Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Archives for April 2010

Iceland blows its top

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The Montreal Gazette’s great cartoonist Aislin summed it all up by publishing a cartoon with an Icelandic text, including the ∂s. It showed a volcano spewing out ash towards the centres of western civilization with the translation of the text given below: “That’s not an exploding volcano, we’re just burning down the banks”. By encapsulating the only 2 events most of the world knows about the founding civilization of western prose literature, Aislin helped explain such scenes as the following which managed to be filmed by the CBC: A horde of teenage girls left stranded after months of bilingual training in in Paris in April because of the disaster of flight cancellations is greeted by a horde of weeping relieved parents at the Vancouver airport. The parents are apparently overcome with relief that their innocent charges have managed to survive the threat of having to stay on in Paris.. It looks like the girls are winking out secret messages that tell a different story about their awful fate of having been forced to stay an extra week in Paris in the spring. Can the parents really think the way they try to act?

An Icelandic teenager, responding to the question of my brother Doug about whether s/he thought Iceland could survive such a calamity, didn’t hesitate: “Don’t worry about us. We know how to fish and raise potatoes.” Give me that Icelandic teenager any old day.

Mrs. Clinton Goes to Ottawa

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The U.S. Foreign Minister, Mrs. Clinton, accepted an invitation to attend a meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Arctic countries -Canada, the U.S., Denmark, Norway and Russia – this week in Ottawa and, without missing a beat, managed to insult and alienate the government whose invitation she had accepted on three different points. First she chided them for not having invited two other “Arctic” countries to the meeting, Finland and Sweden, making the Canadian Foreign Ministry wonder whether the U.S. even had maps in its Foreign Affairs Office since neither Finland nor Sweden have any coastline on the Arctic Ocean. Don’t even ask why she didn’t include Iceland. Then she told Canada it should not withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in 2011, as it had said it would do some years ago. That made the Canadian Foreign Ministry wonder whether the US Foreign MInistry realized that Canada was a sovereign nation, and that it had certainly done more than its part in the “NATO” war in Afghanistan , and had no intention to let another couple of hundred Canadians be killed in yet another fruitless war in the Hindu Kush. And then she told Canada it should change its abortion policy on foreign aid, strangely forgetting her own government’s failure to include such a policy in its own, by Canadian standards, extraordinarily weak domestic health bill.

On the same day in which she thought it was appropriate to lecture a host who had been cordial enough to invite her, four border guards under her command popped out of the shadows in the shared Vermont/Quebec border town of Stanstead/Upper Derby and captured an 82 year old Quebecker. He had wandered across the invisible border to buy a hamburger in Vermont as he had for many decades and the officers held him in custody for several hours before deporting him 10 meters north, after threatening him with a permanent exile from his once-friendly neighbour. Mrs. Clinton, who had been allowed to cross the border in the other direction without assault, declined comment on why a group of burly, rude border guards had been ordered into a town, where the border runs through the middle of the shared US/Canadian library, to take captive any senior citizens they spotted on their way to MacDonald’s.