TriumphAnt

I woke up one recent morning to a radio discussion of “voter disenchantment”, something I expect we’ll hear a lot more of as those Honourable Members currently in the fractious House of Commons take to the streets and country biways in an effort to persuade voters to return them to their seats. Here’s what it reminded me of:

Brick: Somethin' hasn't happened yet.
Big Daddy: What's that?
Brick: A click in my head.
Big Daddy: Did you say, 'click'?
Brick: Yes sir, the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful.
Big Daddy: Boy, sometimes you worry me.
Brick: It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on and all of a sudden, there's peace.
Big Daddy: Boy, you're, you're a real alcoholic!
Brick: That is the truth. Yes sir, I am an alcoholic, so if you'd just excuse me...
Big Daddy: (grabbing him) No, I won't excuse you.
Brick: Now I'm waitin' for that click and I don't get it. Listen, I'm all alone. I'm talkin' to no one where there's absolute quiet.
Big Daddy: You'll hear plenty of that in the grave soon enough. But right now, we're gonna sit down and talk this over.
Brick: This talk is like all the others. It gets nowhere, nowhere, and it's painful.”

-- from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, by Tennessee Williams

For me, “voter disenchantment” is a similar “click”, as people reach a specific point at which we literally turn off the rhetoric, the ranting, the manufactured rage, frothing, fulminating and foaming at the mouth, and in our minds we shriek, “Enough!”

Not “Enough – Shut up the lot of you!” because we know that won’t happen, but rather, “Enough – I have stopped listening, because I no longer care a whit what any of you has to say, so repulsively have you behaved!”

(Brace yourself: because I have a perfect quote to capture that particular “click”, but it’s from a current country and western music hit. Over to you, Jo Dee Messina: “My give-a-damn’s busted!”)

I am on the verge, in fact, of deliberately – and for me, painfully – for the first time ever choosing not to vote in the coming election. And I am someone who has for all my adult life maintained a belief in those two old anti-ennui adages aimed at non-voters: 1. You therefore give up your right to complain about the government; and 2. Consequently, you get the government you deserve.

But truth be told, I likely will drag myself snarling and spitting to the polling station on voting day, so powerfully entrenched is the core principle represented by those two adages. Because there are still places in the world where people walk for three days simply to get to a polling station and exercise a privilege for which some of their friends and family members quite possibly have died earning. And there are places in the world where people are blasted to atoms by a bomb while waiting in line to vote, simply because someone else wants to demonstrate the alleged futility of allowing democratically elected representatives to run the country.

But my Lord I can’t recall a more worthless collective group to wear the banner “government” than those mired in the process we see on the news night after tiresome bickering night. And bafflingly, the collective “we” who have the power to remove the lot of them will inevitably return many of its elders for yet another go-round. By “government” (he self-qualified), I am not referring only to the Liberals, as the Party in power. I also include – collectively – the Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.

Undeservingly harsh? Maybe. I certainly know that there are so-called “constituent Members” whose priority is to win concessions for the people back home. And their motives, I have no doubt, are honourable. But regardless of the individual ethics they bring in their wide-eyed naivete the morning after the election, when they hit this town, where Party engines tirelessly swirl the sewage daily, they are swiftly mired in a system that so far has refused to give up an iota of its sleaze, whatever Party logo adorned their riding’s campaign posters. As former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, “Ya dance with them what brung ya.”

Here’s how a very angry columnist named Andrew Coyne described the system of essentially buying your way to power in this country: “It's a nauseating little tableau, repeated countless times across the country, not just now but usually, as a matter of routine. That's what our politics has become, that's what they've made of us: a nation of peculiarly aggressive beggars -- by turns craven and belligerent, tugged forelock and open palm, permanently impoverished and perpetually aggrieved.”

And for pie in the sky contrast, here’s a vintage speech that helped make “Capra-corn” a part of Hollywood’s film lexicon. In Frank Capra’s 1939 film, “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” the naive junior Senator Jefferson (Jimmy Stewart) Smith, nearing the end of an hours-long filibuster, hoarsely croaks out one of the movie’s more memorable bursts of idealism:

“Just get up off the ground, that's all I ask. Get up there with that lady that's up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. And you won't just see scenery; you'll see the whole parade of what Man's carved out for himself, after centuries of fighting. Fighting for something better than just jungle law, fighting so's he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter what his race, color, or creed. That's what you'd see. There's no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties… Great principles don't get lost once they come to light. They're right here; you just have to see them again!”

Capra, by way of Smith’s speech, requires that our politicians sit just below the current roster of beatified saints. In Coyne’s world view, they’re somewhere around Dante’s 8th circle of Hell in The Inferno.

Personally, I'm looking for someone who sits somewhere between the two extremes. I’m certainly not asking for saints. In fact, when it comes right down to it, I don’t think I’m asking for anything the least bit unreasonable, especially from someone seeking to be elected to a position in which he or she has a share of running a country of 30 million people.

I’d really just like someone to believe in again.

= = = = = = = = = =

A day late and a dollar short: “I am CANADIAN!”

Meanwhile, our fearless quartet of party leaders, supposedly fearful of a snap election vote being snuck into the House while they were away, were they to take part in honouring our veterans overseas at the 60th anniversary observance of VE Day, delayed and delayed and delayed, and finally got their act together sufficiently to get their butts over to Holland to celebrate V-E Day when they figured out that if they all left at the same time, no one would have an unfair advantage back in Parliament.

Thing is, they got overseas so late that they only managed collectively to be in attendance at a wreath-laying on Monday, May 9, the day after the event was celebrated in Holland by the Dutch, by Canadian veterans, and by the rest of the Allied world. (Sunday May 8 being the actual 60th anniversary and all.) But what the hell? One war-ending observance is pretty much the same as another, right? Monday the 9th, it turns out, is the anniversary of the day in 1945 on which Josef Stalin accepted a separate German capitulation to the Red Army. So our fearless leaders actually wound up celebrating the birth of a half century of Soviet hegemony.

We are all comrades. Nastrovya!

Stephen Harper blamed the Prime Minister for getting them all across the water too late to take part in the actual V-E Day anniversary observances. Harper claimed that making such travel arrangements is solely up to the Prime Minister’s Office. I understand he also has to get Martin’s permission to go to the bathroom. (Now remember Mr H: raise one finger if you have to go Number 1; two if you have to… you know.)

= = = = = = = = = =

And if this isn’t a word, it darned well should be!:

“The Conservative-sponsored motion asks the Commons finance committee to recommend that the government resignliamentary experts say…” (from a story on the Canada.com website, May 9)

That’s what this country needs, more specialists who work their entire careers advising Parliamentarians when they should resign: “resignliamentary experts”!

= = = = = = = = = =

This week, two rants for the price of one!

Recently, Ottawa saw the arrival of two brand new free daily newspapers named Metro and Dose*. Metro is owned by something called the Metro International group and, in Canada, publishes editions in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal. Worldwide, they are distributed in 100 cities across 17 countries and are published in 16 different languages.

Dose was launched on April 4 in five Canadian cities, Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, by CanWest News Service. Their claim is that they offer a “different perspective” and aim for a target market of “urban, intelligent and fun 18 – 34 year olds” with a “breezy run-through of the daily news”.

Since both papers launched, this city has been inundated with hundreds of green Metro boxes and red-and-black Dose boxes on every corner in the downtown area, and at countless other locations around town. During each weekday morning rush hour, downtown commuter stops are flooded with vest-wearing people trying to force copies of one or the other into the hands of passers-by, many of whom probably accept one just to avoid being persistently solicited by another such “distributor” a half block farther on.

I’ve read a few copies of both and, frankly, this city needs neither. “Breezy” seems to mean “dumbed down”, if their typical coverage of a topical issue is anything to go by in either paper. (The Dose website, for example, recently showed that its five “top search” hits were #1: “Ottawa”, followed by four separate night clubs / dance bars, which pretty well sums up its readers’ priorities.)

None of which is my point, however. What prompts a whine here is that, because both these papers are not merely free, but are thrust unsolicited into passers-by’s hands, they are received by less-than-enthusiastic commuters, especially on rainy days, with no sense of any attached value whatsoever. In consequence, a great many copies of both papers are swiftly discarded. Now when you walk through downtown Ottawa, you are as likely to see creatively parked copies of both jammed between fence rails, notched into tree branch clefts, wherever, or simply tossed into a passing gravity well and allowed to fall where that Newtonian force carries them. Worst of all, they are stacked by the hundreds in the larger bus shelters where the distributors’ undistributed copies are left at the end of their shift.

“Breezy” is the appropriate description, because the winds that bluster among the downtown high-rise office towers are now routinely blowing tabloid-sized sheets from both newspapers freely along the streets.

In this case, to crib the old saw, no news would be, indeed, good news.

– 0 –

* And, I’m sorry, but I just can’t read that name “Dose” without ear-worming:

“Don't give a dose to the one you love most
Give her some marmalade...give her some toast
You can give her the willies or give her the blues
But the dose that you give her will get back to youse…”

(And so on, by Shel Silverstein, as sung by Dr Hook and the Medicine Show)

= = = = = = = = = =

People who are well-named for their job.

In a not-so-long ago e-mail message from a Baby Duckling, I was told that there is a taxi driver in New Hamburg, Ontario, who is named Rick Shaw.

And on a recent weekend, my wife and I hiked optimistically off to our local bank to finalize arrangements for getting the money for our new porch renos into the hands of our contractor, Nino, and at the same time give the bank permission to take away our house were we to suddenly pack up and run away.

As we walked into the office belonging to the bank official who would present us the final papers either approving or disapproving the financing, I wondered about the psychological impact on other people coming hat in hand to the bank in order to solicit a loan, only to be shown into an office whose name plate identified the man you were about to meet: Les Hope. When I mentioned it to him, he laughed and said it was even more unsettling for people seeking him out in any form of print directory where he is, of course: Hope, Les.

= = = = = = = = = =

If you can figure out what this $208,000 has bought, you’re a heck of a lot smarter than I am! Here is a paragraph from a recent news release announcing a government grant of just over $208,000 to fund a project of the Canadian Labour Congress:

“Under the project, the Canadian Labour Congress will develop information and orientation packages that will analyze and identify gaps in the current capacity of Ontario unions to effectively respond to the needs of their members who have been laid off. This project will reduce duplication in the work performed by Ontario unions.”

Now when I read that, I read that the government is spending a pile of money that will demonstrate clearly that what someone who has just been laid off really needs is a good stiff drink. Oh, and the best way to reduce duplication in the work that is performed by unions? Lay some people off.

How hard was that? Glad I could help. If someone in government wants to drop me a line, I’ll let you know what bank account to use to deposit my $208,000.

= = = = = = = = = =

And finally, I reserve this spot for a moment to say good bye to a sweet old friend. Just this morning, we had to give a veterinarian permission to put our 15-year old calico cat to sleep. In her last days, she was obviously a mess. Even consuming liquids was getting to be beyond the ability of her diseased mouth. And while she spent a great deal of time during her last weeks with us at home resting, and purring when we rubbed her tired old back, she clearly was nearing a point where even the simplest of motions was just too much of a bother.

On the day we first saw Calli, we noticed she had two spiky black tufts of hair that defined the tips of her ears and as she grew up, she never lost them. And we’ll remember the kitten who fearlessly bounded around our first home in a small room that became the nursery when our daughter was born just a few months later. She probably was taken from her own Mom a few days too soon because she seemed never to have received the pivotal lesson of making a cat sound. All her life, all she ever managed was a hoarse raspy croak that would give a rusty door hinge cause to plead plagiarism. In her later adult years, even the croak vanished and her call was a mouth that would open to the “meow” position, but from which, most days, no sound at all would emerge.

We’ll remember, too, the 11-year old queen of the house who grudgingly accepted the wholly unsolicited intrusion into her reign of two other feline princesses, sisters from the same litter, some four years ago. To them, Calli’s angrily lashing tail was a wonderful plaything until she figured out they were here to stay, so the tail-lash, she concluded, was a useless expenditure of energy.

Personally, I’ll remember a cat who never seemed to grasp that not every trip I took into the kitchen meant I was going to put food in her bowl, and who stoically suffered my repeated stumbling accidental kicks in the darkened room as I wandered in either to shut things down late at night, or start things up early on a cold and dark winter’s morning. In fact, I tripped over her often enough that I think she probably thought her full name was actually a three-part string that began with “Jesus CHRIST!...”

Calli is the second cat we’ve bid good bye to. Our first, Ilsa, was a tabby terror who never really fully warmed to the idea of humans as friends. The more so when we added, first, Calli, and then our daughter into what had been Ilsa’s exclusive command of our attentions. Our two remaining four-year old cats, however, inhabit the other extreme. They don’t merely tolerate attention, they demand it.

Whoever coined the phrase, “It’s a dog’s life”, really missed the mark. The life of leisure and expectation of total subservience the phrase implies belongs clearly to cats. One does not own cats; they deign to allow you to share their home and, if you do a good job, they keep you around. Obviously, we did a great job with Calli. She kept us around for 15 years.

We’ll miss her.