Weʼre Supposed to Love Our Neighbour, But What if Heʼs an Irredeemable Jerk? 

After taking a year-long break from his boring Facebucks account in the wake of an unmasked pro-vaxx video with our MIA MLA which must have triggered a lot of hateful comments from their antidemocratic constituents, maniacal Mayor Ghoulie crept downtown last week to post another one of his misspelled videos with shaky pans of a motorcycle, a bike, a country musician & a lone senior on a mostly empty street with no-one visibly shopping at his beleaguered market which has moved around town more than most of his nomadic businesses. While the pandemic-laced world burns with unconstitutional fearmongering all around them, Count Ghouls is nitpicking with Pager the Enabler over the minutiae of their own public salaries, and weʼre supposed to trust their ability to serve us during an emergency management disaster, let alone love them as our fellow neighbours in this power-tool whacking man-cave of white supremacist misogynists? 

Speaking of chauvinistic swine who act like theyʼre the pigs when theyʼre the crimes themselves, one of the worst neighbours next door anywhere is called Mudge (as in curmudgeon), and he represents the ultimate symbol of this WASPy White Heritage Master Plan called Nelsonia every time he insists on “beating the heat” to mow and weed-whack his postage-stamp lawn with the loudest mower known to man, all to annoy his sleeping neighbours way too early on weekend mornings even though he doesnʼt work. 

Behold the sadistic history of the monstrous jerk they call Mudge whoʼs tormented his neighbourhood over the past two decades as he: caged his barking yap-dog in a tiny cell with chicken-wire right outside his neighboursʼ front door; verbally abused his kowtowing wife, while repeatedly haranguing his teen daughter; allegedly got himself fired from his forestry job for sexual harassment; posted a grand freemason icon over his front entrance; placed a noisy wood-chipper by the neighbourʼs sunporch; cut down common trees without permission; built a shed right on the property-line so that excess snow fell on the neighboursʼ rose garden, and then banged his hammer in psychotic rage at them when the clueless CoN made him alter its roof angle; pissed off the arborist hired to fairly trim a shared tree, so much so that the reasonable professional quit due his skinflint crudeness; freaked out at the new neighbours across the street because they dared to ask them not to cut the flowers on city property; operates an ancient air-conditioner right outside his neighboursʼ kitchen window; hung up on the neighbour and stigmatized cannabis when called about the overly loud air-conditioner; snitched to the fire department and lied to make them attend the scene for no reason when the neighbour was having a legal backyard fire with a permit; swears blasphemously whenever heʼs annoyed; thinks everyoneʼs a moron but him; trespassed in his neighboursʼ yard unannounced to manipulate their side of the fence with his nonsensical ʻrenovationsʼ; claims every tree on the property-line as his own, but hates to pay for their upkeep; obsesses over his ratty house as if itʼs an occult cathedral, even though itʼs pathetically sad; sprayed their dirty sand down the civic sidewalk, because “thatʼs what neighbours do”; and forced his son-in-law to destroy the vibrant flowers that the neighbours had begged him to keep alive. 

In light of this bullying passive-aggressive tomfoolery on an ongoing basis, if youʼre the poor neighbour of such a grumpy old tyrant, do you have to love him no matter what the neon bible says? Technically, weʼre supposed to love Mayor Ghouliani too, if weʼre being proper Christo-fascists, but we all know that him and the Grand Freemason next door are anti-choice thin blue line enthusiasts who worship burning fossil fuels and act uber-patronizing at all costs to whomever they please in their patriarchal delusions. Both of these staunch Old Boys Club schmucks undoubtedly adore the fact that the paramilitary Mounties triple-down on the Nelsonia Police Stateʼs persecution of our homeless and underprivileged populace in cahoots with the creepy CoNʼs corporate cops and Corporal Creelʼs keystone railyard bobbies. Love is supposed to be a two-way street, so why are there so many dead-ends in this hick-town pretending to be a hip suburb, and what does one do when the bad guys weʼre told to love would rather run us over? 

If we expect this uncaring clique of bureaucratic clerks at Shitty Hall to love our neighbours as we unwisely pay them to ʻprotectʼ us, how much do we trust the exact same imperialistic system thatʼs kept Lytton residents in the abandoned limbo state of apocalyptic nothingness that Brutish Colonia has left them in for over a year and counting? Given their sick track-record, the ghastly Ghoulie Gang is hardly worthy of our love let alone our trust when all is well, thanks to their harmful Don. Just like four of the five Supremacist Cult judges who authored the doctrinarian overthrow of choice in Canamerica, the Ghoulish Leprechaun is an ultraconservative Catholic who is anti-choice, pro-gun when theyʼre in the right-wingʼs devilish hands & lukewarm to pride events at best — because have we ever seen him anywhere near a rainbow? Above all, if youʼre a First Nations resident of the White Heritage City, youʼll be lucky if the colonial CoN recognizes your existence, as we know that neo-con Nelsonia is all too capable of forgetting the original inhabitants of this stolen land in pursuit of Manmoronʼs power-balls. 

Weʼve seen enough to know by now that the willfully blind CoN has never loved its Indigenous neighbours, but if beefy Cowtown in the oily heart of Greater Albertamerica is figuring out how to honour its first peoples, why canʼt Ghoulieville? 

As the Ceeb reports, “Terry Poucette, who says she comes from a traditional family in Stoney Nakoda Nation, is the team lead with the city’s Indigenous Relations Office (IRO). ʻA typical day involves back-to-back meetings planning Indigenous awareness for different business units, supporting different business units with Indigenous engagement,ʼ she said. ʻIn addition to that, we’ve got council motions that we have to pursue.ʼ Those motions are huge initiatives — the Indigenous Relations Governance Model, the Indigenous Gathering Place and the Indian Residential School Memorial Project. When she accepted the position in January 2020, she was told the office was going to support the City of Calgary with the advancement of truth and reconciliation. The establishment of the IRO was a call to action in the city’s White Goose Flying Report that was released in 2016 — a municipal response to the final report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission”. When it comes to the cruel CoNʼs response to the Idle No More movement and the progressive like, all we hear is crickets, birdsong & Ol’ Grandpa Ghouls bragging about wasting our taxpayers’ money on his elitist ill-conceived dock. 

So, using Chauncey deVegaʼs interview with Dr. Lance Dodes (one of Americaʼs foremost mental health professionals) as our soundboard, letʼs play the game again of whether theyʼre describing Fuhrer Drumpf, or our very own tinpot despot, Captain Ghoulie: 

“I’ve said this so many times in various settings, but people don’t quite get it. (Ghoulie) is not like other human beings, and you can’t treat him as if he is. The news media refused to accept that. He is a severe sociopath, and his willingness to see others suffer and die pushes him into the realm of a psychopath. He lacks the core of normal empathy, and the ability to appreciate that other people have rights. He is a very sick man. Yet the media and others treated him like an ordinary person.” 

“People still don’t quite understand the enormous danger from (Ghoulie). He is a man much in the mold of Hitler. (Ghoulie) is completely dishonest and lacks the ability to understand what other people want or care about. It’s all about him. He is adamantly opposed to democracy. He seeks to be a king, and is in fact a tyrant.” 

“Most of us would like to believe that our leaders are loving and kind people who are looking out for us. When a truly evil person came to power, we were unable to react appropriately.” 

“Most of us would like to believe that there are benevolent powerful authorities at work in the world, leaders who are loving and kind. In this country, many of us were brought up to believe that the leaders of the country are fine people who are looking out for us. We want to believe it. When a truly evil person came to seize power, the (city), the free press, was unable to react appropriately, and we still see people who are ʻshockedʼ.” 

“What happens to another person’s life means nothing to (Ghoulie). How many people’s lives has he ruined in one way and another? That’s what he does. The easiest way to understand (Ghoulie) is to think of him as a serial killer or a monster. The word ʻmonsterʼ means a creature without empathy, without caring, willing to kill or maim or hurt or destroy anything in its path for its own purposes, a sadistic creature lacking normal human capacities. There’s nothing shocking about (Ghoulie)ʼs behaviour when you see him for the fundamentally disordered person that he truly is.” 

“To say you are shocked by anything he does means you just don’t understand how extraordinarily different (Ghoulie) is from other people. ʻEvilʼ is a good word to describe him, and once you stop expecting him to be like you or your neighbours or anyone else in your life, then you’re not surprised anymore.” 

“If you’ve never seen somebody who has that gaping maw at the bottom of their psyche where there’s nothing but sadism and pain for others, if you haven’t met people like this, you don’t understand that evil can exist in people.” 

“(Ghoulie) certainly knows what he’s doing. That’s a different question from whether he has personal insight into his behaviour. He doesn’t know that he is a sociopath. He’s too far gone. He has a psychotic core, in that he is fundamentally out of touch with reality when it comes to his view of himself as a godlike figure, as we’ve seen in his many grandiose and delusional statements. But does he know what he’s doing? Of course (Ghoulie) knows what he’s doing.” 

If your neighbour is the type of nefarious rogue who will verbally abuse your innocent wife when youʼre not around, or if heʼs the type of unelectable Mayor who will encourage the use of ʻGreyhound Therapyʼ wherein anyone who doesnʼt fit his square-hole criteria for surviving the fallacious meritocracy imposed upon us is bused out of town by his in-house jackboots, do we have to love him? Or is it okay to acknowledge that hate and love are closely related emotions, and that sometimes in certain circumstances itʼs alright — as the Dalai Lama espouses — to want to shoot your enemy in the leg, if he intends to shoot you in the heart? Of course, even if you just dare to express wanting to punch a sadistic pervert in this white privilege bastion, your Judas-like so-called ʻalliesʼ might still sell you out to the dominant dictators who enabled the ogre to terrorize your community in the first place and then treat you like the villain. So vote for the Ghoulish One when he inevitably decides to torture our divided citizenry with yet another selfish reelection campaign, but donʼt make us think that we have to love him or his fraternal cronies. 

#thegoldenheron #opinion #forstmedia