Mélange Adultère: Part Three

Following journalistic convention, I shall now make brief reference to a number of scandals, both real and manufactured, using a flogged-to-death suffix borrowed from America's most notorious--though hardly most serious--political débacle.



Appointmentgate [though I also like "Appointmentscam"]:

Stephen Harper's undertaking to have all candidates for federal office vetted by a non-partisan appointments commission was not just a good suggestion; it formed part of the Accountability Act, arguably the centrepiece of the government's legislative agenda so far.

Of course, the commission's establishment hit an immediate snag when (and please read this slowly) Harper's choice of commission chairman turned out to be a purely partisan selection--namely Gwyn Morgan, a CPC-friendly Alberta oilman.

Naturally, the Opposition declined Harper's generous offer to allow a CPC hack to superintend a non-partisan process, and the commission went into limbo. More pressing matters, such as begging FOX News for interviews, have prevented Harper from proposing another candidate for the chairmanship, and he seems unconcerned that a crucial component of his own law remains unfulfilled.

In Harperland, though, an idle commission can still be mightily expensive. The appointments non-commission, which has yet to deliberate a single case, has already cost taxpayers more than one million dollars. Sure, that money could have gone to hospitals, our Afghan battle-group, or our lamentably outgunned navy and air-force, but health-care and military bureaucrats are notorious wastrels. Much better to keep the cash on Parliament Hill, so that a "skeleton staff" (made up almost certainly of the cousins, nieces, nephews and psychic hairdressers of CPC M.P.'s) can sit on their powdered asses tooling around on their Blackberries or, when the mood strikes them, watching from the House gallery whilst Harper's drones drivel endlessly on about their fiscal rectitude.

It's not quite Adscam, but it'll do. If you prefer, though, just keep watching that bright shiny thing.



Brazeaugate:

As you'll recall, Harper made a slew of preposterously partisan Senate appointments early this year, every one of which so hysterically unfit for legislative office that it seemed part of a plot to push Canadians' loathing for the Senate even lower than it is, down to the level where Harper's appointment of a paraplegic groundhog suffering from tertiary syphillis would arouse nothing more than mild bemusement.

Among this clownish crew was one Patrick Brazeau, former head of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, a federally funded organisation. Pursuant to Harper's passionate commitment to diversity, Brazeau's appointment brought into the Senate a member of a criminally neglected and heavily oppressed community--those who like to party, chase skirt, and drive Porsches on the public dime while damning the ethics of their peers and, bien sûr, loudly endorsing the CPC. He brings with him the wealth of thirty-four years of life experience--thirty-four glorious years: he's all of ten years away from chugging ice-cold Molsons with his frat buddies on ten-cent-wings night down at the local Hooters.

Brazeau's provincial sexual harassment case has been kicked up to the federal level, and the senator will soon be explaining to a federal panel why he thinks the complainant is upset over what he describes as "inappropriate text messages and phone calls". I just hope he doesn't overdress for the occasion:





Really, I just love the "Atlantic City mafia" look he's rockin' here, but I doubt if the commissioners will. Note to Patrick: lose the pink stuff, and buy a tie. You're a senator now, not a goodfella, and you'll still be a sex-machine with the chicks.














O'Briengate:

Too few Canadians realise that Ottawa toils under the most catastrophically inept poltroon ever to lope across the pages of North American mayoralty history. His name is Larry O'Brien. He is a well-connected CPC hack, who, despite running for mayor in 2006 on a drearily familiar no-tax-hike, tough-on-crime platform, has overseen chronic tax hikes and rising crime. He serves as living proof of the old adage: elect a neocon; watch your city/province/country turn to shit.

He is currently being tried on charges of having bribed an opponent to drop out of the mayoralty race with the collusion of several senior members of Harper's "New Government". John Baird is among those under subpoena. The Harper follies have been a morbidly fascinating spectacle, but this trial should be the spectacle to crown all spectacles--the prestige, if you will.

Transcending the squalor of the trial, though, is the sick-making outrage of O'Brien's mere incumbency. If old Ottawa--core, downtown Ottawa--had had its way, O'Brien would still be running his cute little temp agency. It was the suburbs who wafted this ill wind into City Hall. It was the politically illiterate Hummer jockeys of Nepean and Barrhaven who foisted this jesting harlequin onto those of us who know better. As this chart shows, we voted for Alex Munter (while praying that he would overcome the oft-fatal political handicaps of being smart, serious, and well-informed); they voted for the guy who spewed endless gibberish about Munter being a typical tax-and-spend "lefty" (yeah--he ran Kanata for years; a classic Stalinist move). What we got was a civic leader who thinks being arrested is "rock-star" cool.

O'Brien's election brilliantly exemplifies the need for Ottawa's de-amalgamation. I am no longer willing to allow suburbanites, hypo-urbanites, and infra-urbanites to inflict their masochistic, anti-civic irrationality on a people for whom the urban core is home, not just something seen from behind an office window a few hours a day. If you can hear the Peace Tower chimes from your home, you're an Ottawan. If not, you may have your own urgent neighbourhood matters to attend to--where to put the next Future Shop, whether to let the golf course expand its parking lot, whether to allow the developers to tear down the church and make way for a new Costco--but you've got nothing of significance to say about what my city should look like. If you gave a shit about it, you would live in it.


Burgergate:

Because Barack Obama did something vaguely "French", we now know exactly how morally and intellectually bankrupt American conservatism has become.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the leaders of the free world, a nation more trivial than which has never been and, pray God, will never be.

The Obama White House: Mange We Can Believe In!

The FOX network has long been rightfully derided for its umbilically intimate relationship with the Republican Party and America's broader right wing. Of those two hateful hemispheres of planetary idiocy, though, FOX has traditionally been the more thoughtful--the analytical foil to the feckless party on whose behalf it speaks. Throughout the Bush II era, the blithering cretins at FOX usually managed to be just barely close enough to the right side of sanity to seem downright moderate beside the cackling hysteria and stumblebum ineptitude of the Bush/Cheney misadministration. FOX's mere carrying of The Simpsons gave it a credibility the Bush White House could never hope to approximate.

Apparently, Team Obama considers this asymmetry to be too deeply embedded in the American psyche to be changed without massive systemic damage. Accordingly, soon after FOX releases a candid clip featuring some of its vulgarly anti-Canadian talking-heads sensibly denouncing Homeland Security for treating the Canada/U.S. border as a serious threat to American security, Obama's security doyenne Janet Napolitano repeats the odious slur--iterated across American right-wing talk-radio since literally days after 9/11--that many of the WTC terrorists had entered the U.S. through Canada and that Canada therefore needs vigilant surveillance.

In a heartwarming gesture of bi-partisan asininity, John McCain later gave his sclerotic endorsement to this preposterous urban myth. McCain, at least, has an excuse: he's clearly in the early stages of senile dementia. I suppose Napolitano's excuse is that she's an American (an excuse which, in its basic purport, is not unlike McCain's), but I do believe that her bottomless ignorance and its possible executive ramifications (she's in Obama's cabinet, remember) serve to prove that Americans' utter lack of understanding of and respect for Canada is not (as so many of us believe) a harmless eccentricity--a patronising nervous tick that we should simply ignore, laugh off, and learn to live with. It's a deeply worrying neurosis that chronically impedes the very continental security about which American official blowhards claim to be so preoccupied.

Former Mulroneyite Michael Wilson, Harper's ambassadorial appointee, appears to think that being "frustrated" by Napolitano's stark stupidity is somehow good enough. This extravagantly-paid stuffed cardigan was supposed to use his wide network of U.S. connections to change the reflexively anti-Canadian tone in Washington, made all the more urgent when the traditionally protectionist Democrats regained the White House late last year. If Ignatieff manages to kick Harper's well-marbled ass to the curb this year or next, I will enjoy watching him yank Wilson off of D.C.'s "exclusive" (i.e. all-white) golf courses and back into his rocking chair where he’s harmless. We need somebody who can bring the kind of balls Frank McKenna brought to the job before Harper's shabby partisan hackery brought his successful term to a premature end.

Until then, fellow Canucks, please enjoy your utterly unearned and quintessentially "American" reputation as the folks who helped bring down the Twin Towers--brought to you today by "Change We Can Believe In"!

Business As Usual in the Imperium Americanum

How to Apply the "Harris Formula":

Famed Irish actor and raconteur Richard Harris loved to tell a story that illustrates how (as he put it) "the British take the best" out of those who hail from their imperial fringes and "throw the rest away".

Harris had appeared on the British stage and screen for over a decade when he won an award at the 1964 Cannes festival for his role in This Sporting Life. The British press announced the good news with the headline, "British Actor Wins Cannes Award". When, a few days later, Harris got into a bar fight, the same press announced, "Irish Actor Involved in Brawl". He tells the story here, from 2:12 to 3:15 (watch the rest of the clip if you want to hear Harris tell one of his famous tales involving Peter O'Toole, yet another Irish actor whom the British claimed as one of their own when it suited them).

I was reminded of Harris' wry observation when I read the Yahoo headline about this year's Razzie Awards on Sunday. The Razzies, a parodic anti-Oscars designed to "celebrate" the worst cinematic performances of the year, awarded Worst Picture to The Love Guru, ill-starring Mike Myers. By all accounts, the award was richly deserved. I was struck, though, by the Yahoo headline: bizarrely, it stated, "Canadian Movie Voted The Worst". A day later, Yahoo removed the story, leaving an "error" page in its wake.

Now Mike Myers, though Canadian-born, has lived and worked in America for over fifteen years and is about as Canadian as Peter Jennings. That is why the American press fastidiously avoided describing Myers' huge box-office hits like Wayne's World, Austin Powers or Shrek as "Canadian movies", just as it has never mistaken James Cameron's movies for "Canadian" products, just as it would never describe massively popular TV phenomena like 24 or Battlestar Galactica as "Canadian", even though both feature largely Canadian casts and though the latter show is filmed almost entirely in Canada.

Apparently, Hollywood productions featuring Canadian ex-pats are "American" when they are excellent and gross millions of dollars and are "Canadian" when they suck and lose millions of dollars. The Harris Formula, then, still applies: the empire takes the best out of us, and throws the rest away. It's a formula that has endless applications. To wit:

1) Canadian-made General Motors vehicles shall be considered "American" if they provide years of safe, reliable service and "Canadian" if they need frequent, significant or expensive repairs;

2) Joint U.S.-Canada NATO operations in Afghanistan shall be considered "American" if they succeed and "Canadian" if they fail;

3) American-made firearms smuggled into Canada shall be considered "Canadian" when used in the commission of criminal offences and "American" when used by little old ladies to fend off burglars and purse-snatchers;

4) North American weather patterns shall be considered "American" when they provide clement conditions and "Canadian" when they cause storms, tidal waves, hurricanes and other climatic nuisances.

Mind you, the Harris Formula can operate in reverse, as America seems all too ready to take our worst. Unbelievably, in an act either of selfless courage or of suicidal recklessness, they were willing to take custody even of Rachel Marsden. The application of that particular cultural laxative may be worth, alone, every bit of imperial insolence we take from them.


"Benz? Shmenz!":

Why do the media insist on reporting Barack Obama's stated belief that Americans invented the automobile as a "gaffe"? Sure, Benz and Daimler patented and produced German cars decades before an American equivalent appeared, but pointing that meaningless factoid out is precisely the kind of petty, pedantic, knee-jerk anti-Americanism that emboldens the terrorists and puts the West in serious jeopardy.

Clearly, too many over-educated, élitist journalists still don't get it: "reality" does not mean "stuff that actually happened, is happening or will happen"; it means "stuff that Americans make up in order to feel messianic, omnipotent and omniscient". If Americans had rooted their culture in a respect for facts and reason, they'd still be a Sabbath-honouring populist republic with a small citizen militia, an ethic of Puritan moderation and a loathing for unearned wealth, privilege and military interventionism--in other words, semi-socialist losers.

Obama's delusional grandstanding is moved by precisely the kind of Nietzschean self-glorification and ass-in, knees-up, balls-out fanaticism that has made America great. Facts are needed only by people who don't have the guts to believe in lies, which is why Obama's countrymen feel that Canadians and their history deserve each other.


Bonus American Superhumanity!:

On Tuesday, Bobby Jindal, thirty-seven-year-old governor of Louisiana, delivered the Republican response to Obama's address to the nation. This opportunity to rehabilitate the battle-scarred GOP with a young face and fresh voice turned into a poisoned chalice for Jindal, as he disgorged what even friendly critics have described as one of the worst speeches ever delivered by a major American political figure. Jindal's self-authored fiasco appears to have dealt blunt-force trauma to what were realistic chances of competing in the GOP's 2012 primaries and then strangled them with a length of piano wire for good measure.

That's a shame, because the speech is comic gold. The son of immigrants, Jindal relates how his parents were filled with the "immigrant's wonder at the greatness of America". He told his audience how his Indian father had seen "extreme poverty" and how the old man was awe-struck when he saw the "endless variety on [grocery store] shelves" without mentioning that his parents came to America as graduate students enrolled at Louisiana State University--rather than as illiterate peasants with but two dollars in their pockets between them--and that Baton Rouge could have shown his father plenty of poverty and hordes of people unable to afford the grocery-store cornucopia he so admired if he had dared to ever wander far enough beyond the safe, middle-class enclave he settled in.

Throughout his speech, Jindal's refrain was, literally, "Americans can do anything". Yes, perhaps the man is just a Jim Morrison enthusiast. More likely, though, he was carried away by that peculiarly American fashion of being a Christian--namely, by refusing to rely on faith in the (allegedly) All-Mighty and, cutting out the middle-man, acting as their own miracle-maker--their own God.

Hey, as long as that bloody "Buy American" clause doesn't prevent Canadian firms from bidding on the inevitable Tower of Babel and Golden Calf construction procurements, it's all good!

"Laureen! Fetch the Knee Pads, Dear: The President's Here!"

Barack Obama begins his historic "Who's Your Daddy?" world tour with a six-hour stop in Ottawa--a sojourn which has been described as far too brief but which will, in fact, give the presidential couple plenty of time to achieve their three top objectives: scoring some cheap Manolo Blahniks at the Sparks Street Holt Renfrew, stopping by the nearest ByWard gift store to grab some plastic Mounties and faux-Inuit crap for the kids, and pretending to give a shit what Stephen Harper thinks (in roughly that order).

Even as I type, both leaders are doubtless glancing over last-minute memoranda in advance of the august event. For Obama's staff, the key question is whether Harper will spit or swallow. This is a crucial issue, since it has been bi-national protocol, at least since Pearson, to ensure that someone on the President's team has a handkerchief handy in the event that seminal residue needs to be wiped off the prime minister's chin before the joint press conference. Control freak that he is, Harper has likely already signalled his intentions in this regard. Let's face it: the man's waistline bears eloquent testimony to his utter inability to resist swallowing whatever comes within cake-hole range, and I trust he'll relish the clean-living, entrepreneurial, non-socialist outpourings of Obama's fine American manhood.

As for Harper's team, there is still much to do: someone must tactfully warn Rob Anders against referring to Obama as a "kaffir"; Laureen must be reminded not to ask Michelle to hang out the laundry; Harper must be talked out of his ill-advised plan to bridge the cultural divide by wrapping his arm around the president and hustling him into a Mulroneyesque duet of "Fuck Tha Police". And time is running out.

We all know that virtually nothing of substance will occur in Ottawa tomorrow, but I thought it might be useful to describe that nothingness in more detail. Here, then, are just two of the many important things that will not be discussed during Stevie and Obama's brief encounter:


1) Cross-Border Security:

This issue comes up only when American politicians feel the need to press upon their Canadian counterparts their chronically paranoid and hysterically bogus concerns about licentious, Commie Canada sending terrorists and cannabis across the "porous" border to cause grief for law-abiding Americans.

Meanwhile, we Canadians are forced to marinate in the humiliating certainty that the people we over-pay to guard our interests are far too polite to remind their American equivalents that the U.S. is virtually the Master of Ceremonies of Canadian street-level crime--being its de facto armoury as well as the inspiration and HQ for most of our branch-plant street gangs. The result, Americans get to belly-ache smugly and self-pityingly about non-existent terrorists sneaking across the border, while we get to witness daily killings, robberies and rapes committed with American guns by "thugs" driven by specifically American notions of prestige and power. Even American network television (which seems to become sicker and more debased with every passing year) has become deadly.

Rest assured that Harper and the entire Canadian Right would reflexively blame the inherent "illiberalism" and "primitivism" of radical Islam if a bunch of Arab-Canadian youths wearing T-shirts with the silk-printed image of Muqtada Al-Sadr were to engage in a beheading rampage tomorrow. But blame America simply because Canadian kids are forming local chapters of the Crips and the Bloods, carrying Tec-9 semi-automatics, and spending their weekends doing drive-bys just like their American heroes? Perish the thought! Lighten up, dude: it's all in good fun...


2) Omar Khadr:

Forget that the charges against him are considered ludicrous by virtually every responsible authority, that his American lawyer--a soldier--cannot believe the boy was ever imprisoned in the first place, that Khadr has rotted in a prison cell for over five years for most likely not killing someone when he was fifteen years old, whilst Bernard Madoff, an adult millionaire who has killed two people so far and who has ruined thousands of other lives, enjoys "house arrest" in his luxury penthouse amid an opulence totally beyond the dreams of people who actually work for their livings (exposing American "justice" in all its repugnant vileness as it has rarely been exposed before).

Think of this only: would Harper not, at least, want to hear Obama's explanation of why an FBI agent perjured himself during his testimony at Khadr's trial? The implications here are immense: the agent, an officer of the United States government, uttered a transparent falsehood designed to smear, not Khadr, but Maher Arar--a man who was cleared of any and all charges by a Canadian Parliamentary inquiry, the findings of which were accepted without reservation by Harper and his government.

What are we to make of the fact that Harper seems incurious about the anatomy of this outrage? Does he simply assume that FBI agents and other American security officials are inveterately corrupt and routinely lie, even under oath? If so, should we see in this assumption surprising and heart-warming evidence that Harper isn't quite as gullible and stupid as he seems, and should that realisation dampen the rage we naturally feel at the thought that Harper is willing to subordinate Canadian interests to the whims of a foreign national security bureaucracy he knows to be corrupt?

Perhaps some brave journalist will bring these matters up, after the press corps flunkies exhaust their probing questions about Obama's pectorals.



Obamamania Update!

Fascinating. The Canadian Press avers that "crowds [were] relatively sparse" immediately prior to Obama's arrival in Ottawa--with police and crowd-control elements apparently outnumbering spectators--while Reuters insists that over three thousand Obamamaniacs lined the streets in order to get a glance at His Most High Obamaness.

Whom to believe? Let's put it this way: the Reuters piece says that Obama's fans had to brave "freezing temperatures and snow" while waiting for him on Parliament Hill. Chaps, I live within hearing of the Peace Tower chimes, and I've just been out: for a late February day, today's high was balmy (hovering comfortably around 1 degree Celsius), and the only snow is on the ground--and it's melting fast.

Methinks the Reuters team is getting its information from a reliable source whose vantage point is a barstool at the Heart and Crown. Clearly, the intent is to turn this event into an American lullaby: "Everything's back to normal, folks. We really, really like you again". Please.

Meet the New Boss! Same As the Old Boss: Part Two

My stomach was almost inspired to refund its breakfast when I read our really, truly black Governor General descanting pompously on the Obama affair. Her Excellency had kind words for the man who now leads the nation that sent the country of her birth into a spiral of misery and chaos unlike any it has seen in all of its lamentable history. She called Obama's story a

continual story of empowerment...[and] a major step not only for the USA, not only for the world's black population, but also for humanity.

Now, while I understand perfectly the compelling spiritual appeal of the notion that even a somewhat black guy can ride the power of a huge, wealthy and cynical political machine into the highest office of an inherently violent and messianic empire, the precise way in which this fact materially helps an HIV-infected Haitian slum-dweller or a Rwandan child who fetches his wardrobe from the local garbage dump utterly escapes me. Are we to suppose that having posters of the great man tacked up in the huts and hovels of the world's marginalised will bring them some kind of edible beatitude? For an education on how much impact these "epochal" events really have, we might ask the women of Pakistan how the election of Benazir Bhutto changed their lives.

Really, to hear the Obama-maniacs rant, you'd think the electors of a global superpower had never before bestowed office onto a member of a marginalised ethnic minority. Even the soldiers of the Roman Empire were "progressive" enough to elect a half-Thracian barbarian to the Imperial throne. The British managed to elect a Jew to their nation's highest elective office in 1868 (something that yet remains beyond America's new-found sense of multicultural enterprise) without proclaiming to the world that they were single-handedly renewing the cosmos and opening the doors of Heaven, Christ-like, for the world to pass through. Those who are truly progressive rarely feel the need loudly and chronically to remind themselves that they are. Of course, Americans would say that such great leaps forward don't count unless they perform them. Who cares what happens in backwaters like Great Britain, after all?

Then we have the constitutionally confused black Canadian mother who, after having taken her son out of school in order to let him watch the inauguration, enthused that "it's great to see that glass ceiling be broken and it says now I can tell my son, 'you can be the president, you can become the prime minister'".

Well actually, Mrs. Lambert, your son cannot ever be a U.S. president--though I'm sure he's a fine, upstanding young man--as the U.S. constitution requires that presidential candidates be born in the U.S. I'm afraid your son will have to settle for a strictly prime ministerial ambition, as dreary and degrading as that may sound.

Also, since your son is black, he lacks a further crucial Obamaesque qualification--that of being not black and having been raised in an entirely Caucasian household and benefiting from all of the resultant white European privileges such a childhood entails. The "glass ceiling" you speak of will be broken only on the eve of a Jesse Jackson presidency, or an Al Sharpton presidency, or an Allan Keyes presidency. I wouldn't hold your breath, madam.

The saddest irony here is that the very basis of people's joy is generated by the very racism Obama's victory is supposed to have negated. Americans refer to Obama as "black" only because American culture is still deeply implicated in the One Drop ideology--the age-old belief (and legal prescription) by which even the slightest bit of African ancestry totally cancels out one's European heritage.

On one level, this was a necessary legal formula during America's slavery era, as the mulatto children gotten by plantation masters upon their female slaves had to be considered saleable non-persons. Any acknowledgement of their "whiteness" would have conferred upon them a quasi-humanity that would have impaired their status as chattel goods. Thus, such products of interracial sexual relations had to be considered "fully negroid" if plantation owners were to protect their investments and avoid the moral and financial responsibilities resulting from their extra-marital dalliances with slaves.

More fundamentally, though, the One Drop rule reflected the eugenic view that any dose of African "blood" corrupted one's whiteness, rendering it effectively void. African ancestry was seen as a pollution, a bio-hazard, that destroyed the "purity" of one's Europeanness. Thus the Americans applied a white/black binary scheme to racial matters: "white" meant 100% purity, and "black" meant everything else. This belief had legal force in many American states until shortly before I was born.

Sadly, the Obama story merely reminds us of the power of that binary schema in the American imagination. Though Obama is as white as he is black, America will allow him to be only black. He has gained the most powerful elective post in the world only after being robbed of half his personhood. He is the first "black" president only because the nation that so anointed him retains an unconscious loathing for the only identity that they're willing to let him have. I can't help but find that to be more than a tad grotesque, and I expect nothing good from a nation that continues to inflict such a thing on even the best of its people nor from a man who grew into manhood under the pressure of such a warping infliction.

I wonder, though: when and where could an openly and explicitly bi-racial man attain a level of unprecedented power--get himself knighted, even--while married to a bi-racial wife? Wouldn't it just have to be recently, and in a "progressive" nation spasming in auto-fellative jouissance at the world-changing power of its enlightened populace?

Or perhaps in 1858, and in Canada? Right. Well, we've all just found yet another piece of our own history of which we were totally ignorant. But then, who needs historical reality when a current pseudo-event is so much more...cool?

Meet the New Boss! Same As the Old Boss: Part One

Every nation sets aside time for periodic bouts of collective narcissism and bumptious, obstreperous chest-thumping. In America, this is known as a “weekday”.

This weekday is special, though. This is Inauguration Day, which rivals July 4th as the day most likely to inspire American pundits to lubricate their innate chauvinism with gooey dollops of a cartoonishly whitewashed national mythology and rub themselves to self-adoring bliss. Ah indeed. ‘Tis Inauguration Eve.

We’ve seen a young, charismatic Democrat rise from humble beginnings to run a presidential campaign on a reformist ticket against a tired, dispirited and discredited Republican machine. But enough about Bill Clinton. This is Barack’s day—a day that has been described as “unprecedented” and “historic” but is, in fact, about as “unprecedented” and “historic” as my last trip to the dentist. I call it the “Redundancy of Hope”.

Really, we’ve been here before, have we not? So, a virile Democrat “outsider” roars onto the scene promising to “reform” the system, restore America’s prestige, and re-ignite the flame of “hope” in the hearts of Americans. Golly. Sounds ever so slightly like this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy and this guy. That’s a lot of reform, a lot of prestige, a lot of hope, and--in each case but one--a lot of ludicrously over-hyped and quickly disappointed nonsense.

I suppose, given the child-like need of Americans (and quite a few Canadians, it seems) to see this event as something epochal, it really is churlish and ungracious to point out the absurdity of the hysteria, but I’m going to do it anyway, all the while knowing full well that nothing I say will stay the hands of the homies high-fivin’ in the ‘hood nor dampen the ardour of middle-aged spinsters and soccer moms swooning with jungle fever at the blush-making thought of their Commander in Chief’s cute ears, chiselled abs, luscious lips, and long, um…fingers.

We haven’t had to wait for Obama’s Inauguration speech to cringe at the American need to Stalinise their history. The man of the hour started the myth-making early, during his last radio address, when he described the pending ceremony thusly: "For the forty-third time,” he said, “we will execute the peaceful transfer of power from one President to the next".

Indeed. The presidential chain of succession has never been marred by violence. Abraham Lincoln “peacefully” relieved Jefferson Davis of his duties as President of the Confederate States by annihilating his army and methodically extinguishing huge chunks of Southern culture. Lincoln then “peacefully” handed over the office to Andrew Johnson after being made indisposed by a bullet to the head. William McKinley, James Garfield, and JFK also “peacefully” sashayed into retirement by way of rude meetings with hot lead moving at rather inconvenient velocities.

Really, do Americans read books? Do American presidents read books? They certainly insist on writing the damn things, badly.

The “historical” feature of Obama’s presidency is ostensibly predicated on the fact that he is black. Sadly, Obama isn’t black. Granted, he is the first American president who would have found himself on the wrong side of the Nuremberg racial laws, but one rarely sees the press put the case quite that way. I guess “First black president” sounds better and makes Americans prouder than would something like “First president who would have been barred from civil service employment in the Third Reich”.


To be continued…