From The Margins

Art has always come from the margins, at least the art that mattered.

The last time Jews had a major artistic impact was about the middle of the twentieth century. In the US, in literature, there were fiction writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley. Poets like Emma Lazarus, Allen Ginsberg, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich and Marge Piercy. In music, composers like the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, Jerome Kern and Leonard Bernstein. In jazz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Stan Getz. In popular music, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Carole King and Neil Diamond. In the visual arts, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Jacques Lipchitz, Philip Guston and Louise Nevelson.

In Canada, the most influential Jewish mid-century cultural figures included A. M. Klein, Mordecai Richler, Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Adele Wiseman and Leonard Cohen.

It was the last time Jews weren't mainstream.

They were either immigrants themselves, usually born in another country and brought over as infants, or, more often, children of first-generation immigrants. They straddled a cultural divide between the New World and the Old World, between a new language and cultural tradition and the languages and traditions of their ancestors. In effect they were equi-distant from both.

It was that friction, that tension, that afforded them the perspective they needed to develop a new perspective on their adopted culture.

It was from that position, as outsiders, that they were able, to fight their way in, culturally speaking. To demand their place at the table, against a certain amount of resistance, and ultimately to gain acceptance by reinvigorating their adopted culture with what they could offer artistically.

That process of revitalization has played out over and over again. The outsider brings a fresh voice and perspective to a mainstream culture in need of re-invigoration. In Canada, in literature, we've seen it in recent years with African and South Asian voices, and then Asian voices, coming to the cultural fore.

But once they arrive, then what?

Their art becomes part of the mainstream. Part of the existing cultural soup. And like any ingredient in a recipe, blended-in and barely distinguishable from the entire dish.

It's why no one talks about 'the Jewish writers' anymore. They are just writers. 

I began to wonder: if it's art from the margins that re-invigorates the culture, where is the margin of the future? Where will we find the outsider-artists who are positioned to provide the perspective that helps us better understand who we are?

Perhaps, as culture in all forms becomes increasingly dominated by digitization, the margin will be found outside that realm. I don't mean people who simply don't use computers, or artists who insist on painting with oils on canvas rather than working digitally. I mean something more fundamental.

Digitization isn't simply changing the way we communicate. It is changing the way we understand the world.

More and more of human experience is being translated into something that can be recorded, measured, stored, searched, transmitted and reproduced. A photograph becomes an image file. A book becomes a collection of searchable words. A song becomes a stream. It's all data.

The digital world is extraordinarily good at representing things. But art is more than just representation. It's a record of human experience: love, grief, memory, physical presence, silence, loneliness, aging, death, desire, intuition, mystery. 

They can be represented digitally, of course. We can photograph a face, record a voice, write down a memory. But the representation is not the thing itself.

Perhaps this is where the next cultural margin will emerge.

For the immigrant artist, the distance came from living between two cultures. He could see his adopted culture from the inside and the outside at the same time. The future outsider may occupy a similar position between two worlds: the digital world and the world that exists beyond digital representation.

And this outsider need not reject technology. In fact, he may be completely fluent in it. He may use it more effectively than anyone else. But he will retain an awareness of what it cannot contain.

That awareness could become a new source of artistic perspective. Because, by definition, the artist's modus operandi was to see and express what everyone else has stopped seeing and expressing.

The Jewish immigrant saw the absurdities and assumptions of American culture because he hadn't grown up inside them. The immigrant writer could hear the language differently because it wasn't quite his first language. The child of immigrants could look at his parents' world and his adopted world simultaneously and see things that belonged to neither.

Perhaps the artist of the future will do something similar with the digital world. She will live inside it, but also outside it. She will understand the language of algorithms, platforms, screens and networks, but she will also be conscious of the things that cannot be expressed in that language.

She might discover that the unexplored territory isn't somewhere else. It's right here, found in everything that remains stubbornly human after we have translated almost everything else into information.

Perhaps that is where the next great art will come from. Not from a new ethnic group or a new immigrant culture necessarily, but from people who occupy the margin between what can be represented and what can only be experienced.

Every successful outsider eventually becomes part of the mainstream. That is how culture renews itself. The outsider enters, changes the culture, and eventually becomes indistinguishable from it.

Which means that the margins never disappear. They simply shift. For a long time, they were found at the borders between countries, languages, religions and ethnicities.

Perhaps the next border is between the digital and the undigitized.

And I don't mean that traditional art forms like poetry, stories, music and visual arts will be abandoned. In fact the opposite may happen. Digitization may be deemed an assault on the forms of art experience that we have cherished and enjoyed for millennia and that could spur an embrace of those forms with even more relish and vigor, in a protective way, as a mother protects its beloved child. 

But one thing is for sure. Somewhere along the border between the digital and the non-digital, or should I say the human, someone is already looking at the world in a way the rest of us haven't yet learned how to see.

Me And My Harmonica (reprise)

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG 

for Adam Gussow

I learn to play harmonica,

To my wife's eternal dismay.

But play the harmonica I will,

Whatever she may say.

She hates the crying racket,

The piercing whiny whine.

But that's not how I hear it,

To me it sounds just fine.

She says she can't be near it,

Yells take it somewhere far.

Where nobody can hear it,

'Play it in your car'.

Me and my harmonica,

We're both made to roam.

The one place I can't play it,

Is when I'm in my home.

Me and my harmonica,

We both sing the blues.

Anything that you can have,

Is something you can lose.

I blow a tune in four-time,

Pressed up against my lips.

And when my tune is done,

Back in my pocket it slips.

I move on down the road,

A wanderer alone.

With nothing but a song to sing,

Far away from home.

Out and in, in and out,

My body and my breath. 

Shapes a sound into a song, 

From silence and from death.

  

Me and my harmonica, 

Go out for a long walk.

Try the door on my return,

But she done changed the lock.

Me and my harmonica,

We both sing the blues.

With every tune I learn to play,

I also pay my dues.

Droppings From Heaven

I read this slowly in between other books. This one was odd; Layton used a lot of political and historical references I barely understood. Cool title though.

This is quoted from a two-star review on Goodreads of the 1979 poetry collection Droppings From Heaven by Irving Layton.

I'll say one thing about this brief ‘review’. He's right about the title.

At least he's honest about the reasons for his cluelessness: an unfamiliarity with ‘political and historical references.’

I'm re-reading the book myself. It's true Layton does make a lot of political and historical references in his poems, some of them obscure, like Stalin, Mussolini and the German National Socialists. The book is, in part, a fiery indictment of man's inhumanity to man.

Layton takes on the admonishing voice of the biblical prophet Jeremiah. But he's not ranting about the downfall of Jerusalem. He's warning about the moral degradation that allowed the atrocities of the 20th century. And not even God is spared his outrage.

Cool title indeed.

Layton writes: “The battle for the free, independent individual, for his dignity and waywardness, against the hordes of robots and frightened massmen that a soulless technology is creating in ever-increasing numbers, has already been joined. The stakes are high: they have never been higher and the future of poetry rests on its outcome.”

When he says ‘the future of poetry’ he actually means humanity. They are one and the same to Layton. He knew nothing of social media influencers or AI agents. Much less a malignant narcissist like Donald trump or a diabolical megalomaniac like Elon Musk.

And what of these poetry-reading dullards and amnesiacs who have limited knowledge of politics and even less of history? Well, they are ripe for the picking. They are susceptible to believing in any absurd conspiracy theory, but will be especially enamoured by ones that finger the Jews for all their woes and have a special affinity for those that offer an apocalyptic ending.

As for the state of poetry, when it's actually read, Layton wrote: “Its old enemies are still with us—humbug, mediocrity, gentility. And, striding with ever-increasing confidence, a couple of newcomers—machine-tooled professionalism and a bloodless scholasticism lugging a supply of cosmetics to rouge it into the appearance of life.”

It's unsurprising that so little of the stuff gets read anymore.

Layton might have added to his list of newcomer ‘enemies’ the elevation of marginalized identities. The job of the arts since his death in 2006 (the year Facebook was launched)—particularly the kind on public life support like poetry publishing—is, too often, political. Look at the submission guidelines of most poetry publishers these days and you will find a line that says something like ‘BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors are especially encouraged to submit.’

I first came across the acronym BIPOC about twenty years ago in a rejection letter from a publisher to whom I had submitted a novel manuscript. The editor wrote something along the lines of—don't take this personally, but we would have been more open to considering your novel if your protagonist had been a woman instead of a middle-aged man, or if you were BIPOC.

Personally, when I read a book—or meet a stranger face to face—I couldn't care less if the author is BIPOC or LGBTQ+. Nor do I care how they identify religiously, ethnically or politically, or what hockey team they root for.

All I care about is truth-telling and being moved by their humanity. And not your truth or my truth. THE truth. And yes, the truth really is still out there. 

Somewhere.

The Era of Moral Relativism

I've said this before: I was educated as a moral relativist. I'm guessing most of my generation was.

Moral relativism is the belief that right and wrong are culturally dependent. In other words, they differ from society to society, and even from person to person. According to this view, no single moral code is necessarily better than any other. I believe in the Ten Commandments, you believe in honour killing — it's all the same. We should not judge the behaviour or values of other cultures because, if no objective moral standard exists, there is no basis for claiming that our culture is more right than theirs.

Moral relativism became ascendant in academia through the intersection of several intellectual and cultural developments.

First was the decline of religion in education and public life. Second was the influence of Marxist and post-colonial thought, which increasingly interpreted history through the prism of oppressor and victim. Third was the emergence of postmodernism, with its argument that culture, knowledge and even truth itself are shaped by underlying structures of power.

The western elite, particularly the academic elite, having imbibed these ideas, grew ashamed of their privilege and power, and they taught their privileged students to feel likewise.

I thought about this recently as I watched a press conference with filmmaker Alex Gibney, discussing his new Elon Musk biopic, along with two participants in the film. I haven't seen it, but by all accounts it sounds pretty devastating.

I listened to the way they described Musk, and it sounded familiar.

A megalomaniac and a technocrat. Someone who believes every human problem can be solved through scientific thinking, engineering and efficiency. A person who believes in the "great man" theory of history — a Howard Roark-type character, if you've read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead — who equates empathy with weakness, lives by the principle that the ends justify the means, and believes power should be wielded by strong-willed visionaries.

Musk is six and a half years younger than me, so he belongs to my generation and wasn't educated that far behind me. The description of him sounds a lot like some of the people I met in graduate school.

I graduated from McGill University in 1986 and then went to a school called IUHEI in Geneva, Switzerland, now called the Geneva Graduate Institute. It was a postgraduate institute of study and research founded with the mission of promoting international relations as a means of resolving global problems.

You'd think a place like this would attract a lot of very smart people, and it did — present company excepted. The seminar classes were very small, usually 10 to 20 people, and most of the students came from elite universities around the world. In truth, I felt like a fish out of water sitting around the table with graduates of Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and the like.

You'd also think these ambitious young people would be idealists: people who believed in the school's mission of solving global problems through international relations — problems like Cold War tensions, civil war, mass poverty and economic underdevelopment, global health and so on.

I certainly was. I arrived in Geneva thinking I might eventually find work at the UN or for an NGO. I was bent on doing my part to save the world.

There were some people like me there. But, to my surprise, there were many more who seemed to have other ambitions. Particularly the American students.

They seemed to want to become hedge fund managers, Wall Street derivatives traders, or perhaps get jobs with one of the big commodities trading companies based in Geneva.

In other words, they were less interested in promoting values than in acquiring personal wealth. They were in Geneva because it looked good on a résumé.

The leaders of tomorrow.

I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised. After all, these were the 1980s — the heady days of "Greed is Good," when Wall Street traders were making their first million before they turned 25. It was the era that produced what we now think of as the Epstein class: people for whom wealth, status and power became ends in themselves.

Money had become a huge driving force, particularly in education. A generation was beginning to pivot away from an arts-and-humanities-based curriculum toward STEM and business education. That was where the money was.

Universities built brand-new, multi-story business-school buildings and scientific research campuses while their arts faculties languished in old, neglected classrooms.

Philosopher Allan Bloom wrote about this in 1987 in his surprise bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. He documented what he believed would be the cultural, moral and political price of raising a generation of relativists.

Not even Bloom could have imagined a President trump or an Elon Musk.

Both represent, the idea that there is no higher moral authority beyond the individual and his own conception of what works. Wealth and power are their own justification, rule of law an obstacle to be overcome. 

Musk and trump may not have the same pedigree as the misguided student protesters who cheered for Hamas after the terrorist attacks of October 7. But they share the same moral obtuseness, and play the same special interest, identity politics game.

The irony is that moral relativism was supposed to make us more tolerant. Instead, it left us without the intellectual tools to explain why some things are simply wrong — regardless of who does them.

I want to be understood

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

I want to be understood,

like every fool.

Like the wind.

Like the honeybee.

I'm dumb as a meteorologist,

or apiologist, 

not content 

to act the vane, 

or spin with 

the momentum of the planet.

Or to get buzzed 

by the petal to petal,

pollen dance 

tickling my nostrils,

hachoooo!

I want to be understood;

translate it all

into a gibberish of symbols,

a code to breach

the defences of another mind 

like an exploding drone.

Why can’t I just

sit back and jaw-drop

ooh! and ahh!

under the canvas Big Top

along with the other yokels;

watch the lion that doesn’t decapitate 

his trainer, and

the trapeze-idiots doing flips,

catcher swinging 

like a clock

open arms

waiting and

waiting and

waiting

and

to be saved.

The New Rock Stars

Trumpapalooza.

That’s what many called the unprecedented—and unusual—midterm Republican convention held over the past two days in Dallas.

And trump, who, if you believe the polling, is the most unpopular president ever at this point in his term, proclaimed that he should be on the ballot in November. To make sure he was the star of the show, he spoke on both days of the convention.

There was a lot of news coming out of the event. But the biggest announcement, delivered by the star of the show himself from the stage, was that if Republicans win both the House and the Senate in November, every American adult would receive a cheque for $5,000.

Don’t think of it as bribery to get your vote, which would be illegal. It’s a dividend, trump said, on an economy doing gangbusters.

Except the economy is not doing gangbusters. Far from it. But put that aside for a moment. And put aside the fact that paying every American adult $5,000 would add somewhere between $1.15 and $1.35 trillion directly to the national deficit. And put aside the fact that it’s essentially trump using Americans’ own money to pay them back for his political benefit.

Trump has made BS promises like this before. Remember the DOGE dividend? You know trump is lying, especially when he starts with, “I promise.” The more grandiose the promise, the bigger the lie.

Still, I’m sure some Americans are dumb enough to fall for this ruse. Like they've fallen for so many others.

But what caught my attention wasn’t the obviously corrupt scheme of a blatantly corrupt politician. It was the show, the spotlight on the main-stage headliner.

Trumpapalooza.

When I was growing up, we looked up to musicians and actors as idols. Rock stars and movie stars occupied the spotlight of our young imaginations. Usually there was the same movie that everyone was going to see and talk about. There was the same rock concert that everyone wanted a ticket for.

As rock stars became more popular, rock concerts got bigger and bigger. First they filled clubs. Then theaters. Then hockey arenas. By the end of the 1970s, they were filling football stadiums. By the 1980s, rock concerts had grown into multi-stage, multi-day extravaganzas.

Yes, there was Woodstock and the Monterey Pop Festival in the late 1960s. But Woodstock was a massive money loser, and Monterey was a nonprofit event; most of the artists weren’t even paid to perform. 

The first Lollapalooza came along in 1991 and helped establish the template for the next generation of this kind of event.

But something else happened along the way. As the concert became bigger, the event itself became the attraction. People weren’t necessarily going simply to see their favorite performer. They were going to be part of something. The focus shifted from the performer to the spectacle.

You weren’t just attending a Pearl Jam concert. You were participating in an event. And that distinction matters more than many realize.

In subsequent years, the dilution of attention away from individual performers only accelerated with new technology. Streaming services for movies and music put another nail in the coffin of the old star-making machinery as Joni Mitchell famously sang about it in Free Man in Paris.

Or has it? Maybe it just changed. Maybe the new star-making machinery is social-media-driven politics.

Trumpapalooza got me asking myself a question: Are politicians the new rock stars? Is this what trump understood before anyone else did? Is this why he seemed able to seize the moment with his shtick in a way that no one else could?

Think about his political rallies. The arena. The giant screens. The music. The merch. The chants. The performance. And finally, the headliner takes the stage and feeds the dreams of thousands of fans with what essentially amounts to a fantasy world.

Trump understood the model. The political party is becoming the record label. The campaign is becoming the tour. The rally is becoming the concert. And the politician is becoming the rock star.

The Democrats are beginning to recognize the new culture. They are looking for their own rock star. Is it Gavin Newsom? He’s got the looks and the charisma. AOC? She’s got the following and the chops, but is she singing the right song? This new kid in Texas, James Talarico, seems to have the right image?

But Democrats still don’t fully understand the model. They are looking for a the rock star. But trump understood something else.

The rock star isn’t successful because he is the best musician in the world. He is successful because he can create a connection with an audience. He can make people feel something. He can make them believe that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

And rock stars don’t deal in truth. They deal in dreams. They deal in fantasies, something to believe in. That’s why they are called fans.

And perhaps that is the most important thing trump understood about the new political culture. A politician used to be judged by his policies, his accomplishments and whether he kept his promises.

A politician-rock star is judged differently. A citizen asks, did you do what you promised? A fan asks, do you still represent the fantasy I put my faith in?

A citizen changes his mind when the facts change. A fan changes the facts to preserve his faith in their idol.

That is the danger of turning politics into entertainment. Entertainment requires fans. Democracy requires citizens. Citizens evaluate. Fans cheer.

And trump may have understood before everyone else that, in the age of social media, the politician who can become the biggest star can also become the most powerful politician.

Trumpapalooza, this bizarre mid-term event with fantasy promises wasn’t just a political convention. It was an example of what American politics has become.

China

My big brother has become a big fan of China. He lives in the U.S.

It started after a business trip. He imports a product from China that is made for his company, like so many American companies. He visited to meet with his manufacturer and talk about a new product they were developing.

He was impressed by what he saw. Huge modern cities. Well-run transportation. Clean public spaces. Automation everywhere. Courteous, disciplined, hard-working people providing efficient service. No apparent crime.

He came home to see dirty cities with people living on the street. Infrastructure in disrepair. Rude people, seemingly angry and complaining about everything.

Last week he texted me that the SWAT team had surrounded the residential building next to his. It was on the local news. A man had apparently murdered his girlfriend and was now armed and holed up in his apartment. The police managed to extract him with tear gas.

China, he said, is at least twenty years ahead of the West right now. It's the future.

If that's the case, then why are so many people leaving the country? And why are they still clambering to come to the West?

He said that's a lie. Most people who leave China go back. They are flooding back in the hundreds of thousands.

I doubted it, so to verify, I asked Chat. According to the most recent statistics, China is experiencing negative net migration—that is, outflow vastly outpaces inflow. Recent UN-based estimates put net migration at roughly minus 319,000 in 2024. 2025 statistics seem to indicate that the trend is slowing, but it's still negative in the hundreds of thousands.

Anecdotally, my brother's contention sounded plausible to me because one of my Chinese work colleagues recently moved back after working with our company for eight years. She was being groomed to take over as the Controller, so her decision came as a surprise. But her circumstances seemed unique. Her family owned a successful manufacturing company in China, and her father had recently struggled with serious illness. There was no one else in the family who could help run the business, thanks to China's one-child policy from two decades ago.

Over the years, this colleague and I had many conversations about China, and she was a staunch defender. I always understood her attitude as more an expression of pride in her heritage and culture than an argument about the relative merits of Chinese society and politics.

I have worked with many Chinese colleagues for a long time. They are typically young women who came to Canada to get an education, found work, usually in the accounting department, and stayed. I enjoy talking to them about why they came to Canada and chose to stay, especially considering the weather here.

It always starts with education. That doesn't mean China doesn't have great schools. It's through an education visa that these migrants gain access to potential residency. So they are coming for the quality of life, not just the education.

I've heard several reasons for coming: to get away from an overbearing, demanding family; to get away from congested cities; because Canada has lots of space, lots of clean water, and lots of clean air; for the adventure and sense of personal liberty.

I rarely hear economic reasons, because most of these migrants come from relatively well-off families. If they can afford to come here for an education, it signifies that they already have means.

I never hear about politics. And from that I conclude that either it doesn't play a part in their decision or, more likely to my mind, they are simply conditioned not to talk about politics.

One time, my colleague and I were talking about her use of WeChat, which is China's main social media platform, sometimes likened to their version of Facebook. But WeChat is much more than Facebook. It's not just a way for people to stay in contact with their old high-school chums. It's also a banking system, a mobile payment app, and even provides access to government programs.

I argued that WeChat was more like a government surveillance system and a mechanism for social control than a communications platform. I asked her, "Can you criticize Xi on WeChat?"

She answered, "Why would I want to criticize Xi?"

When I told this story to my pro-China brother, he defended her answer. He said that I had a blind spot because I was indoctrinated to believe that criticizing the government represented an important value. "You don't understand," he said, "because of your conditioning."

I suppose he's right about that. I can't help but think that criticizing the powerful, holding them to account for the power we give them, is important.

"If you understood her point of view, you'd see that she trusts the government to have the public good in mind, because that's the basis of their system. And it's working well. She sees no reason to criticize the government."

"Is it that she sees no reason to criticize because it's working, or because it's futile, and potentially dangerous, to criticize?"

My take-away from my conversation with my brother is concern for the future of democracy.

I'm having more and more conversations with people who have lost confidence in what democracy represents—in terms of freedom, values, prosperity and security. The collapse is primarily happening in the United States, which drags the rest of the world down with it.

And China is the winner. With every American failure, it looks better and better. Even to a person like my brother, who is educated, has a BA in political science, and understands what's at stake.

To me that's the scariest part.