Maclean’s gives the G20 The Onion treatment

By Alison@Creekside

It’s been pretty difficult to find any humour in G20, hasn’t it?

Inside — a billion dollar bunfest in which leaders talk about implementng austerity.

Outside — 20,000 police decline to confront a hundred or so rioters in favour of spending the following day assaulting and arresting a thousand nonviolent citizens and locking them up in cages for a day.

Undaunted by the emergence of uglier and uglier police stories, culminating in the one where police yank off an amputee’s prosthetic leg and order him to hop to his own arrest, Maclean’s appears to have asked The Onion‘s chronically gormless Area Man to write its unsigned front page cover story this week.

Some highlights from Lock them up :

Anxiety over the behaviour of police is wildly overdone . . . arrests and claims of police brutality need to be kept in perspective.

Only the professionalism and preparedness of police prevented circumstances from being much worse.

Many of the complaints seem to involve the quality of the sandwiches in detention.

At the end of the day, debate over street violence, protest and police ought to be secondary to the summit’s practical achievements . . . . The role of formal summits is largely to provide world leaders with an opportunity to mingle and pose for a group photo.

Yup, that’s Area Man alright.