The Summer the Morons Took Over Town

Toronto native Glenn Gould, who was both a grand musician and, irrefutably, an all-out whack-job, used to say that the area of his home town where he felt most at home was Don Mills, and that comment was taken by many as proof of his eccentricity. He explained that he felt completely at peace driving alone in his automobile, amid the anonymity and featurelessness, the order and hollowness of the place, which was developed at a post-war planned community. My public school geography textbooks, and possibly yours, contained lithographed photos of the Don Mills Center, an outdoor shopping mall that epitomized the Atomic Age. The soundtrack to that low-slung, artfully treed architectural vision was Gould massaging the ivories, letting loose the Goldberg Variations.

Don Mills: A mid-century urban paradise

By the time I scored a big-time publishing job and went to work in Don Mills, in the 1980s, the Center had been enclosed, like most of its counterparts among suburban retailing complexes. A couple of parts of the original plaza that had not been covered became satellites of the indoor mall, such as the government-run liquor store, and the Dominion supermarket. Further outposts had been opened, including the pizza stand where our company’s hard-charging CEO sometimes could be observed scoring his bag of cocaine after a long day of boardroom strategizing. Safe and warm inside the mall, there was a second-story bar that I happened to like. It was patterned after the standard-issue airport cocktail lounges of 15 years earlier. The fellows who brought you beer and peanuts wore old-timey cocktail-waiter jackets, and the sound system offered up Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, during this period when Cyndi Lauper reigned on the airwaves.

As will happen over time, the mall became rundown and seedy. The anchor tenant, an Eaton’s department store, famously closed and spiralled downmarket as an ever-grubbier succession of flea markets took over the space. The swank bar was replaced by an unswank fitness club. The landlord had seen these signs occurring in other retail centers, and went back to the drawing board. Boom went the wrecking balls.

The reborn Don Mills Center opened late this Spring, returned to its Modernist roots as an outdoor plaza. The new old center opened to generally good reviews, if not throngs of customers dying to spend their money on designer gee-gaws.

Post-modern Don Mills: Back to the nearly stench-free future

I wandered over yesterday, and liked what I saw. It`s little different from those new post-modern retail recreations of small-town Main Street that are popping up all over the continent. It reminded me a little of Kierland Commons, in the Phoenix suburbs — but right now that isn’t the main selling point.

First and foremost, the center is just about the only place in Toronto that doesn’t currently carry an offensive stench, or reward the sightseer with vistas of refuse, stemming from the disruption of garbage-collection services by unionized workers. The strike is now into its second month, and there is no end in sight.

The mayor of Toronto, a moron co-incidentally named Miller, but not Don Miller, went on CNN the other week to deny that his practice of dumping household waste in public parks and gardens detracts in any way from the city’s appeal as a tourist destination this summer. Reaching out to the blue-collar U.S. tourists who used to pack picnic hampers and sit in minivans for a couple of hours to enjoy Toronto’s theme parks, baseball stadium and shopping drags, he urged viewers to come see our new opera house, with its ‘world class’ acoustics — like it would occur to Mr. and Mrs. Hamtramck that it’s time to put on their Tigers caps, and visit Toronto to catch the fat broad warbling through Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. Lest you think this mayoral nincompoop has lost his judgment as a stress-induced consequence of prolonged negotiations with intransigent unions, be assured that he was widely regarded as an idiot long before any of this unpleasantness started.

Looks appealing, certainly, but will it pass the smell-test?

There’s a tourist attraction not far from my house that is a popular spot for summer weddings. It faces the Humber River and adjacent parkland and jogging trails. The park, named for the explorer Etienne Brule, is a wonderful garden that has been converted into a temporary garbage dump for the duration of the strike. You should see how unhappy the wedding parties seem, when the stink begins to waft over. A couple of dozen strikers hang around all day, standing by an oil-drum fire, providing added atmosphere by haranguing area residents who wish to dump their garbage. One of the elements key to their dispute is that the workers felt entitled to bank their unused ‘sick days’ and accumulate them to apply toward early retirement. I heard a proponent of this fanciful  notion on the radio, explaining that it was only fair, because in the private sector, employees receive big bonuses just for showing up for work on time. Evidently, this demand has been dropped, but the two sides remain far apart.

God, we used to be smug in Toronto. Back when Peter Ustinov wittily described the city as ‘New York run by the Swiss,’ we bragged about our litter-free streets, our inspiring parks, our reliable public transportation, our upright coppers, our dependable civic government.

I’m no chauvinist, but I remember urging friends from New York to try out the graffiti-free subway system, as a novel experience. We were so insufferably superior, in yapping about our egalitarian streets, schools, and systems.

Now, just look at the place. Every visitor who had to listen to any Torontocentric creep condescendingly explain about how we don’t have the private gated residential communities you-all have in the states must be laughing like Ricky Ricardo. If I had out-of-towners coming in this summer, I’d be embarrassed to have them set foot in most parts of this trashy burg. Instead, I’d run them over to the Don Mills Center, for an antiseptic, hollow,  pleasant, stench-free evening of drinks, dinner, and bookstore-browsing.  ”This,” I would tell them, “this is what things used to be like here, before that half-wit Miller and those brain-damaged unions ruined the city forever.”

The Taliban, Cheney, and humankind’s frenzied race to the bottom

Yesterday, a man named Nigel Wrench, who is the BBC’s evening newsreader, said this, following a reporter’s item about the Pakistani Taliban’s habit of kidnapping children for deployment as suicide-bombers: “Children as lethal weapons. Humanity reaches a new low.”

Is he live, or merely a creation of Chester Gould?

Impossible to argue. That’s why we in the western world don’t think twice about assigning people the task of keeping us safe from those who would turn children into exploding devices and send them out into crowds, to be detonated.

What we could not have imagined, and never factored in, as part of this bargain, was Dick Cheney. And yet, here he is, insistently making his case that because our enemies are monstrous, it behooves us to engage them on their terms, matching tit for tat.

 

Chester, the occasional molestor of rationality

When I say that ”we” couldn’t imagine the Cheney chain of logic, I must exclude Chester Gould. The creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, who late in his life became something of a rabid right-wing lunatic, sketched out an invented character, Diet Smith, who was an unapologetic weapons merchant and a special pal of police departments everywhere. Mr. Smith created a death-ray that instantly vaporized miscreants, and he demonstrated its effective use to his cop buddies. “Where’d the bad guys go?” Detective Tracy asked the arms salesman, who replied, “You’re breathing them.” The cartoonist, Mr. Gould, specialized in drawings of middle-aged white men with heads tilted back and teeth exposed, roaring with laughter, and here he employed just such a panel, framed with the credo, “Violence is golden… when it’s used to put down evil.”

 

Capitalist Smith (with moustache) and his tool, Det. Tracy

 

 

I recall this comic strip appeared in the early 1970s. As a kid reading this stuff, it struck me as more than a little silly, kind of gross, and out of step with the times. Regardless, it was something out of the funny papers, and not to be taken seriously.

 

Gould's gang: Paving the way for a character named 'Chainy'

Flash forward 35 years, and you have a serious-looking fellow who looks like he was rendered in the stylized manner of artist Gould, drawn as a balding lard-tub with curled lip, connoting malevolence, and this cartoonish fellow is out there reviving the Diet Smith dialogs. Mr. Gould, who never failed to find a way to clamber over the top, would have insisted on making his fictive character, his own private take on Dick Cheney, into something more memorable than merely another sadistic nut. (That would be in keeping with his inventions of characters with eccentric personas such as ‘Half and Half,’ ‘Mumbles,’ and ‘Pruneface.’) So, continuing this string of uncanny depictions, Mr. Gould likely would have made his imaginary Mr. Cheney as ‘Chainy,’ a former high-ranking elected official, — say, a retired vice-president of the United States — turned invalid, who bitterly criss-crosses the planet in a personal rocket-propelled wheelchair, flailing out with a rusty motorcycle chain while mumbling his tough-guy philosophy. Mr. Gould might have been wrong about the rocket-chair, possibly, but, otherwise he’s mapped out this comic-strip Chainy right down to the 1930s-vintage baggy serge suiting. “Violence is golden… when it’s used to put down evil.”

 

Today’s paper contains the stunning claim that US soldiers raped suspected enemy combatants during interrogations. That’s the allegation, and as much as you don’t want to believe it, you wait for Dick Cheney to fly overhead in his rocket-chair and shriek, “So what? Look what they did during 9/11!” He, and the proponents of what they call “enhanced interrogation methods,” because people seem to get squeamish around words such as “torture,” will deny that rape occurred, and are bound to describe it instead as “assault with a friendly weapon,” appropriating Lee Marvin’s line from “Cat Ballou.”

However, even in the sometimes morally ambiguous world of Chester Gould (which, it occurs to me, really should be the name of a theme park, somewhere), it should be hard to put a virtuous spin on the practice of raping prisoners. The stark realities of current politics require us to take sides, and we’re with the side whose aim is to prevent occurrences such as innocent children being strapped to incendiary devices. That doesn’t mean we’d ever wish to hear some angry old jackass encouraging the institutionalized policy of abusing prisoners, either theirs or ours. That’s the kind of argument that was born of the comics page, and, for the well-being of our race, for the good of humankind, it really does need to stay there.

Cryin’ Brian, quit your sobbing. It’s Canada, and no one cares what you’ve done

Ask any university historian (except the one living in my house; she’s busy with other things) and they’ll tell you that Canada was created in the mid-1800s as an institutionalized kleptocracy, with the aim of enabling a handful of privileged property owners, known as the Family Compact, to steal openly without having to fret about competition from the speedier, more clever, more ambitious upper-crust thieves who plied their trade in the United States. The Brits and some Irish were regularly allowed to come and run their small scams in parts of Canada, because they had such nice manners and lovely accents, and, besides, they could be related to cousin Wilfrid from Cirencester. On the other hand, the Americans, self-made banking and utilities robber barons from Troy, N.Y., and cellulose shirt-collar oligarchs from Schaumberg, Ill., were unacceptably flashy and vulgar, as well as being far more adept gonifs, to boot. The Family Compact saw to it that the sharp-eyed Americans were slowed down, and preferably turned back at the border. After all, that’s why there is a border.

That’s our homeland, and the name of the place is we like it like that. Many nations have been born of grander visions than the pursuit of untrammeled thievery, but have amounted to far less. Canada, except for a few brilliant hours during some 20th century wars, and an artist or two I could mention, has been entirely about a vague form of social tolerance, a toque-wearing egalitarianism for the rest of us, and shared dedication to the high purpose of letting the corporations and the governing classes get on with what they are compelled to do; i.e., steal.

Here is how the system is structured: Politicians appoint their law school chums, and some compliant newcomers, to the judiciary. When, as will happen, the politician’s manicure is discovered deep in the cash-register till, or photographed massaging the backside of the babysitter, who happens to be the industrialist’s underage daughter, it’s expected that the magistrate will deliver a stern rebuke to the offender, for letting down the side, and the miscreant’s punishment is that he has been admonished by Mister Justice Schoolpal. No further purpose would be served by meting out additional disgrace upon someone of the politician’s probity and high public regard; having his reputation questioned is already excessive recompense.

In Canada, there are precise criteria that serve as sentencing guidelines, when a member of the governing class, or one of their retainers, should somehow be found guilty of having committed a crime. If the wife should be zotzed by a hired hit-man, she has to die at the scene before it is considered a jailable offense. If the wife is simply maimed, or confined to a wheelchair, or if she expires in an ambulance, the husband gets off. That is the legal precedent.

Lesser infractions are routinely ignored. These include matters involving narcotics on a small scale, or misunderstandings over land dealings, or the petty theft of a few million from the treasury, or six-figure bribes secretly made to and accepted by public officials.

This leads us, not necessarily directly, to the Rt. Hon. Martin Brian Mulroney, the 18th Prime Minister of Canada, known popularly during his term of office as Lyin’ Brian, and henceforth, following his tearful appearance before an investigation yesterday, known as Cryin’ Brian. (Even the Toronto Sun, which buried the news of the Mulroney testimony on page 26 of today’s edition, picked up the rhyming sobriquet. Mr. Mulroney currently serves as chairman of Quebecor World, a company affiliated with the Sun’s parent organization.) 

Mr. Mulroney seems to have been caught up in an unseemly business involving an ex-friend representing some offshore business interests, who, in friendly fashion, apparently handed over to the Prime Minister an envelope stuffed with a large sum of money. Mr. Mulroney has been scrutinized regarding this matter previously, and those who previously accused him of wrongdoing failed to make their case. His defence at the time was, “What envelope? What money?” He was later presented by the government of the day with an apology and a packet of travelers’ cheques amounting to $2.1 million, as a token of compensation for having endured some discomfort.

 

BM the ex-PM: Smoke gets in his eyes

Now he’s back before another panel, the Oliphant Commission, and his version of events has been revised. Blow me down, but it now appears there was some cash that changed hands — $225,000 — reportedly received right around the time he was leaving the Prime Minister’s office. He placed it in a safe, and didn’t report it to the taxman for six years. That looks pretty bad, as Mr. M. admits. He told the commission: “What transpired represented a significant error of judgment — on that I deeply regret and one for which I have paid dearly.”

 

Except that he hasn’t paid at all; in fact, he was the one who got paid, two-point-one million smackers, and by taxpayers, no less.

And now the blubbering, which he explained was caused by seeing several of his tormentors from the media sitting in the gallery at the hearing, allegedly enjoying the spectacle of B.M. twisting slowly, slowly in the wind. I’m sympathetic to the plight of the bluff, big-hearted Irishman, quick to tears and laughter. Drop the needle on Van Morrison and Paddy Moloney singing “Marie’s Wedding,” and I’ll bellow right along. I quite enjoyed Mr. Mulroney’s salty, saucy observations, as quoted in Peter C. Newman’s “Secret Mulroney Tapes.” He was an average Prime Minister, at best, but he remains a colorful scamp, and an amusing memento of bygone days, like the retired professional hockey players who still hang around the Chick-n-Deli in Toronto, still trying to score with secretaries, except the secretaries are actually marketing vice-presidents earning far more than the old guys ever did in their prime.

Regardless, this damp-eyed Brian crying in the chapel is much too much. As he famously once told a political opponent, he had a choice. Handed a windfall of mazuma by his wacky successor, he might have taken the dough and endowed an institution of some sort, to benefit the public. He might have been the benefactor of the hypothetical Ben Mulroney Foundation, named to honor his father, and aimed, let’s say, at discovering efficient ways to provide healthcare to the blue-collar populations of outlying communities, such as his native Baie Comeau, Que. That would have honored the ”good name his father gave him,” which B.M. yipped and yapped was sullied during the prior investigations. That tactic might have gained him some sympathy, and some admiration from the little people, whose opinions about him may possibly matter, as well they might, in that strange and needy Irish heart.

But he didn’t do that. He kept the money: locked it away in a safety deposit box, he now says. In Canada, that’s what they do. That’s what they’ve always done.

We understand that. What we don’t understand is the waterworks. It’s not as if he’s bound for the lockup, like a common t’ief or tinker. It’s Canada. There’s no crusading district attorney such as Peter Fitzpatrick to stir up a Cook County jury, and Mrs. Mulroney, Mila, is neither dead, nor even maimed. Sure and it isn’t possible that Himself is sobbing because he thinks someone’s going to feel sorry for him and give him some more money, the way they did last time around. Tell me it couldn’t be that the man’s hopin’ for, could it?

Death comes to Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey and wife Angel, astride Paul Harvey: Good day!

On the very day Rush Limbaugh was waddling to the podium to incite all those angry folks attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (Rush: “Did the Democrats want the war on Iraq to fail!” Crowd: “Yes!” Rush: “They certainly did.”), death came to Paul Harvey. That’s the kind of cheap juxtaposed symbolism that Harvey, the perennial radio gasbag, turned into cash each day in his three-quarters-of-a-century on the airwaves. In his heyday, which was the Nixon era, Harvey was quite the noisy right-wing crank, verbally beating up on hippies, and Ruskies, and what-not, on hundreds of ABC radio affiliates. Later he relocated his golden microphone from the Windy City to Phoenix, and learned to relax a little. By the time Harvey reached the ripe old age of four-score-and-ten, he had mellowed into a beloved antiquity of the wireless, celebrated as a great enduring American showman, like Bob Barker or the Rev. B. Graham. Closer to the rev.

Displaying fashion creds, CCR and Fogerty (bottom right)

Harvey came to Toronto one year during the Nixon era, and threw a sermon out at the People’s Church, an evangelical palace on Sheppard Avenue, not that far from my childhood neighborhood. He was a pal of the local pastor, Oswald J. Smith, who was an acclaimed radio preacher and, like Harvey, not one to make excuses for the godless. I called Wex, and he agreed that we simply couldn’t afford to miss this extraordinary moment in theological history. We found our way to the house of worship, dressed in the manner of the day, the way John Fogerty dressed. We must have been 16 years old.

Every pew in the church was occupied, but the helpful parishioners fought all over each other to clear space for us. Kindly hands reached out, extending hymnals.

Harvey strode to the dais. He boomed a variation of his traditional greeting: “Hello, Toronto-Canadians!” He was a captivating speaker. His cadence and enunciation were broadcast-quality. He’d toned down his use of the pregnant pause, along with exultant sentence ending… which was known far and wide… as his trade-mark! The congregation was in thrall, even the swinger with the rock-star hair and white suit seated a few sections away, who kept turning from facing the speaker to shoot stares at me and Wex. I guessed he was some kind of churchly special ambassador to disaffected youth. We kept our distance.

The performance was not what we’d hoped for. We’d come to mock Harvey, assuredly not to praise anyone. He was a meaningful figure to us high-school wiseguys, right up there with a galaxy of adults we found wondrous/ridiculous. Ward Cornell and Ron Martinez from the world of sport, Spiro J. Agnew and Everett Dirksen from the political sphere, Stan and Jan Berenstain from the world of beaux arts, everyone who ever appeared on the Al Capp TV talk show, and local broadcasting legend Gordon Sinclair, although Sinclair wouldn’t scale the heights of true absurdity until much later, when he recorded his smash-hit prose-poem, “The Americans.” There were only a couple of individuals we considered too hep not to ridicule: the Firesign Theater comedy act, Captain Beefheart, the writer-bookstore clerk Juan Butler, and some guy whose music criticism in Rolling Stone never deigned to describe the contents of the record and conveyed nothing of the subject of his review, but who told evocative short stories featuring fictional characters of his invention. The name used by this reviewer was J.R. Young. I wonder now who he really was, and whatever became of him.

One thing I could never possibly believe is that J.R. Young was actually a teen-aged Rush Limbaugh writing under an early pseudonym, although it is a possibility not ruled out by chronology, but by common sense. As I said, these Rolling Stone pieces were pretty good, and Limbaugh’s published writing is uniformly not-good, although it would be wrong to regard him as an entirely talentless repository of illegally obtained prescription painkillers and last month’s rancid suet. Yes, he has been a malignant force on society, and, yes, for the past 15 years or so, listening to him has been an impossibility for anyone with a bare trace-amount of self-respect. However, the Limbaugh of yesterday was not always what you currently see and hear — and hear, again and again.

Before he surrendered his independent spirit for a gazillion-dollar payoff, Limbaugh was a polished radio yapper who took unexpected positions just to confound his audience, as the great broadcasters have always done. Greatness, however, was something for which Limbaugh just wasn’t cut out. I recall during the late ’80s listening to a few weeks of programs where the host refused to come out as strongly anti-abortion. Caller after caller screamed abuse and threats at their guy. He stood his ground, maintaining that he hadn’t fully formed an opinion consistent with the orthodoxy of the right, and that he was mindful of the opinions of the women in his family, whose judgment he prized. He maintained this position for several days, as the listeners cajoled and pleaded with him to proclaim his rejection of the pro-choice argument. And then he abruptly backed down, and became an anti-abortion zealot like all the rest. He never again looked forward or sideways, for even a second.

He had another great stunt around this time, doing a spoof show where he claimed he’d just started dating a liberal woman and was falling in love, and beginning to reassess his hard-line right-wing positions. Again, his audience turned on him, and became an angry mob set to first denounce their leader and then string him up in the public square. All a big joke, he predictably explained at the end of the program; no libs, no lady, and no love for Limbaugh. In fairness, it was a pretty good joke, albeit a bleakly revealing joke, and one he would never repeat. What I gathered from this was that Limbaugh wasn’t necessarily born to pander to the lowest common denominator, a status that makes him no different from his media enemies at MSNBC, the New York Times or Air America radio. They’re all slobs waiting for a paycheck and a pat on the head from the boss. It’s just that he’s a better panderer than most, and more commercially potent when propped upright in his studio.

 

Follow that robusto: Limbaugh, fearless champion of the nickel cigar

He was still sentient enough earlier in this decade to suffer revulsion at what he’d become, requiring round-the-clock self-administered anesthesia and pastries. That possibly speaks to both his latent humanity, as well as his disfigured character and damaged judgment. Think of Rush as Hunter S. Thompson’s rusticated, half-bright, more insecure baby brother, and recall Thompson’s fondness for quoting Dr. Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

 

Seeing him on television this weekend, egging on the rabid right, turning away from the possible consequences of inflaming his followers during a precarious time in the nation’s history, you’d be wasting your time trying to imagine what it is Limbaugh thinks he’s become. Whatever that may be, it’s clear that he’s more to be pitied than mocked. In that regard, and others, Limbaugh is no Paul Harvey.

You are now entering/You are now leaving Canada. Welcome/Come back soon, Mr. President

Like so many others, I was impressed-as-heck with the U.S. President’s visit this week to the Canadian capital. It was a far less uncomfortable spectacle than when their predecessors last convened in Ottawa, where it was discovered that neither the U.S. leader, Mr. Bush, nor the Canadian leader, M. Chretien, spoke a solitary word of English between them. On that previous occasion, their exchanged grunting and gibbering at a televised state dinner seemed intensified after local organizers arranged for someone’s brother-in-law to look after the AV arrangements, in a contract valued at nearly twelve dollars. The ornate scene was outfitted with a single 40-watt overhead light and a lone microphone declared surplus by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, back around the age of Norman DePoe. The impression I had, watching on television as Bush and Chretien slurped soup, was that the world was scheduled to end in around 10 minutes, and these esteemed leaders were being televised from their refuge in an undersea cavern off the New Zealand coast.

If we had our Strothers, we`d be getting along better with Mr. Martin

Failure to communicate, Strother Martin-style, is far from the problem concerning the facile Mr. Obama, and the earnestly articulate Mr. Harper. Both could talk the scales and bones right off the Arctic Char, as they might say up north. Where the previous two North American leaders were, let’s say, somewhat provincial and cloistered in their outlook and bearing, the current pair seemed perfectly at ease with their respective roles, and with each other. Mr. Obama seems not to be the sort of American visitor to Canada who grows tetchy the first time he notices gasoline being dispensed by the litre, and later becomes unhinged upon determining the scarcity of Pabst Blue Ribbon or that local brand of pork rinds they sell in Tulsa. Similarly, because Mr. Obama was spared the horror of having to converse with minor Canadian political figures such as Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe, he was presumably able to skip the lecture concerning the superiority of Canadian healthcare and the unfair level of transfer payments to Quebec. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who was reminded, as Mr. Obama boarded his plane back to civilization, of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines at the conclusion of Casablanca, chirping about how this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Or not. As effusive as Mr. Obama was in his praise of the neighbor-nation, there are many of his countrymen who still struggle with the difficult concept of a land that looks, sounds and smells like the United States — but isn’t. It’s comparable to the disorientation our English cousins seem to experience after they’ve inadvertently stumbled over the footbridge into Chepstow, Wales, except that the English know instinctively how to handle such a situation, which is to shrug and continue their binge-drinking. An American, separated from his or her homeland, seems to lack that sort of easy adaptability, and feels compelled to begin explaining things, first to themselves and to then anyone unfortunate enough to be in proximity.

Chepstow, a town in Wales, which is another country that isn`t the USA

So it was in Ottawa with the saddest Americans of all, those representing the national media.

Noting the presense at Mr. Obama’s arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, replete with ceremonial scarlet tunics, CNN newscaster Fredrika Whitfield, normally no imbicile, was flummoxed. She admitted her confusion to the viewing public: ”They appear to be some sort of troops.” Other stateside journos, made knowledgable of RCMP protocol by watching Dudley Doright cartoons in childhood, wondered aloud how the Mounties had arrived at the airport without their horses. One bears this foolishness with neighborly good humor; you should hear the nutty things they say about their own country.

Of course, there’s never any shortage of stupidity in the Canadian media, either. The gold standard of local idiocy, the Toronto Star, continues to stick to the plot of its serially published fantasy, which involves an imaginary Canadian political leader named Iggy, who is standing by and about to grab the tiller that steers the federal government. The Star was offering its readers an alternate-reality account of the presidential visit, wherein the American president acknowledged and took a real liking to this fictitious Iggy character, and has him sized up as a better candidate for the role of sidekick than the elected leader of Canada, Mr. Harper.

Indeed, when Mr. Obama finally quits screwing around with the economy and short-hop foreign visits, and gets around to the serious business of buying a dog for his daughters, he could surely find a worse name for the pooch than Iggy. Other than which, it’s fair to assume that the Star’s Iggy must have struck Mr. Obama as a certain type of figure he’d seen in his prior career in Chicago politics, the grinning one-name supplicant — Ziggy the ethnic fellow, or Wiggy the high-strung man, or Piggy the overweight boy with the snout-like nose — who presents himself as qualified for employment as a city library worker, or night custodian at Midway airport, or as a toll-taker on one of Chicagoland’s many fine bridges and thoroughfares.

That is, if he made any impression at all.