To evoke Rod Serling, “Consider if you will...”:
-- Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is doggedly sticking to his delusion that we all will accept there are just some people – “legitimate businessman”-type people, foreigners to be sure, and doncha know they do things differently in Germany? – who pay high-priced consultants with wads of thousand-dollar bills stuffed into envelopes and slid quietly across coffee shop tabletops in expensive urban hotels. Accepting such payments (his voices continue to tell him), not telling anyone and only paying taxes years later when you get caught are all nothing more than “whoops, my bad” moments by a man who would normally have entrusted those record-keeping responsibilities to competent financial staff, but dangnabbit, he just didn’t have the staff anymore when he became a “former” Prime Minister.
-- At the same time, Ruby Dhalla, a sitting Member of Parliament is addressing her own personal scandal. This one began with the innocuous fact that someone in her family (BUT NOT HER!!) employed Filipina women as caregivers for her mother. The story has since exploded into a torrent of wildly divergent versions with all sorts of allegations of abuse by the caregivers. Ms Dhalla, however, claims that the caregivers are now engaged – perhaps as unwitting dupes in the moulding hands of the evil Conservatives – in some vast conspiracy to discredit her. Further, they are not telling the truth – at least according to Ms Dhalla and her lawyer – when they say that they were hired by Ms Dhalla, reported to Ms Dhalla, were paid by Ms Dhalla, and treated abusively by Ms Dhalla by being forced to work for many more hours than those for which they were contracted, at tasks that they argue were about as distant from “caregiving” as this planet’s South Pole is from its North. Further, the caregivers have specifically claimed that when they openly considered complaining, their official documentation, including their passports, was seized by Ms Dhalla and returned only when a caregiver advocacy agent threatened to call the police. And oh, by the way, almost all of the reporters and commentators who have anything at all to say about this story are careful to ensure that we continue to know – by reminding us again and again and again – that Ms Dhalla is “drop-dead gorgeous” and “a former beauty queen”. (So... what?)
-- Larry O’Brien, presently the Mayor of Ottawa (albeit on an unpaid leave of absence) is currently on trial, facing charges of influence-peddling by offering a campaign opponent a lucrative federal office if he (the opponent) would just drop out of the municipal election campaign and effectively clear the track for all his (the opponent’s) supporters to toss their eventual X-marked circles his (O’Brien’s) way on voting day. Which is pretty much how the “ends” played out. But whether those were in fact the “means” is now up to the court to decide. The Ontario Provincial Police, however, decided there was sufficient smoke to consider at least the possibility of a fire, and it was their investigation into the allegations that led to the laying of charges.
-- And while we’re on the subject of law enforcement, the RCMP... yes those RCMP. Even the Force’s own until-recent first choice as psychological consultant has slammed those four infamous officers on Vancouver airport security duty for opting to use their Taser training as the only possible method of dealing with one confused, exhausted, non-English speaking Polish immigrant named Robert Dziekanski, who had remained trapped in the secure customs area of the airport for some nine hours before the sudden appearance of the flak-jacketed four and their (to him) completely incomprehensible instructions, leading to his multiple tasering and death just moments after they (the four “peace officers”) first arrived on the scene.
-- South of the border, the man elected President last November on a virtual tsunami of post-Bushlite “HOPE” has just announced he is quietly reversing two of his key campaign promises – Mr Obama recently ordered the suppression of what are rumoured to be as many as “several hundred” more photos of alleged US prison guard abuse of detainees at US detention centres around the world; and he has also “quietly” ordered the military tribunals in Guantanamo – reviled by critics as “kangaroo courts” – to resume their proceedings, a decision that may not bode well for Canadian detainee Omar Khadr, who was pretty close to the top of the “Next” list when Obama ordered an end to the tribunals immediately after being sworn into office.
-- And much farther afield, waaaaay overseas, one of the world’s great voices of democracy, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest in that country forever, or so it seems, was two weeks away from being released, when in an act that beggars belief she was visited in her home by a American man named John Yettaw – a “borderline diabetic... asthmatic” member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. With the aid of a pair of homemade swim fins, Mr Yettaw supposedly swam across a lagoon to Ms Suu Kyi’s house, reportedly to deliver a bible to her. This story, frankly, smells to high heaven (“He has asthma real bad, that's why I'm surprised he swam so good,” said his ex-wife in one of the Associated Press articles about the ever more peculiar story) because the military junta in charge in that country would like nothing more than to avoid returning the hugely popular passionate pro-democracy advocate to the public eye. And as luck would have it, having a visitor is expressly prohibited by the terms of Ms Suu Kyi’s house arrest. Violating those terms is subject to a five-year term in prison and the Myanmar generals have wasted no time. At this writing, Ms Suu Kyi is confined to a cell in Insein Prison (another of those tragically appropriate bits of nomenclature) while the Myanmar government tries to weather the growing storm of international condemnation over the whole affair.
I think if Ms Ruby Dhalla really wanted to see a conspiracy in action, she could take lessons from the travesty of dictatorial leadership presently helming Myanmar.
-- Meanwhile, back in this country the ever more certifiable Harper government has decided that their best hope for re-election lies not in touting their own record (understandable since as late as last November their Minister of Finance, Jim “There will never be a deficit while I am Minister of Finance” Flaherty, was forecasting a “slight surplus” in his Fall Economic Update, instead of the $80-plus billion deficit under which we are now living), but rather in convincing voters that the real threat to Canada is for our population to even think of voting for a man who drinks espresso coffee into which he dunks chocolate wafers, who has lived outside the country and who (*shudder*) has actually been in the employ of Harvard University – as a professor, no less. “Attack ads”, the Conservative campaign is called officially. Unofficially, I think that most people – most living beings with brains, in fact – would use the label MBPE: management by psychotic episode.**
** Sourced, if you can believe the internet, to this paragraph in a memorandum written by an International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) union local representative, Dr William H Jones, arguing that morale at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was low because the Agency was then in “utter chaos”:
“Did Mr. Goldin help this state of chaos along? Yes. Certainly. He eagerly accepted budget cuts, without the political difficulties of commensurate mission cuts, in a business that had no budget to spare. He decided in his own mind that sufficient chanting of the right mantra could make up for all the talents and resources that he was happily tossing away; he erected a framework of management by psychotic episode the like of which has probably not been seen since the Roman Emperors.”
And that’s just the quick off-the-top of my head list. How can you make fun of self-satirizing material like that? No wonder my Muse headed for the peace of a sunlit pond-side patch of green and took two giant pitchers of beer with her!
(Photo: a still from “Happy Gilmore”)
= = =
A couple of TV ad bleats. That’s always safe ground. We have an ongoing family poll for pride of place on our worst-commercials-going list. Among our current high vote earners: The company that sells insurance for seniors (well, for people over 50, they say) by showing us an appallingly impatient woman driver accompanied by the nasally-bound voiceover: “You don’t drive like her; so why should you pay the same insurance premiums as her?” I wrote them a letter and told them I was still trying to decide which group should feel more insulted – women drivers, their target audience of drivers over 50, or frankly everyone with a television. In the real world, that woman simply would not be driving for very long before some large guy with a lug wrench would step out of his own car, walk back to hers, and smash every last window in her car to bits. (“C’mon already THIS, you ignorant...!”)
The (male) office worker who dresses like Santa for the office Christmas party and has all the women staff atwitter after they’ve paid a visit to his lap – because he takes “natural male enhancement” pills. What bothers me about that one is, first of all, the suggestion that Office Santa apparently has been sitting there all day in a state of obvious... *ahem* enthusiasm, but even more than that is the creepy grin pasted on this guy’s face throughout the ad. It’s the kind if look that, were you to spot it roadside on the face of a hitchhiker, would cause you to swerve far to the other side of the road, accelerate and then put a great many kilometres between you and him just as fast as you possibly could. I have no idea why the makers of this pill have apparently decided that look holds an attraction for women.
= = =
This landed in my e-mail box recently, under the thread title, “RBC Online Banking Alert:- Notification Of Irregular Account Activity!” (Oh fer shure I’ll give you all my account security information and I really appreciate your drawing this to my attention!). Exactly as it arrived,:
“Dear Customer,
.We are unable to send message(s) to your online banking due to a Error Code [E634] between your e-mail address.
To enable you start receiving security e-mail alert when any transaction Or login attempt has been made from your online banking and also continue accessing your online account it will only take you few minutes to update your e-mail address including your Security information's. Click on the link below and you will be taken straight to where you can update your e-mail and Security information's.
http://royalbank.com/login/pro/update/account
Important Notice:- You are strictly advised to match your Memorable Word rightly to avoid service suspension.
Thank You.
Royal Bank of Canada Customer Services”
And of course I just know with even more certainty that it’s a valid message because the many punctuation errors and amusingly creative application of basic English vocabulary (“match your Memorable Word rightly”; “Security information’s”) only re-assure me that you clearly place a much higher priority on accounting and numbers and important stuff like that, rather than frivolous and unnecessary things like correct English grammar. That’s for me the bank of much goodness!
= = =
And finally, I received a Facebook urging from one of my Facebook friends recently inviting me to visit a link so as to be able to vote for something called “The Best Canadian Song of All Time”, according to a short list compiled by someone / something called “Luminato”, which helpfully explains itself to be “The Toronto Festival for the Arts”. These are my only voting options:
1234, Feist
Basement Apartment, Sarah Harmer
Boy Inside the Man, Tom Cochrane
Courage, The Tragically Hip
Cuts Like a Knife, Bryan Adams
Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen
Hasn't Hit Me Yet, Blue Rodeo
Helpless, Neil Young
Taking Care of Business, BTO
The Weight, The Band
Now I agree completely with those who think that setting out to compile a “Best of...” anything list in this age of global internet communication puts you on a par with lawyer Jimmy Stewart picking up a gun for the very first time and, without even taking off his apron, strolling out into the street and hollering, “Alright Liberty Valance, bring it on!” It makes you, in other words, a target, and immediately opens you, the compiler, to all sorts of, “OH COME ON! WHAT ABOUT...??” replies, retorts and outright abuse, depending on the responder’s passion.
In my case, my initial reply along those lines (abuse) was mitigated by the realization that a couple of those named songs I have never even heard of, and so really can’t be too critical. Maybe they’re musical dynamite! (At least I’ve heard of all the musicians, so I’m not entirely orbiting – tune-awareness-wise – out there beyond Pluto.)
But if one reversed the process and, instead of offering me a list and asking me to vote, asked me simply to name what I think is the “Best Canadian Song of All Time”, I would name a song that to me sums up a great many things about what it means to be Canadian. Making it singable, indeed popular, is a bonus. For me that song is...
(drum roll)
...
Gordon Lightfoot’s Canadian Railroad Trilogy. It transcends generations and remains surprisingly relevant to the times, regardless of when one hears it. After all, it began life as a celebration of what Lightfoot applauds as the single most symbolically unifying event in Canada’s history – the building of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway. And now, as we sit here in mid-2009, we look at the poignant story behind that still-mighty anthem and realize that Lightfoot has managed to make it resonant even today, when it is still the strongest single image of what it means to be Canadian.
Because, after all, that awesomely forged coast-to-coast ribbon of steel was a project that took thousands of foreign workers, brought them to Canada to work under inhumanly difficult, harsh, dangerous, even slave-labour-like conditions for ridiculously unfair wages – if the pittance they received could even be called a “wage” – on a scandal-riddled project that pretty much lined the pockets of federal and provincial corrupt, graft-driven politicians from coast to coast.
And I ask you, what could be more Canadian than that?
À la next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment