How should Canadians behave when Bush II arrives in Ottawa on Tuesday?
One is torn between decency and realism, which is by chance the question that always arises in December in one’s own life.
Should we send greeting cards to the people who never send us cards back?
I say yes, make the humane seasonal adjustment for the recipient’s chaotic mind/personal life. Husband says no, is sick of toting the annual deadweight of my friends from high school and his Aussie pals, who may have died of drink years ago.
Verdict: We’ll send them. It’s only decent.
Given the recent discovery that the offspring are not just lactose-intolerant but lactose-hostile (and so allergic to wheat that they can eat only filthy-sounding “spelt” bread), do I buy $100 worth of recipe books with “gluten-free” in the title and try to make Christmas cookies out of what looks like powdered vinyl LPs?
I say yes, cookies are all I have to offer as a stepmother. Husband says no, kids didn’t keel over when they were 6 and I baked those sugar cookies I let them decorate themselves, which is why they all read “fat bum” in purple icing. Husband is Grinch, I say, wet blanket, Mr. Damp Duvet. The kids like the idea of my cookies more than the blackened discs themselves.
Verdict: Yes to spelt. It’s only realistic.
Decency v. realism. The decent thing to do with U.S. President George W. Bush is, as political commentator Thomas Walkom has suggested, to charge the man with war crimes the minute he puts a boot on our soil. Violation of Nuremberg laws and UN rules, use of torture, planned civilian catastrophes, where to start with his shameless evil is the real problem.
But Canadians won’t be decent. We’ll be realistic. We are not going to arrest him or even photograph his irises as he crosses the border. Our PM is going to put on that eternal jovial look that works only for men in his weight class, say “How ya doing, George?” and hand over the store.
And we won’t get anything in exchange, just as I won’t get any cards from my deadbeat friends and no one will eat my Goth biscuits.
If Paul Martin agrees to a) spend a billion on militarizing space and revving up the nuclear-arms race b) send our soldiers to Iraq or c) sell our water (we’ve already signed over our oil reserves), just so Mr. Bush will buy our cows, there will be an election very soon and Mr. Martin will be spelt. For he’s a weak man, who lashed out only when that funny, smart MP Carolyn Parrish told the truth. She said she didn’t much like him.
He talked like a high-school principal about her disrespectfulness, but he had “rejected schoolboy” all over his face. Deputy PM Anne McLellan, showing how women love to humiliate women, said her mother had raised her to always be nice to visitors, unlike Carolyn Parrish’s mom, one assumes. Hey, leave Ms. Parrish’s mother out of this.
As Mr. Martin bullied Ms. Parrish, so will the President bully him. Lately, Republicans are beginning to look to me like a cult: insular, paranoid about foreigners, demanding total belief from followers. The only question is how precisely the Bush cult, one of the most violent on Earth led by a self-declared “war president,” will try to humiliate us. One possible way will be subtle.
Right now, Mr. Bush is afraid to address the House of Commons in case he is heckled. Insecure men cannot tolerate mockery. But Mr. Martin has extracted promises from all parties that no insults, desk-banging or booing will take place. We will be silenced. As it turns out, Mr. Bush won’t chance it. Our humiliation is complete.
I’m always drawn to the details of things. Women, who are frequently humiliated, learn how to analyze little slights. There’s a mid-Atlantic writerly tempest going on now, in which a British playwright plagiarized the work of an American shrink named Dorothy Lewis as well as a New Yorker article on her “scientific” work. Dr. Lewis studies serial killers. One scene in the play came from her conversations with one of the worst serial killers America has known. Ted Bundy kissed Dr. Lewis; she kissed him back.
The playwright is stricken, Dr. Lewis is puffed with self-righteous fury, the New Yorker writer is happy because he gets to write about it. I read his article, but I’m sure I was not the only one with this reaction: You? kissed? Ted? Bundy? Who is said to have killed 100 young women and girls? You let the mouth whose tooth prints were taken from the buttock of a sodomized, strangled Florida university student touch your face?
And you’re complaining that you were plagiarized?
There are degrees of moral corruption. You can, as Ms. McLellan and her mother suggest, be nice to your visitors, even if they are responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians.
But are you seriously going to complain if some decent Canadian MP boos him or calls him a killer?
Dr. Lewis “justifies” herself by saying Ted Bundy kissed her first. Mr. Martin will justify his muzzling the elected representatives of our nation by saying, “It’s only polite.” Ms. McLellan will invoke her mother. And Canadians may well say it would be rude to join the world in showing Mr. Bush what we think of him, while I say that the world expects nothing less.
But it’s that slender electrified wire between decency and practicality. I and the Liberal leadership have a different notion of what is decent.
At a Noam Chomsky lecture this week, hundreds of University of Toronto students were cheerfully planning their Bush protests, and they’re off to Ottawa and Halifax. I was so proud of these young Canadians honouring their citizens-of-the-world Trudeauite legacy.
Now that’s decency.