Kootenay Crust

By Ian Cobb

Ah social media!

The modern media and its infatuation with asking people via social media who they agree with on a given subject continues to create hashtagging pyscho-critics cowering behind sometimes clever handles such as #smarterthanyou, #yerallsodumb, #bitememoron and my fave, #pieyershuthole.

It also showcases how shallow and pathetic we are as a society, which is why, in part, I like social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

Good media should accurately reflect society as it is happening, and beam it back into the brains of the collective average goo where it is hoped there will be some resonation and even better, some reaction and action.

Hence, we see all manner of subjects being zinged through the information stream from thousands of sources. The information age was a trickle of printed matter 25 years ago, finding its way only into the hands of those made the effort to bend over and pick it up, or buy it.

Now, information comes at all of us, at least those of us who are wired in, which is most people nowadays world-wide, like water from a broken high pressure pipe.

It is a veritable typhoon of blah blah blah and he said/she said until the cows come home and blow a bowl. Modern media is more about the laziness of spouting opinion than it is digging, re-digging, fact-checking, double checking, removing drivel and conjecture and completely scrapping pieces if they suck or are filled with foamy canned whipped cream nothing, he said, oozing with opinion. It’s fast food factless flailing for a flaccid fark-stick factory floor.

Speaking about a flaccid fark-stick back-and-forth, a current shriekfest involves Canadian and international music icon Neil Young and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Young, one of the most individually intact music icons, in that he has never sold his soul to the temptations of corporate miasma so we can enjoying hearing strains of Cinnamon Girl while a breakfast cereal ad plays, is extremely put out by the Alberta Tar Sands.

This makes him extremely average in today’s world. Tirelessly prolific, the 68-year-old Young, whom Winnipeggers claim as one of their own, has produced about 40 albums during his 46-year career.

While the vast majority of his peers lost their song writing and creative mojos back in the 1970s, Young continued to chug along, inspiring new generations and making old fans such as myself realize there is a point in continuing to grind along, because now and then you manage to find a new nugget or two.

As a Canadian and born and raised Winnipegger, I am damned proud of Neil Young, even if he has chosen to live most of his life in Northern California. He does not forget nor shun his Canadian roots. Those roots have made Young unique, and he knows it. And as a good Canadian, he’s smarter than the average headline reader.

Stephen Harper, on the other hand, is a complete doinkus erectus.

Tirade tossing Stevo the Puddly, a cardboard cutout of a time gone by wearing Reagan pants and Mulroney slippers, with a touch of Nixon in his prime staining his cheeks, is the leader of Canada, one of the most progressive nations on Earth.

But he has nothing to do with that.

He stickhandled his way to power, like a skier barely keeping atop an avalanche, at a time when the long-shunned right in Canada took advantage of the dying few twitches of the Liberal Party, gassed out by a skunk/rat hybrid named Jean Chretién.

Since then, CEO Harper and his Illuminati handlers have done whatever they bloody please. Frankly, I am amazed we have any freedoms left at all, though it is possible we are all so distracted by things like Justin Bieber’s house being raided by the police over an egg throwing incident that we DON’T have any freedoms left and are simply all dwelling in an illusion called Canada.

So, when Neil Young crows against the Alberta Tar Sands, while taking part in a tour raising funds for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Legal Fund to help it in a legal challenge against two Shell Canada mine projects, it is refreshing to see it reported.

Young stated: “the oil is not going to Canada, but to China where the air quality has been measured at 30 times the levels of safety established by the World Health Organization. Is that what Canada is all about?”

Good question. Over to you Supreme Commander MiddleFinger ToAll, who has presided over the best attempt to enact the dumbing down of the population in Canadian history: Has Canada traded its integrity for cash? We’ll let your trained seal department answer for you.

“The resource sector creates economic opportunities and employs tens of thousands of Canadians in high-wage jobs, contributing to a standard of living that is envied around the world and helping fund programs and services Canadians rely on,” said Harper watch-tapper Jason MacDonald, adding, “Even the lifestyle of a rock star relies, to some degree, on the resources developed by thousands of hard-working Canadians every day.”

OOH! ZING! That sure told him!

The next day Young admitted he drove to Alberta in an electric car, making Harper’s office’s response sound all-the-more schoolyardish and trite.

The good old standby for the ‘use all the world’s resources as quickly as possible and to hell with the consequences until they are killing our grandchildren’s children” ilk is: SEE, YOU USE THE STUFF TOO!

Towering intellect on display there.

All this too will be forgotten in a day or two when Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge’s cocker spaniel Lupo is haughtily chastised for crapping once too many times on the royal carpet and is shipped to a boarding kennel in Kenya.

Meanwhile, rock on Neil Young. You are real and I choose to believe in real people.

As for you and your secret deal making ways, Director Harper, history is going to judge you in the unkindest of lights. There will be footnotes and appendixes dedicated to you, stating things like, “He was the Prime Minister who sold Canada to the Chinese” and “He is the most remembered Prime Minister in Canadian history, because major assholes resonate.”

And on that double entendre, I bid you adieu.

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