Playing Politics

I joined Environment Haliburton a couple of months ago. I was asked to join the squash club, too; I haven’t yet. I’m thinking about applying to be a member of the Outdoor Association and I’ve been on a walk with Friends of the Rail Trail but that’s about it.

I’m struggling to think of any other association, guild or club that I’m affiliated to. I have no family living here, nor dead ones taking up space in a local graveyard. My nearest relative resides in Scarborough: that’s the small seaside town located on the east coast of the British Isles... I have no ancestry that traces back to before Maarten Steinkamp bought up Haliburton County.

So I guess that counts me out of the race for political office in the local elections for a few years (well, just the twenty or so that it takes to become a local!). But then again, I don’t think I have the drive and ambition to be a politician, and I count that amongst my most appealing traits.

To mis-quote American writer and political activist Gore Vidal, “any person who is prepared to run for office should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.” This succinct remark is proven time after time on the world political stage, as power-hungry charlatans hoodwink the general public into thinking they will do good before shafting everyone and everything apart from themselves and their nearest and vilest friends.

Or is that giving George W Bush too much credit? In GDubbya’s defence, I believe he was hoodwinked into becoming president by so called friends in order that they could pull his strings and generally profiteer at the expense of the American and Iraqi people and a whole host of others.

Worse than that is ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Dubbed George W Bush’s puppet - how lame is that, the puppet of a puppet! - Tony gave great speeches about standing up to bullies and corruption and then kowtowed to GDubbya time and time again. But looking at it another way, little Tony slyly feathered his own nest while cosying up to the ‘boss of the world’, before handing over power to his right hand man and supposed friend, Gordon Brown, just as the world economy went, how do you put it, down the toilet!

And then there’s Canada’s perfectly manicured bouffant bonneted Prime Minister Stephen Harper: oh don’t get me started! Or rather, don’t ask my view on him or Canadian politics just yet because I’m still new here and getting to know a whole new set of shysters and their shenanigans.

But it can’t always be bad can it? At least a few of these politicians and their challengers must have started out on their road to office with an honourable goal in mind. They must have wanted to do good, to make change for the better at some point in their working lives. And we, as voters, the very profferers of power to this rarefied and yet all to often rank parade of miscreants, must believe in some of the things they say in their election speeches.

And there’s the rub. Both politician and voter start out with the best intentions. Each has great ambitions and a view to just how they can be achieved. Think of the US and its recent tumultuous election of President Obama. That’s BELIEF pouring out of the voters’ hearts in bucketfuls there.

For my part, I think the American public did the right thing. I have hope, not belief but hope, that the new ‘boss of the world’ will do at least some good.

And that is where we now stand in Haliburton County. The votes are in, the council seats are filled, some with the same old behinds, some with pert new derrières. We have hope that this new political term will see some good work done. We want our councillors to do well; we want them to succeed; we want to believe in them and their ambitions.

Then again, I’m just glad that it’s all over. That this group of politically-afflicted, sorry ambitious souls has stopped railroading every public event and weekly publication just to inform me how many millennia their family has been living - not just cottaging, heaven forbid - locally or to list how many clubs, associations or secret short trouser-wearing nipple exposing guilds they are members of! Or does that last club only exist in Blighty?