What we’re learning now is something that people have learned before, though the development of instant and global connections is making old monsters cast new shadows. We’re learning how completely people can be severed from reality and driven down the path of a cultural invention. Canada is currently in one of the greatest political crises of its history — freezing and seizing the bank accounts of political dissidents, and taking increasingly obvious steps to render protesters permanent unpersons — because people parked. They parked trucks! And honked! They parked and honked! WHY HASN’T THE PRIME MINISTER CALLED OUT THE MILITARY TO CRUSH THE HONKERS DOESN’T HE REALIZE THEY’RE HONKING!?!?!?
It’s World War III over a water balloon fight, psychotically disproportionate and hysterical.
If you feel the need to watch it, there are a half-dozen good videos here of Diane Deans, a member of the Ottawa City Council, endlessly going on about the DOMESTIC TERRORISM of the INSURRECTIONISTS who are committing TREASON and SEDITION and ATTACKING DEMOCRACY, and worst of all? Worst of all? WORST OF ALLLLLLLLL HITLER HITLER HITLER!?!?!?
The terrorists have bouncy castles.
I’d like to see a team of researchers test this person’s brain chemistry, if anyone can get to her before the trucks leave and she calms down to her ordinary state of psychotic rage. The mayor of Ottawa made the quite sensible decision to ask truckers to take the convoy out of residential areas; the truckers made the entirely sensible decision to respond to that request respectfully; and so Councilmember Haldol said this:
She’s living entirely in her head; light is presumably coming in through her eyes, and noises are entering her ear canals, but none of it is being processed. She’s living in her invention.
This choice to descend into madness is a choice, and people are declining it. Here’s the apparently quite decent and reasonable chief of police in Edmonton, saying that, get this, he’s not going to have police arrest people for honking:
But then note the journalist at 0:40 who’s massively butthurt because the police aren’t arresting the honkers. Why won’t you enforce the law, sir!? The honkerers are honkerizing, yet they have not been imprisoned! Whhyyyyyyyyy!?!?!?
Here’s the leader of the Canadian NDP — the New Democratic Party — calmly explaining that people parked trucks and honked because they intended to “overthrow the government” and attack democracy itself:
I think every student of history will recall the many moments in the human past in which people have overthrown governments through the brutal use of parking and honking, the preferred tools of history’s greatest monsters. And of course, if you want to protect democracy, it just makes good sense to seize the bank accounts of political dissidents.
None of this political discussion among government officials is real. It has a foundation in a real thing — people are actually parking trucks and honking — but all of the subsequent crisis and caterwauling is the purest form of empty noise. People in positions of power and responsibility are talking about their own shadow puppets. We’re learning how completely people can be severed from reality and driven down the path of a cultural invention, if that’s the choice that they make.
We don’t have to accept their premises. We can choose the real, and do it plainly. The moment is approaching, and for many people is already here, when government and mass media rant and scream and cry about things that no one else bothers to notice.
What that rejection of mass psychosis doesn’t do is solve the problem of the frozen bank accounts, and it leaves us with the spectacle of a manufactured world of sickness reaching into a real world of sanity and breaking real things. I have other thoughts about that, but prudence prevents me from putting them into words quite yet. More to come.