First off, why is it always Councillors Pager and Woody who dare to talk about supporting the poor arts (heaven forbid!), and not Mayor Ghoulie, the City Mangler, or the Chief Finagler, among other acolytes of the crooked CoN’s disastrous leadership mob? If we were talking about a golf course or a hockey rink, the Ghoulie Gargoyles would be there in spades with the taxpayers’ chequebook spread wide-open ready to buy pucks and balls. Yet even when the Touchstoned Museum and Capitalist Theatre’s white settlers disgrace themselves for the psycho-Con by disrespecting the original inhabitants of this stolen land, the icky manservants and scarlet women of the grotesque Ghoulie Gang refuse to care about their arts NGOs when it comes time to bail them out from their self-inflicted pandemic miseries. If Count Ghoulie and his fellow horsemen of the apocalypse have ever said anything on the record that exhibits enthusiastic financial support for their economically beneficial arts-scene, we’d like to frame their words for posterity. 

Second, when will the pervy CoN realize that you have to support individual artists via their projects and careers if you want to have a moneymaking arts-scene, not just the milquetoast clerks and snobbish institutions already well paid by the public-purse not to create the art projects which quantifiably enrich a mercenary municipality’s bottom-line? Almost every single time the sadistic ‘do-gooders’ at Shitty Hall infrequently broach the Ghoulie-forbidden topic of giving money to the flaky snowflake artistes they despise as mere dilettantes, the tepid subject inevitably veers back to brick-and-mortar orgs due to our reflexive local colonizers’ inherent tendency to pull towards establishment whiteness with its WASPy coddling of the conservative mainstream’s corporate non-sensibilities. 

While the creepy CoN is now belatedly obsessed with exiled artists who can’t afford to rent in town, what about those long-established resident creatives who already own houses and still can’t afford to do their art without any active support or encouragement from our civic politburo? Is it possible that the passive-aggressive CoN is terrible at sustaining professional relationships with their independent artists, as they blithely and eagerly sabotage the successful careers of creative experts who refuse to kowtow to their overlords’ abusive leadership failures and systemic biases riven with blatant conflicts of interest and antisocial persecutory agendas? When the Black Queen says in her myopic state-of-the-arts report that, “our independent workforce have been lost”, is it not possible that she is one of the prime offenders when it comes to alienating those helpful allies whom she should morally and ethically support — let alone because that’s the duty of her non-profit civil arts job, which directly benefits her own personal showbiz interests? 

So many of our citizens are talking about how the hardhearted CoN is set up to suck the life out of its positive light beings, so how do you create lasting art when you’re trying to keep your soul from being sucked out of your artistic body by the vampiric ghouls who claim to be in charge of their sinking ship of narcissistic fools? Dirty money buys essential time and space for beleaguered artists to produce their work, yet cash resources are the last thing that Ghouls & the Gang ever want to waste on their ‘feminine’ economic sectors when there are ‘manly’ enterprises just begging to have corporate handouts thrown at them. If you’re a privy developer with a hole to dig, the elitists in Nelsonia will lick your work-boots clean; but if you’re a producer who just wants to make some art, get to the back of the line, buster, behind the wealthy voters whom we value as servile contributors to our boozy drugged ‘high’-society much more than your sorry artsy ass!

Pauper Pager starts out right when he stated at a recent cultish council meeting that, “it was the municipal government’s responsibility to aid and abet all parts of the arts and culture sector as the community recovers from the latest wave of the pandemic and restrictions are being lifted, (as) the city needs to step up and not wave in its commitment to (our) arts and culture”. However, as a longstanding card-carrying member of the Ghoulie-enabler Club, he soon veered astray down the usual bureaucratic backroads when he fixated as expected on the petro-CoN’s perceived “need to be full ‘throatedly’ eager to participate with those institutional partners that keep our museums open, that keep our theatres open, and give them certainty on where they think the city is going in the next 10, 15 to 20 years in terms of arts and culture”, so that they “can provide certainty by progressing the work that we commit to for these institutions and how we engage with our regional partners in order to have something more sustainable in terms of the long term vision for arts and culture”. Like the well-meaning non-artist in power that he is, Pager’s focus is misguidedly cast upon the survey-addicted clerks and paper-pushers who deposit the artistic cheques and never make art themselves. This insane infatuation that our white imperialist bigwigs have with buildings and institutions versus creators’ livelihoods leads to the exact type of top-down scenario we now face wherein the living artists themselves never see the Scrooge-like funds meant to fill our reopened theatres and museums with these priceless things called shows, artworks & creations. 

When Politico Pager recognizes that our barebones industry picked clean by the scavenging culture vultures whom he works with at Shitty Hall “are probably one of the hardest hit sectors in our city”, and that “even though most arts organizations were fairly well resourced, they are now out of practice and need to get back into the rhythm of operation — a move that comes with some very serious challenges and questions of what is possible”, does his admission from a complicit clerk’s POV not hint at dysfunctions that beset the befuddled arts & crafts industry well before the pandemic provided their classist execs with a bunch of excuses for their ongoing ineptness and repeated inability to please those artists vindictively prosecuted by them and their cronies? “They are still in that area where there is a lot of uncertainty,” Pager opined, “and, after some organizations have expended resources and some have been well supported by the federal and provincial governments, when do you start to get back out there and risk things to put your cultural performances in place(?)”. Not to harp on his overuse of the word “organization”, but do you see any mention of individual artists in his semi-accurate diatribe? 

The trickle-down theory of economics is a well-practiced failure by neo-con Canamerica for decades and counting, but here in the clueless CoN, even our most sympathetic pol towards the arts is preaching a watered-down form of Pyramid Plinko; wherein some of the cool clique get a meagre thousand dollars here and there despite shrinkflation if you kiss enough snow-white tuckuses, while the rest of us undercats in the litter at the bottom get nothing as the misers up top glare down and preen and pose for the tech-addled masses, proclaiming like the white-saviour clerks they are that this “kind of stuff needs to fit inside of a larger strategic document we (clerks) build with our partners”. 

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