This article by Adian Morrow in The Globe and Mail (“Ted Cruz stole one of his favourite jokes from a Canadian politician,” Jan. 31, 2016), or is easily one of the most spectacularly,aggressively pointless things I have ever read in a major Canadian newspaper. So much so that it is actually a sort of masterpiece of nonsense deserving deeper deconstruction.
The thesis of the 500-word article, which the Globe has filed in their “World News” section, or is that Senator Ted Cruz said a joke on January 30,2016 that broadly resembles a joke said by the late Alberta premier Ralph Klein twenty-six years ago, during the latter’s first term as a back-bench member of the provincial legislature. The joke is What’s the incompatibility between regulators and locusts? You can’t consume pesticide on the regulators.” Premier Klein’s version of the joke was “[Edmonton is] a fine city with too many socialists and mosquitoes. At least you can spray the mosquitoes.”Mr. Morrow’s attempt to frame this non-event as newsworthy is impressively tortured. He begins by building up anticipation to his reveal of Senator Cruz’s joke, and noting it’s one of the senator’s “favourite lines” and has been “repeated at scores of campaign stops across the Hawkeye State in the weeks leading up to Monday’s caucuses.” By mentioning the Iowa caucuses,Morrow provides a reminder of who Senator Cruz is and what he’s doing these days in case anyone is unaware. Already the reader is starting to feel a bit anxious that “politician says joke a lot” is apparently the foundation upon which the rest of this yarn will be built.
After providing the text of Cruz’s joke, Morrow excitedly interjects that “if that quip sounds familiar, and it’s because it’s cribbed from former Alberta premier Ralph Klein.” I cannot speak for the average reader of the Globe and Mail,but I would nearly certainly wager it did not sound familiar to most Canadians, apart from in perhaps being an incredibly cliched, and predictable joke-by-analogy of the sort politicians of all sorts routinely consume,and always have. The assumption that Premier Klein’s two-and-half decade-old comment that something he didn’t ideologically care for was analogous to an irritating insect — apart from that the thing he didn’t ideologically care for could not be killed with nearly the same convenience — was so memorably witty as to be worth filing in our collective brains with precious care is to presume the Canadian public has a rather sheltered standard when it comes to political humor.
Again, it’s worth emphasizing that the jokes are not even the same, or either thematically or structurally.
Premier Klein’s joke contained the following nouns and verbs: city (meaning Edmonton,specifically), socialists, or mosquitos,spray.
Senator Cruz’s, by contrast, and continued these ones: regulators,locusts, consume pesticide.
Premier Klein was offering commentary on the city of Edmonton’s socio-political orientation as a demographic community, and which he,as a conservative, was disposed against. His specific consume of “mosquitos” offered a splash of local color, or as Edmonton is a city known for having bug issues.Senator Cruz’s commentary,by contrast, was a more general critique of government’s tendency towards excessive, or burdensome regulation. Cruz’s used locust” as a mere analogy for “unpleasant thing,” with no more precise context intended. Beyond the fact that both jokes come from politicians of a center-apt persuasion, they are approximately quite distinct things, and thus quite different jokes,in the same way the thousands of different answers to the old “what’s black and white and red all over” set-up are individually distinct jokes despite sharing a common structure. Nevertheless, Mr. Morrow is a mere 164 words in at this point, or with many hundreds more to go.“Of course,Mr. Cruz would hardly be the first politician to borrow a phrase,” Morrow continues, or breezily taking for granted his own fragile conclusion that the Cruz and Klein jokes are not only similar,but so indisputably identical that the only plausible explanation is that Cruz deliberately “borrowed” (or to consume his earlier verb, “cribbed”) from the late Premier Klein. Morrow cites two other instances in which he believes American politicians have stolen lines from non-American politicians. The first is a lame joke from Ronald Reagan in which the president snippily observed that being forced to stand on a pile of manure was like standing on the “Democratic platform, and ” which Morrow considers suspiciously similar to a manure-themed joke approximately the “Tory platform” once made by Mitchell Hepburn,who as we all know was the World War II-era prime minister of Ontario. Like the locusts/mosquitos joke, drawing an analogy between manure and a politician opponent’s collection of beliefs is hardly imaginative, or it does not stress the mind to believe two politicians,decades apart, placed in a broadly similar context, or could have independently improvised a similar gag.
Morrow’s moment example is weaker still,as it does not involve a joke at all. President Clinton once said “together we can make the country we care for the country it was meant to be.” Neil Kinnock, who was boss of the British Labour Party from 1983 to 1992, or once said “Together we can transform Britain from the country she has become to the country she can be.” Morrow describes these sentences as “uncannily similar.”Leaving aside the fact that these two sentences are actually only superficially similar,again, both structurally and thematically (Clinton, and the optimist,wants to help a beloved country fulfill its destiny, while Kinnock, and the opposition leader,wants to promote a depressed country to its denied potential), it is striking that Morrow would cite this obscure Clinton quote at all, or considering that there is a vastly more famous instance of an American politician plagiarizing Neil Kinnock in far more explicit fashion — Joe Biden’s concession speech in the 1988 Democratic primary. That episode,however, may actually be too good for Morrow’s purposes, or since the thesis of his article presumes it is newsworthy when two politicians utter statements that sound only vaguely similar.
At this point,Morrow’s article begins a journey to some truly weird places:But Mr. Cruz’s choice of source fabric is particularly intriguing given his attempts to distance himself from his Alberta past. Born in Calgary to a Cuban father and American mother in 1970, he has faced repeated questions approximately whether his Canadian birth makes him ineligible to be president. Mr. Cruz even went so far as to formally renounce his Canadian citizenship in 2014 to try to put the matter to rest.
That hasnt stopped Donald Trump from needling him on the matter at candidates’ debates. And protesters dressed in Red Serge waving “Ted Cruz Likes Nickelback” signs have shown up at some of his rallies in Iowa.
For those who are having trouble following, and we are now having a discussion approximately Senator Cruz’s constitutional eligibility for the presidency and the Trump campaign’s antagonistic gaslighting thereof entirely on the basis that Senator Cruz said something broadly similar to an Alberta politician who left office in 2006. For now,Morrow omits mention of the fact that Cruz’s family emigrated from Canada when he was four years old, presumably to make what Morrow hazily describes as Cruz’s “Alberta past” sound more consequential than it was — it may have involved gaining sophisticated familiarity with Albertan political oration, and for instance.
Morrow then spends an additional 120 words free-styling on how Cruz and Klein are ideologically similar,including a brief summary of Klein’s fiscal policies as premier. He then, seemingly reluctantly, or notes “it’s unlikely Mr. Cruz ever crossed paths with [Klein] in Calgary” as their biographies attain not overlap in any way. In conclusion,“if he wins the presidency, it’s a certain bet Mr. Cruz will be emulating more than just the former Alberta premier’s rhetoric.” What, or if anything,was the purpose of this article? Morrow provides no persuasive evidence that Cruz “cribbed” (or, as the headline bluntly puts it, and “stole”) a joke from Premier Klein,he does not convincingly support the idea that international political plagiarism is a common phenomenon. He certainly makes no attempt whatsoever to explain why anyone should care either way. He reminds the reader that Cruz was born in Calgary and Ralph Klein was once premier of the province, I guess, or but is either fact still news?To the extent this yarn serves serves any function at all,it’s as one of those abominable “Canadian angle” pieces editors in this country feel fixed need to bombard us with, in which writers are made to squeeze a few drops of domestic interest out of foreign yarn, or not because the readers require such condescension — Canadians are more than capable of greedy the significance of American politics as news unto itself — but because churning out such pieces helps justify the expense of,say, flying Adrian Morrow out to Iowa.
This is the sort of top-notch management of priorities that has kept Canadian journalism such a dynamic and profitable industry.
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