Category: Norks

They say that nobody’s perfect, and I guess this kinda proves that old adage out. Anybody with their cranium clear of their colon already knows that I’m quite the fan of Stephen Harper. I like the idea of having someone in charge who a) does what he said he would do and b) doesn’t steep himself headfirst in a bunch of namby-pamby, feelgood bullcrap whilst actually doing nothing about anything the way the Grits did for over a decade. But it must have been baked beans and chili dogs for ol’ Steve’s intellectual lunch the other day because, as brainfarts go, this one could peel the paint off the walls:

VANCOUVER — Prime Minister Stephen Harper is calling on the United Nations to impose sanctions against North Korea for its purported nuclear test.

Harper condemned the test blast and said the UN must make a “a meaningful and substantial response.”

Where the hell did that come from? This is the kind of wussese that I would expect out of the Librano$, or maybe the Dippers, but I expect better from Harper. This is the guy who stood up in the Gerneral Assembly in New York not that long ago and declared the very relevance of the UN was being tested and has, at times, vaguely hinted that he understands that the UN is long past any useful purpose and that it’s days are irrevocably numbered.

Let’s face it: the UN never accomplishes anything. It was useless in Bosnia, useless in Somalia, useless in Rwanda, and it’s useless in the Sudan. The last shred of respect that I had for that organisation vanished when it put Libya in charge of human rights. Maybe Harper hasn’t forgotten any of this and he’s giving them one last chance to prove their worth. I hope that’s it; I really do. But just in case I’m wrong and just in case Harper somehow (though I can’t imagine how) doesn’t really get it, I’m going to put it into terms so damned simple that anyone could figure it out (even me):

SATURDAY MORNINGS AND WORLD AFFAIRS
-OR-
Everything I Need To Know, I Learned From The Hitman

Okay, here we go. Think back to when you were a kid. Remember watchin rasslin’ on Saturdays? No, I don’t mean wrestling. Wrestling is an olympic sport. I’m talking about the figure-four leglock, the flying elbow smash and heads rammed into turnbuckles. Are ya with me now? Good.

Now, think back to those Saturday mornings when you used to watch the greats of the day stride into the squared circle. Back to the days when good guys like Rick “Quick-Draw McGraw, the Boogie-Woogie Man and Dusty Rhodes used to keep the world safe from scumbags like the Iron Sheik, Ted “The Million Dollar Man” Dibiase and Greg “The Hammer” Valentine while other guys like Rowdy Roddy Piper would just kick the crap out of whoever happened to be handy at the time. Still with me? Cool.

My favourites were always the tag-team matches. Whenever one of those was on the card you knew there would be some good mayhem someplace before the show was done. My all-time favourites would have to be the Hart Foundation, with Mike Rotundo & Barry Windham a close second.

The matches always followed the same formula, but we watched them anyway (hey, we were young; give us a break). It would go, with a few little variations here and there, something like this:

Good guy A would be in the ring, pounding the crap out of bad guy A (or B) so hard that his grandkids were going to be born dizzy. The bad guys’ manager (because bad guys always had managers) would then pull some stunt while the ref wasn’t looking, usually a cheap shot, to get good guy A off-balance for a few seconds. Good guy B would holler at the ref to do something about it and the ref would go over and demand an explanation from the manager, who would shrug with a “what, me?” look on his face while bad guys A and B would drag good guy A over to their corner behind the ref’s back and proceed to double-team the crap out of him. This would go on until good guy B finally lost his cool and jumped into the ring to help his buddy, at which point the ref would suddenly finish with being distracted by the evil manager and jump over, grab good guy B and herd him back to his own corner while good guy A was still getting stomped by bad guy A, bad guy B and the manager across the ring. No matter how much the crowd would scream and point, the ref never managed to look the right way and catch the skulldiggery that was going on just a few feet away and it was always the good guy that got admonished for jumping in when he wasn’t supposed to.

What the heck does all this have to do with world affairs, you ask?

It’s simple: the UN is the ref.