It would never end, so it seemed, but praise be it’s about to.
We’ve endured another week of ham-fisted grandstanding on parliament hill, but we’re now to be granted a reprieve from the whole sad lot of them (the Commons summer adjournment starts Friday) and there’ll accordingly be blessed silence descending over Ottawa, except now that I think about it we’ll have to put up with the racket anyway because Honourable Members will be trolling the summer picnic and barbeque circuits.
Cook your own burgers in your own back yard, I say, and ignore the swarm of political travellers about to arrive in your midst. Which is what I’m getting ready to do by altering course and providing evidence, first, that Canada is not the only place with nitwits posing as politicians. And second, this country needs somebody like T. Boone Pickens.
1. Brooksville, Florida
A pleasant little outpost, so the tourist brochures say, 40 miles or thereabouts north of Tampa, population 8,000 give or take. The place has a city council whose alderfolk apparently have so little on their minds they’ve been moved to decree an ordinance covering, as it were, dress code for municipal employees.
From now on, Brooksville city workers will be required to wear underclothes and use deodorant. They gotta have them boxers on, or briefs, and bras, maybe thongs for the women although the edict doesn’t go specifics that small, and generally make sure they observe “strict personal hygiene.”
I’m not kidding here – and there’s more. The dress code prohibits exposed underwear, clothing with foul language, and “sexually provocative” clothes. No piercings, moreover, anywhere except the ears. (Navel, nose, lip, tongue, forehead, any bodily spot Brooksville municipal folks might have fancied are off limits, as of now).
And the deodorant, too. Spray and spoon it on: there’ll be no obnoxious scents wafting around this city hall, y’hear, and none in any public places actually, so the gardeners and construction workers and roadbuilders will need to cart around a totebag of Mennen or Old Spice or whatever so when they start sweating like hogs in the Brooksville summer heat, well then they can just reload and come up smelling like roses.
The mayor of the joint, one Joe Bernadini, voted against the dress code ordinance because he figured it “takes away freedom of choice.” That seems odd because the implication is Brooksville employees should have the option to expose their underwear if so inclined or not wear any at all, and not apply roll-on either, and if they want to, pierce themselves on just about every square inch of skin.
It’s pretty stupid stuff, especially when you consider that cities and business firms and all the rest have managers or supervisors who’ll take aside a malodorous employee for a quiet word about freshening up. Or if there’s a young miss with an overexposure of underthingies or perhaps chestal area, same thing: best you cover a bit more so the rest of us get to see a bit less.
All the papers and wire services and television networks put together stories about the Brooksville dress code, which probably guarantees it’ll be rescinded within hours. Politicians don’t like to be mocked, and don’t like to be portrayed as dimwits, which raises the question of why they insist on behaving like dimwits.
At any rate, if or more likely when the Brooksville dress code is rescinded, and the controversy thereupon expires, we Canadians can be grateful for small mercies. The crowd on parliament hill probably won’t get wind, so to speak, of the goings on in Florida, and will accordingly not be inspired to apply the same kind of aromatic and sartorial standards to every single federal government employee in Ottawa, and across the land. Let us rejoice.
2. T. Boone Pickens
The man is 81 years old, says he’s been a Republican for 81 years, and by the estimates of Forbes Magazine he’s a billionaire three times over.
T. Boone made his money in the awl bidness, as they say in Texas (which is where he hangs out) and along the way is said to have trampled over a goodly number of small energy operators by means of hostile takeovers. A corporate raider, some people claim, but Pickens has never said he’s in business to lose money, and he’s certainly not going to ignore a deal even if somebody else gets squeezed out.
What’s interesting about TBP is that after more than 50 years in the awl bidness, making money by exploring and drilling and investing in the traditional oilfield manner, he’s now saying the U.S. of A. had better smarten up and redesign its energy policy from top to bottom. What he means is eliminate, once and for all, American dependence on foreign oil, and get busy with solar, wind, and above all, natural gas development in country. In the U.S. of A. And he says he has the plan to make it all work.
T. Boone has an interesting list of quotes about the subject. Richard Nixon in 1974: “Let this be our national goal: in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need.” Then Gerald Ford came along to the White House and said the same thing with slightly different phrasing. He was followed by Carter, Reagan, Bush # 1, Clinton, seven presidents in all, concluding with Bush # 2 who said in 2003 Americans are “addicted to oil,” and so his goal would be to “promote energy independence for our country.”
T. Boone says not one of them followed through. They all did nothing except talk, so TBP decided to get busy and draw up the “Pickens Plan” which he did and then spent around $60 million dollars of his own money to promote. He says he’s got the ear of President Barack Obama, and it looks as if by late this summer, the U.S. Congress will pass a bill designating natural gas – American natural gas – as the energy source of the future for both industry and transportation.
There’s no telling at this point how far the Pickens Plan, which he says is the only plan out there, will go. But that’s not the essential point. The real story here is that a private citizen, albeit with a lot of money and influence, has stepped into the yawning energy policy vacuum in Washington and for now, anyway, has moved the politicians down there to get off their rear ends and do something.
We can debate later and worry later about whether T. Boone’s plan will ultimately hurt Canada (he’s got money here and says it won’t and besides he told a crowd of oil executives in Calgary he doesn’t consider Canadians to be foreign, he’s talking about those folks in the Middle East).
As I say, that’s a discussion for another day. In the meantime, T. Boone Pickens – non politician – is the current architect of U.S. energy policy. Pity we don’t have someone like him in Canada to straighten out the parliament hill mob, although not necessarily on energy matters. Just straighten them out, period.