PERSONAL:
DRIVING AROUND WINNIPEG:
      It's a quick trip from the Slav Rebchuk bridge and the missing "People Before Profit" sign to Selkirk Avenue, the main drag of Canada's second poorest neighbourhood. That's Winnipeg for you. This burg can't even be the winner in a competition for bad.
     Anyways  it's an east turn down Selkirk to Main Street, and the first block shows where the 'People Before Profit' sign may have gone. Yup it's up in BIG LETTERS on the local headquarters of the goddamn Communist Party. Now the commies have been many things in their regretable history, and "thief" is one of the minor insults that could be thrown their way. But there it is in big red letters for all to see.This slogan has also been present for years (decades ?), but it only becomes apparent when the entering North End sign disappears.
     I don't know whether to congratulate or laugh at the commies plunking their head office down in thne middle of a decidedly non-proletarian neighbourhood. To say that it has been useless in signing up the lumpen proletariat would be understating the case.Most cemetaries do a far more lively business than these souls nostalgic for the days of Moscow gold. I do a lot of driving back and forth in this city, and the only sign of life that I have ever seen at Commie HQ is that once they cut the grass/weeds in their yard.Never in hundreds of passes have I seen a person enter, leave or merely hang around this particular mausoleum to an idea past its best before date.
      Not that I am at all displeased by this. As the subtitle of this series of vignettes says, "may they never rise from the dead". A resurgence of sympathy for organizations involved in the cover-up of the greatest atrocities in history would be the death certificate of any radical opposition.
     But then we sail past this monument to an unlamented past, and head out to "Pharmacy Row" on Main Street. Makes you wonder why a neighbourhood with the highest concentration of addicts in the city also has the highest concentration of drug stores.Heading north now, and we leave the dreaded North End behind.