The Antisocial Socialist

 Not as sick as I am of him, though. 

Apparently despite this province very clearly not being the UK or we would have Gregg's vegan sausage rolls and it would be easier for me to "accidentally" wander onto the Doctor Who set, Ford quietly—with the agreement of the Liberals and Greens—instituted a mandate to have the Ontario Legislature sing “God Save the Queen” (not the Sex Pistols one, the other one) on the first Monday of each month that the government is sitting.

(Fortunately, the government doesn't sit very often, as they took seven months of vacation last year.)

Three Indigenous MPPs (all NDP, with the support of their caucus), refuse, and here is why if it's not obvious.

It's bad enough that anyone sings the Canadian national anthem when Canada is reneging on its reconciliation promises and obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples but this is ridiculous. He's tossing money to American firms to murder poor people, instituting educational cuts modelled on failed American models. Now he thinks he's BoJo, which in fairness it's easy to confuse them, but this is taking things a little too far.

There are few things, to my mind, so blatantly offensive as monarchism. I simply cannot get my head around it as a concept. It is intellectually unjustifiable to the point of being almost surreal, a blight that, every so often, stands stark against the noble, if flawed, ideals of progression, reason, and secular humanism. I ought to be reminded of it every time I pay for something, but it takes a media spectacle for the offense to truly hit home.

The wedding of the scum-sucking parasites is just a clusterfuck of everything distasteful, politically and aesthetically: wealth disparity, inherited prestige and income, imperialism, patriarchy, celebrity culture. The police, paid overtime by hardworking taxpayers, protect the bloated lordlings from the rage of young people deprived by austerity measures of the future they'd expected. Wastefulness, pure wastefulness. It's disgusting. Every time I turn on the news, I feel like I need to take a long shower afterward.

Were I a different sort of person, I would ask if there were some sort of Firefox add-on I could get to screen mentions of the spectacle like the Charlie Sheen blocker. But that would not spare me from newspapers or the CBC. And, admittedly, there's a part of me that just thrives on the outrage, as though the burning wrongness of a worldview that allows the remnants of feudalism to persist even in this supposedly enlightened age becomes a white-hot, perpetual fire crumbling any remaining vestiges of tolerance or compromise in my worldview.

I can't seem to remember to write 2011 on anything. It isn't just that it's January and I have this problem every single year. It's that it's 2011 and there's still a monarchy* and I don't have robots that do my laundry for me.

ETA: I showed zingerella Steampunk Palin and she retaliated with an incredibly WTF production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen. (Warning: bunnies, Uncanny Valley, furry, your brain can probably not handle it, and it's certainly NSFW.)

* Several, in fact, but one in particular annoys me.

I stood in the cold and dark, shivering, telling myself that I ought to probably walk to the subway station rather than taking the streetcar. That's what I'd been doing until the weather turned, and it wasn't that horrid out. But the St. Clair streetcar is normally quite fast, and I'd recently been ill, and so I gave in. A distant part of my brain noted the blue flashing lights up ahead, but this was Toronto, a large and relatively civilized urban centre, and there are frequently blue flashing lights that have no impact on my life or travels whatsoever.

At last, the streetcar arrived, and I piled into one of the seats, turning up the volume on my trusty Ministry of Culture. I was so engrossed in listening to Of Montreal and losing a game of Solitaire that I barely noticed that the streetcar had stopped moving. Several people stood up and walked to the front of the car, having an animated discussion with the rather weary looking driver.

"...about 15 minutes," I heard, which is never what you want to hear on public transit. I tugged out one earphone.

"Can you let us out to walk to the subway?" As I mentioned, it wasn't far.

"Can't open the doors," the poor driver said (I realized that he had just been asked this question multiple times). "It's a garish parade of inbred parasitic Nazi-sympathizing douchebags.*"

"We're stranded here until they go by," a woman told me.

"This is the third time it's happened to me tonight," the driver added. "They've got secret service cars and motorcycle cops and it's a mess from here to Weston."

"Jesus," I exclaimed. "Your tax dollars at work!"

"I can't believe they need this many cops," the woman added.

"You know," I said. "At my school, we can't even afford to have textbooks for every kid. And yet we can afford this farce?"

"You'll get no argument from me," she said. "I'm no monarchist. One bulletproof car wouldn't have been enough?" (Monarchists, of course, do not take public transit.)

Just then, the scum-sucking scions of a decaying empire cruised past. You could tell by their hair. We were trapped in a royal traffic jam! I am fairly certain there were inbred idiots in the pissy little backwater where I grew up (you don't need to import them all the way from England) but no one ever halted St. Clair to let them through.

"It's not like anyone's going to take a potshot," I added. "This isn't the 1800s." Unfortunately.

"What do they do exactly? What contribution do they make?" a man asked.

"Nothing," I said, "they just take." My fellow stranded travellers nodded in agreement.

Finally, we were allowed to go. We bid each other a friendly goodnight. I was disgusted at this opulent display, but my heart was warmed by the fiery righteous outrage of the good people of this city.

And that is how I came a stone's throw away from the bloody royals, but was unable to throw a stone.

* I may have taken some liberties, gentle readers, with our good driver's phrasing. He probably just said "it's the Royal Family." But his tone said everything.