The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
There are moments in time, captured by photographs, that remain forever with us Ñ swallowing a frozen picture we will never forget. One is that wire photo of the terrified naked little girl (now a housewife in Toronto) fleeing from a napalm bomb in Vietnam. Another is the unforgettable shot of little JFK Jr., in his short pants, saluting as his dead father as he went past on Pennsylvania Avenue in a coffin followed by a riderless horse with the boots turned backwards. Not to put too much on history, but one suspects the death of the Liberal party in 2004 will be remembered most by the front-page picture of a apparently-demented John McCallum trying to thrust a protest letter into the mouth of one Stephen Harper. Harper, the future prime minister, to his credit, swatted off the intruder as someone would treat an errant mosquito. It was the most embarrassing moment of a Liberal government that is in high panic, sending out cabinet ministers to do the heckling jobs that previously were rented out to unemployed university students. This is the McCallum Ñ while the PMO sent out a female cabinet minister to do the same kamikaze attack Ñ who as Defence Minister of our benighted government sent out a dispatch revealing that they didn't know the difference between the 'Vichy' government Ñ Hitler's quasi-government in conquered France Ñ from 'Vimy' Ridge, where Canada came to be a proud nation by its supreme sacrifice in a war that McCallum apparently had never heard of. A very smart guy, esteemed at McGill University, a respected Royal Bank economist, he was somehow Ñ who was thinking! Ñ made the Defence Minister and has now been shifted sideways into Veteran Affairs Minister (where, apparently, someone will explain to him the spelling between Vichy and Vimy.) See 'Part' P.# Con't from P.# Poor McCallum (who would accept an assignment that made him look like a fool?) was already famous for being denied a short flight on Air Canada because he was, um, breathing too heavily into the security Geiger-counter. He is, alas, the perfect example of the Peter Principle (which as a matter of fact invented by my high school wordwork teacher, Dr. Laurence Peter) which explains that in any large organization everyone is promoted to one level ahead of their competence. Which also explains our present prime minister. It is all part of the puzzlement of this Martin government, the leader of which has never been elected by anyone. The leader of a shipping empire, which pays its taxes in Liberia, has for some strange reason based his electorate campaign in running against his own party. Declaring that he is "Mad as Hell" about the sponsorship scandal in Quebec. While guarding our money as finance minister for nine years Ñ and the senior minister in Quebec Ñ he didn't know anything about the scam. He's Pinnochio, which is the reason he's going down the drain. He has succeeded in making the (wisely) quiet Jean Chretien appear to the public as a clever and sympathetic figure. The chap who is suffering most about the Quebec sponsorship scam is now Ñ not Chretien Ñ but Martin. And Harper is illustrating the oldest wisdom in politics: when your opponent is committing suicide, just stand aside and let him do it. Silence is golden. X x x AND ANOTHER THING It is great to honour a fine man, but the hagiography on Ronald Reagan Ñ Time and Newsweek running the very same cover photo of him Ñ is a bit much. He was a surprisingly under-rated figure, tis true, but he did not, as now claimed, kill Communism all on his own. (One of the now off-quoted stories is that as a summer high school life guard he saved 77 people from drowning. Who was counting?) History will record that Reagan's "Mister Gorbachev, tear down that wall!"had a little help. Number one was a Polish pope who resided in Rome. When he went back to his homeland and supported Lech Walesa in starting a shipyard union in Gdansk, that was the first chink in the downfall of Moscow's rule. The second was the march of electronics. When the satellites came to roam the heavens, and the Internet was invented, all those behind the Iron Curtain came to see what they were missing. With such cornball icons as Dallas, and even Johnny Carson Ñ not to mention Letterman Ñ coming available in TV sets the bored and repressed viewers under Moscow's reign grew restless and realized there was a world out there they had never imagined. Reagan was a symbol. But a Pole in Rome and the magic of TV were as important as he was.
