Stupid Canadians couldn't even spell Maroon.
Posted on 11/30/2002 6:09:02 PM PST by quidnunc
The brand new film of The Quiet American is at least as much a travesty of Graham Greene's novel as the old 1958 film was. Back then, the book was too anti-American. Forty years on, it's not anti-American enough. So Greene's ambiguous naif blundering around colonial Vietnam has been oomphed up: the eponymously quiet American played by Brendan Fraser is now, as Peter Bradshaw puts it in The Guardian, "a CIA kingpin whose fresh-faced Ivy League mask falls away at the end to reveal a coldly ideological functionary".
Hmm. A genial Ivy League mask hiding a coldly ideological kingpin. Who does that remind you of? Of all the strains of anti-Americanism available these days, the new Quiet American at least takes the view that the blundering naivety is an artful pose. Off-screen, most anti-Americans won't even go that far. On Tuesday, Franoise Ducros, the Communications Director for the Prime Minister of Canada, was forced out of her job because she'd been overheard at the Nato summit disparaging the intelligence of President Bush. This is not quite the official position of Her Majesty's Government in Ottawa.
It's fine for the French Foreign Minister to accuse the White House of "simplisme", because those idiot Americans are far too simplistic to know what simplisme means. It's safe for "senior British civil servants", in this newspaper, to dismiss Bush as "a bear of little brain", because those frightful Yanks are too ill-educated to recognize such a subtle intellectual literary allusion. It's okay to sneer at the President, as is done routinely at dinner parties in London, Paris, Winnipeg, all the great cities, as "not the brightest bulb in the chandelier", because such concepts as metaphor and analogy are almost certainly unknown to the birdbrain.
Had she done any of the above, Franoise Ducros would still have her job. But instead she cut to the chase. "What a moron!" she scoffed, speaking in Prague to a CBC reporter. The CBC guy barely noticed the remark: I mean, what's the big deal? Everyone knows Bush is a moron, don't they? But Miss Ducros happened to be overheard, and the Canadian government was concerned that, moronic as Bush might be, even a moron knows the term isn't a compliment. Miss Ducros' job is to get her boss press coverage, no easy thing when your boss is the Prime Minister of Canada, and the only coverage she got out of the Nato meeting came when Saddam Hussein publicly endorsed her opinion of Mr Bush and she temporarily displaced Celine Dion as the most famous Canadian in Baghdad. Granted that, on the question of war with Iraq, Canada's doing its usual routine of insisting the sidelines are the moral high ground, the government's not yet ready to be Saddam's PR agency. So Francie Ducros bit the dust.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at opinion.telegraph.co.uk ...
Granted that, on the question of war with Iraq, Canada's doing its usual routine of insisting the sidelines are the moral high ground, the government's not yet ready to be Saddam's PR agency. So Francie Ducros bit the dust.Hah! Touché!
…I was in the Gulf six months ago, and I came to the conclusion that a majority of the people I met — somewhere between 55 and 70 per cent — were, to use the technical term, nuts. That's to say, they believed things that no rational person could believe. …Right, so who's really the moron then, eh?
John Derbyshire of America's National Review thinks the Middle East needs a massive invasion of psychiatrists. Well, about halfway through this last week in Canada, I realized I was beginning to feel about my homeland exactly the way I'd felt in Araby: these guys are nuts. Quebec's biggest English-language radio station, CJAD, conducted a listener poll on the question "Is George W Bush a moron?" Every single person said yes, he's definitely a moron, except for two who thought he was merely an idiot. On the letters pages, it was the same, except for Art Peel of Hamilton, Ontario, who complained that calling Bush a moron "does a disservice to the mentally challenged, most of whom are kind, gentle people".
Exactly. Most Canadians and most Europeans are kind, gentle people but, Bush-wise, they're the ones who are mentally challenged. The "moron" line is simply inadequate: no rational person can believe a twice-elected Texas Governor, successful US President and overthrower of the Taliban is a moron unless a majority of Americans are morons, too. And in that case how come the morons have a global dominance unparalleled in history? As with those wacky Arabs and their Zionist conspiracies, Euro-Canadian anti-Americanism is a psychosis.
One of the funniest things I ever read was actually a serious suggestion by the author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". In a subsequent book named "Lyla", he discussed how there really are no absolute standards of "sane" behavior, and thus that sanity and insanity are culturally defined. So rather than committing people who exhibit irrational paranoia, and who consistently invent wild and wacky conspiracy theories, we should send them to the Mideast instead - where they'll fit right in.
HA! Great stuff!!
Another winner by Steyn!
This fellow doesn't just slice and dice with rapier wit, he uses a giant-size egg slicer!
Stupid Canadians couldn't even spell Maroon.
At this point, it would take away one of Bush's most powerful weapons for his opponents to recognize that they've been consistently outfoxed for years.
Let them continue to question his intellect. It proves that they are fools.
I am older than he.
I doubt I am his type.
If I ever married again, I would prefer my husband to be the strong, silent, type.
Silent being the operative word. LOL
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