3:AM Magazine

By Lyn Fox.

Flying into Montreal , you pass over rippling forests and myriad lakes, resembling a green carpet often snagged and peed on by a bad puppy. Next come Lego-brick suburbs, the mighty Saint Lawrence River , and bon jour Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport. Outside the terminal, faces are happier and arms are hairier than in British Canada. I take a taxi downtown.

Blue-oxidized church spires stab above the grey stone cityscape, as does a fifty-foot La SENZA bra model. Reddish-brunette lovelies sporting mirrored sunglasses, white stretch undershirts, and designer jeans abound. At one intersection, a towering video screen shows nude women cavorting over text advertising “contact dance.” A local news expose found this typically means shapely girls from Latin America rub against the pockets of homely men from North America to make contact with the appendage and coinage which reside there. Close encounters of the third-world-migrant-exploitive kind.

Exit the cab at Fairmount Bakery. In this Jewish neighborhood alley, the Shlafman family has been hand-rolling and wood-firing Montreal ’s first and most renowned bagel since 1919. I squeeze in between ceiling-high racks to speak to a counter girl with kinky flour-dusted hair. “Two poppy seed please.” The crisp grainy shell and soft warm center leave me as eager to exploit the city as Duddy Kravitz.

I set out walking through the heart of this metropolis that long ago embraced the chic. Here director Denys Arcand once defined the cultural edge with his films Jésus of Montreal and Le Déclin de l´ Empire Américain. Here I stroll past dark empty gothic basilicas and packed trendy fashion boutiques. Even my stride must bow to fad. Fellow pedestrians don’t pause for crossing signals like English Canadians but traverse the street whenever the crowd does. (Local custom dictates you should always be dressed to stop traffic anyway.)

It seems there’s a smugness to Montreal hip. Even the twenty year olds profess to appreciate black-American jazz and Quebec-government-funded documentaries about white-American racism. Yet, do these fashionistas realize that the Southern slave system wasn’t so much abolished as expanded to include them, that the textile plantation big house now extends from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Sea, that beyond our privileged borders—shackled by barriers to free competition—the global masses sweat and toil to keep our teenagers sweet and spoiled with the style of the moment? As Elizabeth Hurley says, “You can’t have fashion without victims.”

Newsflash: Mississippi is no longer the center of the cotton or exploitation universe. Yet, upstanding North Americans still organize to protect their standard of living from the “undesirables.” Don’t bash the Klan if you oppose free trade. Labor unions that beg (or bribe) politicians to exclude them from the jungle of global commerce might as well ask four swarthy Negroes to carry them on a bamboo platform over the unpleasantness of a literal rainforest.

Shame on you unswarthy metrosexual Obama for pandering to the rust belt, promising to oppose trade agreements, and supporting the Jim Crow separation that keeps our Latin American friends down or sneaking across the border to learn contact dance. Are they not men and brothers?—or…um…really sexy sisters? The white sheets of paper on which auto-workers petition against free commerce are not so unlike the white sheets which Mississippi donned in times past, born of fearful desperation to halt privilege from slipping away. The world is not a just place, but woe to those who seek to bolster the injustice.

Detroit, oh Detroit , how often has the federal government taken you under their wing when they should’ve forced you to be competitive, but you were not willing. Michigan , oh Michigan , how bravely we Yankees fought against misguided confederates who clung to prosperity built on the backs of others. Now, it is your economy that needs reconstruction, your confederations that won’t let us imagine a Lennonist-but-not-Leninist brotherhood of man. Why not embrace free commerce just because it’s right, without waiting for “trampling out of the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored?”

Perverting Neil Young, Northern man, I’ve seen your employee syndicates claiming to protect the little guy while actually defending the middle-America guy against the little foreign guy. Best remember what your good book manifesto says: “Solidarity now, workers of the world unite!” If slave-holding, brown-sugar-contact-dancing Thomas Jefferson could intellectually grasp that all men are created equal, maybe pension-holding, sweeten-my-contract-demanding union bosses could do the same.
Isn’t it time the sweaty darkies were allowed into the big house for a long overdue glass of lemonade? It’s true that Scarlett O’hara may lose space for clothes, since globalization tends to equalize. However, the world didn’t end in the last millennium, though brown people were starving; it probably won’t end in the next, even if some North Americans have to walk to work. Globalization ushers in a frightening new world. Yet, no moral person can oppose it, any more than he could’ve opposed the emancipation proclamation for making him compete with cheap-labor freedmen.

Feeling like a modern abolitionist, I strut a little too self-righteously past Uncle Tom Hilfiger’s storefront and out of the designer clothing district. By midnight, I sit in La Belle Province on Rue Sainte Catherine. Vinyl booths, neon lights, chrome chairs, and flashing gumball machines surround me. The aroma of poutine, zingy beef gravy over fries with cheese curds, wafts up at me from my plate. Yummy, cheap, and filling.

The gritty, nostalgic, 24-hour diner’s artery-clogging special recalls to me the title of Kathy Reichs’ Montreal crime mystery Death Du Jour. (Yes, the book the TV series Bones was based on. [Yes, the show with the forensic anthropologist babe. Can I finish my story now?]) Poutine is not just tasty junk food; it’s the only method of assisted suicide legal in Catholic Quebec. While pre-mortem gravy stains aren’t exactly dying with dignity, it’s still a delicious and rebellious way to go. I gorge myself proudly as a protest against nanny government seeking to protect my job or my health by crushing global human freedom. Let the cry go forth from this (late) time and (hip) place: “Vivre la liberté equalité et fries avec gravy”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lyn Fox divides his time between the Canadian rainforest and the Mexican desert. The phrase “philosophical adventure” describes both his writing and his life as an avid world trekker with a master’s degree in philosophy. He welcomes all feedback.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, September 17th, 2008.