A bit of light-hearted fare this week. After all, it’s been a bit of a grim month. Worsening nuclear fallout in Japan, ongoing war in Libya, general strikes in England, riots in Greece.
Of course, we had our own taste of riots in Canada last month, and as Vancouver burned in the wake of the Canucks’ Stanley Cup loss, the mayor went on television to blame the anarchists. Anarchists?? Well, actually it’s not a bad idea. After all, if he told the truth – that supposedly civilized “average” Canadians, after too much to drink, became uncontrollable primitives and burned down their own city – it would hardly be a way to garner national sympathy and federal compensation money.
On the other hand … last year the federal government showered billions of dollars into protecting the innocent from invisible anarchists in Toronto, and RCMP are now investigating allegations that local MPs even got to use the money as a slush fund for their districts. Well hey, if an anarchist threat is all that’s needed for Toronto to access that sort of easy federal money, no reason Vancouver shouldn’t tap into some of that action too. Flagrant Inquisition-era distortion of the truth aside, it’s great fiscal policy.
It’s funny … I thought governments gave up blaming “anarchists” for bad things 100 years ago, sort of around the time our modern system of justice was invented. I wonder who they’ll decide to blame for the next riot. Freemasons? Pharisees? But I guess you can never get too old when it comes to easy scapegoats. My only surprise is that nobody thought to blame the sub-prime mortgage crisis on the anarchists. Or, you know, the current slump in the smartphone industry and RIM’s plunging first quarter sales. Anarchist conspiracies, clearly!
We deserve anarchists too
We really missed the boat in Newfoundland and Labrador. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to anybody to blame the collapse of the cod fishery on the anarchists! You know, we went out and did … science, and stuff … and wound up blaming the Spanish and Portuguese and East Europeans for overfishing. Well, like that worked. I mean even when we proved they violated international quota laws, hid their catches from inspectors, and used ramming tactics to avoid being inspected, the feds did nothing. Boring reality stuff, that. Forget the Spanish, we should have blamed the anarchists! The prospect of anarchist factory freezer trawlers rioting in our waters would have probably been enough to dispatch half the Canadian navy to the Grand Banks (as well as Steve Paikin and his live Twitter feed!). Imagine, giant floating sound cannons (maybe disguised as whales for good measure) … Steve Paikin tweeting live from a Coast Guard vessel as they kettle Spanish anarchist boats … that would have been a far more successful strategy, I’m sure.
There’s no reason we can’t still try. “Hey, Steve! Steve Harper! No … no, get your fighter jets out of the Arctic, there’s no anarchists in the Arctic, it’s too cold for anarchists up there – they don’t believe in winter jackets. Over here! We have anarchists over here! BIG anarchists with BOATS! They’re rioting and stealing all the fish!”
I propose it’s certainly worth a try.
For that matter, what exactly is an anarchist, anyway? Is that sort of like a skeet? Like a fancy Latin word for skeet?
Hmm. Here’s how Wiktionary defines anarchist:
(1) One who believes in or advocates the absence of hierarchy and authority in most forms …
(2) One who disregards laws …
(3) One who resents outside control or influence on his or her life, in particular a government, and therefore desires the absence of political control …
Oh, I get it. Sorta like a Spanish fishing trawler.
