This past year a local webzine publisher with direct ties to Christy Clark’s chief fundraiser chided me for daring to compare Trump to Her Majesty in the course of a Facebook thread. And although I was merely quoting that hard left publication The Financial Post http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/terence-corcoran-christy-clark-channels-trump-with-her-misleading-misguided-anti-foreigner-housing-tax, that awesome online nose tweak got me to thinking whether it really was fair to mention Clark and Trump in the same sentence. Well yes. Yes it is. At least in terms of duplicity, evasion, attitudes towards ethics in government, democracy and…real estate. Other than that, thankfully, not so much.
But I want you to take in the image here. This was the decorative hoarding outside the construction site of Trump Tower on Georgia Street in Vancouver in 2015. I initially thought it might be an installation by a Vancouver photo conceptualist prankster like Rodney Graham. It was funny…at first. Then I made the Trump connection and the gaudy tableaux before me suddenly turned dark, sickening. It represents Orange Mussolini’s entire value system plunked down in our little corner of rain forest: obscenely rich arrogant white people living the highlife in a fresh, natural environment hitherto unvanquished by the forces of the kind of unfettered turbo capitalism so favoured by the Short Fingered Vulgarian. It should cause locals to upchuck.
If you’ll look around town at the luxury townhomes and condos being built in place of the rows of 1950s bungalows along Oak Street and elsewhere you’ll see some fairly nice developments that, in theory, add much needed density to the city’s housing stock. But the problem is that it’s all “high end”, “luxury”, “exclusive”, “boutique”. And it’s everywhere…and out of reach of the majority. It is all part of a conscious campaign of division. The ad campaigns, the graphics and the language being used to promote these developments are only a shade under the image above. And the BC Liberals, more than anybody, have been allowing the city’s homes and real estate to be devoured by global capital, speculators, the 1% without any concern. In fact, until they realized the election was coming up, they openly sneered at those who dared complain. At the end of the day, this image very much does reflect the values and aspirations of many among us. Sad.