Behind The Curtain (14 April, 2023)
The soundtrack for Behind The Curtain this week, Something On by The Tragically Hip, was chosen because the second verse specifically references the 1998 Montreal Ice Storm!
Audio for Behind The Curtain will be available soon!
On this site, we don’t do breaking news, but nothing stops me from talking about news that’s over a week old. So here’s literally my cold take: last Wednesday, Montreal was hit with a mini-ice storm. Tree branches, and in some cases entire trees, fell all across town due to the weight of the ice, knocking out power for thousands for days, forcing the city to close parks and some streets, and bringing politicians like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier François Legault to town to stand alongside Mayor Valérie Plante and point at things.
If you think I’m going to go into a tirade about how politicians need to do more, you’d be wrong…for the most part. Plante and the city were dealing with the fallout and the cleanup before and after the presser, and as for Trudeau, unless he needs to send in the army or funding to help with the cleanup, the photo op is pretty much all he can do. Legault, though, continued his unbeaten streak of not being able to read the room. He thought this was an appropriate time to stress that burying all, or most, power lines underground would be too expensive. Sure, he was specifically asked about it, and sure, that has been Hydro-Québec’s policy for decades, but he remains the one who is in a position to help more but refuses to do so. Very on-brand. But I’m not here to rant, I’m here to reflect and tell stories.
If this was the 1998 Ice Storm, I’d have quite a few. Like being without power for over two weeks and visiting my friend who also had no power every night so we could keep each other company. Then there was the time we went to another friend’s house, who did have power, only to drive downtown to a powerless, but somehow open, Madhatter’s. I’m talking about the original Hatters’ on Metcalfe, the one with the dance floor that always felt like it would fall to the floor below. The one with wood steps and wood panels everywhere. This particular night, those steps and the tables had candles on them and the place was packed with mostly college and university students getting drunk on the even-cheaper-than-normal beer. The bar was trying to get rid of its stock before the unrefrigerated kegs went bad. Probably not the safest situation, but that night, it felt like a really fun and surreal respite from my ice storm reality.
This time around, my personal anecdotes are limited to missing out on going to Gigglefest last Friday due to a venue change, moving a haunted tour I had booked away from the now-closed mountain, and going to a different location for my family Easter dinner on Saturday. Not exactly the stuff of nightmares. Sure, I saw downed trees in my neighborhood and heard that some nearby stores were closed, but I live on a major street and my particular slice of St-Henri was spared major damage. I didn’t lose power. I was fortunate. Others, less so. NDG, the northeastern Plateau, Rosemont, and the West Island were the hardest-hit areas. People I know in those parts of town just started getting their power back on Sunday evening, just four days after the storm, and some had to wait even longer. The only surreal part of this experience for me was the disconnect between my holiday weekend life as normal and the devastation surrounding me on all sides. I was in the middle of a disaster zone the same way the hole is in the middle of a St-Viateur bagel.
I experienced the ice storm primarily on Twitter. You see, in addition to writing this weekly series and, you know, Founder stuff (Editor’s Note: No, we don’t know what that means), I’ve been running FTB’s Twitter account. We’re calling it Forget The Press. It’s Montreal news with just the facts. Sometimes this involves a tweet with a link to a longer news article from, say, CBC. Other times it’s a retweet or quote tweet with important info or compelling images (see above). Sometimes it’s live tweeting. We don’t have a blue checkmark because it’s meaningless now. We don’t have a gold, or “organization” checkmark because, well, we don’t have $1000 a month to spend on an experiment. CBC News does have one of those gold checkmarks, though it might be in jeopardy, if this reply is any indication:
Twitter decided to label NPR as “US State-affiliated media”, which they later changed to “Government funded media” (and yesterday, NPR left Twitter over this) and CBC reported on it. They tweeted the article and Twitter owner Elon Musk replied with a Thinking Face Emogi. What’s there to think about? CBC does receive funding from the Canadian Government, but its editorial policy is completely independent. An affiliation or funding label implies control, like there is in China, which just isn’t the case here. But, of course, Elon Musk doesn’t understand the concept of public media, or the town square. Wait, I’m supposed to keep it local, so I’ll rephrase: Elon Musk, who once dated and has kids with Montrealer Grimes, doesn’t understand the concept of public media, or the town square. Does that work, Andrew? (Editor’s Note: I’ll accept it this time.)
I wish I could ignore him and easily focus on what’s important, but as I scroll through Twitter, either to Tweet or see what I could be re-tweeting or covering, Elon is there. Reminding me of why he annoys me so much. From his getting rid of legacy checkmarks in favour of recognizing any rando who pays him 8 bucks a month, to his constant right-wing (er. “libertarian”) trolling, he’s there, in my feed, both of them (Forget the Press and my personal account). I don’t follow him, but I see him. I don’t follow Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook, either, but he doesn’t bombard me with his brain farts. Yes, I know I could mute him, but then he might mute us from others, unofficially, of course. I was always ambivalent about Musk, until he came out strongly against work-from-home for office workers. Then I knew he was the enemy, or at the very least, someone I hoped I would never see in power of anything I cared about.
And now here we are. Legitimacy is a bought commodity, and even those who can pay, like the CBC, risk being labeled as state propaganda. I even saw one dude commenting that CTV, the most corporate of Canadian corporate media, should be identified likewise. He clearly is on the elite level of ignorance that really pisses me off because I’m forced to defend Justin Trudeau, which I dislike doing. But he’s also the target market for Twitter’s new owner. My biggest fear is that Elon’s schemes work, at least financially, and other platforms follow suit. Of course, if I lived in a different part of town, my biggest concern last week probably would have been when will my damn power come back on! If I was checking Twitter for updates on my phone, I might have been annoyed at having to wade through Elon posts and seeing Doge instead of the bird logo for a few days, but I think my focus would probably have been on whether or not I had to throw out the food in my fridge.
It’s a privilege to be able to get annoyed by the regular stuff when so many of your neighbors are lacking basic things like electricity. That was my day-to-day last week. In1998, we were all in the same boat, except for a select few who lived on the same part of the grid as a hospital or had their own generator. During COVID, we were all in the same storm but in different boats: some yachts, some rowboats, and some pieces of plywood. For the mini-ice storm last week, we were all in the same boat and briefly in the same storm, but some parts of the boat submerged for five days while others didn’t. And the people in the submerged parts could spend their days in the above water parts. This analogy has run its course, as it looks like the damage from the storm will have by the time you read this.
Was there a real sense of community solidarity last week? If you read McSweeney’s List this week there was, and even more than there was in 98. But from the perspective of someone not personally affected who spoke with people who were, for the most part unaffected, and spent too much time on the internet, I didn’t really see it. I’ll strive to do better. Until then, follow Forget The Press (@forgetthebox) and me (@jasoncmclean) on Twitter and check back next Friday!
FTB Founder Jason C. McLean will return every Friday for another installment in his series, Behind The Curtain.
