Care for some cheese with that whine, journo boy? Little caviar on a cracker, perhaps? Poor babies. How hard it must be to be you, or rather how easy: Just blame it all on a bunch of kids in black, get a few complaints and disavowals from activists in the same piece that directly prove you to be a pontificating jackass (as well as a liar), and just don’t dig any deeper. And you wonder why they don’t trust you media droids? If this is the best you can do, quit fucking wondering. Your shit is self-explanatory.The kvetcher who wrote that was working for an LLC blog–that is, one of those corporate mouthpieces dressed up to look like hip, cool, internet-savvy cutting-edge independent whatever. Nothing independent about it, in actual point of fact; any “blog” with an LLC at the bottom is not a real blog. It’s a corporate entity, not an independent media outlet, and reflects a corporatist worldview when all is said and done. This reporter is a perfect example of that. His final paragraphs also strike me as representative somehow:Our first foray today was to attend the Toronto Community Mobilization Network’s press conference at 3 p.m., which was barely a press conference: it was in fact an extended chance for TCMN to whine at the press for being unsupportive. (At least when Bill Blair holds a press conference and bullshits to your face, he doesn’t need a crowd cheering for him.) It was exactly what you’d expect: cops are bad, we’re exercising our legal rights, the people who have been detained overnight are “political prisoners” (by the way, I’ve rung Aung San Suu Kyi on the phone just now, and she says “drama queen says what?”) and on and on–a long-winded stream of the biggest heap of self-righteousness not seen since, well, since the last time I heard Stephen Harper criticize the left wing in this country.And for all of that, protesters, you still could have come out the good guys today. It would have been so easy. You only had to do one thing, one single goddamn thing: “We don’t approve of or condone the Black Bloc tactics and we don’t approve of or condone violent protest.” There you go. Say that, and you’re heroes, plain and simple: people who chose not to let their grievances against the government be tainted by malice, even in the face of ridiculously overwrought police tactics. One lousy sentence; that’s all we asked of you. Just show us a little good faith.But of course it didn’t happen–not from the top. We got weasel words worthy of Parliament. “We don’t comment on the actions of individuals.” “That’s not the story here.” And the reason for the weaseling out is really simple: organizers don’t want to condemn Black Bloc tactics and bandana thugs. The radical protest movement in Canada (and let’s call it that for lack of a better umbrella term, to distinguish it from the labour unions and NGOs that vamoosed on Saturday the moment they realized the goon squad had ruined everything) long ago decided that the Black Bloccers are part of the movement and welcome at their rallies, and that the next time they hold a protest the thugs will show up again and they’ll break shit again, and the rest will just yell “solidarity” like a bunch of useless assholes.
…not to mention disingenuous. That $1.2 million figure included the free booze, which our “alternative” bourgeois journo-boy did not disdain to drink. The “fifty thousand bucks” only refers to the centimetres-deep splash pool proper, but it’s still a hefty sum of money for some plastic liner and a little bit of water. There are families in Toronto who manage to live on less than what that glorified splash-pad cost, for an entire year. (Trust me, dude, you don’t want to see where they have to do it. There’s no “kind of nice” about moldy, roach-and-rat-infested apartments in crime-ridden slums.)Anyway, this is the kind of opinion you get when people’s brains are eaten by corporatism–which, as Mussolini’s speechwriter knew, was the essence of fascism. You get a whole lot of bitching about the wrong people, while the real culprits–definitely NOT “every last one of us”, as Christopher Robin there says, but just a very very few–get off scot-free. Oh what the hell…maybe some people just need pictures to help them understand what this was all about.The entire day was a pathetic waste. At the end of it, journalists and delegates partied inside the International Media Centre; the summit was done, they could now go home, and there was free booze to spare, so why not? It’d be a shame to come to the G20 summit and not get hammered by the fake lake.Actually, in retrospect, the fake lake is honestly kind of nice. It only cost about fifty thousand bucks, not the one-point-two million everybody kept discussing, and it’s really quite pleasant to sit in. But when a fake lake is the best part of your day, it’s been a worthless day. That’s the fault of pretty much every last one of us.
There you guys go. Succinctly put, no?Notice that the “We Fool You” element is second from the top. They have the clergy, but the press would also fit in that tier. The press is, after all, the ruling class’s instrument. Like the clergy, it’s their job to justify God’s ways to man–“God” being the ruling classes, “man” being the rest of us.And don’t get the idea that the “alternative” LLC “blogs” are any different. Actually, they’re just a semi-hip repackaging of the same old thing you’ll find in any crotchety old conservative rag. The excerpts I cited above are a prime example. They’re full of smug, whiny-assed dismissal of legitimate protest, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s like Christopher Robin there was just looking for excuses to dismiss the entire anti-G20 movement. Which, of course, he was.Now, why do you suppose he was doing that? As always, the best question to ask first is that old Latin standby, Cui bono? In other words: Who benefits?Well, corporatists benefit. That’s a given. He wouldn’t be writing for an LLC “blog” if not. Look at the pyramid, and remember: This guy is employed by those at the level of “We Fool You”. And after them, there’s the ruling class. They like to see attention deflected from the real culprits to a few convenient scapegoats. “We Rule You” needs “We Fool You” to get the ruled masses to accept the rulership of the few.And above the ruling class, there’s…what? Anybody? Bueller?Now. Let’s look again at the middle-to-lower levels of that pyramid. Below “We Fool You” is the face of the oppressor we saw yesterday: “We Shoot At You”. And below them are the useful idiots, the parrots we can always trust to squawk along at whatever propaganda “We Fool You” put out, along with “We Shoot At You”. Yes, the “We Eat For You” bunch is contemptible as all hell, though very fashionably dressed (and very appreciative of all the free booze being served around the lame, overpriced fake lake. Belly up to the bar, boys.) I’d say that Christopher Robin, while he writes for “We Fool You”, is actually a member of “We Eat For You”. Little wonder, then, that he feels compelled to piss on the peons below. What else do the eaters do when full of booze and there’s a fake lake lapping at their feet, putting thoughts of pee-pee in their little pea brains? What else–just take a flying whiz at the producers without whom the entire pyramid, including their preening, smug layer, would crumble down.And it would crumble. If the peons knew who their real enemy was, that is. Which is why “We Fool You” has been so busy this past weekend, tamping down dissent, stroking the bourgeois sense of entitlement at “We Eat For You”, and defending and justifying the actions of “We Shoot At You” and “We Rule You”. Even if they disingenuously deny it, as Christopher Robin does. Unfortunately for Christopher Robin and his blame-the-Black-Bloc ilk at We Fool You, LLC, there’s video like this one, showing undercover police in action……in which, if you look closely at about the 45-second mark, you’ll see a masked, black-clad “anarchist” (conveniently marked with an arrow) melt in behind the police line. Something he wouldn’t be able to do if he were not, in fact, one of them! So much for blaming the so-called “Black Bloc”. The real blame, a healthy portion of it at least, must fall on “We Rule You” and “We Shoot At You”, and not the small radical anarchist element among “We Work For All” and “We Feed All”. (The lion’s share of the blame goes, of course, to the nameless, faceless entity at the top of the pyramid.)And now we know why so much money was spent on unregistered security corporations at the Billion Dollar Boondoggle. And also why the same got that quickie licence, while the police got sudden, overnight, secret expanded powers. I’ll bet these fake anarchists, put there to stir trouble among the real ones, were in fact the unaccredited security contractors in question. Who needs a real cause for mass arrests and suspension of civil rights when you can just manufacture a bogus one–using the services of a corporation?Ah yes, “We Rule You” and “We Fool You”, “We Shoot At You” and “We Eat For You”. We See What You Did There.And We Are No Longer Fooled.
