It was the first really hot day of the summer, just gorgeous really, and I decided to skip off the rest of the afternoon at work and ride my bike down to the water and breathe in some fresh lake air. It may not be the Pacific Ocean or anything but, it’s nice enough and sure beats bumming up and down Queen Street stopping in the same stores over and over again (though free pinball at Songbird never grows tiresome).
Sure enough, my respite from crabby city energy was broken by a police boat cruising right past me, kicking waves up to the dock, and spraying toxic lake water on my brand new shoes. Instant paranoia struck for a second. Was I sitting too close to the edge of the wharf? Maybe they read my anti-moose column last month and were set to apprehend me for inciting vandalism. Okay, the boat just happened to be docking beside me. But hey, they arrested John Clarke as he was riding his bike over the Bloor Viaduct. They charged him with inciting a riot, well over a month after the protest his organization OCAP (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty) held at Queen’s Park. Three of his compadres were charged with participating in a riot. Well, they might as well charge the riot police with participating as well, since it seems like both sides were equally itching to have a go at it.
Really, what are they trying to prove by charging Clarke? It’s only going to encourage him. Don’t get me wrong, I support OCAP’s cause -- it’s sick that the province is content to let people starve on the street while they fund a tax cut that the lousy suburbians will just blow on gas -- and I don’t even disapprove of their means, since non-violent protest is meaningless if no one will ever listen to you. It’s just that you do your cause no good by appearing to act in such poor taste.
I wasn’t at that protest -- and all accounts are filtered through selective media bias and fractured word-of-mouth. But I haven’t been to a protest in ages, and it sounds like that one justifies all my reasons for skipping out -- all the facets of protests have become cliché: the “Hey Hey Ho Ho” chants, the “people united will never be defeated” rhetoric, the crusty punks with their bandanas who think that today they’re gonna storm the Bastille. And it seemed like there was that element in the crowd -- hidden amongst the majority of decent, well-intentioned folks -- who were out to live up to that cliché in full. Basically, what I’m saying is that Sally Housecoat and John Lunchpail in East Gwillmbury aren’t going to side with you if they think you’re just a bunch of dirty anarchists. We live in an age of aesthetics. As Bruce Sterling pointed out in an age excellent essay entitled “The Viridian Manifesto”, the best current means to any end is to make it utterly unfashionable not to support those ends -- it doesn’t matter whether or not the bourgeois understand it. It doesn’t seem kooky to speculate that some saboteur wanted the protest to turn out the way it did.
Interestingly, a notorious Annex conspiracy theorist/barfly told me he thought John Clarke was British Intelligence... ... ...
Nevertheless, my left-lib bleeding heart tells me they shouldn’t have arrested the poor guy. He’s not getting rich off supporting the homeless -- and, truth be told, I’m scared shitless of the cops right now. This might be Toronto the Good, but it’s quietly, slowly, surely turning into -- and I hate to use this term (I really do) -- a police state, man. If you think I’m being an alarmist, I ask you this: WHERE DID ALL THE FUCKIN’ SQUEEGEE KIDS GO??!!
