Posted on 11/20/2004 2:11:49 PM PST by GMMAC
Hassan was everything MP will never be
THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
Saturday, November 20th, 2004
- CHARLES ADLER
DARN it! I missed another episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. It was the morning after the airing of the program when I saw the picture of that leather boot applied to the torso of the Bush effigy.
I assumed it was a picture from Fallujah or some other city where fundamentalists fantasize about murdering the American president.
But after a few swigs of coffee, I began seeing the fine print in the newspaper beside the picture and realized that this was just satire from what one of my radio listeners calls the Al-Jazeera of North America, the CBC.
OK, let's apply the brakes now before this turns into a drive-by media assassination. I didn't come here to bury Canada's public broadcaster, but rather to praise it.
The CBC tomorrow will be doing a stellar job in producing what is one of Canada's most-watched events, the Grey Cup. I wonder if This Hour Has 22 Minutes is planning a spoof, one that would highlight the political event of the week? May I offer my friends at CBC a suggestion?
How about a couple of guys dressed up as terrorists, running out onto the football field? Both are hooded. One is brandishing a very long sword. The other is carrying a tackling dummy with a head on it that looks exactly like Carolyn Parrish. At the midfield stripe, the two of them stop and pose for the cameras. Then one of them yells out "Allahu akbar!" and decapitates the dummy. He then treats the sliced-off head as a football, spotting it for his accomplice who now pretends he is a placekicker. He kicks the head 25 yards down the field. The two individuals then remove their hoods in order to reveal who they really are as they accept the applause from the crowd. As it turns out, the guy with the sword is the prime minister and his partner in "crime" turns out to be the real Carolyn Parrish. A little tasteless?
I cannot imagine any Canadian reading this column having a belly laugh right now. My guess is all of you have a sick feeling in your stomach, one that may be similar to that experienced by many Canadians when they saw Ms Parrish's boot on the George W. Bush doll.
Did the CBC get a mountain of protest letters for having done the stunt? Probably not. Their audience has been conditioned to accept virtually anything that demeans Americans in general. George W. Bush in particular is fair game.
People much wiser than me can answer the following questions: What has become of Canada? Why has rabid anti-Americanism conquered so many hearts? Why has it become the glue that binds so many people in the True North Strong and Free?
This week was a victory for the pro-American forces. Even though Paul Martin was hesitant to lop off the insurgent's political head until she decided to publicly bad-mouth him and his party, you have to believe that if the PM really embraced the hate-mongering, Parrish would still be sitting in the Liberal caucus.
If and when This Hour has 22 Minutes decides to parody Paul Martin's decision, they may choose to have someone playing the role of George W. Bush as a puppeteer, kind of like Geppetto, the character in Pinnochio. In this skit, Geppetto Bush would be doing his carving in his wood shop. He carves out a puppet that looks just like Paul Martin. The real Carolyn Parrish then appears and offers Bush a toonie for the Paul Martin puppet. She then removes a lighter from her purse and sets Mr. Martin's shorts on fire. Immature you say? A two-buck yuk? You bet.
If Carolyn Parrish truly wanted to fight George Bush's policies and wasn't interested exclusively in cheap shots and photo-ops, she would have gone to Iraq to help the victims of the current conflict. She would have emulated the Care International worker who wound up in the hands of the terrorists.
This column should have been about the great contribution to humanity offered by the late Margaret Hassan. She was everything that Carolyn Parrish will never be. But then, Hassan never did get her 15 minutes of fame on This Hour has 22 Minutes.
Charles Adler is heard weekday mornings from 9 a.m. until noon on CJOB's Adler on line. Contact him at cadler@cjob.com
© 2004 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.
It took him a rather long ramble to get to the above point....
toonie = two dollar Canadian coin. (By analogy to one dollar coin, "Loonie", because it depicts a loon on the reverse side.)
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