The Duchy of Jerald

What Do I Think About Arts Commons?
I’m 65 now. A former artist run centre administrator/artist. An art educator. A semi-pro
musician. A recent stroke survivor. Lifelong member of the Liberal Party of Canada and past
member of it’s policy committee. A lifelong resident of Calgary’s inner city where I grew up
virtually orphaned on its streets, my so called (very conservative) family moving here after my
father was abandoned by Cominco for receiving his diagnosis of terminal black lung.
I once told Preston Manning that I owed his father, former Premier Manning, who preached the
gospel on radio every Sunday in our ‘home’ a debt of gratitude. His government’s mean spirited,
penny pinching welfare that I grew up on, made me a lifelong socialist and advocate of
guaranteed annual income and education, the silver bullets that solve poverty, crime and health
issues in global society.
I still feel rage at the hypocrisy of the self serving conservative Christian misusing the very
cool teachings of their gospel for their own selfish economic agenda. The same fear of ‘others
taking what is mine’ justification that they use to embrace nationalism as opposed to
globalization. Buy locally is a conservative agenda, disregarding that their Christ would see that
the guy in India needs to feed his family too. Fuck the pakis, fuck the Jews and fuck those faggot
cocksuckers too, in the language of my conservative ‘home’, the streets of Calgary.
I accept that these expressions have also been business as usual with the Catholic Church, for
centuries, as they plan ahead in terms of centuries. On an individual basis the using of altar boys
for the pleasure of the priests has the same lack of empathy as their global policy of using
women as breeding stock to make more straight Catholic men.
The current far right in today’s political climate, locally and internationally, claims a lot of
allegiance to the Catholic Church. The head of the Alberta conservative party that was
parachuted in from the federal party for example.
My former wife, upon graduation from law school in Calgary, promptly divorced her aspiring
artist liberal husband, joined the Catholic church, and joined the conservative party of Alberta, in