The Shitty Council of oblivious Nelsonia recently handed out their Sustainable Leadership awards and one of them went to Wormtongue’s loyal lackey Igor for kissing the ass of the right-wing oligarchic Crypt of Commercialism as it eagerly works against the common people in favour of the one-percenters who are destroying our world one greedy business day at a time. The whole point of sustaining the status quo of white male supremacy is to resist the growth of multiracial democracy that is threatening to upend the power structure represented by the elitist Chamber of Commerce, so it makes perfect sense that colonial Nelsonia would reward the lickspittle manservant who is most willing to bow down to Wormtongue and his conservative-minded petty aristocratic brotherhood.

As servile Mayor B&B espoused while presenting Igor with his lifetime of brown-nosing award, Igor “provided the business community with much-needed assistance in pandemic recovery efforts, public safety protocols and labour market assistance”, meaning that he did everything within his white-bred power to help the capitalistic power-mongers maintain their grip on the imperial powers that allow them to ignore the inherent matriarchal authority bestowed upon the true leaders of this stolen land at the expense of anyone who does not pay to be in their white supremacist frat-house.

When Mayor B&B trumpets that Igor “presented to council on business recovery in our community a number of times over a couple of years, providing council with a clear and accurate picture of what our businesses were going through”, she overlooks the fact that Wormtongue and his faithful stooge continue to willfully ignore the basic premise that our economic problems are caused primarily by the sheer numbers-game of the baby boomers and their outsized influence on the demographics of our small city that will skew everything financial in favour of them away from those younger locals who will never be able to afford a house or rental in order to work in the town they grew up in. It doesn’t take an economics degree or a membership in the Country Club of Commerce to know that the property rich buffoons in their gilded ranks will rule the roost for as long as they can afford to exclude everyone who can’t pay their obscene housing bills based on the miserly wages paid out by the supposedly business-friendly biz community overlords and their ring-kissing money-men like Wormtongue and company.

When Igor worked for the Nelsonia Daily Snooze back in the naive day, he was among the aggrieved who lamented the loss of the print newspaper after the hostile takeover by the battle-station Dark Star, but like a servile domesticated animal who knows which hand feeds him, he now praises the neoliberal media tycoon of Oak Bay’s regional propaganda paper in his acceptance speech when he kowtows, “the opportunity to work with the chamber and (chamber executive director) Tom Thomson has been an awesome learning experience… (and) the work I do for the Nelson Star is the nothing but fun because there are so many entrepreneurial people here”. For as the Black Queen of the fawning Nelsonia Farts Council knows all too well, if you lick the boots of the corporate Dark Star and the gadflies at Shitty Hall long enough, you will be rewarded with all sorts of unearned privilege and sycophantic glory.

As the resident daughter-in-law of Oak Bay’s journalistic baron, the toady Black Queen has been given a new column in which she can be the minion for the anti-Indigenous Columbia Basin Distrust and its meager chump-change grant racket for any poor artist who dares to be rejected by the harsh charity givers just like over ninety percent of its unpaid applicants who do not fit their white supremacist totalitarian agenda. For over twenty years and counting, the grant-giving kingmakers of naive Nelsonia have been handing out the same paltry amount of micro-money without accounting for inflation or racist bias, while pretending that they are so damn beneficial for the vast majority of creatives whose dreams are crushed, as the nepotistic Black Queen so indelicately puts it. As she cruelly writes, “there is nothing worse than spending hours on a grant, sending it in, and then having it be disqualified due to ineligible requests”, and if you don’t fit their top-down fascistic criteria, you’ll have to wait until 2024 to take another kick at Lucy’s elusive football.

As everyone who lives in the Colonizer Basin should know, the patriarchal militant Distrust exists because of the literal and figurative power grab they pulled on the Autonomous Sinixt’s maternal leadership who were declared extinct by Queeny’s governmental villains so that they could expropriate their original authority over the headlands of the river system from time immemorial in order to reap the ill-gained profits and playact decades later like they care for artists when all they think about is filthy lucre and unchecked power. When the Black Queen parrots, “I love to hear about people’s ideas and creative dreams, but often bring up the inevitable, potentially dream-crushing question: ‘So, how will you pay for it?'”, what she’s really saying is you have to be a jackboot like her in order to just maybe qualify for their exclusive shell-game which will never be enough to fund any meaningful rebellious arts project worth its salt. To emphasize their innate disdain for First Nations’ causes, the offending article is accompanied by a photo of the murals on the Capitalistic Theatre where a Sinixt painter’s original artwork was meant to be, until it was scrapped by the devilish Ghoulie Gang who were scared by its anti-colonial motif. So in other words, if you don’t play the game by their rules, you’ll never get the prize in the end.