Dateline: OTTAWA—A study headed by Dr. Lawrence Dipplerdoo,
medical researcher at McGill University, indicates that excessive exposure to
Question Period at the Canadian House of Commons can be fatal. In an interview
with RWUG Magazine, Dr. Dipplerdoo said that if you watch all 45 minutes of a Question
Period, from beginning to end, there’s a statistically significant chance that your
face will melt off of your skull and land in your lap.
The period officially called Oral Questions occurs each
sitting day in Ottawa and allows the opposing parties to seek information from
the Canadian government. Parties pose a limited number of timed questions to
ministers, depending on the size of their caucus, and one or another minister
rises to respond.
“Theoretically,” said Dr. Dipplerdoo, “a public exchange like
that between elected politicians should be benign or even salutary. Transparency
in government is widely assumed to be a virtue. But my team has discovered that transparency is beneficial only if what you’re permitted to see
isn’t so horrible that the sight of it melts your face off.” Dr. Dipplerdoo
therefore recommends either that Question Period be kept from the public “as a
sort of lethal secret on par with the true name of God” or that television
viewers of the abomination be forewarned that they could be left faceless.
According to Dr. Dipplerdoo, the risks have gone unreported
until now because hardly anyone bothers to watch even a moment of Question
Period, let alone the entire daily cacophony, the assumption being that Canadian
politics is boring and therefore unworthy of attention or that Question Period
is a circus in which nothing is ever resolved amidst all the taunting and
sneering. However, Dr. Dipplerdoo noticed that recent cases of human
face-melting had a common cause, which was that when the bodies were found, the
deceased had been sitting in front of their TVs which were tuned to a station
that broadcasts Question Period.
“The petty jeering and juvenile cat-calling, the routine
dodging of questions and reciting of mere market-tested talking points, the standard
refusal to come clean and level with the public, the hypocritical nitpicking by
the opposition that’s never saintly when it’s in charge of Parliament—all of
that’s familiar to the minority of Canadians who’ve been brave enough to give
even a passing glance at a Question Period,” said Dr. Dipplerdoo. “But what
we’ve found is that those corruptions can be concentrated and effectively
weaponized.”
The doctor hastens to add that the mechanism by which
Question Period can kill its viewers is unknown, but his team hypothesizes that
“the Canadian politicians’ soul-crushing cynicism, which is so evident in the
farcical Oral Questions, is impossible to ignore or to misinterpret when a
viewer absorbs a full dose of that poison. What can literally kill average
Canadians is the shock that a government could be so hollow, that so many
elected representatives could so recklessly sabotage the disguises for their
nihilism—their conservative haircuts, tailored suits, and the like—by
demonstrating their bottomless loathing for each other and for all Canadians.”
The doctor said that the depth of that hatred is evidently contagious
and proves lethal in sufficiently high doses—unless the viewers are “immunized
by a personal reserve of shamelessness.” “After all,” the doctor continued, “the
politicians sit through day after day of the absurd goings-on at Question
Period with their faces intact. We theorize, then, that viewers could survive a
full dose of the poison from the House of Commons as long as they, too, were so
jaded that nothing could appall them.”
Justin Trudeau, head of the Liberal Party, held a press
conference in response to the team’s conclusions. “Canadian politicians are
decent and honourable citizens,” he protested, “who work hard and sacrifice
much to serve the Canadian people.” Mr. Trudeau denied that the tribal antics
on display in Question Periods, including the officials’ manifest contempt for
each other, cast any doubt on his meme about the politician’s good intentions.
No comments:
Post a Comment