No Political Campaigning

No Political Campaigning

       by Douglas R. Trudeau

give a man a hundred pence

give a man a dollar

give a man a cockatil

and watch him loose his coler

In the small town where I was born and lived until I decided to leave at the age of forty-six politics was all  importent. It concerned everyone and it consumed everyone. People sat in coffee shops in winter when nothing on the farm required their presence and there they spoke of the virtues of this or that candidate for the fall election. Jokes made the rounds, serious tones of voice suddenly overcame some, expenditures were discussed vehemently in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars, and local issues such as the state of roads, the problem with regulated agricultural industries, and the division of church and state led to heated debates. This was a time for care and, above all, a time for mental exertion by thousands of farmers, by thousands of those who made their livings laboring in the soil, by all those men and women on whose backs rested the well-being of the entire Canadian nation.

       One farmer's wife, Mrs. Amanda Caliphmann, was sick and tired of sitting at home waiting for her husband to return from his two hour coffee breaks at Renfrew's Café in Mather, Manitoba. One morning she decided no longer to chafe Ralphman nor to speak to him nicely about being home more nor to in any way make his life easy. She made up her mind in the morning having woken with the thought in her head again for the third day running.

       She drove her car into town and went to the municipality office where she wrote her name on the ballot for the Liberal party. She paid the two hundred dollars down, which Percy Groominger accepted with a smile and then absently put into his jacket pocket. She started on Sixteenth Street knocking on doors.

       "Hello!" she said, smiling, aware that she looked quite neat and delicious in a fresh dress, green shoes and red lipstick, and with a bit of rouge on her cheeks. "My name is Amanda and I am the Liberal candidate in town. Would you consider voting for me in the election in October?" The parties addressed usually smiled in return since rural neighborliness demanded the drama of mutuality and kindness, and then said that they would think about it. She worked her way down the rest of Sixteenth, and then Fifteenth, Fourteenth, and partway along Thirteenth by the time her husband caught up with her.

       "What the hell are you doing?" he whispered, smiling, since people would be watching.

(to be continued)