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7 July, 2001
Whyte Avenue riot

Many more interesting older people have told me that the best time to travel in western Europe is twenty to forty years ago. Today traveling in Europe has become "cool" and much more accessible, and the flow of visitors there is mainly American-style tourists who want a nice time in a postmodern Euroland theme park.

American hotels are everywhere and it is hard to learn the languages because many Europeans speak English to all visitors in order to better hawk their diluted, packaged, ivory-tower version of travel abroad. Now a lot of travelers do not want to experience another culture, or anything other than the pulp they have been blithely absorbing from American television and movies. They go to Europe so they can say they did, to go to the top of the Eiffel tower, to watch the running of the bulls from a balcony, and to be served by quaint moustached Germans with "real" accents.

This makes me sad because I missed the boat of authentic travel to Europe. The heyday is over, has been replaced by people selling me English-language tours of the castles of the Loire valley. Europeans are not interested in travelers anymore, and going there is not as fun or educational as it once was.

Today this is a standard paradigm: a little-known subcultural place becomes a gathering point for people seeking something challenging, stimulating, and outside the beer-commercial language of pop images. Then, gradually, the place becomes overcome by people who know nothing about subculture but who think they want to. Instead of educating people about subculture and providing something that is outside traditional frames of reference, the place becomes exactly the background from which these newcomers came, and fades into the nothingness of mass culture.

This happened to my favourite dance club, to raves, and now, sadly, to Whyte Avenue. Formerly a haven of lovely freaks from purple-haired punks to tie-dye wearing hippie buskers, Whyte is now a festering pit filled with nothing but dead-eyed baseball-cap-wearing yuppie suburban imports drunk on Canadian beer and corporate culture.

After the July 1st Idiot Day riot (which included hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, verbal and physical abuse of police, sexual assault, brandished guns, stabbings, and an attempted murder), people are searching for a "solution". For the more peaceful corporate-radio-listeners, for business owners, and for bar owners, there may be a solution, but it is irrelevant to me. For people who use to enjoy a unique and interesting experience in Old Strathcona, there is no solution, there is no cure. The patient is dead.

Police reinforcements, stricter liquor laws, or regulation of business (i.e. bar) development are not going to bring back the days of hanging out on Whyte Ave simply to meet interesting people, hear different music, or do nothing but soak up a common laid back, creative, open-minded frame of mind.

The riot on Whyte had nothing to do with a hot summer night, a statuatory holiday, alcohol consumption, bar closing times, number of bars per block, or inadequate police presence. The problem that caused the riot is far deeper, older, and diffuse than any of that. The problem is corporate cultural imperialism. It is the large mural on Whyte so obviously commissioned by a beer company. It is greedy capitalists invading the Ave with bland, standardized clubs, with pablum music, and with national franchises that are the same nationwide. It is the erasure of all localness from the area. This kind of mass-produced non-culture attracts, creates, and originates from the same mob mentality that caused the riot. It is sad, but true.

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