Chagal4's Blog

Comes the election we can all get loaded. Because it’s over. There are those who who say that you can’t really learn to despise someone until they’re elected. In our case, we’ve had the same Prime Minister for ten years and we have learned to loathe much about him. The other candidates haven’t yet demonstrated their most odious sides. No doubt that will come with time and if they are successful. That’s the way it is with “palitics”. We want to like these people but in fact …just by getting elected they are drawn further away from us. They travel in armed and armoured convoys with darkened windows. They seem to exist in photo ops and pre-arranged ultra secure public appearances…then return to secure “facilities” with every conceivable alarm and guard device. They don’t worry about mortgage or car payments, student loans or fixing the roof or putting granny in the “home”. They have “people” for that. And ultimately it’s this separateness we come to hate. We all know that the problems facing any modern government are mind bending and demanding of anyone involved. Still we’d like to think our leaders are ordinary people…like us. And that’s because of what else we know. These people make mistakes on a regular basis…some they’re tricked into…some because they’re just plain pig headed and dumb assed…and some because they are fucking swine. If we thought they were ordinary people, like us, we could excuse these gross errors and occasional disasters…because …hey, we all make mistakes.

It would all be so much easier if we could send them to sit in the corner on the red chair to ponder on the errors of their ways.

I want to think of Africa

But every time I try…it’s as if a cold grey curtain

Falls before my eyes…Africa gets murdered time and

Time again…and then it’s resurrected…to get murdered

Once again. If this had happened to a person

They’d have to write a book…create a new religion

Give it all a second look.

I want to think of Africa

Makes a grown man

Cry.

And we seem to have a lot of “others” these days. I just read a stunning article about something hideous that has surfaced on the right wing side of our political rat’s nest. Our government is promising, if re-elected, to put an end to “cultural barbarism”. This is pernicious code for targeting “others” in our society since the cultural barbarism is not so clearly defined. One can be damn sure that it won’t be targeting the government’s own barbarous treatment of Aboriginals on and off reserves. And one would like to think that the wealthy folks who import live-in nannies and keep them virtually prisoners, abuse them and underpay them would be solid suspects. Nope…I think if they do anything about Aboriginals it will be to call them “barbaric” and put more police on the job.

Never-mind…in these divisive days there are plenty of others to go after. Foreigners mostly…but we’re careful not to alienate anyone specific during election campaigns…but later? Well let’s just say that Canada is not planning to help much with the refugee crisis and we have already put in place some laws that will strip the citizenship of “bad people” . Yes, Yes, I know that some of these people might indeed be bad…but the due process is pretty shaky here. A person born in Canada is a Canadian citizen…you can’t just take their passport and deport them to another country…unless that country agrees to take them…can you? Well maybe.

So here’s the thing. Say a young Canadian girl goes to a certain war-torn country with the intent of nursing the afflicted. While she’s there…”somebody” tells “somebody else” that she’s working for ISIS. She eventually comes home and is promptly arrested. Our “terrorism laws” say that she can be tried and convicted on the word of “somebody” in that other country without having that somebody revealed and even without the courts or the public and especially not the defendant knowing what “somebody” said. But if it’s good enough for our intelligence guys…hey…what’s the problem? Maybe she wasn’t working for ISIS at all but we’ll never know and furthermore…it’s against the law to talk about it.

Poor people are “others”. They always have been. I’ve heard social workers tell me that these people sit on the porch of their rented houses, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes while collecting welfare and not looking for a job! We should deport their asses for sure! I wrote a few years ago that being unemployed made one a second class citizen. In fact it’s worse than that. Being unemployed is like losing citizenship…and the longer one remains unemployed the harder it is to get that citizenship back. Homeless or not…these people live in a shadow world surrounded by our prejudice and conceits. We conspire to “not see” them on the street. Means they’re not there of course.

So this drawing is for the others we don’t see. These people collect bottles and cans and trade them for cash…presumably so they can sit on their porch and drink beer and smoke cigarettes.

I live near an area of Ottawa called the “Market” . In one shape or another the “Byward Market” district has been here for more than a hundred and fifty years. Fruit and vegetable vendors set up stalls alongside flower pedlars and maple syrup merchants. There are stores that sell fish and cheese, and wine, furniture and clothing and restaurants of every description. Bars and nightclubs with summer patios that are filled from lunch to bedtime. It’s a lively place. There is also…like most market areas, panhandlers and crack heads and zipsters babbling on speed…and late at night, gel topped, razor sculpted, gangstas invade the clubs reeking of toxic cologne and rolling in last years Beemer (blacked out) and this years Accord (all white) and high roller Range Rovers and Escalades and Navigators…and the odd matte grey Hummer. They knock fists and slap hands and hitch up those dragster jeans and eyeball the baby Hollywood, fake Kardashians in their elevator bras and polished legs with two hours of effort invested in every face…wobbling on six inch spikes …Oh babyyy…does your mama know?

In the summer there are buskers and performers…hard to compete with the late night show rolling in and out of the clubs but…earlier in the evening the family diners and “this -place- looks- nice -dear” crowds dither over choices and stand around to watch the jugglers and clowns and acrobats…singers and players and a Japanese lady plucking her instrument to the perplexity of many.

And there was this guy…a juggler because what else could he be…but wait…he also played the accordion. I was hoping for a monkey but the shirt was enough for me.

Did he actually look like this? No…I did this a month later. And anyway…it looks like his shirt. And I loved that shirt.

Chairs are ubiquitous…everywhere…all of the time. Makes me wonder what they do when we’re not there. Do they dream…

O.K. so I’m riding through the park, moaning about the cold that makes my eyes water and how there will soon be snow and all that jive…when I look up and see this tree. Now it wasn’t a big tree…more like a medium tree…maple tree, to name its tribe. It was standing there, mostly alone since the city had ripped out dozens of full grown trees in this area…afflicted by the emerald, green, purple assed, mother-fucking, ash borer. I don’t know where those fucking things came from but they can’t go back fast enough. If the rednecks tried as hard to keep these bugs out as they are to keep the Syrian refugees out…the trees would be grateful. Apologies…I digress. So there was this tree and it was on fire…figuratively not literally…It was the way the sunlight hit it and the explosion of colours, golds and oranges and pinks and reds and yellows all shimmering in the breeze so that it glowed like Penelope Cruz in a sequin dress. Well I stopped my bike didn’t I? And I reached for my miracle of modern technology (a phone that takes pictures!) and the battery was dead…or at least sleeping. It was gorgeous and it lifted me that tree…and I thanked it.

Years ago I did this drawing after seeing a documentary about the scary shit we do to the environment. I meant to say that If we destroy trees…we can’t re-invent them.

We’re having an election here soon. The apples are running against the oranges…with some grapes and peaches in there too. The country’s in reasonably good shape compared to many others. The apples haven’t done much for the poor people but the oranges aren’t  a great deal better at that…and neither of them seems to able to resolve the aboriginal questions that get bigger every year. Both apples and oranges are good friends with business…always have been really. They may quibble over which businesses they like but that’s just called sharing the wealth. Pity they can’t share more of it with working folks. The grapes and peaches strive mightily in the direction of “goodness” but there just aren’t enough of them…and they have a terrible tendency to shoot their feet full of holes in the middle of the race…making it hard to get to the finish line. I think we’d all be better off if they’d all come equipped with mouth zippers.

While the country is in relatively good shape it’s in the interest of the apples and the oranges to tell us how bad it REALLY is so that we can beg them to fix it. I figure they could do a lot to fix it if they inserted their long pointy parts into their round hollow parts and hopped over the horizon.

I feel a load of sympathy for the grapes and peaches and fear and loathing toward the apples and oranges. Alas a lot of people are thinking that voting for an orange will help to get rid of the apples…A hell of a choice…I’d rather vote for a loaf of bread.