TriumphAnt

Sha-ZAM! It’s a Gomer-y Pile!

So I guess I should say a word* about yesterday’s (as at this writing) media earthquake from Ottawa (which registered a 7 on the retch-ter scale) – the release of Part 1 of the Gomery Report, a.k.a. “Adscam”, a.k.a. “$%@#!%#&$ MERDE!” if you’re Jean Chretien, and a.k.a. a doorway labelled “I know – I’ll run as an independent!”, if you’re Alphonso Gagliano, now barred for life from holding membership in the Liberal Party. (Cheer up consigliere, in a different world you’d actually have been handed an outcome that was negative! But I digress.)

* FYI, “disgusted” is that word. You don’t wanna ask me for adjectives.

Gomery Part 1 is, of course, the colossal finger-pointing synthesis of all the evidence collected over the past several months in what is known colloquially as the sponsorship scandal. Part 2, due in February 2006, is supposed to be: “In Part 1, we identified the problems; now here’s what you need to do to fix them.”

But there’s already a firestorm of response over Part 1. No surprise at all that it is erupting from those – including former Prime Minister Jean Chretien – on whom Justice Gomery stuck the label, “Responsible”. Chretien’s response is a tad peculiar. As nearly as I can parse his counter-argument, it seems to boil down to “Waaaal, you know… dat guy Gom’ry, he di’nt call enough of my frien’s to say nice t’ings about me. So I’m gonna sue!” Good luck, sir. Bring lots of balls to your hearing.

Golf ones I mean.

And for some unknown reason, Gomery used the words “Prime Minister Martin” and “exonerated” in the same sentence, so there will be no bonus points awarded for guessing what the Liberal media lines were from the moment the first media microphone was thrust into the first Grit face following the November 1 tabling of the Gomery report.

For the big zip that it’s worth, you can count me among those who just cannot accept that the man who was Finance Minister under Jean Chretien, and effectively the country’s number 2 politician – in fact the federal government’s number 1 man in Quebec while all this was happening – knew nothing about a program that scurrilously moved tens of millions of dollars around among Liberal-friendly advertising agencies, buffered by kickbacks all along its sordid, looping trail with apparently no bookkeeping whatsoever, under the laughably unrealized goal of “national unity”. I believe that Paul Martin just covered his tracks more effectively. Or, by virtue of his being Prime Minister at the moment, he has now come into the resources to cover his tracks retroactively and thoroughly enough to teflon his way out from amid the latest barrages of flung dung.

(Didn’t know “teflon” was a verb, did’ja? I teflon; you teflon… works for me.) But like Tony “The Great Leslie” Curtis in the classic pie fight sequence in “The Great Race”, Martin is only dodging the first wave of pies. Sooner or later, a pan just chock full of bumbleberry is going to come out of Stage Right and catch him right in the old platitude generator.

Quickies: 1. As I said recently in an e-mail message to a friend – To Jack Layton (who began railing loudly and angrily about Liberal corruption within minutes of the release of Gomery 1 but, when asked if he was prepared to back up his righteous indignation by supporting a vote of non-confidence in the government, demurred with a toe-digging, “Well, we haven’t really talked about that”): Jack, why bother even lacing up your blades if you have no intention of going for a skate? For the record, I don’t buy for a minute that oft-repeated NDP ass-saver, “Canadians don’t want a winter election.” Voting for most people is a five-minute detour on the way home from work one evening.

Actually, what Canadians don’t want is to be forced to sit through what is going to be quite possibly the ugliest campaign in our history. If it were up to me, I’d announce the dates, give each party a ten-day window to post its policies on a single universally-accessible Elections Canada website, with hard paper copies distributed across the land during that same ten-day window, then hold the vote. No polls; no televised debates. And for damned sure, no “Party pundits panel” on the CBC, which always and inevitably descend into mutual insult sessions that contribute nothing to the process except a ringing confirmation of the juvenile lack of respect they have for each other and Canadians in general.

2. To Stephen Harper, whose right-hand man Peter MacKay recently said, “We’ll let you know what we’re going to do when we’ve seen the first poll results of Canadian opinions.”: You do realize that, quaint as it might seem, Canadians still consider (admittedly, less and less with each passing month) that our Members of Parliament are our leaders. If you want to rule by plebiscite, find a country where that is the official form of government. But if you want to lead in Canada, give us a reason to follow you beyond building a campaign platform based on, “I’ll follow the advice of most of you. Just give me that chance. By the way, the Liberals are corrupt.”

3. To Gilles Duceppe: Gilles, it’s not always about giving Quebec a raw deal. Sometimes, it’s about realizing Brian Mulroney’s perfectly coined mission statement for cabinet ministers, “Ya dance with them that brung ya.” But look in the mirror. You’re a separatist, for God’s sake! If you really find being a “Canadian” so damned onerous, then stop sucking up what is provided at the public trough, because it’s been stocked by the very nation from which you so clearly have said you want to split! Separate already! See how far you can walk in thin paper shoes.

Oh – but you take with you precisely what “Quebec” was on June 30, 1867. After that, it was part of Canada. So you might want to start negotiating with the northern Cree right now because (a) they don’t wanna go (i.e., they’ve already served notice that they’ll want to “separate” from Quebec so as to remain in Canada), and (b) James Bay and Manicouagan – home to all those Hydro Quebec power generating stations – are on their land. And no, you don’t get the Vandoos. They might well be a unique, wholly French-speaking regiment, but they’re in the Canadian Army. And they left a lot of worthy, so terribly young men behind in the soil of Europe while fighting under the red ensign to defeat Naziism. The red ensign, Gilles – that’s the flag with the Union Jack in its corner. So you can’t have them. While you’re at it, leave your MP’s pension in the cloakroom and your passport with the border guard sitting in the car on the Portage Bridge (don’t worry, we’ll build a permanent crossing point real soon) before you go. There’s a good lad.

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As Hurricane Wilma tracked across Florida – somewhat weaker than the “HURRICANE OF THE CENTURY!!!!” it was originally billed to be, CBC viewers got to witness the network’s efforts to make it seem a much bigger disaster than it actually was. When the coverage cut to “our meteorological specialist on the scene”, she actually pointed to some palm fronds that were lying on the ground at her feet. “As you can see,” she over-seriously intoned, “whole palm leaves were blown from the trees, and awnings were buffeted on this nearby condominium” (points to nearby condo with an apparently intact awning, but which at least provided a visual definition of the “awning” concept for people who never heard the word before.)

“Oh the humanity!!”

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There are a couple of Diet Pepsi commercials in which a middle-aged businessman is asked if there’s anything from his youth he’d like to relive. In one, he considers recapturing his “Flock of Seagulls” hair style; in another, his too-tight jeans. At the end, he simply concludes, “On second thought, I’ll just stick to my Diet Pepsi.”

In the same spirit, once in a while something will tweak my “If I only knew then what I know now…” musing and, most recently, it has been an occasional regret that I wasn’t a fan of The Band when they were in their heyday. A few years ago, I bought a VHS cassette – and later a DVD – of “The Last Waltz”, the Martin Scorcese film of their official farewell concert. It makes a frequent appearance on my DVD player. Not that I’ve seen a lot of rockumentaries, but this is definitely my favourite, made so in large measure by the rich roster of performers, and Scorcese’s outstanding camera work around the stage.

And I also just bought their “A Musical History” package that includes five CDs and a DVD of some of their early stage appearances. And even when they’re just hacking around in a basement jam session, there’s a gritty folksiness to their music and such an apparently easygoing cohesion to their playing that a Band concert about 30-odd years ago would really have been a truly memorable musical experience. (One of their most often-cited links is the fact that they backed Bob Dylan on his 1966 tour, but that was an erratic collaboration at best and it is their enormous archive of sans-Dylan material that shines brightest.)

I suppose better a late-comer than a never-having-found-outter, but oh, to have been in the Winterland Theatre in San Francisco during the 1976 US Thanksgiving weekend! And sitting here, from the viewpoint of late 2005, the imagining is made more wistful by the fact that two of the group’s founding members have since died – bassist and singer Rick Danko in 1999, and pianist, drummer and lead singer Richard Manuel in 1986.

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On the euphemism watch, here’s a new one for “I really don’t have a clue (but I’m not going to let that stop me from talking!)”.

Recently, I was watching a panel of journalistic talking heads jabber away about something or other, when one of the reporters was asked by the interviewer to provide some particular background to the subject at hand.

The reporter started with a few words, and then paused and inserted, “But I wouldn’t quote me on this…”

As the old adage goes, “Better to keep your mouth closed and have everyone think you’re an idiot, than to open it and remove all doubt.”

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Cheers!