At the eastern end of this treed mountainous realm is Banffshire which arrogantly knows that itʼs the best of all, and at the opposite end of our natural paradise is Nelsonia which pompously thinks itʼs the best thing ever, when itʼs the worst at pretty well everything. 

Obviously, Banffshire gets a major advantage for being in a nationalistic park that receives its own federal taxpayersʼ money and countless more tourists on the federal highway, but misled Nelsonia could easily emulate all the hard-won prepaid research, innovation & execution that the shire-folk have already done for them to easily emulate. 

Banffshire wisely and lucratively closes off its main street and key crossroads to all traffic save public buses, while the klepto-CoN worships the car by allowing traffic to back up on its main drag due to its bigoted businesses that donʼt understand that you make way more money when more people can walk up to your business without worrying about vehicular manslaughter, as study after study has proven all around the world. The result is Banffshire tourists enjoy running wild with their free-range children and dining in exhaust-free patios, whereas visitors to daft Nelsonia get to suck carbon monoxide and lose the best downtown view and space to its beloved Road Hogs whoʼll run them over. 

The delusional lakeside ʻCityʼ of Nelsonia in the West Koots Rockies is: grimy, dirty, scuzzy, gritty, sandy, corroded, toxic, traffic-jammed, backlogged, nasty, uninformative, confusing, misguided, misleading, deceptive, unhelpful, colonial, racist, bigoted, ignorant, conceited, narcissistic, nepotistic, predatory, perverted, twisted, paternalistic, patronizing & condescending, among many other WASPy negative flaws perpetrated by its hypocritical sycophants wrongly in power. 

The famous Town of Banffshire in the East Koots Rockies is: likely much of the above; except at least they can lay claim to being organized, pedestrian-friendly, pro-Indigenous, efficient, artistic, cultural, exciting, fun, energetic, clean, swept, ecological, helpful, educational, informative, welcoming, accommodating, practical, imaginative, creative, thoughtful, exemplary, architectural, multicultural, diverse, intriguing, interesting & progressive, despite being a place founded by white heritage supremacists who overvalued the god almighty dollar. 

True, Banffshire has a spotty history at best with Sir John A-holeʼs legacy of discriminatory politics and industrial exploitations, but it had Indian Days with the local Indigenous bandsʼ consensual participation, and it still has at least a visible presence of Indigenous peoples with the First Nations-themed Trade Post and the Bison Nations Museum with its real artifacts; compared to absolutely nothing native in the patriotic CoN, apart from a token corner in its imperialistic museum and the odd mural on a side-street alley wall. 

Banffshireʼs central bridge over its iconic river features historic stone reliefs of an Indigenous man, while the cop-loving CoN adores its barren ugly BOB beside the paramilitary police station as if itʼs a spinoff character in their horrific Twin Peaks clown show. Totem poles and a First Nations presence at most civic events and parades abound in Greater Albertamericaʼs showpiece tourist jewel, while we only experience Indigenous culture in self-important Nelsonia when it puts on a one-off exhibit or a random event. 

The Indigenous peoples who lived around Banffshire before it was a town to party in like itʼs 1999 have always been recognized to exist and celebrated on the uneasily shared landscape, but the co-opted CoN canʼt even acknowledge that they have to respect every First Nations interest in each aspect of its municipal planning affairs, let alone highlight their overlooked and almost forgotten presence in these ancient homelands where they are most decidedly not extinct no matter what the pencil-pushers say. 

Banffshire has colour-coded districts laid out on ubiquitous maps posted everywhere throughout town with clear directional signs and arrow markers to show walkers where they are at all times. Nutty Nelsonia has teeny hard-to-find signs with small lettering too high up to see in not nearly enough spots for outsiders to have any idea where they are. 

Typical of Ghoulieʼs Eurocentric snobbery, on a recent Friday night he eulogized a country hick band of white dudes who might have been busking illegally in front of a closed coffee shop and posted his recorded video on the Crackbox. Would he have been so enthusiastic if the improvised group was a bunch of Indigenous drummers and singers, or even a Black reggae act with their music amped up loud? Captain Ghouls acted like sunshine on a Friday night was an extraordinary event that didnʼt happen anywhere else on the planet other than his own gentrified fiefdom. The only things selling tickets these days in boozy Nelsonia are boobies and aging white insult comics, but the Ghoulie Gangsterʼs low standards allow him to be ecstatic about the devastated state of his monocultural arts ʻsceneʼ. Does Ghoulie care about what anyone else thinks as exhaust fumes whiz by his spineless back, and parents chase after their unfree kids and hold their hands tightly so they donʼt get killed on Baked Street? Instead of asking his citizens in general what they think about his flailing regime, Mayor Ghouliani decrees like a dictator that “you gotta love Nelson”, and now that heʼs said so, itʼs a fact to be unchallenged by anyone. Even gnarly K-town does a city-wide biannual survey to find out what its citizens think about their corporation, but in Ghoulieville, his word is bond. This vampiric despot of Shitty Hall is a self-proclaimed liberal Tory who votes BC Illiberal out of deep love for the whitewashed Falconer, and just like illiberal King Turdy, Old Man Ghouls thinks heʼs on the right side of history when heʼs actually a mostly unwitting proponent of white supremacy. For lest anyone think the Golden Heron approves of the censorship of free speech in the service of oppression in any form (even if youʼre Count Ghoulie or Pierre Trudeau the Second), hereʼs an apt summation of our feelings by Anis Shivani at Salon about letting every single person say what they want to say so that we can all know who they are and what they believe, as opposed to having to guess: 

“Liberals (such as the deceptive Ghoulster) present themselves as occupying the reasonable center of political discourse today, but in some ways they are more extreme than the most delusional and paranoid Republicans. They have reduced all of human life and its activities to strict monetary calculation, and have destroyed art, imagination and creativity in the process. Their imaginary visions of democracy, human rights and meritocracy are entirely in the service of justifying the current form of capitalism, which is trending toward eradicating life on the planet.” 

“Despite liberals’ endless self-scrutiny in search of microscopic evidence of racism, I would suggest they are the most effective carriers of the white supremacy virus.” 

“If I haven’t yet alienated all liberal readers, I would go further, to suggest that despite their relentless search for rooting out micro-racism in their minute words and deeds, liberals are in fact the most effective carriers of the white supremacy virus. Emboldening Israel at the cost of any recognition of the rights of Palestinians is white supremacy. Instigating a massively expensive and apparently endless proxy war against Russia, as a first step in checking or confronting the inevitable hegemony of China (those creepy Asians who’ve become too big for their boots), is white supremacy. Converting the George Floyd protests of 2020 into ultimate advocacy for more money for more police — as nearly all Democrats in positions of power now advocate — is white supremacy. Wanting to “save” Afghan women and children by lamenting the end of the 20-year invasion and then imposing sanctions and stealing their money is white supremacy. Which party, I ask you, is more associated with these policies today?” 

“No one has to believe that liberals steal elections or that vaccines are more dangerous than COVID or that school shootings are false-flag events or that there’s a Jewish conspiracy to replace white people. But censoring these thoughts only gives them more durability, as we ought to have learned from repeated examples over the last few years.” 

“Here’s how it works: An illegitimate thought is censored, which gives it a certain resilience as the wrong way to think, opposed to which is the correct thought. Censorship becomes the force by which the liberal-bourgeois state codifies various elements of power such as to propel them beyond the critique of power. In this dynamic, the unfairness of a two-party electoral democracy representing only narrow bourgeois interests, the unequal and even unscientific foundations of American public health, the interdependence of imperial violence with chaotic domestic outbursts, and the bipartisan consensus over the punitive treatment of immigrants become untouchable issues, precisely because quasi-state censorship has elevated them to the status of sacred truths threatened by extremists and therefore not subject to rational critique. Censorship is the process by which the illegitimate is made legitimate.” 

“In these last days of empire, when liberalism is on the defensive and fighting for propositions that are ecologically and even economically unsustainable, we will not see an end to the violent repression of nonconformism, only its reinforcement.” 

Thereʼs no doubt that Mad Dog Ghouls who runs the guns in this white Master Heritage Plan would call himself a ʻliberalʼ, even though he obviously laments the loss of Darth Harper; but the likely ascension of MP Cranbrook Cop into the federal cabinet of PM Pepe LePue will cheer him up, as this bastion of white power is subsumed more and more by the darker forces of Greater Albertamerica — who at least know how to run their neo-con tourist traps with some degree of functionality and logic. To be clear, we want Corporal Creel, Wormtongue & the Ghoulies of the world to speak their minds freely, yet we donʼt want them anywhere near the levers of power which they currently wield. And if theyʼre getting too cocky about this dead-cat bounce of white male supremacy, remind them about Ecuadoria where the Indigenous peoples are reminding their overlords whoʼs the boss and winning demands for more economic support and governmental assistance with acquiring their bank loans, which should definitely happen here too, right?

#thegoldenheron #forstmedia #opinion