Maru's Mun Journal

Today, I went to the smaller island in the lake where there is a Benedictine nuns' convent that has been working nearly uninterruptedly since the 8th century.

( Cut for Bavarian postcard subjects )

Cultural appropriation is what they yell in the (sometimes painfully) Politically Correct circles on tumblr when somebody adapts style element that are associated with some sort of underprivileged culture.

For example:

• White people should not wear dreads -- this hairstyle belongs to the black culture, so it's appropriation (Warning: NSFW image behind link!)
• Non-Asian-descended Americans and Europeans converting to Buddhism is such a silly fad and insults the people of Tibet, Myanmar etc., where Buddhism is such an important part of their struggle.
  
• White people should not rap -- ditto
• White or black people should not incorporate the Dia de los Muertos elements in their Halloween festivities. That's Mexican. Cultural appropriation! No sugar skulls for you!
• Westerners should not get large tattoos of swirly ornaments. Please stick to your hearts and mermaids. Tribal tattoos belong to South Sea people; adopting them is cheap cultural appropriation. Oh, and Scythians. But Scythians are different. They are dead.
• Westerners should not enjoy Korean soap operas with people wearing outrageous clothes. They are for Koreans only. Cultural appropriation!
• White people should not enjoy Bollywood movies, or cook Indian meals, or drink chai or lassi, while they do so. Combining bright pink and bright orange is stealing Indian culture, too. Cultural appropriation!
• Straight men are required to dress drably and be rude louts. If they take good care of their clothes, looks and living space, thinking about the effect it will have, and are attentive and caring to others instead of kicking back and watching football while drinking beer, they're culturally appropriating the behaviour of their girlfriends' gay BFFs in order to gain points - booooh!
• Westerners should not get into manga, anime, or cosplay. They shouldn't even practice zen, ikebana, or kendo. That's Japanese, and doing it is bad, bad cultural appropriation!
• Protestant people should be completely barred from owning Orthodox icons, let alone display them on their walls.
  
• German or English people should not listen to Irish Folk. Celtic knot-work, and tartans, are off-limits, too. Especially tartans. Absolutely nobody who is not Celtic should wear anything remotely like plaid! Keep your greedy Germanic paws off our Celtic heritage. Booo! Cultural appropriation! P.S.: And don't you dare hold an impromptu wake on the night before your grandfather's funeral, with four people reminiscing and working their way down the bottle of the strong stuff into the wee small hours. Don't even call it wee small hours to start with! Shush!
• Pizza and spaghetti are Italian. It's really inappropriate to culturally appropriate a small Mediterranean country's cuisine into world-wide favourite staples, especially for kids. Boooh!
  
• Westerners should not make porcelain and display it in special China cabinets. They shouldn't even import it from China. Porcelain is for the Chinese people only. Oh, and please give us back our tea!
• Speaking of which, coffee is Arabic. And chocolate is Mexican. If you drink any of these, it's cultural appropriation.
• Christian westerners, stick to your apples and pears! Peaches and dates are oriental, and it's really the height of cultural appropriation to first send a large number of crusades into the east and then steal our fruit as well. Oh, and dainty moorish columns look ridiculous on your northerly castles. Don't do it!
• Draco standards! A Scythian/Sarmatian invention! Every last damn barbaric army throughout this entire Migration age hullaballoo adopting them is really a blatant case of cultural appropriation.
  
• Roman women shouldn't bleach their hair to try and turn blonde like their lovely Germanic and Celtic slaves, that's ridiculous and unbecoming!
• No more cult of Mithras! It's a ridiculous imported eastern religion unbecoming a Roman or Greek. Same holds true for the worship of Isis. Oh, and that weird cult, what do they call it again? Christianity? That's a Jewish sect, for Jupiter's sake!
• Erm, no, actually, we don't want any former pagans to become Christians in the first place. This man Saulus who now calls himself Paul is going down totally the wrong path and encouraging people to culturally appropriate. That's all wrong...
• Keeping cats is an Egyptian custom. You Romans, Greeks, Northmen, Persians, Scythians, what have you, really really should keep your hands off our beloved and revered pets. You don't even worship them properly but merely like them. Blasphemy! Cultural appropriation!
• First those Romans conquer Greece, and then they copy all our statues and equate their rustic gods with our own. And that hack Virgil writes this ridiculous pseudo-Odyssey about Aeneas from Troy to justify that they, too, are descended from civilised and historic people mentioned in Homer. If you get down to it, it's just blatant fanfic. Actually, they steal everything from our culture that isn't on the trees at the count of three. It's deeply embarrassing, and highly ridiculous. Really. Romans culturally appropriate fucking anything!
• We are Tibet! We have Bön! Do we really need to culturally appropriate Buddhism from India?
• We are China! We have Confucianism! Do we really need to culturally appropriate Buddhism from Tibet?
• We are Japan! We have Shintô! Do we really need to culturally appropriate Buddhism from China?
• We don't want those big rude hunter-gatherers with their big rude dogs to adopt our way of keeping cattle and tilling the ground to plant and harvest grain, fruit, and herbs. They're all over the continent, and we are sitting here on the shore of Lake Balaton, a tiny minority from the south-east. Neolithic revolution isn't for mainstream mesolithic culture to appropriate!
• Trading ways of working flint and bone, and painting the walls of caves, up and down the Danube and the Rhone really means that one culture appropriates the specialities of another, and that's really not done! We must all keep our customs separate so everybody can see which is which.
  

I think you catch my drift? What they call 'cultural appropriation' and deplore is really at the heart of human history. We wouldn't work without it. I keep finding more and more examples, but have to get myself to work now.

Cultural cross-pollination, even thought it may have seemed ridiculous at the time and/or in hindsight, is what friggin' drove the development of human culture throughout history. A kendoka from East Germany with bright red dreadlocks in a bright red hakama? Probably ridiculous and culturally appropriating in too many ways than can be told before I need to catch my train. But really, that's where the world is going.

Culture doesn't belong to anybody. It kind of sloshes around in the global meme pool. When privileged strangers start experimenting with whatever other people have done for ages, it may look a bit silly; but after a few centuries, chinoiserie cabinets and mithraeums will be regarded as the classical expressions of rococo and Roman culture, respectively...

In Stuttgart, which is a notoriously peaceful city of industry, engineering, productivity, technical innovation and annoying attention to details (suburbs are home to the headquarters of Mercedes Benz and Porsche, both), an unholy alliance of conservative politicians and a few big businesses (among them Bilfinger Berger, the large construction company implicated in the corruption scandal in Cologne where less materials were used in building a new subway tunnel than was billed, quality checks were falsified, and structures in the middle of the city collapsed in consequence, among them the historical archive, and two people died) is trying to put the train station underground and sell the swathe of inner-city land at a high price for business and residential development.

Usually something like that will be welcome to the Stuttgarters, whose motto notionally is 'Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue', that is 'Work, work, and build your own home' -- people dedicated to industriousness and the self-absorbed increase of their own wealth and security.

However, this projects has met with heavy doubts as a) an expertise conducted by a firm of civil engineers revealing that there are unexpected cavities and potentially unstable gypsum pockets in the city's underground has been summarily ignored by the conservative politicians and the corporations involved, shocking the over-careful, security-minded Suebian bourgeois population with unheard-of arrogance and dismissal of measurable facts, which simply is not done there, b) most of the current main station would be torn down -- and that is a momentous monument of very early modernist architecture, and c) 300 very old trees in the city park will have to be felled.

The volume of protests was remarkable. Anything from school children to old age pensioners turned up in droves every since the first parts of the historical buildings were demolished. At once point, there were 40,000 protesters at one single protest march -- remarkable in a city of 600,000!

German chancellor Angela Merkel, of the Christian Democrats (= conservatives) was quoted with the remarkable words that politicians can't ignore valid contracts, no matter how many people are standing around on the street at one point, but have to enforce decisions made. For great ironic context: Merkel is from the former East Germany and started out her career in the grassroots movement that toppled the East German regime and ultimately the iron curtain, ending the cold war that way, almost entirely through pressure from the street and mass protest of completely ordinary people.

Yesterday, the politicians in the pockets of Bilfinger Berger and the other companies involved sent out the riot police against completely non-violent protesters who were chaining themselves to the trees and trying to stop the destruction of their park. Without warning, they fired tear gas and water cannons at the protesters (the usual mix of school kids, concerned housewives, old age pensioners, students, and some opposition politicians, plus random freelancers like one writer of detective novels quoted in some news blogs, who can pick when they work and when they protest -- the rest of the people who'd come to a demonstration on a Saturday were of course busy with the 'schaffe, schaffe' part of the Suebian lifestyle), broke them up using mounted police, riot batons, armoured and/or sand-filled gloves, and possibly even rubber bullets.

This vid shows random eight minutes from the protests, with a policeman spontaneously spraying pepper spray on people doing exactly nothing at 4:10. Oh yes, and German police don't have to wear name tags, don't have to give their names when asked, and are allowed to cover their faces in any situation. Similarity to Star Wars' Imperial Stormtroopers has been remarked on several times around German language blogs.

Here, for example, is a number of pictures on one of the blogs that come up on my blogroll at Blogger.de, taken by the blogger himself.

Hundreds of protesters were injured, some of them badly; one person had at least one eye shot out by the water cannons.

Scenes ensued that remind you of a) the movie 'Avatar', b) police and army trying to squash the 1989 protests in East Germany which our present politicians laud for its great civil courage, and as the foundation of a renewed and reunified modern democratic Germany, and c) what happened in Iran in the summer of 2009.

For some reason, the horrifying scenes have not yet spread out into international media (even the English language version of Der Spiegel doesn't mention it with a single word as of now -- compare the Love Parade disaster going international within a day!), which is why I offer this write-up. It probably belongs on ontd_political, but I don't like dealing with large and busy comms.

There is one picture from the protests that is already becoming sort-of iconic after only one day. It shows an old man bleeding from his eyes because of the tear-gas, supported by a middle-ages man and a very young man. From their looks, they might be three generations of the same family.

I put it under a cut because nobody ought to have a picture like that sprung on them on their open flist. Nobody died (yet), but other than that, it shocks you in the way video footage from Iran did...

( Picture under cut for serious RL gore and shock value )

Remember, this happened yesterday, in a park, during a protest about a contested infrastructure project, and some old trees.

Something is very wrong here.-

(As to have one Urquhart-free post today:)

While The Island is groaning (rightfully so!) about Greenland having stolen the gulf stream (What does it want with it, thaw out all its Eskimo mummies like the ones from Qilakitsoq*??), the effect that all this has on the landscape is very pretty.

**ducks from all the snowballs the Brits start hurling at this unfeeling blasphemy**

*No clicky linky if you don't want to see m-things right away!! Wikipedia, as I have often remarked, likes to have gory pictures jump right at you and disturb you deeply when you look something up, and you can't ask them to take them away, because of neutrality and accuracy...