Missives from the Canadian Underground at the Dawn of a New Age
Hello. This is the Philosopher of the Black Market, an organized criminal. I mean someone who, tarot cards dealt, ought to make a decent living facilitating your vices but who is self-educated and forward-thinking enough to dispute laws and status-quos preventing her from doing so free of police harassment and social stigma before any speakeasy.
American Desperado and Cocaine Cowboy Jon Roberts in his autobiography recommends to youngsters considering the life of crime: “Don’t be a jerk and wait to get a good lawyer. Get your lawyer first, and pay off all the judges and politicians before you do any illegal things.”
I retort – where you getting that dough if you aint already playing The Game? Your trust fund?
Try activism, and take donations. Corruption, honestly, darling.
Which is why I’m so pleased (smiles tightly) Canada elected Justin Trudeau, an adorable whelp I’m sure I can persuade of my human-right to make a living selling sex, drugs and vigilante justice to people like him for not-money-necessarily. In-debt will do in the post-capitalist gift economy brought to you by global social media and feminism. I mean providing for the consensual crimes: vice-trades occurring between legal adults who have given their informed consent to black-market transactions, whether those be exchanges of sex for favors, drugs for money, or violence for respect, so long as those trades do not impact in a patently negative way on the life or integrity of any innocent. Sound reasonable?
I think so, and for someone to deny the reasonableness of the Golden Rule of Informed Adult Consent in Black-Market Transactions rings intellectually and emotionally immature, which is to say unfit to run a country, and I’d be forgiven for thinking ‘immature’ when I look at Canada’s floppy-haired, doe-eyed, apparent head of state. Is daddy ruling from beyond the grave, or his dominatrix from her dungeon throne? And aren’t you amazed no ambitious prostitute or drug-dealer or contract-killer has considered such a scheme before? Sure the honey-trap is old hat, but what if instead of secretly I put on a burlesque performance of imitating a gangster in open editorials to highlight hypocrisy? Many of my colleagues excel at discretion, and I wish I could count myself among them, but being an exhibitionist I’ve adopted an ‘elephant in the room’ persona so awkward (like) to have to talk about, people don’t. Meanwhile from my giant vantage I’ve been assembling dossiers on you.
Ambition on the black-market is traditionally associated with soullessness and most career criminals are career criminals because they lack impulse control and empathy, no matter how structured and code-bound their gang, but this is art, not money, so I like to think I’m one of those loyal, forgivable gangsters we see on TV like they were the norm. That media in general romanticizes the criminal class tells us something, citizens and outlaws. Citizens: you don’t want a crime-free society even if you vote like you do – if Prohibition prevailed, what would you watch on TV? Outlaws: if you want to get away with breaking the law, it suffices to do so cinematically, with wit and heroics. See I’m a nice girl who was (tragic-comically, in the most elaborate farce in Canadian history) drawn into the underworld by a) cute boy wanted to get back at his judge-dad by being the opposite, which seemed righteous at the time and still does and b) necessity in a small and isolated town lacked an organized criminal presence to provide for the niggles of its lonely, bored judge. So I believe the black-market and gangsters who run it are an economic and social necessity, impossible to eradicate and, like the prodigal son, prone to acting out when invalidated.
Still. Times are a’changin’. Hope of an end to Prohibition glows rosily on the Canadian horizon, and it’s only wise to ask one’s self and the democratic government what ‘legalization’ of the drug and sex-trades would look like and who would profit, in the government or private sector, before we make any great socioeconomic leaps forward into Tolerance.
However, time, this dedicated psychonaut will tell you, is not wholly linear and the web generation has already outgrown federal say-so in matters relating to individual fetishes. Anarchy precedes legality: outlaw roadrunner, cop coyote – the Law plays catch up, and sets booby-traps in the wrong places. “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” said Trudeau Senior in a paternal tone circa 1968 and repeated Trudeau Junior like his boy caught browsing online porn circa 2016. The state has no business in your tax-payer-funded bedroom, Justin: gangsters do.
For example thought experiment: what will meek ol’ Canada look like when not a spry Gen X is at the helm, but a wry Gen Y? Hopefully us Millennials get a Primeminister as pretty optimistic as Justin Trudeau. Justin Bieber, perhaps, if Canada is 10 years behind America. Am I alone in picturing ‘anarchy’ in this scenario – the Future?
Luckily for Canadian citizens from all walks of life, anarchy as a political term means ‘sovereignty’; which is to say whether or not adult citizens can sell sadomasochistic sex or deal ecstasy or kill each other in rituals and write about it on blogs is unlikely to strike an under-35 on the up and up as a matter for federal jurisdiction but definitely something to talk about for publicity. And if you don’t get what I am talking about, what are you doing campaigning for ‘change’ when I could be?
The term ‘federal jurisdiction’ and the conceptual banality and paper shuffling ensues is too dry and long-winded for a generation communicates in pithy, irony-tinged tweets and mass thumbs-up delivered immediately to their international cluster tribe. The current order of government will collapse for reasons of evolving semantics: entertainment and politics are merging in a culture of instant-gratification to the point if you’re not wondering how amusing is your political party, you misunderstand the word ‘party’! Is why I founded @FUNPARTY! Feminist-Gangsters and Black-Market Human-Rights Advocacy Polydix Silliness on a platform both seriously ridiculous and ridiculously serious, like any good masquerade.
I want the Emerys to join cause the Liberals wouldn’t take them and that says something about how ‘Liberals’ feel about this ‘legalizing marijuana’ business I have a stake in as Stoner Living’s graphic mascot. Does staunch former prohibitionist police chief Bill Blair know how to sell marijuana or do marijuana trafficking activists know how to sell marijuana? Personally I won’t recognize Ottawa’s prude authority over me insofar as it relates to regional customer satisfaction as a westcoast black-market entrepreneur, and why should I when the only relationship I can picture between myself and certain persons in government is ‘The Mistress with Her Toy(z)’.
Chuckles. Welcome to Canada. The Land above America where a Pirate Hooker Queen rulz! in my imagiNation. Move there and get bushed. Either or a writer putting on an edgy stunt, but who can tell the difference? The Real Lana Del Rey is a troll.
Why not an artist so flexible and erudite upon encountering her it subsequently becomes difficult for narrow-minded cops, courts and politicians to deploy the condescending rhetoric and byzantine punitive actions with which they are well-used to confronting those who color outside the lines of their square? Which is not to say they wont try – ham-fisted disciplinarians are always spoiling for a fight, an opportunity to inflict suffering in the guise of upholding ‘morality’ – only that this pen is slimmer than their prison bars, and besides internet access is a human-right and I’m telepathic. It’s not that I don’t respect the democratic process, it’s that often the democratic process doesn’t respect me as a woman and gangster and psychic, and what loyalty do I owe group-think in that case, your Honor? “That is a good point,” he tells me off the record.
While the democraticish process busy-works itself figuring out how to provide mere marijuana in a sensible and profitable manner, people be smokin marijuana, poppin molly and snortin coke and somehow those products are getting from non-existence to consumption despite adverse conditions. How much energy does any police/court system want to put into stopping citizens from committing consensual crimes? Consuming recreational drugs, purchasing sex acts from cognizant adults, or shooting your rival in The Game? That last one maybe The Law ought to focus on, but what if I told you – because a soothing voice in my pothead told me – the most effective way to diminish gang violence is to validate the professional reality of gangsterism as a distinct economic class dedicated to the provision of black-market goods and services: sex, drugs and anarchy. Gangstersism is a profession.
Like all professions gangsterism requires its internal moral code and external checks and balances. Having gangsterism the profession of providing black-market goods and services be an offence in and of itself – like Canada’s anti-gangsterism laws intend by extending prison sentences for traffickers who can be proven to be systematically making money in relation to an organization or gang – is like making stonemasonry guilds illegal and persecuting those who get their fellow professionals together: bound to make groups of ambitious people act sketchy and ferment a revolt. Inevitable. But more later.
If you like this check out- https://gorillaconvict.com/2015/12/christmas-in-the-hole-by-john-broman/