Dear Sir:
Unless you’ve been dozing through the early skirmishes, you’ll by now be painfully aware that this fall the battle for leadership of Our Fair Nation will be raging to a climax.
Prepare, then, to be bombarded with an intensifying storm of blather, as claims and exclamations about ‘transparency’ are exchanged between the contestants. Haven’t we learned yet?
Or has senility (Canada turns 150 in 2017, after all) totally repressed the wisdom bound-up in the ‘Parable of the Emperor’s New Robes’ of our younger days?
Remember him? Parading about in his new Robes of Transparency, pressed on him by some slick spin-doctors?
We certainly don’t want that featured on our dinner-hour TV news now, do we, Mrs. Harper?
Present-day ‘leadership’ seems more designed to blend into the background like some candy-coated chameleon (“See?… I’m just like you guys,”) rather than stick out like a sore thumb.
Perhaps that explains the disgruntled mumblings: “Politicians, they’re all the same!”
Yes, Malvina: it’s true. They are all made of tickey-tackey, and they all sound just the same.
In our current realm of talking-point-spouting, double-plus-good duckpeakers, there’s no effective antidote to the Robes of Transparency, or Cloaks of Invisibility, or Teflon makeup now descending over our political figureheads.
Each is designed to cover up marked abnormalities or deformities that might distinguish one from another. And they do work – more or less.
So, to heck with transparency, I say; give me the integrity of the well-hammered thumb any day.
Especially election day.
John How,
Terrace, B.C.