Like many boys left alone with a pocket knife as their only companion, Albert Demers had taken to kidding. He started with a straight razor, says regionalist historian Raymond Ouimet.
Would you leave one of those long, thin, super-sharp blades in the hands of a nine-year-old? At that time, at that age, many of them were already working with axes, in the middle of logging camps.
Children were considered little beasts of burden, to be worked on at will. They could barely read and write. When they found out. They could hardly verbalize what they were experiencing. Basically, for any education, these children were offered to learn catechism.
The idea of equalizing opportunities for everyone was not on the agenda of this colonized society. Even less for girls than for boys. Where are we now with this idea of a necessary equality of opportunity in Quebec? To look at all the time taken to only half-legislate on child labor, it is permissible to ask serious questions.
Son of this world of lumberjacks, Albert Demers kidded everything you want, in addition to drawing. Chips swirled around him. His dreams being prisoners of the pieces of wood he manipulated, he learned to free them, to free them at the point of his knife. Soon arose from the woody material figures of all kinds. Human beings, animals too, all trimmed in the woods of the country. In a world hewn with an axe, Albert Demers was told that he was no longer a brat, but a sculptor.
One day, it is said, a powerful luxury car stopped at his house. Two sinister-looking emissaries made him understand that it was in his best interest to follow them without protesting, to climb of his own free will. Once there, he was asked, for a generous fee, to decorate one of Al Capone’s residences. For the king of the mafia, Demers complied. For fear of being executed?
In Chicago, Al Capone’s headquarters was so well known that walking past it was part of the sightseeing program for anyone planning to visit the city. Yes, Al Capone was a king. He reigned over America between the wars, that of all miseries.
The objective of gangsterism, the supreme stage of capitalism, is to eliminate competition in order to maximize the growth of profits and see a monopoly economy triumph. These mobsters, always well dressed and pious, claim to obey God. A way in short to affirm that they believe that everything is permitted.
Al Capone’s power was so great that many legends still circulate about him. What part of the truth is there in the circumstantial account of this forced genuflection made before his power by a kid from the Outaouais?
One thing is certain, when King George VI visited Canada in 1939, Albert Demers was also there to honor him. He realizes, in one piece, an immense representation of the sovereign. It looks like a giant, somewhat naive fetish. This king of wood is over four meters tall. It is presented in the newspapers, in the general outpouring of joy that envelops this royal visit.
Father of the future Queen Elizabeth II, George VI was the first reigning sovereign to visit the Canadian colony. Some local political brats hope that this will be an opportunity to demonstrate that Canada, despite evidence to the contrary, has indeed obtained its independence. Since 1931, the Treaty of Westminster asserts a semblance of independence with great seriousness. No laughing matter. Thus, in a political pirouette without tail or head, the colonial political elite considers that this foreign king is simply that of Canada, avoiding recalling that he represents first and foremost the history of an imperial seizure.
On the occasion of the coronation of Charles III, the new specialists in the marketing of royalty say that it would be the first time that the nobles were not asked to bow down to this total power. Sign of a happy evolution, it seems, it is now all of society that is invited to do so!
We were told that the thousands of marching soldiers, the gilded carriages, the thoroughbred horses, the crowns, the embroidered clothes and the formal receptions held a new simplicity, in accordance with the supposed ecological aims of a monarch sensitive to the idea of ”sustainable development”. This is just as credible as hearing Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon talk about sobriety. Or to believe in the sincerity of the crocodile tears of a very provincial vassal in the face of the debacle of the third link.
Wooden monarch, Charles III reigns over fifteen countries. Unlike Jamaica and other former colonies, Canada has long refused to consider itself seriously as a republic. No question of reopening the Constitution, of cutting the cord, indicates Justin Trudeau. Queen Elizabeth II was also, according to him, one of his “favorite people in the world”. Under the Conservatives, nothing better. Everyone remembers that it was customary for them to replace works of art in government buildings with official portraits of Her Majesty.
These wooden idols, thanks to which power is heated, manage to slip from one era to another. They renew their identities in the present, relying on relays that take advantage of them. Those who master the language of wood, accomplices in maintaining such power, also know how to bow down to the whims of billionaires and businessmen who support them in return.
Our democracies everywhere are rotting. In a country with a colonial past, there are always, perhaps more than anywhere else, unfortunate kids to make themselves believe that their submission to the powers of the moment is a high art.