There is No Game like the Good Ol' Montreal Hockey Riot!
A city whose hockey passions create a constant hunger for battling peace and the status quo.
by Adam Enright
Hockey riots are one of the best things about Montreal . . . Montrealers love great restaurants, quality microbrewed beer, explosive styles of lovemaking, lively parties, huge events . . . and they go all-out when they have a hockey riot! These traffic-halting displays of spontaneous celebration and unabashed public drunkenness are proof an un-squelched, lively spirit still burns in the hearts and minds of Quebecers!
Riots are an amazing and rare thrill, like a social form of extreme skiing, where drunken hordes crush down a street set aflame with fervor and passion and sometimes aflame because things are on fire. You get an awesome sense of the power rippling through a throng of adrenalized people hopping up and down with derangement and fear on the realization that rule of law has been suspended temporarily. It makes your heart race! It is what all the great revolutions in history were made of, when the world's great injustices were finally halted, rolled back, flipped over, set aflame and brought to bear upon the unlucky heads of the moneyed perpetrators. Most importantly, the experience goes a long way to counter the fashionable modern concept that we, the people have been relegated to the roll of pleasure-seeking drones powerless against the evil mechanisms of the world. The reality is, we, the people are as mighty now as we ever have been in history, but choose to capitulate or whore off that power to gum the teething ring of globalization. We are, and always have been, only one liquor store full's worth of booze close to a revolution! The infectious popular climate of self-pity, skepticism and navel gazing shatters when a life-affirming riot begins to break out. And, Oh, the particular thrill of hitting a riot cop on the helmet and shield with snowball after snowball cannot be had in any other of life's experiences, purchased or free!
It really is too bad riots are so rare, if you have not had the experience, you really have to try one! Consider it riot tourism, an important sociological experience, a study plumbing the dreaming monkey’s nethermost urges! There is no excitement on earth like courageously standing with a frisky mob against a dark looming battalion of riot cops, especially for good causes like anti-globalization or the pure love of sport! The possible outcomes are virtually endless, the resolution to the evening a total mystery, and unless you and your fellow rioters are greatly outnumbered, a battalion of riot cops can be held at an even stale-mate against a drunken mob for quite some time. Stay on your toes, never turn your back to the phalanx of cops and stay to enjoy the awful pageant of chaos! You owe it to yourself and to society. Ten minutes of rioting equates ten years worth of any other therapy devised in terms of the rejuvenating effects for the mind, body and soul.
A Montrealer's lust for public disturbance seems in strong contrast to folks in other major cities. They never seem to have real riots elsewhere. Could it be because these cities are too highly concentrated with stuck-up yuppie scum bag types who wouldn't want to have their designer slacks torn and who have long been castrated by the materials and comforts of the market economy to be able to muster any sense of mass social outrage? The urge to riot always burns bright in the hearts of the underprivileged and working classes everywhere . . . and while poor folks live in these cities, they seem strangely reluctant to run amok for social change, go berserk for global warming, and run riotous for that beautiful game of hockey. Really, where in the western world was it did you hear the last time of five cop cars getting torched in one night of rioting? In Montreal of course!
Sure, not all of Montreal's riots involve hockey fans. Most notably of these are the riots held yearly on the night of St. Jean Baptiste when the great ceremonial bonfire is lit in the middle of summer on the tinder-dry forested crown of Mount Royal Park not far from the city's famous neon crucafix. Circle this day on your calendar and make your riot tourism plans! When the cops try to put out the giant bonfire of burning branches and beer cans right in the middle of a drunken mob of 10,000 happy people celebrating Fete Nationale, revelry turns to anger. When those 10,000 people see their sacred fire doused out, they become like an uncontrollable swarm of drunken hornets, marching out of the park to lay waste to Avenue du Parc and any police cars, public or private property in between, every damn year. And who can blame them? Of course the shit block drops when the cops go do dat, and for no good reason! Bully MUC cops ruining a great spontaneous and unofficial display of Quebecois patriotism, every year without fail.
The MUC cops, like cops everywhere, always incite the worst of the violence during a riot. If the cops would just come dressed in their regular uniforms and just sit back and let the looting and mayhem wind down naturally, there would be no problems. Instead, they go charging in with visored helmets, gas masks, shields and swinging batons . . . grouped into formations akin to a Napoleonic battlefield painting. It is no coincidence Montreal parties become riots ten or fifteen minutes after the riot cops arrive. Something about an infantry charge of five hundred leather-clad storm troopers into a 10,000-strong party brings out the riot in people.
Yes, it warms the hearts of all Montrealers to hockey riot! The comeraderie, the sheer romance of it, it brings joy and pride to restoke that spirit of rebelion. Some Montrealers save their TV shopping for riot days. The store owners along St. Catherenes get slick, brand-new store fronts for blocks in the wake of a successful riot . . . that is what their investment in riot insurance is for! The cops get a month's worth of frustration out and also get to dispense their month’s quota of pepper spray and tazer batteries all in one night. The street kids, anarchists and punks get to harmonize their politics and put their theories to practice with happy new hordes of converts in business suits and clerk uniforms.
There is no wonder. Montrealers are not at all squeamish to drink three forties of discount high-alcohol beer only to discover, with their spirits rejuvenated and excitement building, they have become overtaken and posessed about saving the world, gender politics, or the pure love of sport. They immediately take to the streets en masse, screaming, yelling, hugging, kissing, dancing, arguing, making friends, meeting lovers, finding similarities, creating new understandings, discovering shared outrages, kicking over stuff, pulling signage off of storefronts, smashing windshields, kicking down doors, burning dumpsters, utilizing chunks of asphalt as projectiles, toppling street lights, uprooting trees, vandalizing utilities, rolling and torching police cars and demolishing stuff you'd never imagine could be destroyed by means of human hands alone. A turning point is reached when the mob begins breaking into liquor stores, or, if they are open, literally emptying liquor stores by a surge of athletic, quick-moving shoplifters in five minutes . . . at which point the jubilant band of rioters are whole-heartedly ready to step into one grande final melee with pumped-up bully MUC cops. The scene dramatically unfolds like vivid recreations of the works of Francisco Goya. And good for them! Montrealer's shared passions create a constant hunger to battle and overcome the status quo. The consumer capitalist cotton candy haze has not snipped the balls of Montrealers yet!
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