well, Steve Harper's billion dollar weekend has come and gone. looming large among the amazing accomplishments, it seems governments have agreed that deficits are bad.
meanwhile the city seems to be traumatized by the weekend's activities. ironic, in a way, given the colonial concerns so often expressed in YYZ about being "world class". all "world class" cities have these confrontations between the police and the inhabitants from time to time...
i guess it also speaks to how long it's been since the Toronto Maple Leafs were a serious contender for the Stanley Cup. that always seems to bring out the riotous impulses in some of a city's more sporting people...
no one stood to gain more from the weekend than Canadians. Governor Harper was seriously over-exposed on the massive spending surrounding this event- most of it on the security involving more than 19,000 police from across the country.
it could have hung on him like a bad shirt through the next election and led just enough voters to express their discontent at the ballot box to deliver us all from the christian colonial conservative policies of Harper and his backers.
but no...
thanks to a few hundred losers in the "Black Bloc", CopFest was a huge success.
their need to act out their masturbatory fantasies - as always - has to come first.
their need to act out their masturbatory fantasies - as always - has to come first.
the idea of a revolution that would not be televised is an anethema to the black block. they love to vogue a radical pose- they live for the photo op and youtube clip.
unlike the people in Gaza or Iran, for whom protest and action are life and death issues, these sad brats are risking nothing more than an intoxicating whiff of tear gas, a deodorant failure following a gleeful sprint or an overnight detention.
they reduce decades of honorable anarchist thought and action to petty, pointless prom-night level vandalism while sanctimoniously celebrating themselves in tones and terms Torquemada would find familiar.
self-absorbed to point of sociopathic, dressed up in radical hand-me-downs, the BB gang are a bigger threat to school lunch programs, needle exchanges and other under-funded social programs than they are to any forces of Darkness, here or anywhere.
the Black Bloc are "radical" in the same way the Brown Shirts were "radical". they are the best friends bad cops could ever have, and when the Christian Right in this country really needed a friend, the Black Bloc was right there for them.
tribe knows tribe...
-30-
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