How did Simon-Pierre Beaudet’s morbid fascination with the third link come about? “Morbid, the word is well chosen”, admits laughing the author of THEY EAT IN THEIR TANKS – chronicles of the third link and the end of the world, an essay that he would like to have the luxury of qualifying as science fiction, but which does describe our dystopian present.
“It is no longer important, now, what will happen with the third link. This nonsense may well see the light of day, even if it seems unlikely. Regardless, the best is behind us. The third link was there to reveal the characteristics of Quebec City, its lines of fracture, its buried passions ”, writes the one who signed in 2016 Fuck the world and which remains, in this new book, the same ruthless descriptor (and decryptor) of an era of asphalt and drive-thru, a little as if Roland Barthes had gone to visit a power center while listening to Vulgaires Machins.
“The third link was the rattle with which we entertained ourselves to forget how rotten life has become in turbo-capitalism,” summarizes the most comical Quebec essayist since Pierre Falardeau. Funny, at least, as long as the tragedy of our car addiction gives you a laugh.
It was during the 2017 municipal election campaign that Simon-Pierre Beaudet discovered what would become his new object of fascination. Jean-François Gosselin’s Quebec 21 party had made the creation of a motorway link between the two shores its main battleground, if we exclude its opposition to the SRB project (rapid bus service), which was to link Lévis and Quebec.
“It was exemplary, the way opinion radios have of interfering in the political world,” explains the writer and professor of literature over the phone, recalling that the founder of Quebec 21, Frédérick Têtu, benefited from a regular forum on CHOI Radio X. “The Québec 21 program was based on the promotional campaigns of these radios. This idea of being against the SRB and for the third link, it was the radio program before. “
If he has long been one of those who used the pretext that it is enough, if these stations indispose us, not to tune in to them, Simon-Pierre Beaudet now thinks that such a strategy would consist of a dangerous abdication. “I believed for a long time that they were given an inordinate importance, he recalls. They themselves regularly say that they are given inordinate importance. But of the public opinion radio which runs from six to six o’clock, even if it is often harmless and redundant what is said there, in the long term, it has a decisive influence on the vision of the world which spreads throughout the city. And that is embodied in a particularly marked way when there are polarizing social movements. In my opinion, they had a decisive influence in the abandonment of the SRB project or in the construction of an amphitheater for a hockey team that does not exist. “
A revealing saga
With these “writings of circumstances”, some of which have already appeared online or between the pages of the journal The useful idiot, Simon-Pierre Beaudet continues his humble, but stubborn, work of resistance in the face of the inexorable proliferation of neighborhoods of houses-all-alike and other parking lots as large as football stadiums. Drawing from chronicle to chronicle the despairing portrait of a West which continues to annihilate the world, but which cannot consider annihilating the dogma of the job-Costco-dodo (a phrase he borrows from Samuel Archibald).
” [J]I am a hypersensitive I am / reached in the depths of my being / in my nerves // by ugliness ”, he announces in the falsely lyrical prologue of THEY EAT IN THEIR TANKS, a confession that many receive as an attack ad hominem, while it nevertheless appears obvious that, like all cynics, Simon-Pierre Beaudet is only a humanist who collects disappointments.
“There is an interesting relationship in this between the category and the specimen,” he observes in an interview. People identify a lot with their lifestyle, which makes it difficult to tackle categories like Costco, the third link, or automotive culture. It may be inevitable that people will make it personal, but that won’t stop me from making a critique of our way of life. Especially since what I discovered in my city, it exists everywhere else. It seems rather characteristic to me that when you want to take a vacation, you want to run away from this. I’ve never heard of anyone going to take their vacation to Charlesbourg or Costco. “
At this stage, the third link, this “soap opera passionately followed by the inhabitants of the city”, would therefore have essentially the value of a narrative, having no other utility than that of regularly oiling the media and political machine or, if you prefer, do the talking. “As such, writes Beaudet, the saga of the third link contains all the aspects of the contemporary Western human condition: it speaks of our malaise in our life and our territory, of our unhealthy relationship to work and consumption, of the crisis of the media eaten away by the reign of public opinion and clickbait, of the complete decay of the political field, mainly occupied by populists whose main political program consists in keeping the people in their doldrums (work, consumption, automobile), with as background the ecological and climatic crisis which frightens us and whose the third link is the most spectacular mark of denial. “
But although it is obviously easy to make fun of this “fantastic buffoonery”, the continued commitment of the Legault government to the project would testify precisely to the kind of society that it does not want to let disappear in our collective rearview mirror, warns Simon- Pierre Beaudet. “I don’t have the impression that the government intends to complete the project, I don’t know when it will abandon it, but keeping the project alive is a way of saying that ‘they have not given up on the worldview that is summoned by the third link. It is the CAQ’s vision of the world that passes through the third link. “