Nobel award-winner Bob Dylan basically defined the protest song in the 1960s. What do protest songs sound like today? Well, here's a favourite example, from 2011. https://youtu.be/0Fju9o8BVJ8
It was probably just a fluke. Perhaps an accidental click of a mouse. I don't remember exactly how I got there. What I do remember is that at first I thought it was just a joke, a mistake, maybe fake news. It could be an old satellite image, I thought. Something from some long-forgotten hell centuries ago. I checked the page source. It was real. And it was happening right now. An ominous blob of — of what? Rain? Smog? Locusts? — was creeping up the Atlantic coast. I could only wish it was something so benign. But deep in my heart, I knew it wasn't. The colour code for rain is blue. Smog is yellow. Locusts are brown. This was white. And white can only mean one thing: snow. A death cloud of snow. And it was headed our way. I might be the only one who knows our collective fate right now, I thought. Here in my little den in the east end of St. John's, I imagined other residents blithely chatting to workmates or shuffling around WalMart, oblivious to the impending doom. No ...
Actually, it began quite a bit before this, but if there ever was a moment that perfectly captured the hubris of the Muskrat Falls delusion, this Dec. 17, 2012 spectacle was it. You can picture then-premier Kathy Dunderdale the night before, carefully honing every mixed metaphor and tired cliché in front of a mirror. I don't think she wrote the speech, to be honest, but it was certainly an amazing piece of work. And by amazing, I mean gob-smackingly bad. With today's announcement of an independent inquiry into the lower Churchill development — one that has mushroomed in cost and is proving to be an economic albatross around our necks — I immediately thought of this speech. I remembered how clownish it seemed at the time, and how I knew it would come back to bite these people in the ass in the not-too-distant future. Minister Jerome Kennedy (right) seems to be genuinely enjoying the absurd hyperbole. On the other side, Nalcor boss Ed Martin looks a little uncomfortable. Pe...
A belated review of The Red Pill , a film by Cassie Jaye In February, federal Conservative leadership hopeful Maxime Bernier received an endorsement from Alberta Wildrose MLA Derek Fildebrandt. It was an important coup for Bernier who would normally face an uphill battle convincing right-leaning Albertans to bet on a Quebecer. He wanted to tweet something clever, something to show that Fildebrandt "gets it" — that he sees the real thing when he sees it. So he posted the following meme. It's an allusion to a scene from the 1999 film The Matrix in which the main character is offered a choice: take the blue pill and remain in the artificial reality you're blissfully trapped in now, or take the red pill and discover what's really going on behind the scenes. As metaphors go, it's a sledgehammer. And it's been exploited endlessly since the film came out. We're being manipulated by the system. Do you want to wake up to reality, or stay...
Comments
Post a Comment