Paul Grignon has struck a popular nerve with his cartoon exposé of a financial system that’s exacerbating our public debt spiral and hastening descent into environmental destruction.
By now most of us have heard about at least a few of the local people who’ve “made it big” in the world of online viral videos. Victoria writer Andrew Struthers’ two-minute spoof based on the Canadian Wildlife Service’s “Hinterland Who’s Who” commercials, “Spiders on Drugs,” is the undisputed champion, currently nearing 30 million views on YouTube. More typically, other area folk have garnered tens or hundreds of thousands of hits for a beautiful folk song, a recording of a police assault downtown, and one of the biggest lip-sync gatherings in the world (I don’t know of any popular videos of local babies or pets doing especially adorable things, but there are likely a few of those, too).
Certainly the most surprising of them all to go viral, though, would have to be 63-year-old Gabriola Island visual artist and animator Paul Grignon’s Money as Debt.
It’s an independently-made 47-minute video lecture on our current system for creating money.
Yet Grignon has now sold over 12,000 copies of it on DVD, while it’s been (mostly illegally) copied and resold, uploaded, and translated so widely that by Grignon’s last estimation it was in 24 languages, appearing or being discussed on thousands of websites, and surpassing two million viewers. It’s been endorsed by the Canadian Action Party and the American Monetary Institute, ex-managers of Wall Street investment firms, and prominent economists like David Korten and Hazel Henderson. It’s also been heavily promoted by Elizabeth Kucinich, along with her more famous husband, congressman and former US Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, and used at rallies for current Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.
What accounts for its surprising popularity?