The eXile is back, reincarnated as The eXiled, after being shut down Russia. I missed its brand of schadenfreude:

There was some wonderful news last week: Steven Page, lovable lead singer of the Barenaked Ladies, was arrested for cocaine possession. If Barenaked Ladies, BNL to their fans, were a normal band, this would hardly be news at all. In fact, it might be good for ticket sales. But BNL is a Canadian band, the paid pipers of Anglo-Canada’s blandest, dullest, most aggressively mulched minds–so a simple drug bust is a disaster for them and their trusting, stupid fans.
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BNL had just come out with their first record for kids when Page, who looks like a computer-aged version of every other smartass you knew in the dorms, was caught by cops in Fayetteville, NY, a suburb of Syracuse, with two women and a few lines of coke. The smug idiot felt so untouchable he’d left the car running outside and the apartment door open. The cops walked in and he said, “It’s cocaine.” No need to waterboard this one, boys.

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The rest of the band was really bummed because BNL was about to make the big money, Disney money. They’d stopped pretending to be grown-up music and were making the rounds of Canada’s talk shows promoting their first record for kiddies. I’d actually seen them, on our new tv, playing the goofy but nice, safe band guys—a middleaged boy band, the sort of music a suburban wife’s husband might make with his buddies at a weekend bbq. Alas, Disney dumped them as soon as Page’s blow job hit the papers. The family market is not for the weak. Disney announced that BNL was being replaced on the Disney tour by They Might Be Giants, which might be the most loathsome band ever spawned, pure cynical Manhattan sneering, eminently suiatable for the little ones, nearly as evil and cruel as a five-year-old.

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Of course, some bright spark will no doubt manage the critical insight that this is “schadenfreude,” and therefore illegitimate. But why illegitimate? Perhaps, if you’re a Christian, you have to pretend to believe that a bus crash in Bangladesh is more tragic than your own impoverishment. But I’m not a Christian, most especially not the secular variety so common in Canada. And in the two years since we’ve immigrated to Canada—well, I’ll spare you the whiny details, but things have not gone well. And if there’s one thread uniting all our nastiest experiences here, it’s the taint of Anglo hypocrisy. Real, old-school, Dickensian hypocrisy. Barenaked ladies are the sound track of that hypocrisy, and I am shamelessly delighted to see them fall. May they all be raped in prison.