The Very Figure Of The Entitlement Class

Her face says Mackenzie, but her toque says Guatemala. She’s got that angular, ill-put-together Scots look. The hat looks itchy. It is itchy. It was made by peasants.

At home she plays Radio One constantly, the volume set between “murmur” and “burble”. She has an under-sink compost bin. You’d think this would stink up a kitchen. It does.Oh man, I know this woman so well. Don’t you?

Behind every government counter you find her. She is an advocate or mediator. Shop steward or liasion officer. An intake, or outreach, worker. Wears that Cowichan sweater. Bitterly opposes the government: your modern civil servant. She works on issues around. A lifelong learner.

Name of Ariadne or Arwen, when it’s not Heather or Jen. She has a bookshelf full of gurus, unless she is Unitarian, in which case she has a bookshelf full of gurus. Sometimes she’s a he: Nadir, or Tyler. On your strata council anyway. Allergic to cigarette smoke.

She/ he studies sociology. Is concerned about pesticides, high-voltage overhead lines, and cellular radiation. She is not superstitious at all, though, nor secular: spiritual but not religious: buys her woven-reed yoga mats at the Unitarian bake sale, because Lululemon is corporate.

You pay her to ensure beer gets poured, bees kept, food cooked, messages delivered and debts collected, in socially beneficial ways. You’ve bought all those Haida masks on her walls. Enjoy.

What are you doing? Tsk, tsk. She doubts it should be allowed. She hates open containers, spitting, patriotism, hockey, rude music. If she has a child or two, she denies it sugar, and sometimes tells the poor babe it has two mothers, or two fathers. Which fiction cannot be made true by any amount of federal benefits.

She, aka he, is the very figure of the Entitlement Class, Canadian version: the rise of which cohort neither Marx nor Engels foresaw. And when you see her at the Farmer’s Market paying a 50% markup on slightly-rotten tomatoes, you may see yet another way in which collectivism is wrong.

Contributed by Lyle Neff, a Canadian poet and journalist in Vancouver, British Columbia notorious for his hotheaded nationalism and elaborate use of profanity.