Parody is obsolete.

Back in the pre-Youtube days – a phrase that sounds so quaint and old-fashioned you’d might as well be starting a sentence with “so I got my Van Halen 8-track stuck in my Geo Metro” – funny videos were hard to come by on the web. You’d have to use Yahoo, or Lycos, or Altavista or whatever to find some guy’s animated-gif-strewn, NSYNC-midi-blaring Geocities homepage where you could devote 20 minutes of intense strain on your 56k connection to download a 30-second RealPlayer video of whatever crap we found funny back then. (Oh yeah, and it’d buffer all the fucking time, don’t you kids remember buffering?) Back in those archaic days, after endless nights of commando-crawling through the trenches of the internet, I remember finding a video so amazing that to this day, it holds a special place in my heart. There was no Youtube, no Twitter, no Facebook, not a single luxury, so anything amazing that you found on the internet was a source of personal pride.

I suppose there’s no better way to discuss this video than to just tell you exactly what it is. It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in a series of Japanese commercials for a questionable-looking vitamin drink. That’s right, we see the Governor of California dressed as a nerd playing Mahjong  before turning into a bedazzled, cackling superhero, shouting in Austrian-tinged Japanese like an escape lunatic, shilling for what I can only assume is crack cocaine in a can. I found this video all on my own in the 90s, probably saving it off an Angelfire site to watch in Windows Media Player, and it brought me so much joy.

Of course, to find the video these days all I had to do was type it into goddamn Youtube, and a hundred versions popped up with zero load time.

What I’m trying to say by all of this non-sequitur nonsense is that it’s not unprecedented for video to appear of a prominent politician running off to Asia to shill for a chemical company.

Tony Clement, your Minister of Industry, has shown up in a tacky promotional video throwing around his influence as a government official to whore himself out for a chemical company in his riding – it’s okay, they’re a green chemical company, so they can’t be evil! – in an infomercial aired in China. The opposition is not amused. We kind of are.

Here’s the video!

Ahaha this is the shittiest video. It’s narrated by Wilford Brimley with a mouthful of peanut butter and consists mostly of shots ripped from Canadian Heritage Minutes, and actually has the audacity to use the song from “Chariots of Fire” in its first non-ironic context since it was used in the actual movie “Chariots of Fire”. And “What a Wonderful World”, what the fuck are you serious, couldn’t this podunk grease-barrel company get some generic production music that doesn’t blatantly break music copyright laws without permission?

If Tony Clement can learn anything from Arnold Schwarzenegger in terms of selling toxins to Asians, it would be to turn into a sparkly space-magician and drown his rivals in noodles while cackling ominously. That might actually bring the level of decorum for the next Question Period up a notch, considering Tony’s already been compared to the ShamWow Guy in the hallowed halls of our nation’s parliament. NDPer Pat Martin compared Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, to – well, let me just quote:

“All that is missing is the headset and he could be the ShamWow guy. Vince, the Slap Chop guy, has some new competition.”

Well, the SlapChop guy and the ShamWow guy, that’s actually the same guy. He also beat the shit out of a transsexual hooker. Vince, I mean. Not Tony Clement. Or at least, not that we know of in Tony’s case.

Tony Clement, you’re now in the MapleRag Infomercial Hall of Fame. Now, just try to peddle your influence to get your colleagues in Parliament to star in some infomercials of their own. Baird would be great to be that angry, sweaty “before” guy that starts every exercise infomercial, the one in black-and-white who’s struggling terribly to perform basic human functions as the voiceover booms “are you tired of back-breaking sit-ups?”

[Story: CBC, if you trust those commies.]

This is a Serious Politics hat. SHE'S SERIOUS ABOUT POLITICS, LIKE US.

WELCOME BACK, POLITICS! We missed you! Our Olympic break was fun, though, we got to post all sorts of silly things as the OFFICIAL CANADIAN™ POLITICS BLOG OF THE VANCOUVER™ 2010™ OLYMPICS™, writing about sexy curlers and acid flashbacks and Nickelback, but now we have to put our Serious Hat back on to make Serious Posts about the adult matter of Politics, which apparently just returned to Ottawa!

Also, Roll Up The Rim started again, in terms of national breaking news we have to report. So go forth and suck back a cup of warm, cream-diluted, African-inventin’ burnt patriotism and half-heartedly slip the slimy lid up until you see “RÉESSAYEZ S.V.P.” before continuing with one smooth motion into the trashbin toss.

Hey, remember Canadian Against Proroguing Parliament? Of course you do, you’re probably a damn member of the thing. If you’re still too old to be using Facebook (an age barrier which creeps upward by the day – it currently sits around 38), then you’ve at least heard about this group, since it’s been filling column spaces, creating blog buzz and was probably even mentioned on CTV Newsnet, to the delight of all 17 people who watch that channel. (Edit: I actually checked Wikipedia, and apparently the channel’s now called CTV News Network, and has been called that for like half a year – what the Lisa LaFuck?) This Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group was a big deal, see, because it was supposed to usher in some new era of grassroots political involvement across the country. Political involvement, social media, today’s youth, grassroots, new media, web 2.0, et-fucking-cetera.

These people met on Facebook, and then met up in the real world without supervision? Did they learn nothing about internet safety from Bert & Gert?

Back in February the Facebook group actually did stage something of a coup, when their 200,000+ members managed to actually translate into something happening in the real world! 15,000-odd people showed up for rallies/parades across the country to protest the proroguing. As we all know by now, Stephen Harper listened, and decided not to prorogue parliament Yeah, not much happened, but from the sounds of the media coverage, this was just the tip of the iceberg as this Facebook group was supposedly brewing a political revolution across the country – like the American Tea Baggers, except without the fat, racist, pill-addled Walmart-greeter wingnuts in Confederate flag-Snuggies.

All this media coverage got to the heads of the organizers of the Facebook group. You see, people start shitty Facebook groups all the time – I just performed a quick search, and there are no less than 1,600 Facebook groups with the sole purpose of calling Justin Bieber gay – but when your group takes off virally, you can get an inflated sense of self-worth. When 225,000 people join your group, you get the idea that this wasn’t just thousands of people mindlessly clicking “Accept” when their uncle sent them an invite – this is 225,000 followers of my movement! I’m a leader of a grassroots revolution of a quarter-million Canadians!

Of course, you’re not. You’re a guy who made a Facebook group. The Facebook fan page “Running downstairs on Christmas morning and realizing you’re Jewish” has over 200,000 fans, too. “Back in my day vampires sucked blood, not cocks” has in the ballpark of 200,000 fans. “The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants” boasts over 600,000, while “Realizing you borrowed the pen you’re sticking in your mouth” dwarfs the CAPP group with over 800,000 fans. “Flipping the pillow over to get to the cold side” has a whopping 3.5 million fans. That doesn’t make any of these into mobilized, sweeping political movements. It makes them Facebook groups. What the media hasn’t realized is that having 225,000 people in a Facebook group doesn’t mean that 225,000 active members are working towards any kind of end goal, just like there isn’t a massive 3.5-million-strong political party based on the principles of pillow-flipping sweeping the world. It just means that a bunch of people vaguely felt something, so they clicked “Accept” when they got a group invite, and then probably never checked the group page but hoped that their membership would make some sort of intangible difference in the world.

Long story short – as the Globe&Fail reports, the CAPP Facebook group, which has apparently begun taking itself way too seriously and has somehow raised ten-grand (yes, in real dollars, we’ve left the realm of Facebook make-believe) is trying to turn itself into some sort of legitimate political movement.

HOLD ON, it gets funnier I promise.

They’ve kept their CAPP acronym by changing their name from Canadian Against Proroguing Parliament to the more stilted-sounding Canadians Advocating Political Participation. (A completely unrelated aside: my alma mater did that too! It was called Waterloo Lutheran University, and they were all, hey, our school’s not Lutheran anymore, but we wanna keep the WLU initials, so, uhhh… thinkin’…. how bout… fucking GOT IT. Wilfrid, Laurier, University. Nailed it. True story, I swear!) Anyways they’ve put together a website at canadaparticipates.ca. Honestly, look at the site, and think about how the Globe wrote a whole article about this thing, and about how it started as a Facebook group, and there’s ten-thousand dollars floating around somewhere to pay for this stuff. Ok, that’s a little funny already, but in a sad-funny way, like watching a fat figure skater falling.

The first event ever put together by the new CAPP? Some comical silliness they called the Not So Secret Democracy Mission. Alright, I’m just gonna post their mission statement, it’s too funny on its own. Read this in the voice of a little kid who’s dressed up in a suit and making his voice all low to sound super-duper-serious:

“On January 23, 2010, we showed up in tens of thousands in over 60 communities in Canada.

This time, we’ll show up with even more.

On March 2, 2010, the last day of prorogation, Mr. Harper will be under the impression that we’ve all forgotten about his evildoing. Care to show him that not only do we still remember…that not only are we still ANGRY…but that WE WILL NEVER FORGET!

[...] THIS IS A MISSION THAT WILL GO DOWN IN CANADIAN HISTORY.”

They helpfully also mention that they “do NOT condone violence”. Oh, thank God! I thought for a second your top-secret campaign to single-handedly change the course of Canadian democracy was going to involve just kneecappin’ suckers with crowbars at Tim Hortons. Turns out, it just involves them making a budget Youtube video, and you watching that Youtube video, and, if you wouldn’t mind, making a video response so the original video gets more popular, pretty please? Seriously. This was their event that they thought would go down in Canadian history.

Alright, fuck, here’s the dumb video in question, shot with some Ryerson film studies major’s Handicam, set to the dulcet tones of “Default Windows Movie Maker Sound Files > Emotional Piano.mp3″, which features people saying stuff for a minute while somehow also saying nothing:

So what was the point of the top-secret-mission if this whole “event” was just the launch of a bland Youtube video with a cast of nameless, multiethnic people saying bumper-sticker slogans across Toronto? Back to the mission description:

On that day, we encourage EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO SEES IT TO POST A VIDEO RESPONSE. In that fashion we hope that we can “hijack” YouTube and become the most discussed/watched video for that day. You can even post video responses TO video responses!

So when’s that day coming up? It was Tuesday. As in, yesterday. How’d that Youtube hijacking go for them? Did they bring the Internet to a crawl with their medium-shattering anarchist takeover of Youtube?

The Facebook group advertising the event had over 700 people saying they’d attend. When the big day came, they got four video responses.

Four.

To summarize: One of many Facebook groups pop up to protest proroguing parliament. One of them gets more popular than the others. People in the media, specifically dumb people, somehow interpret this as a call-to-arms of a political revolution. The Globe writes about how they’re the next generation of political involvement. The organizers, believing all the hype, become a foundation fighting against political apathy, and on their big launch date, with the backing of media attention, they attempt to hijack Youtube by flooding the system with video responses. They get four.

MapleRag is official launching the campaign to fight the growing trend of apathy towards groups that fight apathy.

[Globe article]

[CAPP website]

[CAPP's Fail-video]