One place i tend to pay a tiny, tiny, tiny bit more attention to is Australia. Partly because in many ways it is an analog to Canada. Partly because i used to live there when i was 5. Partly because outside of central/ south america, it is the place on the planet where we have been most warmly received as a band. I know many Australians visit this site. So i thought i’d post a link to the this very short and provocative piece about some of the players in post-Rudd Australia. In the words of Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes, “food for thought!”.

you will be too. anybody who has seen Captain Ron knows that chicago is good people.

it appears that the schedule and ticket info can be found here.

So thankfully, we have people like Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org who has been compiling a detailed overview of where Haiti stands 6-months after we all watched Port-Au-Prince leveled by an earthquake and were momentarily moved to do something to help.

The bad news is of course, that almost none of the desperately needed aid money pledged by wealthy nations while the headlines and photo ops were in full swing has been paid to Haiti’s reconstruction efforts, leaving the population living in nightmare conditions.

If the obvious horror of the human toll being exacted in Haiti by this negligence isn’t enough to motivate us here in the First World to help, perhaps we should consider what kind of precedent it sets for the inevitable moment when the city/ province/ state in which we live becomes the epicenter for some over-the-top natural or human-made disaster. Will anyone be there to help us? Or will they just follow precedent and use it as a photo op and make pledges that will never be kept while our families suffer and die in squalor?

To be honest, that is the prime motivation behind any involvement i’ve ever had in anything to do with politics or activism or any garbage like that: if they can do it to those people, they can do it to me. To me, justice isn’t about some liberal do-gooder nonsense, it’s about self-preservation. i know it’s boring compared to music and sports and movies and beer and irony and being clever and all that, but I believe it is in our best interests to pay attention and do something to help when other people are getting fucked over.

We still recommend financially supporting Partners In Health directly. Or if you’re one of those people who just has to get something in return, you can make that same donation in exchange for a download of 3 fun songs recently recovered from our early records.

Speaking of sports, former NHL enforcer Georges Laraque and even current Canucks d-man Dan Hamhuis are encouraging people not too forget about Haiti, so as you can see, the two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

In other news, fuck are you people going to get sonically slapped in the fucking face by our new stuff. haha.

i won’t bother with the obvious comparative study of the isolated “violence” of a handful of protestors versus the overwhelming violence practiced day in and day out at the expense of millions upon millions of human lives by national states the world over in order to secure their geopolitical interests. too easy. too obvious. too fundamental.

i will however, point out that unless you’ve been in the situation of being a direct, physical and psychological target of overwhelming and belligerent street-level force FUNDED BY YOUR OWN TAX DOLLARS, it can be hard to understand the frustration and rage that can build over the course of an afternoon let alone over the course of a lifetime.

hell, you don’t even have to have experienced it directly. just sitting on our couches in our homes, cursing the stinking system, we all know that the state has a monopoly on ultimate violence and total control. otherwise it wouldn’t exist as it does, right? things would be different, cause we would have gotten up off our couches and changed it if we were operating on a level playing field. but their is no level playing field between the state and its subjects. citizens plainly have insufficient institutional power to derail the sociopathic behaviour of the prevailing order. frustration and rage is the predictable result.

that frustration and rage is exacerbated when you’re pitted face to face against a wall of riot cops who are alternately corralling and intentionally provoking your otherwise peaceful demonstration into a corner, firing rubber bullets at you, detaining and searching you with no cause, hitting you with batons, singling out and abducting organizers, impersonating protesters, firing gas canisters intentionally at head level, exploding sound grenades by your ears, permanently damaging your body with exposure to chemical bombs (all based on personal experience by the way) and then having it all portrayed in the media as if it were YOU that needs to be restrained and punished rather than the megalomaniacs on the other side of the fence that continue to plunder and pillage the planet at these obnoxious publicly-funded private-parties of the global elite.

in these situations, there is only so much futility a person can take before their rage can get the best of them and a burning cop car or a smashed bank window starts to look pretty appealing. yes, these are futile acts, but what do we expect people to do when they are treated like shit and the justice system does nothing to intervene on their behalf?

sure, ideally we could all rise above it and aim for a perfect, superhuman state of restraint. sure. and yes, ideally i too would prefer the demonstrations were strictly peaceful (for strategic reasons mainly) and that other, more polarizing means of demonstration and protest and disruption occurred outside of these public gatherings (where they would be more effective).

but the people who manage the security state won’t let that happen anyways. they WANT violence. they provoke it. why? it justifies their absurd budgets. it lets them test and refine (and demonstrate to the rest of the population) their methods of population control in a managed setting, preparing for the day that the shit really hits the fan and the police state finally gets to give up any pretense of democracy. why else would they have the summit in fucking downtown toronto, where spirited protest was absolutely certain to occur, rather than on some cruise-ship in the atlantic where it could all be completely avoided? these are essentially war-games being staged on our nickel. and we, the people, are the enemy.

so let’s just try to keep things in perspective when corporate media habitually fails to hold concentrations of global power to any sliver of account and instead chooses to replay footage of a stupid burning cop car on a loop for hours on end as their marquee story.

there are plenty of examples of independent video footage of cops provoking and mistreating people at the G20 summit surfacing on the net. do yourself a favour and check them out and ask yourself how you would feel if you were on the receiving end of it. or if it were a member of your family.

that’s all i got to say.