A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Already the ruling party had implemented austerity measures the only survivors of which would be the upper classes. Secondary school curriculum was being demodernized, teachers and nurses were being fired, health care was being privatized, amenities and resources were being deregulated, climate change was being accelerated. From the outside, from a leftist standpoint, it appeared as if it were a marker of political action to endorse the cheapening of one’s quality of life, that it was normal and a generational birthright to vote on the side of structurally induced hardship. Perhaps some wanted to conjure a scapegoat, something (a government) and someone (a politician) to blame when one’s individual or familial struggles to live a good life fell short, acting on a suspicion that the game was rigged against them, though a culture of anti-intellectualism would prevent them from diagnosing why. A punishing government was a burden they could choose, one that would keep them from installing too much optimism in what a future could reap. From year to year things changed very little, one’s threats to existence remained the same, and so liveliness coalesced as the negation of change, of difference. A common enemy, in other words, is another name for social cohesion.