Cooking with Government Cheese.

…the horrible reality of the liberal agenda…

Like many of you, I eat things. Things like soap, sunglasses, harmonicas and plumber’s putty (yum!). But in addition to these items, I also eat food.

Where food is concerned there’s obviously an entire spectrum of quality. It runs from classic dishes prepared by gifted professionals to anything cooked by the Irish, or by any French person not living in France (Acadians and Québécois, I’m looking at you…). Assuming that you don’t want to be a turnip and depend on others for all of your sustenance, you’ve probably learned to cook a few things for yourself.

This is not to say that you’re any good at it, of course. I have known at least six people whose definition of ‘cooking’ precisely matched my definition of ‘unwrapping’. Generally, they went no further than opening cans or finding the end of the freezer bag that had the zipper-lock on it. I could even relate the tale of an adventurous friend of mine who decided that she’d perfected her method for cooking chicken only when she didn’t vomiting explosively after eating it - it should also be noted that this woman now owns a restaurant and if she doesn’t pay up, I’ll tell you where it is.

The problem with cooking for the self-taught is that there is no reliable, external measure by which to measure your skill. Your friends are all idiots and will either lie to you or simply call anything crap if it’s not filled with aerosol “Cheez”. You can try comparing it to the culinary work of your dear mother but let’s face it, the old girl could have been feeding you guitar picks in rotten mustard for 18 years and you would have eventually grown to like it. Where food is concerned, the number of people who will lie to you again and again is truly staggering. I once tried my hand at Thai noodles to impress a girl I was dating and the result resembled a wok full of ear wax with a handful of elastics tossed in. Like a trooper (and something of a hog, honestly) she consumed the mess and then lied heroically about the quality of the dish as we rushed her to the ER.

PBS helped me out a little, but I could never make any sense of whatever the hell Julia Child was saying and The Frugal Gourmet was accused of being a pederast, so I felt uncomfortable having his cookbooks in the house. CBC tried to educate me as well, but being the CBC the best they could do was a show with an off-balance, British guy who substituted every ingredient other than salt for Spam and peach preserves. Inexplicably, they called this show The Urban Peasant rather than The Cook Who Won’t Go Shopping.

So I was adrift in a sea of some metaphor or another until I finally got a decent signal provider and started watching the Food Network – pardon me, Food Network Canada.

If you’re from a country that is not Canada, you may not be aware of the technology we have to mostly copy American cable channels. We’ve not perfected the process and as a result the gaps are filled with government-mandated Canadian shows and a lot of public service announcements. This may sound like a good thing until you realize that the absence of commercials is made easier since a slice of all the Canadian programming is (you guessed it) paid for by the government.

Before I go any further, let it be known unequivocally that Food Network Canada is a terrific source of entertainment and information. To be honest, next to my 24-hour news addiction Food is the channel I watch the most.

It’s especially good once you can stop flinching every time Emeril Lagasse screams at his food…delicious, chef – and now my daughter is crying!

If I weren’t so hideously under qualified, I’d like to have a show on Food Network Canada – I am Canadian after all and I can’t be worse than some of the single season runs that have come and gone over the years. It also goes without saying that it is even conceptually impossible that any show I might make would be worse than The Manic Organic.

It rhymes…get it? Not only do I get it, but I own a tiny piece of it. I don’t know what the parent network shows while our organics are being manic, but I’d like to be able to see the menu.

So while I learned to cook a lot better while watching Food Network Canada, I was both enthralled and unnerved that I was paying for a very small piece of Christine Cushing. I sure hope that it’s one of the good bits.

I am such an awful person – but I can cook.

Canada, Triumphant!

In November of 2004, the CBC married a series of documentaries to a viewer vote-in to determine the identity of The Greatest Canadian. While I was not on the edge of my seat to see who The Greatest Canadian would be, the series held my attention to the end. I was certainly not disappointed when they announced Tommy Douglas as the winner.

Tommy Douglas was probably born in Manitoba, Saskatchewan or possibly Nova Scotia before its admittance into the Canadian Federation by the Queen in 1967 (this event led to the naming of the Washington Nationals baseball team). There seems to be considerable evidence that Tommy Douglas was either a 1930s Prairie Socialist or a country singer who performed old Nashville standards in a poorly-constructed set that bore little resemblance to the ‘down home’ kitchen that it purported to be. Tommy Douglas may have worn glasses, but this seems odd given that according to some, Tommy Douglas also managed to serve as an ace airman during the First World War.

Tommy Douglas clearly is The Greatest Canadian and quite multi-talented to boot. It’s not hard to see how he won.

In the same week, the Dan Rather/CBS News scandal broke in the US when it was confirmed that a bunch of people probably lied about some papers that really didn’t matter to an electorate who had already voted. Lamentably, more Canadians could tell me the details of Rathergate than could tell me that Tommy Douglas was the father of the Canadian Medicare system.

It turns out that next to Douglas’ Medicare, the most universal thing in Canada is television from America. We are steeped in it as a nation and its pop culture has become our own. Most of us have watched enough Law & Order that we could not only pass the New York State Bar exam without cracking a textbook, but we could probably empanel our own grand jury to indict whoever it was who abducted that pretty white girl on CNN. I know people who will argue about whether or not the pigeon-like Jack McCoy correctly applied the rules of evidence discovery but think that the Court of Queen’s Bench is a place for gay guys to hang out.

We may not be sure who our Governor-General is, but half of us know the name of the chef who screams ‘Bam!’ on the Food Network.

As you may have guessed, this is central to our ongoing attempt to find some form of representative government here in Soviet Canuckistan.

Really.

Around mid-December the American ambassador to Canada complained that some candidates in this federal election, and most regrettably our Prime Minister were using public animus towards the United States to curry electoral favor with the Canadian people. Earlier, a member of the Canadian Cabinet commented, “I hate those bastards” in reference to our American pals. I’m genuinely pro-American as a rule, but I can see how this kind of thing happens. Other than telling our political leaders to shut up, the American ambassador has been sending us gift cards from Hallmark telling us that we are jerks for not sending troops to Iraq and bad neighbors who actively encourage terrorists to cross our borders. The complaints of our politicians and general populace seem fairly forgivable in that light. In one respect this is much like blaming a bear for fertilizing the forest. If asked, the bear would very likely inform that such is the reason that the trees are there in the first place.

This story even got some coverage on the American news channels, so this way we can be guaranteed that some Canadians have actually seen it. More importantly, it gave American commentators like Tucker “fading fast” Carlson another reason to call us “retarded and pointless.” Ann Coulter, that cornerstone of wisdom has previously reasoned that “Canada is lucky that we (the US) allow them to exist…”

Thanks, Ann. You are the wind beneath my wings.

Which side of this equation is more depressing, though: a nation at war whose pundits take the time to belittle us or a nation in the midst of an election that needs to pile on the American President to unify its base? Since Carlson and Coulter are paid to go around and give the rest of us the intellectual equivalent of pinkeye, I am saddened to say that it might be us.

Canada suffered through an election about a year and a half ago when the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada was making a serious run at forming at least a minority government. It never came to pass and the Liberals moved into their second decade of uninterrupted power. This time we are reviewing many of the same issues, a slightly varied bunch of bribes to the electorate (perennial loser Jack Layton is offering every Canadian a hot-oil massage) and a scandal that doesn’t really blame anyone who’s still in office. The CPC has surged recently in the polls, but everyone recognizes that this is a function of Liberal implosion rather than new-found love of the party led by the autonomic Stephen Harper.

With twenty percent of our electoral seats tied up by the lazy threat of separatism, it’s hard to imagine the rule-set that will allow either side to definitively win this game in the foreseeable future. Certainly, if they do the other side will be reduced to such national penury that they will cease to function as an effective opposition party. This is our new dynamic; we are plagued by ineffective coalitions or saddled with an unchallenged majority. Given the lethargy of Canadian governments free from an impending vote and the desperate, middle-child earnestness of the short-lived coalitions I can’t say that any of our prospects are very good.

The energy has been sucked out of the process and we are left with the unsightly scrum of a Prime Minister desperate to win his own mandate, and a challenger painfully aware that the two previous iterations of his party failed to become a legitimate national entity. Both are then blocked from electoral transcendence by a gaggle of Parliamentarians who will never hold power, but throw untold spanners into the works in the name of representing a constituency that is either nation-wide but ethereal or rock-solid and entirely regional.

Assuming that Ann Coulter and her army of undead McCarthyites don’t take us over first, whoever serves as the lightning rod to raise us up from this puddle will get my vote as The Greatest Canadian on the next ballot.

Cross-Border, Cross-Talk.

For me, there are few events more enjoyable and looked forward to than an election season. It’s sad, I know and I should probably be hospitalized. I’m like a crack addict or a heroin junkie. An absurd likeness of me should be getting arrested on COPS right now. A lanky, long-haired and (by uniform code) shirtless doppelganger should be getting chased down by police in Arizona. When I’m unruly, the will beat the hell out of me and I will deserve it. My NASCAR-endorsed Blackberry falling to the ground from my battered hand as the MSN news ticker scrolls by unread.

Sadly, my only beatings will be for cash - doled out with the cold, machine-like precision of Sindee, the nasty-looking hooker with big hands.

Now, a quick glance to the margin will show that my boredom-spree originates in Canada. So you would have to be from somewhere else to think that I’m talking about a Canadian election. Anyone from Canada will tell you that our elections occur in a tight six-week envelope, coming and going will all the ceremony of grass through a goose. They are interesting in the same way as an amicable divorce. If you’re really lucky the whole process will produce a legislative mess only slightly less unnerving than its immediate predecessor. Until recently in Canada, our political spectrum has been quite narrow – sitting like an ugly date on the left-of-center fence. Now, we have a slightly conservative party who we all try and make seem menacing like strict, angry Republicans. We do so at our own peril, as the former leader of that party arrived at one press conference on a jet-ski.

Now imagine Republican master-strategist and perennial dough-boy Karl “the Architect” Rove doing that.

But like many – if not most Canadians with political curiosity – my gaze turns south to the United States of America. The reason for this is simple; the American political season lasts for a period exactly three days less than a full Presidential term. Even now, with the 2005 Inauguration less than a month behind us, several important political organizations are positioning themselves for the hotly contested presidential contest of 2008.

Fox News and CNN top the list. I also hear that the Democratic National Committee gave doctor-turned-governor-turned-shrieker Howard Dean a job doing something around the office – but who cares about that?

I’d have mentioned MSNBC here but they have so few viewers that when they do an opinion poll, the total number of respondents only adds up to 45%.

Fox has already done several hard hitting stories laden with questionable bits of information (Freedom Facts) to the extent that Hillary Clinton is a bitch. CNN, who you know you can depend on because their motto says so, has done some similar stories. Because they are not fair and balanced, they will only report that about half the nation thinks that Hillary is an evil harpy. Both of these luminary networks also do stories on Mayor of the Universe, Rudy Guliani or Senate Action Hero John McCain running for the Republican ticket.

This takes up a lot of their time, and it gives Wolf Blitzer a reason to live (a dubious enterprise at best…).

What gets lost in this is that the chances of any of these three getting their party’s nomination in 2008 is roughly equal to the probability that the late Johnny Carson will be reborn from his crematorium ashes to be a guest Judge on American Idol.

The point of all this – since I just discovered that I don’t have one - is that this is what we tune in for. I don’t know the word for it, but its not news – its certainly not journalism and it may not even be information. If I wanted that I could go online to Reuters, the AP or the BBC. Hell, I could even turn on the TV and watch the CBC.

Well I could…

Canadian news is largely bereft of this, probably has something to do with not needing our own hyperactive media culture since we get to borrow the much larger one directly below us. Consequently, we have calm quiet broadcast punctuated by moments of over orchestrated conflict where two political pundits will politely agree to disagree. Once, one of them leaned forward and pointed. Really. I also have to assume that most of these people were one-time print journalists because, Jesus they are a homely lot.

So we are left with the tragically unoriginal notion of the Vast Wasteland of American Television – a broad and unforgiving landscape where hot chicks (but serious looking) read the news in 2-minute bursts and nothing is so salacious as that which only might have happened. It says something about the consumers of this culture when we turn to journalists for soothsaying and prophesy.