Ostentatious displays of privilege will be punished. Today in the horrorscopic device called Twitter somebody made the mistake of composing a thread about a small pop-up “general store” in Vancouver’s Chinatown. She was immediately strafed by the progressive mob, who are always ready to swarm any traveller hapless enough to stumble into their zone of derangement.
Sermons about the “aesthetics of colonization” will surely correct the poor lady’s wrongthink, if not the intense shaming, snark, and vitriol. Vancouver’s last election was such a resounding repudiation of the Dumbass Left that the city is now stuck with a municipal government vile even by Vancouver’s hopeless standards. These folks are nothing if not champs at hurting their own causes.
Working as a bartender at the Royal Canadian Legion on Saltspring Island keeps me sane and busy. I’m very fond of our customers, many of them real and practising dissidents, authentic fighters with serious material concerns, not machine activists who scream “Colonizer!” at anyone who upsets their delusions. People whose quote-unquote lived experience has no value inside the prevailing hierarchy of oppressed fetish dolls and asinine jargon, even if they’re poor and their lives full of tragedy.
On Saturdays the Legion hosts live music and recently we presented a superb local Latin American dance band. Load-in and soundcheck often happens mid-afternoon when the bar is occupied almost entirely by old regulars, some upwards of their 70s, who play pool or sit around shooting the shit and drinking Lucky lager at what we call the Table of Wisdom. It’s also a more peaceful time for the weird senior loners who quietly transform into unexploded bombs when the bar starts to fill later in the day.
For instance Russ, a tall and skinny former US Marine who worked as a cop and then a PI in the Bay Area during the late ‘50s and ‘60s. Russ is frail but you still wouldn’t fuck with him. He has the stare. He alludes to the things he’s done and seen, and I imagine his old American underworld like a scroll of Weegee images. I was warned that Russ could be “cantankerous”, but he likes me, and I always have his Jack Daniels and ginger with a twist of lemon ready to go. Sometimes he “forgets” to pay.
Russ arrived as the Latin band wrapped its brief soundcheck, walked to the bar and asked about the music. “Peruvian?” he began. “My first wife was Peruvian. Beautiful woman. Perfect body. Perfect tits. Didn’t need to make an effort. The other women hated her. Until a little later in life when she started to put on the weight.”
By now Russ was joined at the bar by the band’s pipe-player, a super-hot young guy with long black hair and parachute pants. “It’s the Peruvian diet, you see,” Russ continued. “It’s heavy on the carbs so she was bound to lose her figure.”
“Excuse me,” the pipe-player interrupted, lifting his shirt to parade his flat fuckin’ gorgeous honey-brown abdomen, “but I am Peruvian and do you see a pro-blem with my diet?”
I assumed in the moment that Russ wasn’t used to a sharp rebuke from a Peruvian flautist, because I caught the flash of homicidal desire before he responded: “Oh, Peruvian, are ya’?”
“Yes.”
“Well why don’t you get yourself a llama and be happy,” he snarled, ambling away with his highball while the pride and defiance drained from his young aggressor, who was left looking hurt and confused. It was a strange, hardboiled, oddly effective takedown. Against this, the modern Politics of Grievance do not stand a chance at the Legion.