Down with hipsters

[Re. “America vs. Mirror,” Letters, Sept. 18] While I don’t want to get involved in the letter debate about Americans, I found the response from a Canadian hipster in the Plateau to be pretty fucking annoying. Your unabashed celebration of hipsterism is sickening.

Newsflash: You’re not creative. You’re hardly left-leaning (you inhabit and gentrified what is now probably the most bourgeois area of Montreal, dumbass). You’re walking fucking proof of Gramsci’s moving equilibrium. Your shameless appropriation of past countercultures renders them useless—the establishment loves you. They make money off of you.

No one should seriously refer to you privileged little trust fund bitches as “commies”—your relentless apathy is the furthest thing from radical politics. McGill has low tuition fees? The Plateau is a cheap area to live in? Tell that to students who actually have to pay for their own tuition, you Liberal pawn scumbag. There are parts of Montreal with actual “leftist” communities, but I’m afraid to name them here for fear of groups of self-indulgent assholes taking over.

And P.S., your glasses (and probably the face they rest upon) are freaking ugly.

>>Arthur-Anonymous

Up with hipsters

Boy, you sure sound like an angry individual. What did “hipsters” ever do to you? Were you once cockblocked by a dude in tight jeans? I detect a strong conservative, homophobic vibe.  Get with the program—if a girl was wearing a tight shirt, you would dig it I bet. Double standards are so 1900s. Gender roles are diffusing.

And don’t worry, fashion happens—thick-rimmed glasses will be gone the way of Hammer pants before you know it. Baba ghanoush is tasty, and yoga is good for you (globalization, silly). They clearly don’t float your boat, but that’s OK, no one cares.

Nobody is better than anybody (duh) but if you think hipsters/hippies/insert-generalization are pretentious, maybe you are a little insecure, or maybe you should read that letter you wrote closely and wonder if you are projecting your own attitude. Maybe you shouldn’t waste your precious energy knocking other people’s harmless lifestyles—oh no... recycling, gasp! And anyway, “they” are not as homogeneous as you think they are, just like everyone else. Embrace the evolution, my friend! Peace.

>> Margarita

Jack over Johnson

[Re: “Sign, sign, everywhere a sign,” Punkusraucus Rex, Sept. 18] I really wasn’t amused with Johnson Cummins’s column this week, as he was so quick to be offended by Jack Layton’s campaign posters.  He doesn’t quite understand why artists get fined for postering and why it’s okay for Jack, as if it’s his fault. 

Well, I’ll have you know that Jack isn’t the only party running with campaign posters around. More importantly, how could he have the nerve to put the blame on Jack when he’s fighting so hard to counter the Conservatives’ plan to cut $45 million in arts funding?  In fact, Jack even came to Montreal to participate in the big music concert rally at Club Soda to protest the cuts last Tuesday. 

If Cummins isn’t happy with artists being able to put up posters, then I’m sure he probably wouldn’t be happy if the artists didn’t go as far as the printing shop, or as far as booking a show, or as far as the recording studio. As far as I’m concerned, each poster of Jack Layton stands for all the thousands of other artists’ posters!

>>Vanessa Delsooz

Understanding He, She or It

[Re: “Epicurus, Hume, Dirlik,” Letters, Sept. 18] The following comments from John Dirlik don’t reflect religious fanaticism, but I do think they show a touch of arrogance: “if God gave man free will, then he cannot abdicate responsibility for the outcome, be it good or evil... That believers actually expect rational people to buy such perverted thinking defies logic.”

Nothing’s wrong with having respect for our concepts of rationality and logic. That’s because we’re human. But is God human if He transcends us? Are our concepts relevant? In other words, by what competence can a creature presume to judge a creator?

Is Dirlik right in having such reasonable expectations of God? Well, God didn’t make much sense to Job in the Old Testament, either. Yet it was precisely in Job’s topsy-turvy fate that we see the Deity acting, strangely enough, both stern and generous, “both omnipotent and compassionate.”

The old question remains: if there is a Deity, is it possible that He or She or It might exist beyond our convenient understanding? Yet when it comes to the contemplation of a higher spiritual power, are we motivated merely by our faculty for reason? Perhaps Balfour was right when he said, “A religion that is small enough for our understanding would not be large enough for our needs.”

>>L. S. Cattarini

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