The Unsupportive CoN & its Cronies Realize That They Donʼt Support the Arts 

Donʼt you love it when the unsupportive people paid on the public dime to support you get together to tell you that they havenʼt been supportive enough of you and your mutually beneficial creative career, and that they are of course the very same inept bureaucrats who get to keep their precious jobs and reassure you they will do further investigative research while getting paid to tell you that they still wonʼt support you in the future? 

The anti-artistic administrators of the sycophantic CoN led by the Black Queen were told pre-pandemic that housing costs were the number one issue facing artists who were no longer able to afford the gentrified land-holding profiteering scam run by the complicit Ghoulie Gang, but it took two years of pandemic misery and a volunteer survey wherein the unpaid artists yet again did all the work to help the paid administrators for the misanthropes in charge of destroying our golden ‘arts town’ goose to declare in their shortsighted finite wisdom that, “in all of our conversations (at the CoNʼs CDC) and outside of it, housing has been a huge, huge barrier for artists who want to stay here and live and continue to exist but canʼt afford to at this point… (so) the artists just become further and further removed, then we see less diversity to what we are used to in our community.” 

How many hours of billable public money did these protected clerks squander to tell struggling artists (who were told they canʼt do their jobs for years without anybody caring at all) that the reason they canʼt afford to do their work in this duplicitous ‘arts town’ is because they canʼt afford the living space which theyʼve already given up or been renovicted from? As the colonially-named Selkirk College agrees, “living space rather than working space was something that was talked about quite often and it came out that … cost of living and places to live were so far above the other issues.” Even Councillor Bump-On-a-Log “wondered if gentrification in Nelsonia meant the artists were moving to the rural areas surrounding the city… (and) how the city could retain its reputation as a cultural hub, even if the artists didnʼt live here.” You need culture to be a cultural hub! 

Thereʼs no shortage of dramatic quotes about the problem from shortsighted dupes paid to fix the problem before it even worsened. “Twenty years ago people in Nelsonia could work part time, create their art and rent an affordable place to comfortably accomplish all of that,ʼ said Councillor Woody. ʻThose days are gone, of course. It seems like the crux of the issue here is housing. Because if people canʼt have affordable housing and have that spare time to actually make art, if you are having to work all of the time to afford it, itʼs really challenging.” So the slippery CoN seems to get the problem way too late to do anything about it, but whoʼs responsible for the fact that “the one theme that kept coming up while the study was being conducted was how little support there was for the (arts) sector in Nelsonia”, according to the Black Queen in charge, who adds without a hint of self-recrimination or critique for the Ghoulie gangsters culpable for this avoidable and predictable tragedy that, “local sectoral connection with C‐19 support and funding programs was weak; this is a complex issue and warrants further investigation”. 

Putting aside whatever “sectoral connection” means to the layman non-administrator, every single one of the Shitty Hall staff members and political stooges on that redundant virtual call should have been looking at themselves in the digital mirror to analyze why they themselves did absolutely nothing effective about an historically obvious problem staring them in the face from a mile away. When self-important privileged clerks like this sordid lot go on the record years after the fact about how they now see the blatant truth of the matter, all theyʼre doing is time-stamping for eternity how ignorant and oblivious they were to the root of the issue on account of their own self-reflexive prejudices and Anglo-Saxon elitism. The colonialist college spokesperson said it best, in terms of who suffered versus who gained, when they admitted that “those most likely to experience income shortfalls included the working artists and creators, as well as the contractors and those in the performing arts and film and media sub-sectors.” And of course, in return, the hypocritical authorities paid to protect those who suffered the most such as administrators, politicians & civil execs and servants were “less likely to be affected”. 

Councillor Pager optimistically suggests that it is “time to investigate purpose-built housing for artists in Nelsonia and develop a long-term strategy for ʻthis very important sectorʼ, and set some goals for what kind of purpose built units that should be seen in the city to support that sector… and we need to empower some sort of organization to address the need in our community … so the city is being built with intention for the next version of Nelsonia”. Back in the twentieth century was the time to plan the next Nelsonia in order to avoid this unholy debacle of classist perversions that the Ghoulies have unleashed, so now that weʼre past the perfect hindsight of 2020, is it not too late to address a problem that has already irrevocably changed the tenor of this heritage settlement which has embraced techno-rationalism and boozy sugar daddies whole-hog? 

Hereʼs a radical idea for how to support poor artists in the insipid CoN, that is not what it pretends to be to the outside world: support the artists themselves by directly giving them all the squandered money thatʼs given to all the administrative organizers who are ruining us by telling us how theyʼve neglected us; and not through grants decreed by the establishment whiteness con-artists who decide what is artistic based on a creative projectʼs suitability to make money in a Christo-fascist enclave that couldnʼt even accept an advertisement for Mametʼs “Sexual Perversity in Chicago”, due to its laughable family-friendly persona which it uses to veil its reality as a hellish realm of exploitative sickness wherein the old and weak prey on the young and pretty for their own vampiric gain. 

Once you live here long enough, you begin to see behind the masks when the corporate ghouls let slip what they really think while theyʼre telling you all the evil things that they are about to do, so you learn to listen to what they are saying between the bottom-lines. What the CoN is really telling its artists who have moved away in poverty, or strain to remain here despite the cricket-filled silence when it comes to active support on their behalf, is this: You donʼt matter to us, you never have, and you never will; unless you make money for us that supports the businesses we actually approve of, so sit tight and wait for the next round of extremely limited grants designed to only benefit an exclusive few. For instance, the Know-how Network was recently busted for funding Indigenous projects at a clip of less than two-percent of its settler applicants. Thatʼs what it feels like in the sadistic CoN, as they fund two of their WASPy ass-kissers out of a hundred non-kowtowers and believe that they have saved the day, until night comes and the dark side of repressive imperialism wins yet again against rebellious free-spirited creativity. 

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