the blaine invasion

I was a candidate in a Canadian Federal election. In that election, like the one just passing, the expression one heard a lot was `It's so surreal.' This may be a prism that many are seeing through not only the Canadian elections but life.

I have written elsewhere that I hate the ideology and practice of memoirism, that is, structuring narratives of the past in which the ego plays the starring role. I find memoirism an essential tool of fascism, child abuse, plagiarism and other unattractive coping mechanisms.

But

This idea of elections being surreal coupled with the sensation I have felt lately when people have wondered about my Canadianism, or even my actual existence (including my own family) got me remembering aspects of my political career.

And

I have assured myself that it is not memoirism I am doing because first of all I seem to be the only one who is the slightest bit interested in any of it anymore as something to enhance their own narratives with, and second because the memories always involve `we' not me. And they are surreal anyway.

I realised how surreal they were when I was drinking whiskey in a Vancouver hotel that used to be seedy but was now rather nice watching a political documentary on T.V. And there it was, scenes rendered into narrative historic fact wired into part of the official Canada easily replacing my surrealism. And there I was. Canadian at last! A ghostly image.

First scene was of the time we decided to invade the United States. This act, mentioned in U.S. media as the first time since the war of 1812 and in Canadian parliament as the work of anti-Canadian professional revolutionaries and poets was filmed and shown all over the world. It made, I know, the news in Denmark and was seen by someone who was once a girlfriend who contacted me again.

`We' decided to do it, the invasion of the U.S, originally called a peace picnic, because the U.S. had invaded Cambodia. We thought we would go twenty two miles into the U.S and exchange that for the Parrot's Beak, which is what they had. Twenty two miles. Very practical.

There was a good leaflet and `we' gathered in strength at the Peace Arch between White Rock and Blaine. Then, with a happy sigh, the picnickers, children, drummers and significant others that we were packed up lunches and marched past customs into Blaine and Amerikka under a sunny sky.

As the column of cheerful invaders diminished, people stopping to shop, or getting tired and going back to lunch, a large man ran out of a bar carrying a pistol saying `you fucking communists'. A woman, who I see was a candidate in the recent election, kicked it out of his hands. Some of us cheered. I think she is now billed as a reformist.

After a few miles in, just past a hotel, `we', the core who had ventured forth and a few who had joined us since, turned and went back to the border singing the Huron Carole and feeling very Canadian although some were just learning the words. We had gone only a mile. But it had been an act more literal than what most of the others had done. We took our threats and proclamations seriously.

It was surreal back there, there was a line of a thousand ugly looking, angry, scruffy Canadians, some bleeding, raging in and around the border flower beds who were faced across that border by a line of multi-uniformed American riot police and soldiers, dozens of whom had rifles. It was a lesson in what happens in the meantime if you are ever writing a short story.

Some of the troops had torn shirts, were Seattle Blue Asses, some were so called Indian Affairs, some were Army, some were armed customs officers and some were cowboy-hatted border guards. There was a Coast Guard guy. We went through their lines unnoticed and invisible as we were not actors in that classic confrontation and image. Cops against the people. We joined the Canadians. The Canadians were digging rocks from the flower beds and hurling themat the police. The gates of the Peace Arch had been shut and tied with booster cables. Under the slogans 'may these gates never be closed' and 'children of a common mother' they were closed and someone had defaced the 'mother' with spray paint. As I approached I saw a friend leaping way into the air (he became the founder of a great institution and his name rhymes with `leap') hurling a flower encrusted white painted rock. This photo was on the front page next morning.

The police finally attacked and broke a few arms. In fact they invaded Canada. It was also the first time since the last (but it was a near thing in the war measures act too). The police attack was prompted when a trainload of new cars, including Corvettes, went by on the railway parallel to the road and was enthusiastically stoned! Corvettes! No wonder they attacked. A few broken arms and counter charges later we all went home watched by two (yes, only two) Mounties sitting quietly in their car. As Mounties do compared to the Cavalry. Anyway on the documentary I saw years later in the hotel the voiceover said that the demonstration had been a very peaceful protest on environmental issues and nuclear testing. A prominent politician was interviewed associating himself with these traditional Canadian concerns. The voiceover didn't say `nice' or `boring' but you could hear it there with an invisible smirk. Later it showed the Native People's Caravan which went across Canada visiting reserves picking up demands to be taken to the Parliament where it was attacked on the steps by Mounties. I was beaten again there. But in the documentary some women were met by Trudeau. But I had seen myself leaving in the clip before! The voiceover said it was a caravan about women's rights, which in fact had taken place years earlier. A woman who I knew was interviewed mentioning the rights now won.

There was later the clip of our community human rights campaigningwhen `we' drove at night through the streets informing first nations people and kids about their rights giving them leaflets and numbers of lawyers as the were being rousted by the police during a periodic campaign. The shots were of the rain and the windshields. I complained about to the CBC as romanticising the situation when they were first shown at the time. And they showed again a staged event with police officers I had also complained about. I confess in a movie I made later about mobile clinics in Africa I used the same shot.

Further surrealistically, not in the shot, and more outside the narratives, and in more image defying memory was the guns we had hidden in the trunk of our human rights cars in case the police started a shootout as they had with some Native persons. In the town of Blaine a great number of deserters and some escapees from Camp Pendleton military prison were in the hotel and came back across the border with us. The Caravan went to Grassy Narrows where desperate and near suicidal warriors, some with mercury poisoning and some drugged to the eyeballs were effectively surrounded by Wounded Knee templated Mounties. We took them out.

Later on, following all that I mistakenly punched Chrétien in the nose in a small remonstrance (that should alone make me Canadian but was not in the history documentary).

Yup, 'we', the surreal picnickers, were an Underground Railroad, yup, `we' the barefoot lawyers were people's militia, and yup `we' the surreal gypsy social reformers were following a Clauswitzian dictum on encirclement and not Ghandi.

Get them out! Get them home! Feed them!

My active engaged political career was based on the same dictum I have now in writing. Get them out! Get them out for God's sake from that silly encasing narrative. That beginning, middle and end of the story. Get them out however you can. Get people away from the dead
end roles the official narrative has written for them. Deserter, Perp, Prisoner, Martyr. Use surrealism, use a joke, use the collective power, use the magic image. but get in somehow, anyhow, get out and take them with you.

Take them away from the invisible watcher, the author, the one way glass mirror all invisible but whose presence turns the whole of life into a prison. Take them away from the concocted farce, the tightly structured fiction, the escapist video that has been quietly substituted for Identity, Community Nation and Mind.

`We', it was always `we' (the group makes it possible) failed once during a liberal march for prison reform which was supposed to cover a breakout of some friends we knew were being tortured, some we knew to be very confused and very terrified bunnies indeed. The breakout
didn't work due to a love affair between one prisoner and a social worker.

`We' at midnight snuck out the occupiers of an eastern university building so that the next day when the police attacked there was no-one there (red faced or what, even their dogs). But the demands were forgotten unfortunately. Good demands. They all were good demands.
Most have been met. But not really.

My political campaign as a parliamentary candidate meant I could dress as a lumberjack (I actually was an automobile builder so still a genuine worker despite the costume). I wore lovely chequered shirts and steel toed boots. I spoke from the bottom of my mouth. I was against war, racism and denial of human rights. Who isn't?

In `all candidates meetings' the audience loved me more than any of my students ever did when I clowned around about Shakespeare. They loved a Looney. They saw I was outside of the deathly false earnestness of the cocoon of simple banalities (the west vs. the east, big government vs. little, old arguments and memoirs). My stooges asked the planted questions (some of whom became very serious academics, one of whom now tragically dead did as much for rights of the disabled as anyone on the planet). I answered well and got no votes. I should have read poems.

None of this has happened now. The official narrative has taken over. Canada. It's surreal.

Have to do something else be someone else.