The
Great Canadian Lampoon
Satire
in a time of political correctness pandemic
The Ballad of Sunny Ways
Colin Alexander
120 pages
Paperback on amazon.ca $15, e-book
$6
Countering
political correctness, cancel culture, and assaults on the freedom to express
contrary views, commentator and former newspaper publisher Colin Alexander has
come out with a book of satirical verse, The
Ballad of
The
title piece ridicules the pomposity and humbug of the current government. Some
forty stanzas mock Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s contradictions and
absurdities of governance.
Given
the Prime Minister’s admiration for
The problems are
minor when dealing with
the country that I love best.
We should simply
concede whatever they need
for perpetual
peace with the West.
Mr.
Alexander swipes at politically accepted attitudes toward the free-market
economy. Here’s one on the Prime Minister’s addiction to fancy dress as well
his family’s love affair with
I wear the bandanna that I got in
to
renew what I learned from my father—
The Marxist perspectives and
worthy objectives
of
the Castros and Doctor Guevara.
Then
there’s the muddleheaded handling of the Covid pandemic:
You have to
admire us for handling the virus—
we couldn’t have moved any faster.
Wonder of
wonders! It was done without blunders.
I averted a major disaster.
Here’s the final stanza of the
title piece, targeting Bills C-10 and C-36, aimed at restricting freedom of
expression on the Internet:
So I want to make plain if there’s any disdain,
my sense of revenge grows keener.
And if any should
try, I’ll suck you so dry
with the ease of a vacuum cleaner.
The Ballad keeps on going with zinger after
zinger. Given Mr. Alexander’s ridiculing of the drive for censorship, and a
possible reaction, one may recall Voltaire’s saying, “It is dangerous to be
right in matters where established men are wrong.”
The book also lampoons the
justice system, which Mr. Alexander calls an oxymoron. “Absent credible
independent oversight,” he says, “judges too often encourage their colleagues’
expensive process and then override settled law in favour of vested
interests.” The book includes a wide
variety of other traditional and narrative verse that rhymes, scans and makes
sense, not all of it humorous but always provoking thought.
Extolling the virtues of satire and referring specifically to the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, the historian Simon Schama said, “Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.” The Ballad follows in that tradition.
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