Youth Existenz

December 14, 1969. 

London, Ontario

Introduction:  Are you tired of being told what you want?  It seems more and more that our desires, what we want from this finite existence, have been dictated to us from groups on both sides of the political spectrum.  The “right,” i.e. our parents and the established order, claims that all we really want is a stable job, a family, and a medium sized suburban home where we will happily live for the rest of our lives.  The left, by contrast, tells us that this is precisely what we don’t want, and they mobilize us to act against the established, comfortable ways of life.  In some cases, such as the student movements in Berkeley and Toronto, people have begun to search for these higher purposes.  We will thus look to build on these developments.  Our essential question will be, “what do we really want”?  We thus propose a new way of doing politics, one which does not first seek to act without having a well thought out foundation, nor does it seek to have a single foundation! We recognize the plurality of human desires, these motivating factors which make us human, and we want to hone these! Multiply these! Discover these within our selves!  Art, creative power, philosophy! all of these things point serious ways forward for our community, and we intend to pursue them by holding forums and encouraging the cultivation of serious questioning regarding what it means to be alive. 

Historical Background: As suggested above, our movement will attempt to build on the student movements which took place at Berkeley and Toronto in recent years.  At Berkley, we perhaps saw politics and student life converge for the first time.  As the draftees of the document entitled “We Want A University” state, “In contrast to this tendency to separate the issues, many thousands of us, the Free Speech Movement, have asserted that politics and education are inseparable, that the political issue of the first and fourteenth amendment cannot be separated” (42).  What was wrong with their educational experience? Their problem was that their education had become commodified.  This is to say that the only reason for going to school, it seemed, was to learn a specific set of skills which can then be used later on in  the “outside world.”  They write that “the university has become grotesquely distorted into a multiversity; a public utility serving the purely technical needs of a society” (44).  They thus proposed to form the “Free University of California,” a place outside of the existing university for scholars and students to gather to discuss important issues that were not being addressed by the existing school.  Dennis Lee, a graduate student from Toronto, had a similar idea.  He founded Rochdale College in downtown Toronto, a free institution for those interested in a true liberal education to flock to.  

List of Demands: As stated in the introduction, this party seeks to liberate the people, not only the young people, of today’s prescribed and universally accepted ways of living one’s life.  Chiefly however, and what makes Youth Existenz different, is its commitment to the idea that ideas and personal growth should precede action.  This is not to say that we will condemn action, that we will never act, or indeed that our method of doing politics is not active.   The following things will be interrogated for their importance and viability.  This list is of course not exhaustive. 

1. The army. Many youth of today strive to join the army, to fight forces overseas. But what are they fighting for? Do they really despise those whom the government deems to be the enemy? Nationalist gusto will be given serious consideration.   
2. The “office job.”  For the most part, this is the occupation of our fathers. It is the desired occupation for many today. But what is it? These organization men, what are they missing?  The nature of the office job, the life of the “organization man” as Whyte called him, will be questioned. 
3. The family. Too often the youth of today are getting involved in “domestic partnerships” which they are not excited about, and are typically entered into because such an arrangement is socially appropriate, or, God forbid, financially sensible.  We hope to give serious consideration to what entering such an arrangement entails, and also consider what the ideal relationship to have with someone is. 
4. Drugs. Many of us youth today indulge in mind expanding drugs.  But do we really need drugs? Can we not learn to appreciate the world without them?  Serious meditations on the world and the cosmos, with and without the use of psychoactive substances, will be discussed. And the place of drugs in a future society will be debated.  
5. History. Where do we come from? Where are we going?  These essential questions will be asked again and again, and will help guide our endeavours. We will give serious consideration to the roots of our tradition, seek to find moments in it which we like and wish to reproduce.  A sound relationship to one’s history is essential to moving forward effectively.  
6. Several other topics along these lines will be debated weekly in London, and hopefully other places.

As stated in the historical sketch above, this manifesto, which was drafted by undergraduates at UWO (now WU) in famously conservative London, Ontario, attempts to build on the student movements seen at Berkeley in particular during the mid 1960’s.  The leaders of the Berkeley movement, which was known as the Free Speech Movement, decried the type of education that they were experiencing.  They describe it in the following terms: “we get a four-year-long series of sharp staccatos: eight semesters, forty courses, one hundred twenty or more “units,” ten to fifteen impersonal lectures a week, one to three oversized discussion meetings per week...” (43).  They thus detected a similarity between the structure of their education and the world of production outside of it; in other words, their education was turning into a necessary stepping stone, a training ground, between childhood and the “real capitalist world,” a world which they did not want part in.  They write that “the university has become grotesquely distorted into a multiversity; a public utility serving the purely technical needs of a society” (44).    

This anti-establishment sentiment is perhaps articulated best in Dimitri Roussopolous’ text entitled “Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement and an Extra Parliamentary Opposition.”  He describes the sentiment among Canadian youth in the 1960’s as a “growing refusal” of “middle class values and life-styles” and “the commodity system,” among other things (Roussopolous, 32).  At the root of this sentiment, we find, is a concern that the established way of life offers very little individual fulfillment or freedom.  As Roussopolous states, even the ways we interact with the world and with other people have been stifled or deadened by the capitalist world: “the new left actively sheds the internal structure of authority, the long cultivated body of conditioned reflexes,  the pattern of submission sustained by guilt that ties others to the system even more effectively than any fear of police violence and judicial reprisal (32).  

  The “issue” which Youth Existenz sought to address was very broad.  Its energies are not focused on one cause such as the Vietnam War, the increase in income disparity, or environmental degradation as a result of western industrialization.  To be sure, it was definitely not in favour of these changes.  But it’s aim was not simply to react to them.   It sought to challenge what was at issue in them so as to understand the world and ourselves in the process.  Asking questions to find out why people desire these forms of life is thus paramount.  Why do we desire money? Is the environment more important than our present gains?  What is, after all, really important?  What about the quality of art in our time?  What do the art forms which are popular today say about our time as a whole?  It thus seeks to incite pertinent questions regarding human existence.  

This attention and enthusiasm for rigorous questioning is what separates it from earlier movements.  While they paved the way for the New Ways Party and are thus invaluable to its success, they did not, explicitly at least, dare to ask the pressing questions which are most important.  They hinted at these questions.  The Free Speech Movement, for instance, tried to “break down the machinery and build “intellectual communities” worthy of the hopes and responsibilities of our people” (45).  What were these hopes?  Through “seminars on educational revolution and many other topics which are not considered in the university,” these hopes and expectations are hoped to be revealed. 

Roussopolous provides a more comprehensive account of the anatomy and aims of the New left in Canada.  Indeed, Youth Existenz borrows many of the central tenets he proposes in his text, but also distances itself from others.  Roussopolous states, for instance, that parliamentary politics are a dead end for the left and anybody seeking radical change.  This is the fate suffered by the NDP and other Canadian socialist parties who conduct parliamentary politics.  Instead, he advocates “small task oriented groups” in which concrete ideas will be discussed.  Another point of intersection between is the belief in the reconciliation of theory and practice.  We need to practice what we preach, or else what is the point of preaching it?  It remains an empty invisible theory otherwise.  

Roussopolous is an enemy of hairy-fairy theories.  He writes that “there can be no theory that rises above the living realities of action” and he dismisses those who characterize leftist movements as “action freakism.”  (34).  “There is not enough civil disobedience in Canada,” he says.  But Roussopolous’s flight from theory is perhaps too hasty.  What he means by theory then has to be questioned, but he does mention that utopian ideals which envision different material conditions from the present have to be thrown away, as well as “radical rhetoric” which blows a lot of smoke but does not achieve anything in the world.  In this respect then, he is in line with Youth Existenz.  Indeed, he practically utters the party line, if there was one, when he says that “we still have to build in this country that existential commitment which goes beyond radical rhetoric” (34).  

Roussopolous also calls for a thorough treatment of history, specifically Canadian labour history and the history of progressive movements.  Through studying these formative moments in Canadian political life, one builds a kind of tradition and gets to see clearly where past movements failed so as to effect the greatest possible change in the future.  Change, then, is the underlying message of Roussopolous’s vision, as it is for most leftist manifestos.  This orientation towards change will have a definite place in Youth Existenz.  Through debate and careful, precise thinking and reflection, progress will be made--we will have changed who we were.  Yet simple change, such as mindless civil disobedience, will not be advocated.  Rather, an understanding of what we are and where we come from will establish, slowly, a lasting direction forward.  Through challenging every claim and way of life, including our own, we hope to present this way forward.  

Response to Bertell Ollman's "How to Take an Exam and Remake the World"

       For Bertell Ollman, as for the leaders of the student protests in the mid 1960’s, one’s university education cannot be separated from political concerns.  What do they mean by this?  Arguably, they are claiming two essential things.  First, they want to banish the idea that university as we find it today and in the 1960’s is removed from the everyday lives of people; it is not an “ivory tower,” as some believe it to be.  Instead, it is linked to the outside world, a world which for Ollman and the students in the 1960’s, is divided between rulers and the ruled.  As such, and this is their second claim, one’s university education is necessarily either pointed against the existing society, i.e. critical of it, or else it affirms this society.  In other words, a student or professor is either part of the solution or part of the problem.  I will argue that while Ollman and the students of the sixties, particularly those at Berkeley, are correct to identify today’s university as an institution which, for the most part, trains “pliant subjects” for future positions in capitalist society, the idea that university education is and should be political is problematic.  After outlining precisely how today’s university trains students for future jobs in capitalist society, I will argue that the university does not and cannot solely aim to criticize capitalist society.  This would be to dismiss important disciplines such as philosophy and literature, which are apolitical in themselves, and can work to complement Marxist criticism of the existing power structure.

Before discussing the problems associated with politicizing university education, we need to explore Ollman’s description of today’s university, which is for the most part accurate.  His account echoes the words of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid 1960’s, who state that “the university has become grotesquely distorted into a “multiversity”; a public utility serving the purely technical needs of a society” (We Want A University, 44).  Ollman holds that this characterization of the university, as a training ground where students acquire skills necessary for success in the “outside world,” not only aptly describes North American universities today, but also higher educational institutions throughout history.  He states that 

what's called "education" has taken many different forms over the centuries, just as its content has varied from A   to      Z, depending not only on what was known at the time but on the skills and personal qualities the rulers of each society wished to inculcate into their subjects” (Ollman, 6).  

Thus in ancient Athens students learned rhetoric, ancient Spartan students learned swordsmanship and military valour, and students in medieval Europe primarily learned theology (6).  In each of these periods, the curriculum reflects the interests of those who ruled their societies, not their own interests in course material.  

The case is no different for the majority of today’s university students, who, according to Ollman, attend school because they want to acquire skills which will be beneficial when they graduate and enter the outside world, which is a capitalist world.  As he says, “after struggling and sacrificing through four or more years of university, you are ready to start a "career" (4).  Based on personal experience, I agree with Ollman here. In classroom discussions and casual conversation, it is common today to hear students, especially arts students (the type of student I associate with most), justify what they learn in university by listing various skills which they will inevitably acquire through such an education, and which will be useful for future careers.  What exactly are these skills?  Perhaps the one which these students most frequently cite, and the one which they believe sets them apart from students of other faculties, is the capacity for “critical thinking.”  What is critical thinking?  Many cannot provide much of an account, but they do know that certain banks and advertising agencies value it greatly.  They also know that an arts education is generally regarded to help students hone their ability to think critically, in contrast to a business or engineering education which, they say, merely teaches students to plug numbers into formulas. 

       Another skill many students believe they will acquire by completing an arts degree is communication.  And how could we not?  With the amount of papers we write every semester, we are bound to get better at expressing ourselves.  Reading and speaking are also essential communication skills which an arts education endows students with.  If we do just the right number of presentations, and just the right number of readings, we will have acquired the ability to communicate clearly and thus effectively, skills which are endlessly transferable.  What else do today’s students hope to acquire from their education? What else do they find useful?  Their list of skills is long indeed.  Time management will come in handy when we have employers to appease; thus our assignments and our professors, those to whom we hand assignments in, act as the products of our work and our bosses respectively.  Interpersonal skills, i.e. the ability to interact with other people and be attentive to their needs, will be useful in the business meetings which we will inevitably attend.  This is certainly the popular attitude on campuses today, namely that the reason we take arts courses, the reason we pursue a Bachelor of Arts degree, is to develop skills which will be useful in the capitalist society where we will find our place. 

It is this instrumental mentality that the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement identified to be the defining characteristic of their own university experience.  The strict requirements that a student had to fulfill in order to graduate, which are nearly identical to the requirements of a bachelor’s degree today, make one’s educational experience sound more like work in a factory.  They describe their educational careers in the following (depressing) terms: 

we get a four-year-long series of sharp staccatos: eight semesters, forty courses, one hundred twenty or more “units,” ten to fifteen impersonal lectures per week, one to three oversized discussion meetings per week led by poorly paid graduate student “teachers” (43). 

This regimented experience prompted them to nickname the university “the knowledge factory” and refer to themselves as “student cogs.” 

To borrow Marxist terminology, this experience of being a “student-cog” in the “knowledge factory” leads to the alienation of academic labour.  This is to say that since many students today treat course material, i.e readings, as ‘stuff’ which needs to be converted into product (much in the same way that raw materials in a factory need to be transformed into products), the intrinsic value of the ‘stuff’ disappears; its only value lies in its ability to produce in us the required skill or the grade we receive.  Since subject matter no longer needs to be grappled with for its own sake, students become bored and angry that they have to learn it.  While this hostile relationship to one’s studies will perhaps always exist (people have their preferences), it is seen increasingly on campuses today.  Scribbled on a desk at the library, for instance, are the words “school sucks” (which is of course followed by the question, “then why are you here?”, which is followed by “nerd”, and so on).

Dennis Lee, a graduate student at the University of Toronto in the 1960’s, gives an insightful account of being alienated from his studies.  Lee recalls sitting in a graduate seminar in 1965 and feeling no real connection to the subject matter which was being discussed.  He writes, 

I can recall my sense of utter estrangement as I wound my way through the realization that what they were saying had no purchase on me, that the experience of being in that seminar was without meaning for me, that doing graduate work had not become real, and that my entire undergraduate and high school education had been mainly a sham” (Getting to Rochdale, 46).  

       At the root of Lee’s estrangement was his realization that the university was not what it purported to be; it was not an ivory tower dedicated to the advancement of knowledge.  It had “fallen away from its own ideal of a liberal education” and become, as the students at Berkeley labeled it, a training ground for the technical society beyond its grounds (48).  In other words, Lee had realized the stark reality of the contemporary university.  He had previously overlooked this reality because he was interested in the material.  In the seminar, however, the dim state of affairs hit him in an almost inexpressible way.  As for today’s students, your connection to course material had no value other than what grades were possible because of such a connection.  University had revealed itself to be “a fraud” (48).  

       Ollman makes a similar observation about the alienation which today’s students experience from their course work.  Perhaps the main reason for such alienation is the examination, the popular method of evaluation in most university faculties today.  He asks, “why exams, and why so many?” (171).  For Ollman, exams are the strongest evidence that what we learn is only valuable for what it gives us in the future.  He provides a list of reasons as to why exams in particular are intended to prepare us for capitalist society.  This list includes the preparation for a rigorous work situation, mental, emotional, and moral preparation for fast paced work, as well as responding to strict orders such as “discuss this” or “outline that” (149).  Ollman notices that these methods of evaluation lead to a similar level of alienation experienced in the daily capitalist world.  He writes that 

students know, for example, that exams don't only involve reading questions and writing answers. They also involve forced isolation from other students, prohibition on talking and walking around and going to the bathroom, writing a lot faster than usual, physical discomfort, worry, fear, anxiety (lots of that) and often guilt (35).  

Thus in the same way working people experience stress and physical pain as a result of forcing themselves to constantly produce for their employers so they can afford to live, students suffer mentally and physically to prepare for exams.  As the leaders of the Free Speech Movement say, even “human nerves and flesh are transmuted under 

the pressure and stress of the university routine. It is as though we have become raw material in the strictly organic sense” (43).  Stress levels have reached new highs lately in North American schools, even resulting in suicides.  In these troubling statistics we can surely detect radical alienation from one’s academic labour.   

Thus Ollman’s assessment of today’s university experience is mostly accurate.  For the most part, it can be said that students today flock to university in order to acquire essential skills for careers in the outside capitalist world.  This is evident in conversations, both inside and outside the classroom.  Whether they desire these positions (and the lives they entail) themselves or the system conditions students to desire them, they regard university as essential for carrying on with their lives, and parents undoubtedly influence this view.  We go to university to avoid becoming garbage men!  Further, Ollman’s account mirrors those students of the 1960’s who viewed their educational experience as increasingly resembling the capitalist society outside of it.  For Ollman, however, universities have always responded to the needs of the surrounding society. 

But as suggested above, Ollman’s account of university today, which accords with that of the student movement in the 1960’s, is correct for the most part.  It is empirically true that students across North America are increasingly entering university in order to acquire skills which will be useful for future careers in capitalist society.  Rather than being, in the words of the Berkeley protesters, “turned on by a great idea, a great man, or a great book,” many students who pursue degrees in the Arts view course material as raw material waiting to be converted into products, whether these products 

be essays, assignments, or exams.  This results in painful boredom and restlessness, a feeling which was exemplified by Dennis Lee, a formerly engaged student who realized the falseness of his education and the university institution.  These moods are also acutely visible around university campuses during exams.  

Since this is generally true, Ollman might not have felt the need to discuss the survival of the liberal education in a few schools across the continent.  Through its exploration of primary texts of the western canon, the University of King’s College in Halifax is one of these schools.  There, professors and students share a love for grappling with these great texts, and do not seek to gain skills or grades which will help them achieve a position within capitalist society. Granted, there are students there who do not have this vigorous enthusiasm for the texts and human inquiry; but there will always be rats, as Marx knew.  The point is that at King’s, (and in other pockets within large research institutions) texts are treated for their ability to say something about the human condition, to open up avenues of discussion about the mysteries of existence.  To read Plato and only think about what skills one will develop, such as the ability to articulate oneself, would be to miss the force of his points.  So while students at King’s, and other keen students across North American universities today (they are out there) do not go to school without regard for the occupations they may hold in the future, these occupations are not their first priority.  Instead, they aim at nothing less than opening their world and acquiring a deeper understanding of where they came from.   

This brings us to Ollman’s larger claim, namely that professors and students who are not explicitly critical of the established order, which is a capitalist order, must be in 

favour of this state.  Is this the case?  Is the only true or worthwhile criticism economic criticism, pointed at exposing the material conditions behind history, i.e. social and political phenomena?  There is definitely a lot packed into this type of criticism.  Marxists are not only interested in exposing how we are determined economically--how our lives have and will be dictated by the economic status of our parents and grandparents--but also how we are determined by other social structures, or how the ruling class attempts to control the populace through other channels.  Ollman mentions how the advertising industry influences our choices, and includes on his “list of the advantages of socialism” that it is “concerned with truth...it would make the false advertising, hope, and outright lies that defiles so much of our public life unnecessary...” (170).  

There are many other institutions which exert some degree of power over us.  Elementary school itself, with its incessant disciplining, and other institutions such as the police, the army, and even the family work to make us compliant in the system.  It is these apparently neutral institutions which Ollman and other Marxists attempt to expose as tools or expressions of the ruling class.  These criticisms are indeed well founded and important.  Yet can we say that all education should be aimed at exposing them, and that any style of criticism which does not attempt to reveal the “big lie” of capitalism is not proper critique?  Further, can we say that those who do not criticize capitalism openly, and attempt to discover its covert influence on our daily lives, are therefore in support of the existing state of affairs?  Ollman seems to think so.  If one is not critical of the capitalist system, he is being disingenuous toward humanity, and is blinded to the real, worthwhile problems facing people today.  

But what about other kinds of critique?  There are two disciplines which cannot, I think, be constantly subjected to Marxist critique, and can actually be used to the Marxist’s advantage if he treats them on their own terms. These disciplines are literature and philosophy, two expressions of culture which Marx famously said to be symptoms of prior economic conditions and therefore less important than criticizing the power of the ruling class and trying to eventually overthrow its power.  From these two disciplines, which aim to discover and enhance our understanding of human existence, the Marxist can gain additional perspectives on his own practice.  As the Dalai Lama suggests, “Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned with only gain and profitability” (29).  One cannot simply assume that the ethical posture will take care of itself.  Therefore the Marxist needs to welcome the perspectives of other disciplines, philosophy and literature in particular.   

Ollman is generally correct about the state of university education today.  Like other higher learning institutions in humanity’s distant past, the curriculum, i.e. what we learn, is only valuable for the positions we will acquire later in life, in capitalist society.  This is empirically true; one need only listen to conversations between arts majors to detect the influence of capitalism, and thus the pure instrumentality of one’s education.  One student in a history tutorial last year said it best: “all that matters is that I get a job.”  But we would be remiss to overlook the survival of liberal education in North America, asurvival which requires keen students, faculty, and a supportive institution which respect  ideas for their intrinsic worth and not what one gains through studying them.  I was fortunate to attend, and still attend, such an institution.  This is also not to say that there are not students and teachers in larger institutions, such as Dalhousie, who respect education for its own sake.  I have come across several thrilling academic personalities in these places, which are, as Ollman suggests, for the most part dominated by the “means-ends” mentality.  

Review of Thomas King’s A Coyote Columbus Story

       Thomas King’s short story A Coyote Columbus Story is written as a children’s story, with its light, lampooning tone, informal language, and childish characters.  Yet beneath this humourous presentation, King comments on important issues facing present day North American culture.  These include the question of perspective regarding North America’s colonial history, the possibility of maintaining (or reclaiming) a genuine Native North American tradition, and the disturbing and nihilistic influence of capitalism on ourselves and our environment. 

The story progresses in the form of a quasi-dialogue between the narrator and Coyote, a mythological “trickster” common in Native North American folklore.  At the beginning, Coyote announces that she is going to a party for Christopher Columbus (presumably on Columbus Day) and informs the narrator that Columbus is the one who found both America and Native Americans.  When the narrator questions this claim, Coyote says that she read it in a “big red history book.”  The narrator then launches into his own account of Columbus’ arrival, in which Coyote herself brings Columbus and his men into existence.  She does this out of boredom, having been abandoned by her Native friends, who find “better things to do than play ball with Coyote and those changing rules.”  These things include fishing, shopping, and going to the movies.  

Coyote soon regrets “thinking up” Columbus and his men however, as they spurn her invitations to play ball, which is all she ever wants to do, and are only interested in gathering things--gold, silk cloth, and portable colour televisions--to sell back home in Spain.  Coyote says to herself, “Maybe I thought too hard. These people have no manners. They act as if they have no relations.”  Things get worse when Columbus decides to switch from gathering material items to gathering the Native Americans themselves to sell in Spain.  This decision initially evokes Coyote’s laughter: “That is a good joke, she says, and begins to laugh some more.”  Once she realizes the gravity of the situation, however, Coyote dismays.  She asks plaintively, “who will play ball with me?”  This, then, is the narrator’s account of Columbus’ arrival and the subsequent European colonization of North America.  In direct opposition to Coyote’s claim that Columbus found America and Native Americans, the narrator concludes by saying “Those things were never lost...Those things were always here. Those things are still here today.” 

        King presents the aforementioned cultural issues in the form of a children’s story.  The tone throughout the story is light and informal, and King presents many of the important decisions and claims made by Coyote and Columbus as inconsequential.  When, for instance, Coyote makes the historical claim that Columbus found both America and Native Americans, the narrator replies in an almost mockingly chastising tone “Boy, that Coyote is one silly Coyote--you got to watch out for her.”  As well, Columbus’ venture, and indeed Columbus himself, are presented by King as childish.  For even though Columbus’ deeds, especially his decision to 

bring the Native Americans to market, are devastating, he and his men are portrayed as frisky, even temperamental children who are ultimately blameless.  When, for example, Columbus’ men present him with the goods they have gathered, Columbus reacts petulantly, grinding his teeth so hard that “he gets a headache and gets cranky.”  Coyote is perhaps the most childish figure in the story, however, as she is obsessed with playing ball, a game for which only she can make the rules.  Her reaction when Columbus gathers most of her Native American friends is especially juvenile: she is sad because there is no longer anybody to play ball with.   

A Coyote Columbus Story functions primarily as a criticism of dominant historical narratives.  In other words, it calls into question those versions of history written by the “winners,” who are in this case, and most cases, Europeans.  Coyote’s claim that Columbus found both America and Native Americans, an alleged ‘fact’ which she read in a dubious “big red history book,” implies that only Europeans have a perspective worth considering, and that the North American continent and the Native Americans did not exist prior to Columbus’ discovery of them.  The narrator’s account problematizes this understanding, as Coyote, perhaps a symbol for the contingent nature of the world, brings Columbus and his men into existence.  This new account of things serves to remind Europeans that their conquering of North America and Native American peoples was perhaps not ‘meant to be’ but was rather accidental, owing to the forces of chance.  This account also forces people with “Eurocentric” biases to step outside of these biases and consider not only another version of how colonialism came to be, but also an entirely new historical perspective, namely that of Native North Americans. 

King also mounts a subtle critique of capitalism in this story, or at least the consumerist mentality of the Europeans who colonized North America.  He appears to be saying that this mentality, which Columbus and his men embody in the story, is dangerous as it contains few moral restraints besides those of positive laws.  This danger is evident in Columbus’ insatiable desire to gather whatever material goods he and his men desire, and it culminates in his devastating decision to gather the Native Americans to be sold.  King’s statement here is that fellow human beings, as well as the environment, may at any moment become objects of exploitation within the capitalist system. 

King’s decision to present the controversial story of Europe’s colonization of North America in the form of a children’s story is very effective.  By portraying Columbus and his men as temperamental children who were brought to North America by chance, King invites present day Canadians and Americans to view their history with humility and perhaps with humour.  Beneath this trivialization, however, one feels an ethical injunction: namely, that we be attentive to other historical perspectives, as well as the potential human beings have to commit harmful acts.