45° 25' North; 75° 42' West
I wonder.
When George W. Bush takes a break from playing the Marlboro Man, does he like to pretend he's a virile young stud like Matt Damon in one of those blow-'em-up-real-good-until-you're-the-last-man-standing Jason Bourne flicks.
Either way, a generation from now I can see how the 'my head is an empy suitcase' acting style of Mr. Damon would be just about perfect for the lead in a big budget schlockbuster called "The Bush Supremacy".
And the rest of the cast?
Well, a balding, sneering Paul Giamatti would be great as Dick Cheney, if only because we have not yet had a chance to see him play true evil....Faux evil, in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, would be an aging and constantly constipated Mike Myers....Whitney Houston, still crack/stairmaster-addict skinny fitted with ragged dental implants would be a perfect Condi Rice... Arnold Schwarzennegar would play himself, although by then he will have had a total body implant....And the real villain of the piece? Well, that would be Freddy Prinz Jr., who would simultaneously play Alberto Gonzales and his alter ego, Deep Throat II.
Now, this flick could go two very different ways.
If Jerry Bruckheimer makes it Rene Zellweger will be cast as Laura Bush and the entire world will be under the thumb of the morally superior Fourth Reich, a place where media-hypeable scientific breakthroughs of irreproducible insignificance will be made, sans stem cells, by Jenna Bush (Britney Spears) and Paris Hilton (the Olson Twins) after they spend, like, at least half-an-hour in the lab between visits to the Viper Club and abstinence orgies at the Scaife Institute's no host bar.
On the other hand, if the last remaining Weinstein brother gives the reins to Hal Hartley, Parker Posey will be Lady McLaura and we will get to see mankind Rise from the Rubble of the Rampaging Right, led by the reformed stay-puff marshmallow man, Karl Rove (Jason Alexander), and the no-longer-profane, dyed-in-the-wool-again atheist Chuckie Colson (Drew Carey).
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While Mr. Bush's eyes are not Irish I was reminded once again of Brian Mulroney earlier this week during a flight out of Vancouver on an aging Airbus-300.
Those are the smaller ones, the ones that were designed to grab market share from the Boeing 737 at a 4:1 cost multiple.
Which is all well and good if you are Lyin' Brian or Karl-Heinz Schreiber.
But it positively stinks if you're sitting in a window seat and you can't see the bloody movie over the bulkheads without straining your neck and spilling your drink on the person sitting next to you.
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I flew to Ottawa on Sunday night with Ujjal Dosanjh.
And let me tell you, the last non-stop to the Nation's capital on a Sunday is a sour-eyed tomb.
Until, that is, we climbed through 10,000 feet somewhere over Chilliwack and the fasten-seatbelt sign was estinguished with a ping.
Then, suddenly, 200 laptops chimed alive and a thousand monkey fingers commenced pounding out the bureaucratic mushwords that would be chased, non-stop by the policy wonks, the hucksters, and the lobbyists until Friday when everybody climbs back into the cigar tube to fly home again, drunk, for a weekend away from the bunker.
Which is what the entire town of Ottawa is. And even more so, the town across the river, Hull Quebec
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After touchdown, the cab ride downtown was a wild one with an Ethiopian named Joseph who drove like a banshee and regaled me with non-stop tales of politio-indelico all the way to the Marriott on Kent St.
The 'Marriot on K' is a bi-annual torture chamber for people like me.
Because what takes place there is kind of like a science-geek version of the Fight Club. They fly us in from all over the country; then they lock us in the basement and force us to beat the crap out of each other for two days straight (aka, peer-review). Ultimately, the last 25% left standing get to keep their federal funding until we go at it all over again six months later.
All of which doesn't leave much time for sightseeing.
I did, however, manage to sneak away for half an hour on Monday to make the three block trek up to Parliament Hill so that I could check out the preparations for the arrival of King Dubya.
What I found was pretty damn Canadian, and it made me feel proud in a quaint, Hoser kind of way.
First off, the place was wide open. There were protest groups quietly erecting signs on the lawn and tourists were wandering freely over the grounds. Of course, there were some security barriers, but mostly they were those three foot high, lightweight aluminum gate/fences designed to keep the tour buses and lookie-loo's moving in the right direction.
Down the street and around the corner it was a very different story at the American Embassy where the security precautions, concrete buttresses, razor-wire, spiked sidewalks and black-clad guys with long sticks(?) on the roof-tops made the entire block look like a gigantic, heavy metal chastity belt on steroids.
Safe streets, indeed.
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Tuesday, Dubya Day, arrived cold and windswept.
The 'W' Caravan rolled into Ottawa's downtown core just before lunch.
By the time I got outside at about 4:30pm there was nothing to be found but a few dozen happy protesters who, while they had been unable to bear witness to the closed-captioned meeting of the Emperor and Our Paul, at least they had done their best.
Which was a heck of a lot more than the tens of thousands that stayed home to watch it all on TV, ostensibly because they had been bombarded for six days straight about the viscious traffic snarls and security checks that would have surely befallen them if they had ventured downtown.
Which got me to thinking.....what would it take to get North Americans out in the streets in numbers that even halfway approached what is going on in the Ukraine right now.
Probably nothing political, but if the TV networks went down because of a strike or a 'terrorist' attack for more than, say, half a day, that just might make the nut.
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On the flight home I passed by smilin' Sammy Sullivan in first class on my way to the back with the hoi-polloi where I belonged.
And after settling into my seat, I peered out the window into the bright white light generated by the huge banks of floodlights shining on a paleblue 747 sitting bloated like a whale on the tarmac.
It was AirForce One and the colour of the thing made me chuckle.
Girly-man hues, I thought.
But after that I was done, brain-fried and exhausted after throwing and taking all those hypothesis-slaying haymakers from the science-geeks for the previous 48 hours.
In fact, I was so tired that when the movie came on I didn't even bother to don the ear pullers or crane my neck to watch.
After all, I had no interest in supporting Matt Damon in his quest to kill scores of innocents just so he could take revenge on the few that had ticked him off in "The Bourne Supremacy."
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