Protest? Occupation? As the diesel fumes dissipate in Ottawa, words fail us

This column is an opinion by Edward Riche, a St. John's writer. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

What went on in Ottawa? Not the causes, not "the manifestation of several mass anxieties" or "pushback against government overreach" or "social media disinformation poisoning" but what are the words to describe the events in the nation's capital? It was ostensibly a "protest" but soon became an "occupation" and finally — a stretch — an "insurrection."

Perhaps it was none of these things. Photographic evidence suggests to me it might have been a simple hooligan hootenanny: piglets on spits, yahoos in hot tubs, ceaseless noise blocking out thoughts, getting shitfaced shirtless in the snow, taking a dump under the rainbow flag flying in the yard of some supposed Laurentian elites.

Reading some of the placards being waved around there is a case to be made the whole thing was a psychotic episode. Some of the players were probably "crazy" … but you aren't allowed to call anyone "crazy" anymore. Let's instead say they were "unhinged."

We can't ask the self-appointed leaders of the Truckists themselves because, looking at the incoherent memoranda of understanding they have issued, their delusional lists of demands it appears they might be simply too stupid to know what it was they were doing while determined to do it anyway. But you aren't allowed to call anyone "stupid" anymore, it's "cognitivist."

And, in fairness, it isn't reasonable to expect people who have "F-ck Trudeau" written in large letters on the side of a tractor trailer to be articulate.

People were calling for "freedom" but what they wanted was absolute licence; they were the entitled demanding to be indulged.

There were figures from the far right and the far gone. There were con artists and their willing marks.

Andrew Coyne, in the Globe and Mail, called it "a convoy of the confused." They never represented an existential threat to Canadian democracy, as they were too few: a teeny-tiny minority of arseholes, manipulated by American nutters, internet scammers from Vietnam, Bangladesh and Romania, by Moscow troll farms. They were chumps for Fox News that Facebook has given the means to congregate. They were a terrific public nuisance.

How to describe the Ottawa police response? "Cowardice" is one word, "complicity" another, but I think it is more akin to incompetence, a predictable consequence of the country's mediocrity militancy.

Maybe Macleans' Stephen Maher had it with "indolence." Another solid journalist I know privately described the now former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly as "The Occupation Concierge."

A neologism is required to describe the rage for recording or streaming everything with your smartphone in the belief that a document of your illegal activities will exonerate you. (The real worry with 5G isn't activation of the vaccine nanobots, or creeping surveillance capitalism, but the tsunami of witless cellphone video it will bring.)

The government doesn't know any better what to call this mess. It was Ottawa's problem and then Ontario's until it became a national emergency from which parts of the nation could unofficially opt out.

The smart government communications mind would have seized the discourse months ago, taken control of the message, written the script when the crisis was in its nascence and turned "vaccine mandates" into "disease control measures," which are harder to plausibly stand against. If someone had found the right words we might have been spared all this.