By now, everyone's seen the famous “Jesusland” map, wherein North America is divided in two, with the southern half designated as its own private Galilee. I have a number of objections to rearranging the continent this way. First of all, we lose almost all the great college football in exchange for a suicidal professional hockey league. Second, we lose the birthplace of the blues and the cradle of jazz and gain only the homeland of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and four-fifths of The Band, which is a slightly more even trade than the one that costs us the Iron Bowl between Auburn and Alabama and leaves us only with Oilers-Flames, but I still think we come up short on the deal.
Which is why I was heartened to learn on Wednesday last that George W. Bush, the newly elected president of the United States of America, will be paying his first visit to Canada later this month. Now, you may find it odd that a president who could fly halfway around the world to pose for a photo op with a fake turkey has managed to be in office for four years without ever making the short trip to Ottawa, but you should never underestimate what finally winning an election -- if only by a little bit more than a field goal -- can do to a fella. Imbues him with all sorts of courage that he -- and the officials of the Texas Air National Guard -- never thought he had. Talk about your bold new ventures. Let's rejigger the social contract, and go off elsewhere to war, and inconvenience the caribou, and improve the pay grades of our most manifestly incompetent “yes” people, and turn the federal judiciary into the Clan Of The Cave Bear.
And, on top of all that, let's send The Man to Canada!
I mean, this is some kind of a 51 percent that we're talking about here.
(I have encouraged my children to take instruction from their president. I have told them to inform various educators that, henceforth, a 51 percent on any examination will be considered sufficient to have my daughter convert her middle school into a shrine to Orlando Bloom, and that a grade of 51 on his next research paper will be considered sufficient for my youngest son to turn every building at Brandeis University into a video arcade. I, myself, plan to pay the cable company 51 cents on the dollar this month while simultaneously demanding that they show nothing but the 2004 American League Championship Series and the entire oeuvre of Shannon Tweed. I am the man who put the man in mandate!)
Let us not minimize the president's fortitude here. If the past election proved anything, we are told, is that saying icky things about the president -- and the president's policies, and the president's war, and the president's ongoing game of The Monk And The Milkmaid with his new secretary of state (OK, I made that one up) -- is no substitute for having a positive, plainspoken message about where you're taking the country. We wanted a man secure in his choice of handbasket, by God.
Anyway, here he is, in his very first month as an elected president, and one of the first things he does is go off to a country where, back in 2002, one of the prime minister's aides called him a "moron." (Canadian morons, of whom there are several, and some of whom own NHL franchises, were quick to register offense.) Luckily, at the time, Crossfire's Robert Novak leaped to the defense of the president's honor, asking of the Canadian premier, "Now, who's the moron?" Rhetorically, of course, in Novak's case, this is rather akin to hurling oneself on a grenade.
Remember, this whole flapdoodle happened before the president and most of his new foreign-policy team launched their excellent adventure. The war in Iraq was little more than a twinkle in Richard Perle's third eye at that point. Now, having embarked on it, the president is planning to go to a country where, given how things have gone over there in Babylon, more people than just one obstreperous flack might share the earlier opinion, and I doubt even Novak can suck up fast enough to protect the president from the mumbled scorn of an entire nation.
I recall vividly the moment when Richard Nixon got on an airplane and went to China. I remember seeing the photos of him toasting with Chou En-Lai while "Dr." Henry Kissinger looked lovingly out onto an actual dictatorship. (I also remember thinking, while Chou and Dick were boozing it up like old golf partners, that, somewhere, Alger Hiss must have been drinking even more heavily.) I recall what a world-shaping event it was said to be, although, as Lewis Lapham once put it, the whole affair amounted to "recognizing" the existence of the Pacific Ocean.
What are those moments compared with the bold move of sending our current president north? OK, so China was a fanatical military power with more than 700 million people at its disposal. But did any Chinese bureaucrat ever call Nixon a nasty name? Believe me, I have been to the dangerous parts of Canada. I have been to Churchill, in Manitoba, where polar bears wander the streets and swim in the river. I have been to a roadhouse in Alberta. I have watched Chris (Knuckles) Nilan skate his wing against the Bruins at the old Forum. I have walked on the wild side up there, and now the president is boldly bringing his agenda to this strange and wonderful place. I think we should wish him Godspeed.
Or whatever 51 percent of that is.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
