Kootenay Crust

By Ian Cobb

We really do live in strange times.

I’ve been sulking about this Earth, shouting at belligerent idiots and making fun of tools who need it, for more than five decades.

Over the span of my life I have watched our world evolve from its post Second World War shell, fat and sassy from economic successes, into an out-of-control consumer driven shell game, where a tiny number of people control how billions live. And things just keep getting weirder all the time.

My parents’ generation saved us from tyranny and in a few short decades, it seemed as though the world may be emerging a better place, as the Soviet threat dissipated and a more global attitude sprang forth – even in America – the land of the free and incredibly self-centred and willingly uneducated.

My generation and those before grew up under the threat of global nuclear annihilation. Our children’s experiences have been vastly different thanks to sweeping changes in how we interact with one another, and how we obtain and process information.

Canada and Canadians have remained fairly consistent in terms of maintaining our ‘Canadianness’ – which is to say we are still a people who seek to resolve conflict rather than point fingers of blame and shout like a group of seven-year-olds on the playground. Sure, there are shouters and haters and wannabe tough-guys like Ezra Levant who’d leave a loaf in his Dockers if a right proper huckleberry grabbed him by his collar, but we’re still a fairly calm, collected Canada.

Sadly, our mentally ill cousin to the south is floundering and it is impacting the entire globe, and not just the Canadian economy. Times are changing quickly and the average human cannot handle change. Add an element of ‘those who have had it good are going to have to give up a bit and adapt to change’ and an undeserved, prevailing attitude of entitlement to the mix and BAM. Shit be goin’ south.

Hatred is swelling in the hearts of so many Americans, it is staggering. I am also seeing it with Canadians, thanks to the endless parade of nimrod flailings on Facebook, Twitter etc. The ignorance being farted from puffed up angry faces gushes over the socioscape is a towering tsunami of stupid.

Back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took power, there began a dumbing down of a nation that really didn’t need to act any more ridiculous or stupid. America became ‘great again’ and chests puffed up as the cocaine flowed and silver-spoon fed narcissists who have never known a day of financial challenge in their Gucci-encrusted lives assumed power. Say hello to Donald Trump, everyone.

It wasn’t cool to be smart until tech nerds began to trot out the infrastructure that has computerized the first and second world.

Sadly, rather than improve our society, the increased level of education and global awareness, thanks to global media and the Internet, has frightened millions into cowering, barking, shrieking, lashing out angry fools. People formulate ironclad positions on things they hold dear and damn the truth if turns out they’re wrong. Just shout louder and longer. It has created two distinct camps; generally those who are not fooled at every ear-shock of a carnival barker’s howling and those who are easily duped and are too excitable for their own good.

We see it, unbelievably, every day on the news – in the despised ‘mainstream’ media that fails to be everything to every complex interest group.

Guns, once again the hottest topic in the gripesphere and windbagsphere, are perhaps the best example of this.

There are those who believe gun control works (Australia has a special story to share) and those who think that those who want gun control want to pull their heads off and poop commie poetry down their neckholes. You can tell a NRA drooler that black is black and white is white and throw out enough statistics to cause a calculus professor to have an aneurism and they will still shout back “yer a fuckin’ idjit panzy.”

That is the jagged edged discourse of our age. We have an overpopulated world that we humans are rapidly using up – but who cares? Pass the bullets and let’s have an orgy of stupid while we ignore the truths that have been staring us all in the face for thousands of years. Truths such as: life is a precious gift; love is the energy of life; be at one with yourself and the world will be at one with you; always be humble and kind; and don’t draft a goalie in the first round.

For some reason, we Canadians, as a whole, seem to understand those truisms better than our American cousins, even though they purport to be batfart crazy followers of Christ, who taught the truisms that ‘the manipulating machine’ obfuscate in the name of their profits. They’re blaming Islam and lax immigration laws for the Orlando slaughter. The NRA blames everything BUT access to automatic weapons mixed with sweeping mental illness running unchecked through the streets of America. The system ain’t broken; it’s all Obama’s fault. Let’s make America great again by clinging to our wildly outdated misogynistic, bigoted, small-minded past. Blame blame blame – do nothing to solve anything and blame some more. The American way. Easy peasy lemon squeezy bang bang bang.

We mousy Canadians have always been living next to the elephant that is America; fearful of a midnight gas pain or foot cramp. That was how it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s and to a steadily decreasing degree in the ‘90s.

Now we are living next to a sociopathic elephant that will say and do anything to maintain its status quo. That status quo was designed by a terribly small group of the world’s wealthiest people, so they could continue to reap the rewards of the common-person-as-their-slave at the expense of his/her dreams. America is the brat spawn of that group and it is spiralling out of control. Once mass anger hits the hysterical sweet spot – duck and run for cover folks.

All one must do is consider the race for the U.S. presidency. On one hand you have the wife of a former president who is a well-trained tool of the status quo maintainers and the other is the quintessentially ugly American, a rich brat asshole who should have received more than a few beatings in his life for being a rich brat asshole. And even more absurd: Donald Trump is the anti-establishment guy. The obscenely rich hand-me-down punk is supposed to resonate with the ‘average’ American right winger. That’s how lazy our sociopathic neighbour has become; how laissez faire and distracted they are and how lost they have become.

People are dying every day because crazy people can buy assault weapons and guns of all kind and flavour and almost half of all America thinks that is okay. They devise their excuses and point fingers of blame in every direction. But as my extremely wise wife is wont to say, “when you point a finger of blame, three are pointing back at you.”

Instead of this latest mass tragedy uniting Americans, as 9/11 did (though it lit the match that lit the hate fuse, as the controllers hoped it would), Orlando (the shooting will always be known simply as Orlando) is only another day in the asylum where millions of paranoid, delusional, PTSD-stricken, poverty immersed, hopeless souls swirl in the maelstrom that is America.

And the world continues to be impacted by it, just as the ancient world swooned and gibbered and fell into chaos when Rome decayed.

Hope isn’t lost; not in Canada. But I am beginning to believe we are seeing the beginning of the end of America.

We must remain alert and possibly think about building our own border wall because the elephant beside us may not only rollover and crush us; it might just stampede, fuelled by an unquenchable rage that it denies at every turn.

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