The Fifth Part of Chapter 1: Encounter

I could not agree more with that young man’s sentiments, thought James. The mention of Shakespeare had brought up the thought of Macbeth, and that lead to a thought of people in power, namely the current Prime Minister, Bruce Thomas Meach. He pondered the lead article in that day’s Globe and Mail. Helena Perari, a journalist and television personality known for making strongly moral judgments about people, and making enormous issues out of people’s genuine or supposed dishonesty, wrote it; he remembered many times when she lit into an interviewee she found to be dishonest. He remembered a quote from the highly opinionated piece: “If he really wishes to project sincerity, he actually needs to be sincere.” It was about the aforementioned Prime Minister, and it was about a brouhaha surrounding his questionable dealings in the retirement of his predecessor, Andrea Larissa Mercuria Colm. “The affair always carried a whiff of scandal,” she had written. Circumstances pointed to some arm-twisting by somebody linked to Meach; everyone had expected her to retire eventually, and people remembered her quite fondly, which meant that a few people were at least a little disconcerted. Colm was changeable, a highly adept politician and thus able to read the public’s overall mood with great skill, and commerce flourished under her. Meach, on the other hand, was a man devoid of emotion and everyone except his wife compared him to a robot. The article had quoted his wife as saying, “Well, people thought that it was time for Andrea [Colm] to retire, and my husband agrees; but I assure you he had no hand in the matter. He just happens to be her popular successor,”

“James, you’re staring, darling,”

“What? Sorry,”

“No need.” He noticed that her voice carried a faintly musical ring.

“What do you think of the Prime Minister?”

“He seems all right. There’s nothing much remarkable about his policies. You know, balancing the budget after that hyper-Keynesian splurge, keeping inflation low, promoting free trade, the stuff economists are happy about.”

“I know that, but it that could also describe Colm’s policies. What about personally?”

“I can’t really recall him smiling. He seems like such a boring technocrat.”

“I know; all our politicians seem wooden right now. You might replace Cameron Duff with a talking mannequin, and nobody would notice the difference.”

Cameron Duff was the leader of the opposition, and nobody took much notice of him except for Meach, who ridiculed him, this being the period between elections, when only the Prime Minister’s thoughts really counted for anything in politics; some people preferred that it was not that way, but James and Clarissa were not of that persuasion. James knew other people who took a very different view of Duff, and idealised him as a modern-day globetrotter, an intellectual, the satirist, the jester, and the anti-hero, all essential roles in the public sphere. One such person was Rick, a neighbour, who had said to James a few weeks previously, “God how I wish I were him,”

Some even viewed him as a saviour, an avenging angel, or a knight in shining armour; for those who viewed him as an avenging angel, it certainly helped that he liked to wear light-coloured clothes. There were also some sordid stories, which one should always take with a grain of salt, that the opposition leader had once been and still was a womaniser; those rumours raised the ire of numerous feminists. His mother, for instance, refused to call Duff by name, simply referring to the man as “him”.

James, however, simply thought of Duff as someone who one shouldn’t take too seriously.

“Speaking of hyper-Keynesian splurges, what did you think of the American stimulus package?”

“A lot of it was waste; it didn’t create any jobs––their unemployment rate only just went below ten percent, and it was too much and not enough at the same time,”

“Too many roads and not enough libraries,”

“Yes,”

The conversation continued in this vein until the bill came, which came to fifty dollars. They stayed in Montréal over the weekend, and they did typical, romantic couple things, which to them seemed magical but to others seemed soppy.

Previous Next