Uncle Fun and Sparky Land

 

Translator’s Note: The management of this space has appealed to my better nature—and my love of comprehensible English—to get me to convert Sparky’s thoughts into something approaching sense. As always, I take responsibility only for the spelling and grammar of what follows, not for the content…unless I agree with it, which in this case I do. So there. –Moose

(P.S. The lab coat I’m wearing in the illustration is a loaner from Gullible Girl, the inexplicably trusting boon companion and assistant of Science Boy. The two of us have to compare notes someday, or start a support group, or something. Anyway, on to Sparky’s latest contribution to civic discourse…) 

     If you live in Canada (and who doesn’t, other than 99 ½ % of the world’s population), or follow Canadian politics (and who doesn’t, except for all those people I just mentioned, and then some), you’ve already heard more than enough about the Senate expense scandal. If you’re like me (even though I bet you’re not), you wish they’d just jump to the scene where all the suspects are gathered in one room, someone turns off the lights, a few shots ring out, and all that’s left is a pile of bodies for the cleaning lady to sort through on garbage day. All the questions about who knew what and what it’s all connected to aren’t getting anything like answers yet, so I thought I’d toss in a question of my own.

HOW EFFING HARD IS IT TO KNOW IF YOU’VE BROKEN A RULE????

     I’m not talking about impossible stuff, like the rules on parking signs. I mean, would there actually be a rule or regulation beyond the brainpower of someone who spent most of their adult life figuring things out for a living? Someone like, say, an ex-journalist? Or, in this case, two ex-journalists? Ignorance of the law is exactly the excuse that Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin have been trying to claim…along with a couple of houses that nesting squirrels have probably lived in more than they have, and enough airfare to fly out, find Amelia Earhart, bring her back, then take her out and get her lost again.

     Okay then, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. The rules of ethics for the Canadian Senate are so complex that even a longtime political correspondent for a national TV network can’t begin to fathom them. That’d be fine in my book, if it weren’t for three other senators saying that these rules aren’t difficult at all to follow. One’s Larry Smith, who spent nine years in Canadian professional football as a running back; another is Nancy Greene Raine, an Olympic champion downhill skier; the third is Jacques Demers, a Stanley Cup-winning hockey coach and former minor professional hockey player. Besides being senators, these three have one very important thing in common: they’ve all sustained blows to the head.

     It’s just the law of averages—you don’t reach a high level of competition in football, downhill ski racing, or hockey without having your cranium introduced to terra firma, an opponent, or anything else that isn’t keen on making the introduction politely. The occasional whomp on the melon just goes with the territory. And since all three plied their sporting trades (I stole that phrase from Uncle Fun) way back before they checked hay fever sufferers for concussions every time they sneezed, it’s kind of likely that they all picked up some form of undiagnosed cerebral injury. Who knows how long they’ve been wandering around with secret bruises on their brains?

     My point is this: three people with bruised brains find some pretty basic rules about right and wrong easy to understand. On top of slightly mangled grey matter, one of them—Jacques Demers—is, by his own admission, what you might call a latecomer to literacy. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that he’s yet to Dick-and-Jane his way up to the finer points of ethical behaviour as outlined by Plato or Immanuel Kant—or even to the level of reading material that’s on Mike Duffy’s or Pamela Wallin’s bookshelves.   

     So, what’s going on here? Why couldn’t Duffy and Wallin grasp something that was child’s play for Larry Smith, Nancy Greene Raine, and Jacques Demers? It has to be the blows to the head. They must knock something into you—or knock something out…like the notion that you can get away with lying forever, if you practice hard enough.

     So, here’s my solution: everybody involved in politics in Canada needs a good hard hit in the head. Not just elected officials, appointed ones, too—after all, Canada is the country where a judge ruled that plagiarism is okay, as long as a judge does it. Let’s clobber 'em all—lobbyists…political advisors…pollsters….chiefs of staff…the Governor General. Grandfather that last one so that Michaëlle Jean gets a wrecking ball right upside the orbitals for letting Parliament be prorogued on flimsy pretenses not once, but twice. Better yet, make it two wrecking balls, flailing around like that clacky toy Uncle Fun keeps telling me to stop playing with while he’s trying to concentrate on the tumblers of a combination lock.

     And, as long as I’m talking about Parliament, the heck with Question Period. Just let the pages loose on the government and opposition benches like the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, klonking every noggin they run past. Give them all a great big skull-crunching hit in the head, I say—and do it now. No special favours. No exemptions. No exceptions. Start with the head that’s at the head of the entire mess. Clamp Stephen Harper’s temples in a vise, and give him a hit in his little pin head for every pinheaded stunt he’s ever pulled to make the government the clown show it’s turned into while he’s been ringmaster.

     Matter of fact, you could probably stop there, and things’d turn out alright.

Sparky