the news from the
(ivica)
"A
little rebellion now and then is a good thing."
(Thomas Jefferson)
Moustaches have been appearing
all over town on random pictures of the Queen. And moustaches on the letters of
her name also. Even on roaming pieces of coins and paper-money! I've been told that
Oliver See is the one responsible (Picasso (in his youth) would have been
proud), and I finally tracked him down in a seedy suburb of Fat City called
Why the
Queen? What do she ever do to anybody? The woman is ineffable! I mean, we're not Australians, Canadians have standards! Oliver
agreed to meet me. "But not today, today is Nudist Tuesday." And he told me to come alone....
He showed up in the newest
fad in Fat City: a T-shirt with his neighbourhood or
suburb written on it. It turns out that he had squealed on some greedy
politician who had demanded a kickback. But nobody
believed him and he became alienated with the system. He lost his business and
his business-friends. This was his final desperate act of rebellion. And the chain of democratic power leads up and up past
Parliament to the Queen! So he held her personally responsible.
This particular act of
middle-class guerilla warfare was a new concept to me, so I looked around a
little more closely at some of the stolid citizens of Fat City. The Canadas had
already lost the teenagers, the geezers, the poor, the right, the left, the
super-rich, the immigrants, the women, divorced fathers, the French, the
English, the Natives, the sick, the Newfies, the
fishermen, the unions, the teachers, the religious, the East, the West, and the
et cetera. I mean, if the
"...he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his island
and his tribe are the laws of
nature."
(George Bernard Shaw)
"What is true of Christianity is
equally true of Buddhism."
(Bertrand Russell)
I found John Burger. Fat
City owed him $4,000 at one point. They stole his car. He had had some car
trouble and left the car on a downtown street (within sight of two hovering
Green Hornets). And then the car disappeared. He
phoned the city; they claimed they didn't have it. He
phoned them every week. It turned out that they did have it all along. They
demanded $2,000 in towing and storage fees. He refused to pay. They had also
slapped on 8 parking tickets on his windshield just
for the hell of it. The kind lady judge gave him 30
days to pay. She refused to hear any story against the city. He paid the
parking fines...in the end...but he was no longer a happy man in Fat City....
The car was worth $4,000.
He figures Fat City owes him $4,000 plus interest (for the last 10 years) plus
administrative, carrying, transportation, handling, and miscellaneous charges
(plus penalties of course). His garage is full of dozens of street signs, 7 blinking
construction beacons, numerous bright pylons (stacked neatly), a city-park
picnic table, and one of those little snow-clearing tractor-vehicles. (Needless to say, his wife does NOT understand....)
Income Tax people have been
hounding Nick Carbone (for three years) over some big
bank accounts in his name...but they weren't really
his. Some other guy has the same first and last name. Finally he switched all his (legal) money and pensions into
an off-shore bank as his form of silent rebellion. (He tells me
that "we paid $110 billion dollars to that bunch of political punks
and what do we get out of it?") He also started a tax-free barter co-op in
his condominium building. He buys German beer, Japanese cars, Chinese slave-labour products, Indian child-labour
rugs, Italian food-products, Mexican clothes, French fashions, Dutch
flowers.... I told him the government charges duty on that imported stuff. (He
ignored me.)
Elizabeth D. snitched at
work. (The polluting was too much even for her Seventies Soul to bear.) And then the Mounties let loose her name by accident
(probably to shake up the barrel and see what popped out). And
then her straight-laced husband left her. (He left her for an older
woman too---now that's mean!) She lost faith in the
system. She's moving to
"...and
in the civilized world the conspiracy between money, politics and science
grows daily more threatening to human survival...."
(Robert Graves)
"They were prosperous in their
small way.
They had a little house of two rooms
and a piece of land, half an acre maybe.
They fattened a pig every year
and kept a cow and a few hens.
On the land they grew garden truck for the city."
(Frederick Philip Grove)
Jill Charron
gave me a call. She had reported a crime-in-progress and the cops couldn't care less. By the time the cops had showed up at
her place (the Tim Horton's had closed finally), the
criminal had slowly driven off. She had identified the criminal as a neighbour; she identified his car and his house. They said
nothing could be done. (The suspect
was known to them.) She had expected police to stream to her defence...here in the
(These middle-class girls all look the same to
me anyway. Once I went downtown to pick up my girl friend and when I got home,
I found out it wasn't even her after all, just some girl that looked the same,
wore the same type of clothes, walked the same, and smiled the same...and it
turned out that they both owed the same amount of money to Visa....)
My friend Jill was a bit
naive, but serious trouble like this had never hit her before. She was still in
shock...at the lack of any real police protection: the cops were slow, they didn't do anything, they never arrested the guy, they said
they were busy. She was shocked that the criminals make money
and the over-time cops make money...and she has the right to remain
silent and pay her taxes! When I asked her what she would do to retaliate
against this system, she just gave me a wicked glare....
keep paying,
ivica-wondering-where-the-lions-are
"The
mistaken exits and entrances of my thirties have moved me several times to some
thought of spending the rest of my days wandering aimlessly around the
like a character out of Conrad, silent and inscrutable."
(James Thurber)
[MONSTRA MIHI MONETAM]
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