So, 'tis the season to review the year again. Let's go!
First frame almost didn't happen that way, but when in last june Moncton made headline news and was almost shut down over some Rambo-wannabe who killed three members of the RCMP. I made that cartoon on the fly and it was quite a hit with my relatives on Facebook. My mother mentioned it while I was in Tracadie for the holidays...
Cops, riots and nuts.
Just like any death since the invention of social media, two days later, anonymous Phil's over the internet were already calling that a false flag operation (in conspiracy circles, it means "bad guys in power did it because, one world-government"). It's one area where far-left wing and far-right go so far from each other, they end up at the same place.
There is a point in common between the Moncton shootings and the race riots and following dead cops in the United States; a downward spiral of mistrust between the people (especially minorities) and the police.
As soon as the name of the shooter became public, everyone rushed to his Facebook feed to see the anti-cops and paranoid memes he put there (because that's how we reward lone, murderous nuts, we make them famous!). Before the murders, the RCMP had a pretty bad image in south-eastern New-Brunswick. Like I pointed out during the October 2013 riots in Elsipogtog, they have a bad history of repressing riots in the poorer towns of the province and they pass for a a hand-me-down institution recycled from 19th century British empire. It a context like this, all you need is one nut willing to go too far and desperate for fame, you get three dead cops and a following grief-o-rama all over town, TV and Twitter. I participated it, brought flowers, we all did. Nobody ordered anyone to put flowers at the police station, we all did because, hashtag!
And a few months later, after all the collective hysteria comes the collective paranoia. I've heard the same people who wore red as commemoration whisper "But if it was you or me getting shot, they wouldn't throw all that fuss!", "The government used that as propaganda!".
Wait a minute. We, as a collectivity gave them that over-the-top funeral but that's more than enough for conspiracy theorists to whisper "The Man did it!". Cue conspiracy theories, which brings out more lone nuts. More police murders also means cops will be much more nervous and agressive when dealing with the public, which means more botched interventions (from riots to simple arrests), which means more mistrust between the police and the population, which means more conspiracy theorists, which means more lone nuts...
A Bin-Laden wannabe named Bibeau...
This time, goody-two shoes Canada did not make crime news just once, but twice. After the Moncton shooting, there was that one in Ottawa by a pure-laine quebecker born and raised here pretending really, really, REALLY hard to be muslim integrists...his last name was Zehaf-Bibeau!!!
To understand why I'm rolling on the floor laughing at the moment, my anglo-saxon friend, it's because names that end in -eau sound so typically french-canadians: Arseneau, Thériault, Primeau, Bordeleau, Brideau, Pronovost, Ribreau, Trudeau, Thibault, Perrault... just like last names that end with -ov sound russian, and names that end with -ez sound spanish. Picture a "terrorist" whose last name is Zehaf-Johnson or any last name that sounds as american as apple pie. Suddenly, it's much less scary and foreign, does it?
What is really sad, though, is that I heard the news of that Bin Laden with a phentex beard, I was at work in what is the most cospolitan work place I've been in yet. I had many practicing muslims as co-workers, and other friends who came from muslim countries that don't consider themselves muslims anymore but can't escape people's ignorance. They face racism and islamophobia on a daily basis because of their skin tone, accent or name. For example, the acquaintance of mine that is not muslim anymore is still stuck with the first name Muhammad and he's met many people will not consider him canadian even though he's been in this country since before they were born.
Meanwhile, xenophobic idiots call for the expulsion of immigrants on Facebook. As proof of the "dangerousness" if immigration, they will use an attack made by a guy named Bibeau...
A Poutine/Putin joke I had been saving since February
Also, 2014 marked the century of the biggest German family brawl in history between king George, kaiser Wilhelm and tsar Nicholas. This year has been a little WWI doc-o-rama for me. I've seen pretty much everything serious Youtube has to offer on the subject. I grew a fascination for the Russian revolution. They are so much like Canada and one day, we're bound to be in competition for the title of best, biggest, most frozen patch of nordic awesomeness on the planet. While Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, Harper tried to act tough with Putin. As much as I hate the conservatives, I have to admit that even a broken clock shows the right time of day sometimes and some day, we'll have conflicting interests with Russia. Even the liberals realize that.
What I facepalm at, regarding Putin, is all the idiots who love him just because the US hates him. A bit like when I was a teenager, I hated Marilyn Manson but I listened to it just to freak out my parents and stopped listening to it when nobody cared anymore. Politics don't work that way. Even though the US made pretty bad stuff in the last decade or two, doesn't mean their "enemy" must be the good guy. It only works that way in movies. Bad movies. In reality, there are no heroes in politics, just machavellian greed on both sides.
In the meantime, there's hockey. We beat Russia, our historic rivals in the sport on their home ice AND we get to make fun of Little Stalin's last name that means "french fries with gravy and cheese" over here. Russia's team didn't go that far in the tournament and pres. Poutine himself seemed to take that pretty seriously. I had been waiting since February to draw Sooky having a celebratory Poutine with hockey stick fries and topped off with a gold medal.
Nerdy dirty laundry
We all know someone who was smart in grade school, was told he was going to be a doctor someday but now lives in his mother's basement at almost thirty, on the Xbox (or Playstation, since nerds take that so seriously) 20 hours a day . I'm sure somewhere there's someone to call that cliché anti-nerd racism. You sure the cliché of the loner idiot who goes insane at the mere thought of sex doesn't hold any water? Just look at the apocalyptic reaction following Gamergate. I had heard that someone in the gaming World received death threats over an affair or something...
Hang on a second. Death threats? Over games? I don't need to know why, what, when, where, who but just check the definition of "game" in the dictionary: something people do just for fun. Someone who makes death threats over something that trivial must be taking games waaay, waaaaaay too seriously. Even athletes who win millions while "playing" soccer, hockey or baseball don't take it that far! To overreact that much, games must be consuming those people's whole lives; their wifes, mothers, friends, educator, lover, brother, sister all in one box. That little box must be all they have.
Just the fact that people threw around death threats about a game pretty much confirms the cliché of the friendless, socially non-functionnal nerd because to take simple games that seriously, you really must have no life worth living and a misanthropy that makes me seriously wonder if you're related to Mittaines himself.
A few years ago, in the golden year of "springs" all over the planet, the glory days of Anonymous, Assange and Snowden, I thought that revolution was only a few clicks away. But is it really worth a revolution to put so much power in the hands of asocial wannabe-wizards who will stalk anyone just because they can? Yeah, the NSA is spying on us, well, so do they! Except that hackers don't answer to anyone except their own power trips...
The Hangover Club...
Another gag that I've been saving for months was the scottish terrier and Jacques drinking away their defunct aspirations to independence at a bar I considered calling "The Hangover Café". During the lead-up to the referendum in Scotland, every Facebook post from Radio-Canada were filled with comments from disgruntled Québecois separatists who related to the experience. Que voulez-vous? The enemies of the British monarchy are our friends! Contrary to Quebec's referendum in 1995, though, Scotland's was lost by a margin sygnificant enough so hopefully, the independence movement won't become the xenophobic relic it is on this side of the Atlantic and nobody will blame it on "money and ethnic votes".
Make no mistake, people like me owe a lot, a whole lot to Quebec separatists and people like them who were, for a time, the only left-wing in Canada. It is in reaction to Québecois separatism that Canada's constitution was rappatriated (even though Quebec never signed it), the education system was modernized under their influence and bilingual cities outside of Quebec, (like Moncton) were given major boosts by the federal government in order to make Canada more of a bilingual continuum instead of two opposing blocks. I get a lot of inspiration from québecois artists who were aggressively independantists. I appreciate La Bottine Souriante and their love of our folklore, the sweet tragi-comedic poetry of Les Colocs and the sharp social criticism of rappers Loco Locass and late filmmaker Pierre Falardeau... The québecois separatists of the 1960s and 1970s even lived up to earn quite a compliment; being called "communists" by the far right of the time.
But the PQ that bit the dust last year has nothing to do with those ideas. Like all other nationalisms, it just divides the World between "us" (or "nous") and "everyone else". It once fought fo the inclusion of those who are not necessarily anglophones to be part of society, now they propose charters to exclude those who are not of their own culure from public service. They are a pale copy of the people they toppled, except that they speak french.
As for social justice and left-wing politics, the seperatists now have billionnaire Pierre Karl Péladeau as their potential leader. He's the owner of the Québecor empire and with his tv stations, magazines and telecom company (Videotron), he has a diabolical grip on Canadian media in French comparable to the grip Rupert Murdoch has in the US.
So much for social justice and left wing values. The PQ is now a right-wing party, pandering to the insecurities and xenophobia of an aging base and using Quebec independence as a fake promise to try, but just barely try, to attract young supporters.
Merci, monsieur Latulippe.
Also, an unsually high number of funny people passed away this year. Robin Williams' death shocked us all, of course, but it's not unusual for clowns to hide busloads of sadness under their funny faces, a bit like Krusty the Clown in the Simpsons. I also had to pay hommage to Joan Rivers who, for me, will always remain the voice of Dot Matrix in Spaceballs. A movie I loved since I was a kid. 4 is for Jean Béliveau, the legendary star player of the Montreal Canadiens
I paid tribute to another guy you might not know unless you're interested in Quebec comedy but who's an absolute legend, Gilles Latulippe. Unlike Williams, he died after a full life of 77 years and after being a household name in Quebec for over 50 years. He was one of the last survivors of the generation of Rose Ouellette (aka La Poune), Gratien Gelinas, Olivier Guimond and others who bascically founded Quebec popular culture at the time of Vaudeville theater and black and white TV. Personally, I remember him from a TV show my mother watched in the late 1990s called "Les Démons du Midi" where he made people laugh like there's no tomorrow with his improvised characters and decors...and a fraction of the budget that today's comedy shows have.
His co-host of Les Démons du Midi, Suzanne Lapointe, also died just yesterday. Less than four months after Latulippe.
I don't do stage, I do cartoons but I feel like everyone who does comedy, in one form of another in this culture has a huge debt to that man and his generation of creators.
Since so many great people left us last year, let's wish ourselves some good laughs, new discoveries, and for the deciders to smarten up this year.
Have a good 2015!
