And y'all wonder why folks don't vote...
May. 3rd, 2008 01:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianI had to quote my favourite "not as much the dumb muscle as he thinks" lad, Charles Gunn, for today.
Boris freakin' Johnson, Mayor of London. Well, fuck.
Still, now that people have pretty well guilted me into voting regularly, I can say with all due honesty, "Don't blame me; I voted for Livingstone". Yeah, well, I didn't much like him as a choice either, but frankly, I didn't like any of them and voted Ken on the basis that he was the one who got us into this Olympics debacle that is coming up in four years, and he should carry the can on the "getting us out of it without bankrupting the city" front.
I'll admit it; I'm cynical to the point of morose depressive frenzy about the Olympics. Want to know why? I'm from Montreal, that's why. Montreal hosted the 1976 Olympics. This shouldn't have had any kind of impact on my life in any way because I was born six months after the fact. However, it did. Why? Because of the Olympic Stadium.
The Stadium went overbudget from the very beginning, eventually costing the city $770 million. That's in '76, when the Canadian dollar wasn't completely in the toilet. However, over the thirty years before it was finally paid for (and really get a taste of it, roll that bad boy around on your tongue for awhile; thirty years it took to pay for that monstrosity), it ended up costing $1.4 billion in repair work. Because even going overbudget as it did, it was poorly constructed, wasn't finished until the mid-80s anyway (despite the games being ten years beforehand) and then ... well, then no one could think of anything to do with the damn thing. They tried it as an 'American' football and baseball stadium, until the Alouettes tanked in 94 and the Expos got bought out and shipped to Washington DC two or three years later. So for the last ten years, this thing's been sitting there, doing nothing but costing money and slowly, gracelessly falling apart.
They finally paid it off in 2006. I repeat: thirty years after the games. Thirty years this sat and sucked up tax money. Is there any wonder they called it The Big Owe for all those years? And that's just the Stadium. I think the swimming pool fared better; I know I had day camp field trips there in the eighties. But then again, it wasn't in the news in the same way Stadium was. Still, point is that The Big Owe wasn't the only expense that was never going to pay off.
So yeah. This city can barely keep public transport running properly on a day-to-day basis, and now they're going to cram it full of Olympics spectators and miscellaneous personages. And then there's the building work involved. I can only hope we learned our lesson on white elephant architecture from the freakin' Millennium Dome, which sucked the Lottery Commission dry until O2 finally bought the fucker. But as it stands, Livingstone must have had a plan when he placed the bid, and I for one would like to have seen him have to implement it and succeed or fail on its merits. But now he's gone and we've got this Boris thing. I can really only hope that, despite my personal complete lack of confidence in him, Mr Johnson can get things done.
And that, you see, is why I have had to be guilt-tripped into voting. Because people tell me, "You can't complain if things don't go your way if you didn't vote", which is a desperate fallacy because I can complain any old time I like. Difference is, instead of saying, "I didn't like any of the choices; none of them deserved my support, so none of them got it," I have to say, "I didn't like any of the choices; and not only did I have to vote for the lesser of way too many evils, the lesser of way too many evils didn't win anyway, so what the hell did I bother going to the polls for?" I know in theory why, but in practice, it's really disheartening.
...Well, shit. At least I don't live in the US. I'd hate to be trying to make sense of the Democratic Party primaries...
Anyway, to sum up, I'd like to quote another beloved individual, on the subject of voting, because it expresses my views right now quite nicely.
"You want to know about voting. I’m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you’re locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain’t allowed out until you all vote on what you’re going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch ‘Republican Party Reservation’ [a TV soap]. They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand-new sexual organs that you did not know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That’s voting. You’re welcome."
-- Spider Jerusalem
Boris freakin' Johnson, Mayor of London. Well, fuck.
Still, now that people have pretty well guilted me into voting regularly, I can say with all due honesty, "Don't blame me; I voted for Livingstone". Yeah, well, I didn't much like him as a choice either, but frankly, I didn't like any of them and voted Ken on the basis that he was the one who got us into this Olympics debacle that is coming up in four years, and he should carry the can on the "getting us out of it without bankrupting the city" front.
I'll admit it; I'm cynical to the point of morose depressive frenzy about the Olympics. Want to know why? I'm from Montreal, that's why. Montreal hosted the 1976 Olympics. This shouldn't have had any kind of impact on my life in any way because I was born six months after the fact. However, it did. Why? Because of the Olympic Stadium.
The Stadium went overbudget from the very beginning, eventually costing the city $770 million. That's in '76, when the Canadian dollar wasn't completely in the toilet. However, over the thirty years before it was finally paid for (and really get a taste of it, roll that bad boy around on your tongue for awhile; thirty years it took to pay for that monstrosity), it ended up costing $1.4 billion in repair work. Because even going overbudget as it did, it was poorly constructed, wasn't finished until the mid-80s anyway (despite the games being ten years beforehand) and then ... well, then no one could think of anything to do with the damn thing. They tried it as an 'American' football and baseball stadium, until the Alouettes tanked in 94 and the Expos got bought out and shipped to Washington DC two or three years later. So for the last ten years, this thing's been sitting there, doing nothing but costing money and slowly, gracelessly falling apart.
They finally paid it off in 2006. I repeat: thirty years after the games. Thirty years this sat and sucked up tax money. Is there any wonder they called it The Big Owe for all those years? And that's just the Stadium. I think the swimming pool fared better; I know I had day camp field trips there in the eighties. But then again, it wasn't in the news in the same way Stadium was. Still, point is that The Big Owe wasn't the only expense that was never going to pay off.
So yeah. This city can barely keep public transport running properly on a day-to-day basis, and now they're going to cram it full of Olympics spectators and miscellaneous personages. And then there's the building work involved. I can only hope we learned our lesson on white elephant architecture from the freakin' Millennium Dome, which sucked the Lottery Commission dry until O2 finally bought the fucker. But as it stands, Livingstone must have had a plan when he placed the bid, and I for one would like to have seen him have to implement it and succeed or fail on its merits. But now he's gone and we've got this Boris thing. I can really only hope that, despite my personal complete lack of confidence in him, Mr Johnson can get things done.
And that, you see, is why I have had to be guilt-tripped into voting. Because people tell me, "You can't complain if things don't go your way if you didn't vote", which is a desperate fallacy because I can complain any old time I like. Difference is, instead of saying, "I didn't like any of the choices; none of them deserved my support, so none of them got it," I have to say, "I didn't like any of the choices; and not only did I have to vote for the lesser of way too many evils, the lesser of way too many evils didn't win anyway, so what the hell did I bother going to the polls for?" I know in theory why, but in practice, it's really disheartening.
...Well, shit. At least I don't live in the US. I'd hate to be trying to make sense of the Democratic Party primaries...
Anyway, to sum up, I'd like to quote another beloved individual, on the subject of voting, because it expresses my views right now quite nicely.
"You want to know about voting. I’m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you’re locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain’t allowed out until you all vote on what you’re going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch ‘Republican Party Reservation’ [a TV soap]. They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand-new sexual organs that you did not know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That’s voting. You’re welcome."
-- Spider Jerusalem