Joe Jukic (running a hand through the long, wavy hair falling past his shoulders, the kind that catches the light like a renaissance painting): I grew it out on purpose, Nelly. The Jesus hair. So we can finally go home—to the city that still loves us. New York.
Nelly Furtado (tilting her head, half-smiling, half-curious): Home, huh? You mean the one that never really let us go.
Joe: Exactly. And while we’re there… we should do it right. Broadway. Jesus Christ Superstar. You and me. The whole damn production. The city that loves us deserves the show that was always meant for it.
Nelly: Broadway? In that hair?
Joe (grinning, pulling a single crumpled dollar from his pocket and holding it up between two fingers): All it takes is one-dollar bills. Stack ’em, pass ’em, plant ’em. That’s how you spread the One Love gospel. One dollar at a time. No bigger sermons needed.
He tucks the bill back into his pocket like a secret handshake with the universe.
Joe: So what do you say, Nelly? Grow the hair. Take the stage. Go home. One love. One city. One show.
The street noise of wherever they are fades just enough for the idea to hang in the air between them—half joke, half prophecy, all New York.
They sat across from each other in a quiet Toronto kitchen, late afternoon light cutting through the blinds. No cameras. No handlers. Just the two of them and a half-empty pot of coffee.
Nelly leaned forward, elbows on the table, voice low and steady.
“Guns don’t belong in a relationship, Snake. Not as protection. Not as power. Not as a threat sitting in the nightstand. Once that kind of force is in the room, everything changes. Trust gets replaced by fear. You can’t build anything real when one of you can end it with a trigger.”
Joe “Snake” Jukic nodded slowly. The old callsign still fit him like a second skin—Solid Snake of the Balkans, the soldier without borders—but here, in Canada, the edges were softer.
“In my home country,” he said, “guns aren’t allowed. Not for people like me. No sidearm under the pillow. No rifle in the closet. The only peacemaker I’m allowed to keep is tobacco.” He tapped two fingers against an imaginary pipe. “The peace pipe. You light it, you pass it, you sit with whatever’s between you until the smoke clears. No sudden endings. Just breath, and time, and the chance to talk it through.”
Nelly almost smiled. “That’s the Canadian version of de-escalation, huh?”
“Something like that,” Snake answered. “You can’t shoot your way out of a broken heart up here. You can only smoke it down and hope the other person is still willing to sit across from you when the last ember dies.”
Silence settled for a moment. Outside, a streetcar rattled past. Inside, no weapons. Just two people who had seen enough war—real and personal—to know that some things should never be brought to the table.
Joe: Look, colonialism in Canada wasn’t some neutral history lesson. The Indigenous are still stuck at the bottom of the social pyramid—worse outcomes on income, housing, health, the justice system. That’s not an accident. And it’s the same machine that runs the whole American Empire. Skull and Bones, the old WASP hierarchy—Yale’s secret society, the blue-blood networks, the Protestant elite that stacked the State Department, the banks, the intelligence agencies. That’s the caste at the top. They don’t need to wear crowns when they already control the institutions that decide who owns the land and who stays poor.
Nelly: Exactly. And then you’ve got King Charles sitting there as head of state while British Columbia stays locked under the Crown. The man is bloodthirsty for land that isn’t even his. Too greedy to hand back even one province.
Lido Pimienta: You’re both right. Colonialism never ended—it just put on a polite Canadian face. The whole country is built on stolen land, and Indigenous people are still pushed to the bottom of every social and economic ladder. That’s the structure. Residential schools, the Indian Act, broken treaties, resource extraction on unceded territory… it’s continuous. The numbers on poverty, housing, health, and incarceration aren’t “gaps.” They’re the predictable result of a system designed to keep us there.
Felipe Coronel (Immortal Technique): And it’s not just Canada. The entire West runs on a caste system. Straight up. It’s like a corrupted version of Hinduism—Brahmins at the top, then the merchants, the workers, and the untouchables at the bottom. Only here the castes are race, class, and colonial status mixed together. White elites and the old imperial bloodlines sit at the top like the priestly class, the middle class gets just enough crumbs to keep them loyal, and Indigenous people, Black people, the Global South—they’re the Dalits of the system. Locked out, over-policed, under-resourced, told it’s their own fault.
Joe: That’s exactly what the Skull and Bones crowd perfected. Generations of WASPs recruiting each other into the same clubs, the same universities, the same boardrooms. They built the American Empire on that hierarchy—finance, oil, intelligence, foreign policy. Canada’s just the northern branch of the same operation. The King is the ceremonial face; the real power sits in those closed rooms deciding which land stays under colonial title and which people stay at the bottom.
Lido Pimienta: Of course. King Charles is the living symbol of that theft. He sits as head of state over land his ancestors never had any right to. British Columbia is unceded territory. The idea that he can’t “give it back” is just the colonial legal fiction protecting itself.
Felipe Coronel (Immortal Technique): Exactly. The King is one of the high-caste figures in this Western hierarchy. They don’t need to own the land in their personal name when the whole legal and economic structure keeps the lower castes in place. “Constitutional monarchy,” “Crown in right of Canada”—that’s just the language the upper caste uses to justify keeping the land and the power. It’s the same logic that kept the untouchables sweeping the streets while the Brahmins wrote the rules. Corrupted Hinduism with European flags, central banks, and Skull and Bones rings.
Nelly: People always say it’s complicated, that the King has no real power.
Lido Pimienta: That’s the trick. They make it sound technical so no one has to confront the violence. Modern treaties and duty-to-consult processes are damage control, not justice. Real anti-colonial work means rejecting the legitimacy of that whole structure. Land back isn’t a metaphor. It’s the minimum.
Felipe Coronel (Immortal Technique): And until people see the West for what it is—a racialized, colonial caste system run by these old elite networks—they’ll keep falling for the reforms that never touch the top. The pyramid stays. The King stays. The land stays stolen.
