Jacques Parizeau died this week. Before you ask what team he played for and if he won any Stanley Cups, let us cats explain that Parizeau did not come from the world of hockey — except that he used to be premier of one of the sport's most ardent homes, Quebec.
And 20 years ago this October, Jacques Parizeau nearly convinced Quebeckers to break away from Canada and start their own country.
You can read all about it in this book, but here's the bottom line: The "no" side won with just over 1 percent of the vote. For those of us who care that Canada remains united as well as strong and free, it was a mighty close shave.
That's one reason we cats are kind of unmoved by Parizeau's departure. The other reason is what he did after he lost the election.
So confident of the outcome that he neglected to write a concession speech (gee, who does that remind us of?), Parizeau stepped up to the microphones and said this: "It's true that we were beaten but we were beaten by what? By money and ethnic votes." Eeek! By the end of December, he was out of politics. The president of the Rabbinical Council of Montreal perhaps put it best: "Defeat is a test of character which Parizeau has failed."
But lest we Americans start feeling superior to the frustrated Quebec separatists of 1995, let us remember that only a few years later, Trent Lott pulled a Jacques Parizeau when he said that the United States "wouldn't have had all these problems over the years" if the country had just elected Dixiecrat and segregationist Strom Thurmond President in 1948. Whoops! — there went Trent.
It's interesting to us cats that both of these, um, gentlemen got in trouble by dissing whole groups of their fellow citizens. This is something that we particularly dislike, and which the millions of idiots who slime other people on social media could take a lesson from. But sadly, too often, unlike Lott and Parizeau the perpetrators are rarely made to pay.
And you know what? Here in America, a whole lot of them are Republicans. We cats HISS.
(IMAGE: Jacques Parizeau, October 30, 1995, committing political suicide.)
No comments:
Post a Comment