UNITED CLOWN POSSE
If it wasn’t already apparent, I don’t have a lot of love for conservative politics. When this UCP party won, I was working at a supervised consumption site in Lethbridge called ARCHES. During the campaign, Jason Kenney, their leader, the little guy with the money bag and clown face in the video above (mural by AJA Louden! - @AJALouden on IG) had said something along the lines of “why are we letting people inject poison in these NDP drug sites?”
I knew then that if they won, ARCHES and the people we were supporting there, would get fucked one way or the other. They didn’t care that statistically SCS and Harm Reduction were the most successful way to help people find sobriety &/or healthier lives. They were the old school religious right, and they believed everyone should pull themselves up by the bootstraps like real manly men. Same shit I grew up surrounded by. Bunch of entitled men vying for alpha status who figure since they can grunt in the sun for 36 bucks an hour, they didn’t need help from anyone, and therefor they weren’t supporting these yuppie social services, and they certainly weren’t supporting no more taxes! So they voted us into the current mess we’re in to avoid keeping our carbon tax money here in province.
Fast forward to now.
No Jobs. No Economy. No Pipeline. No SCS in Lethbridge, former home of the busiest one in the whole wide world. Just a bunch of tax payers money given away.. I’ve seen estimates up in the double digit billions, but we’ll likely be trying to tally it all up accurately for a while. More people than ever dying of opioid poisoning since Covid messed with dealers supply routes. Meanwhile Kenney and his cronies will be on a beach somewhere tropical, far away from the selenium poisoned rivers, bankrupt businesses, and unemployed masses he’ll leave behind. They wouldn’t even let travel restrictions stop them from holidays in the sun this year.
This song still rings true more than a year after I wrote and recorded it. Even if I do admittedly also make some wild statements I couldn’t back up logically about who we should or shouldn’t let croak. I wrote this shit before covid, so felt a bit fucked up talking about dooming boomers after this all unfolded. It was really intended a lot more hypothetically. Wear a mask ya’ll, save the elderly.
The bit about these crooks wanting to privatize healthcare was a bit of a tinfoil hat theory when I wrote this too, but damn if I can’t say I told you so now. The health ministers wife is selling private health insurance, but probably no conflict of interest there at all.. Dumbing down of the population through de-funding public schools and pushing towards indoctrinating the youth with regressive propaganda at private church schools.. it’s all there. I guess I didn’t predict the current expansion into coal like it was 1967, but I didn’t have a crystal ball, just some forethought into what this parties rhetoric was supporting and leading us towards.
I hope I piss a few people off. Maybe they’ll write #MountainsNotMines to @JasonNixonAB, the faux “environment minister” who just reversed the laws that had made it illegal to strip mine the Eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta since the mid 70’s. Maybe they’ll tell @Shandro to stop attacking public healthcare, or to step up and enforce (and pay us to stay home for) a few weeks of lock down that would end this half on, half off again economic slump they're keeping us chained to. Maybe someone’ll tell Kenney to keep #handsoffmypension if they’re a teacher who’s lived here for 50 years like my Mom. Maybe we’ll all just keep telling him #ResignKenney until we get a chance to replace him. Maybe we’ll have to do more lawn signs.
Songs can’t always be easy listening. Sometimes you’ve gotta say something inflammatory and get people to question it. I’d stop rapping if I didn’t have opinions to voice on what matters to the people around me.
