OTTAWA – Sean Rice, dressed in his usual July 1st garb of Canada flag boxers, Canada flag face-paint and a full Canadian flag worn as a cape, has had to take special precautions to prevent onlookers from thinking he’s one of those Convoy fucks.
“I’ve been doing this since I was a little canuck,” said Rice, whose traditional Canada Day activities include blasting his all-CanCon playlist, slamming a two-four of Molson Canadian, and bellowing the “I Am Canadian” monologue in front of the annual fireworks display while other celebrants politely look way.
“But this year,” Rice said, “it’s all tainted, man.”
Rice describes having been floored when the convoy of science-denying, bigot-led adult toddlers adopted the Canada flag as their emblem. This not-at-all disturbing move, taken from the playbook of authoritarian regimes over the last hundred years, accompanied the convoy’s completely unironic accusation of the Canadian government as being fascist.
“So that’s when I came up with this,” Rice said, pointing to the asterisk carefully painted on his lower jaw, which, ideally, directs readers’ attention to a carefully crafted essay body-painted onto his bare chest, continuing down to his right ankle. “It details my belief in vaccines,” Rice said, “as well as in science, voting, and also the first three verses of Barrett’s Privateers, just cuz it rocks! Of course, I did it all in the mirror, so a few of the letters are backwards, but it gets my point across.”
Despite taking several hours and three full tubes of alcohol-based paint, Rice’s fix hasn’t been the success he’d hoped. “All those Convoy dickfucks keep honking and waving like I’m one of them. And everyone else crosses the street and gives me the stink-eye. When I run after them explaining I’m a real Canadian patriot, that just seems to make it worse.”
Still Rice expresses a sincere hope that by next year the Convoy will be a distant memory so we can all get back to celebrating the colonial takeover of a giant swath of Indigenous land, free from all this baggage.
