Bonne St.Jean/ Hooray for Baptist Day!: A Quasi Rant.

One of the many, many benefits about living in Quebec is the existence of the St. Jean Baptiste holiday, aka today. Maybe I just like it so much because, as an ex-Ontarian, I tend to forget about it until it's actually upon me, and an unexpected holiday in the middle of the week feels like manna from heaven. Or maybe because it inevitably leads to some kind of franco vs. anglo dramz that entertains.

This year was the English band controversy. If you're not reading this in Quebec, you've probably missed the whole dumb ting, so here's the rundown. A couple of bands slated to play at one of the many SJB shows were English, which meant they sang in English (gasp!) and so were summarily disinvited. This, of course, led to a minor media kerfuffle which led to them being reinstated.

Now, I did see Lake of Stew when they opened for the Sadies and John Doe, and I liked them fine. For the first song. And then I realized that I was in for a whole set of bluegrass songs about NDG, which I really thought only had enough material for half a bottle of Jack Daniel's and maybe a quarter of a bluegrass song, but no matter. So I wasn't particularly invested in seeing their performance as a victory for anglo rights or anything.

But I did think this whole controversy was frigging stupid. Nations like Canada or Quebec are made up piecemeal of a bunch of different cultures and grafted onto the boneyard of colonialism. Trying to govern them so they're monolithic and legislate them so they're monolingual (or at best, bilingual), is a dangerous mix of ignorance and reactionary tribalism. And kind of a losing bid anyway.

So my solution for this bullshit next year is to have a St. Jean Baptiste's day concert where everyone sings in any language but French or English. Portuguese, Yiddish, Swahili, Arabic, Italian, Ukrainian, whatever. Go nuts. It's not going to save the world, or even accomplish much in the way of moving past identity politics. But hopefully it will scramble the brains of folks like the Association Culturel Louis-Hébert so much they won't be able to mount an effective response, and Quebec news can get back to getting worked up over road conditions.