the key turning in the lock, the door opening, the terse commands barked out, the bowl filled, scarfed, barely tasted.

The other one percent read Hexagon on the Substack platform.

Some of these platform-reading subscribers are aware of a debate taking place in the platform’s “Notes” section. On one side of the debate are Substack writers and readers for free and uncensored speech on the platform. On the other side are writers and readers who declare they are against Nazis on Substack.

It’s of course more nuanced than that — “Nazi” is a loose and loaded term; one person’s Nazi is another person’s something-else; there are plenty of people on the free and uncensored speech side that are against Nazis; and there are people on the against Nazi side who are pro the something-else versions of “Nazi” — but that’s the basic breakdown.

The side against Substacked Nazis is ably led by the investigative journalist Jonathan M. Katz, who opened the debate in June by responding to a softball interview with a seductive and reductive idiot named Richard Hanania by Substack founder Hamish McKenzie.

(Look this up if you like, I’m not going to discuss it or hotlink it — like most things contemporaneously American, I wish it would just go away).

In late November, Katz wrote a piece on the subject for The Atlantic. Last week, he and other Substackers wrote a collective letter to Substack leadership, in which they asked a “very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis?” So far, 207 Substack publications have signed the letter.

Katz and the letter’s signatories’ main beef is not that Hanania and his ilk are on Substack, but that they are actively promoted on Substack’s flagship publications and allowed to charge for subscriptions, meaning Substack is directly earning 10% of these publications’ earnings, thereby profiting from white supremacy and hate propaganda. And when called upon to explain and defend their position, Substack’s leadership has refused to directly respond. Which, frankly, is plumb weird, given Substack’s published terms of service and their stated belief that “critique and discussion of controversial issues are part of robust discourse”. And, with each passing day, as their silence amplifies — it’s getting weirder.

But I have not signed Katz’s letter. Not because I’m not against Nazis, I very much am, and neo-Nazis, and every other category of Nazi. And not because I would not very much like to hear Substack’s McKenzie et al respond to the signatories’ queries. In fact, I think it is a deontological imperative. I haven’t signed because… we’ll, I’m not a fan of the open letter. My position is not Sam Kriss’s, who calls “any kind of open letter for any cause whatsoever” a form of “psycho behaviour”. I just think it’s wrong-headed and divisive.

This brings us to the free and uncensored speech camp, which is ably represented by many Substack publishers. An open letter by one of them, Elle Griffin, author of The Elysian, has roughly the same number of signatories as Katz’s. Their arguments are what you would expect. They want to be treated like adults. They don’t want to be told what they can read and write. If, they argue, they stumble upon a Stack that they don’t like, they don’t have to subscribe to it. If it or its author or its followers keep appearing in their Substack feed, they can put up blockers. Etcetera. Pretty straightforward. And for me, convincing. I get it. But there is no way I’m going to sign their letter either.

Because, well, I am uncomfortable shackling myself to the chain gang on that list. I question many of their motivations. I find many of their readings of the other camp’s motivations disingenuous. I find their language, the invective, the belittling, the dogwhistling, very telling.

Quoting Emily Nunn, whose salad recipe I knicked back in Brooklyn last week and at the top of this post:

Katz is asking Substack to respond to a simple question. That’s it.

12.

Substack has so many other “problems”. Sugar, for example. Diabetes is the world’s number one cause of death. Obesity is up there too — 2.8 million people a year, according to WHO. And right now my mailbox is bloated with toxic Yuletide recipes. Cakes and candy canes, shortbread, mince tarts. Then there’s bubbly, mulled wine, Christmas cocktails and nog. Alcohol kills three million people every year, yet each week hundreds if not thousands of Substack posts are sent out extolling its virtues, and many of these have “Bestseller” badges, and are showcased on Substack’s flagship.

My position on this? I adore cake and I drink like a fish. Like a school of fish. So.

Then there are the cars. The trucks, the bikes, the motorbikes. Every day, more than 3,500 people are killed in road accidents, yet this platform abounds with vehicular encomia. How do I feel about this? I fucking hate cars. I wish they would all disappear. People with loud motorcycles should be forced to take public transport 24 hours a day.

But I just drove up the length of Vancouver Island in a car, and the rest of my family was in another one. So.

Last year, 30,000 people were killed by canines, and at least two more by house cats, which also eat songbirds. For fun.

Should people be banned from posting stuff about their pets?

Substack does not permit pornography. Nor does it allow sex workers to monetize their services on the platform. But wine, cigars, bicycles, brownies? It’s the wild wild west. Anything goes.

Why?

What’s your point, Mooney? Surely you’re not equating these with the Nazi problem? Get a fucking grip.

Well. I’m an old Areopagitica type — short of shouting fire in a crowded theatre or espousing Radio Machete-level hatred — I think it best to keep bad ideas on the record and out in the open where we can see them and respond. Otherwise, the bad guys are hard to track.

I don’t find it disturbing that Substack provides a platform for bad ideas, but I do find it worrisome that it actively promotes Substackers that promulgate ideas that Franz Boas fought against — and intellectually dispensed with — a century ago. I wish they wouldn’t. And the idea that, en plus, they’re providing white nationalists with an income stream — and taking a cut — sickens me. If they continue to do this, I will have to reconsider my position. I might even have to “sign” something. Or leave.

In the meantime, I love Substack. It is a fabulous experiment. I hope it survives its present predicament. And I hope that people who want to read and write about salads and poetry and zoophilia and God will continue to feel free enough to do so, without having to self-censor (too much) and without always having to weigh in on the weightier issues.

Post-October 7, a lot of writers felt that they couldn’t write anymore. Sam Kriss for example:

This is understandable. Personally, however, I am thankful that, a couple of weeks later, Sam Kriss overcame this feeling of sickness and was back, weighing in on Taylor Swift’s navel and the new Napoleon.

Ok. All for now. The bowl is full. But It’s Monday, I missed my self-imposed Sunday deadline for the first time in 87 weeks. I hope you all enjoyed the extra-long nap.

See you next week, if only to say hello in passing.