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from our favourite canuck columnist/comedien ...
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globeandmail.ca
I'm put off by putting off
By HEATHER MALLICK
Saturday, July 17, 2004 - Page F2
The Bush administration is burnishing plans to postpone the U.S. election on Nov. 2 should there be a terrorist attack on or near that date. They have no evidence whatsoever that such an attack might occur, Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge said, but it's just as well to be extra-special-super-careful.
Even an innocent, as opposed to a paranoid like me, could only conclude that the Bushling thinks Kerry Edwards, as I like to call that charming Democratic ticket that sounds like a winsome girl playing hopscotch, is going to win. If he thought Bush Cheney (which, admit it, sounds more like a deep-woods serial killer who sews his pants using your bone splinters and sinews) was going to win, he'd hardly postpone the election, would he?
But I'm sorry, it's just not done. Many things can be postponed, and we'll get to those, but not U.S. elections. They'll call you a new name, George, and it's not one you can pronounce: "Junta." The Bushling cannot announce with a straight face that in view of the fact that the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh/the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in, um, Fordville/my house in Crawford, Tex., has been flattened by al-Qaeda, we're going to postpone the election for a number of years for rebuilding. The reno guy tells me two years, which as we all know means four. So okay then?
In banana republics, when the Generalissimo or El Presidente for Life announces that the vote has been "postponed," it's a polite word for "cancelled."
The rest of George's speech would be anti-climactic, no matter how long he tells voters to boil their water (40 minutes). It would just sound like how insane dictators in Woody Allen's Bananas announce a coup d'état. From now on, all citizens will wear their underpants on the outside of their clothing. The new language is Swedish, all babies will be named Vinceremos, the new national anthem is Without You by Harry Nilsson and the flag is a mosquito net.
Iron your flag! The United States will officially become the world's most powerful laughingstock. All that splendid history, that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, Jackie's pink suit and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Miranda decision and "I have a dream," Muddy Waters and Steinem, all those marble buildings in Washington, they were built on Lego. It's tragic, yet at some level, unspeakably funny. Americans don't like being laughed at, George.
Postponement is rarely a good thing. Macbeth's "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well/It were done quickly", isn't the best example, but still, if you're absolutely dead stuck on ruining your life, might as well get it over with, is Shakespeare's point.
I'll tell you who has just learned that postponement is impossible: David Bowie. Bowie was rock's chameleon. He tried everything, fixed those rather appealing feral teeth, yanked his face smooth. But as his emergency angioplasty reveals, he now has to try being 57. He'll succeed. He has no choice.
Childbirth. It can be prevented or cancelled, but a great big pregnancy means the fetus wants out and will have its way. I just postponed my first mammogram, partly because I had been blissfully unaware that the phrase "flat as a pancake" was an operative one. I fear "postponed" will become "cancelled." They're busy people; it's not as if they'll call up and harangue me the way my dentist does. But it's not wise, is it?
I used that old "I'll wait till it's in paperback" excuse to postpone buying Gulag, Anne Applebaum's history of the Soviet work camps, but it was really a shameful moral procrastination. Guilt had gripped me -- why do Stalin and Mao trail Hitler so far back in the history stakes? -- but there were so many other things to write a metaphorical letter to the editor about.
When I read Gulag this week, I was perversely relieved to hear that the new nations that once suffered under Stalin have also postponed the emotional surgery, the building of memorials and museums as well as the decades of historical archeology that tens of millions of gulag dead require. Let's fix things first and then look back, they say.
The problem is, they haven't fixed things. The gulags live on. There are people still living in northern Siberia because 68 years ago, they made a joke about Stalin's mustache. Vladimir Putin is not bringing them to the sunny south any time soon. And it is only the mass postponement of learning about Stalin's exile of the Chechens that allows Mr. Putin to stick with a murderous tradition.
The last word on postponement goes to Lincoln. When it was suggested that he postpone the 1864 election because there was a civil war on, he responded. "We cannot have a free government without elections. If the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone, a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered us." Case closed.
hmallick@globeandmail.ca |
