The High Road (12 page)

“So you mean the toothpicks aren’t supposed to pop out and stand up like that?” I asked, pointing to the screen. Sally said nothing. By this time his beard seemed to be moving all on its own as the fine, comb-straight lines began to vibrate and curl. “What’s that?” I pointed to the screen again.

“Damn, I thought we got them all,” Sally breathed. “This is heading south in a hurry.”

“It almost looks like a kernel of corn,” I said, squinting at the pale yellow nub in the lower left quadrant of Angus’s beard.

“Yep. That beard is thicker than a Brazilian rain forest. For all we know, the cob could still be in there somewhere.” Sally sighed.

Clearly the producer in the control room was no longer transfixed by the slow-motion transformation of Angus’s hedge. I saw
Brett’s right index finger zip to his right temple as if to prevent his earphone from flying out. Brett looked down, listening.

“Uhm … Angus we’re going to take a quick break now,” Brett said, before turning to face the camera. “So stay with us and we’ll be right back with Liberal MP Angus McLintock.”

I opened my mouth to say something to Sally, but she had bolted for the studio like a cheetah on a gazelle. I imagined her attacking Angus’s hair and beard as an anxious producer counted down the commercial break. The monitor in the green room was not an inside feed but the standard cable output so I waited for the annoying Pizza Pockets ad to end before Brett eventually materialized before me once again. The camera shot had changed. I could no longer see Angus when Brett was posing his questions. Sally was probably still working on Angus.

“Welcome back to
Face to Face
. I’m Brett Palmer and I’m pleased to have renegade MP Angus McLintock with me in the studio today. Angus, there’s a new rumour circulating on the Hill this morning that an ultra-conservative Christian preacher, Alden Stonehouse, will also seek the Tory nomination in Cumberland-Prescott against Emerson Fox. How do you react to that?”

“Well, I suggest Emerson Fox’s view on the matter is more important than mine. I’ve heard of this Stonehouse fellow, but I was not aware that he might run. I assume he won’t be campaigning on Sundays,” Angus deadpanned. “Who opposes me for the seat is really not my primary concern. I’m interested in reminding, and in some cases maybe convincing, the people of Cumberland-Prescott that we all share democracy’s principal obligation: to do first what is right for the nation before we consider what’s best for our own community, let alone for ourselves. That may sound obvious but in my experience, it’s not the way politics seems to work in this country. I aim to help change that.”

Sally’s emergency intervention during the commercial break must not have saved the patient because the camera shot of Angus had also changed. Throughout his thoughtful response, the TV screen was filled entirely with the face of Angus
McLintock. We saw a bit of his hair but the frame of the shot prevented the viewer from witnessing the real action taking place an inch or two off Angus’s head. This particular camera shot was perfect for a remote dermatological examination, but didn’t make for great T V. Angus delivered what I thought was a powerful answer. Unfortunately, the extreme close-up was more likely to prompt viewers to count his nostril hairs than focus on his compelling words. It sure made for strange T V.

Ten minutes later we were headed back to Cumberland with Angus at the wheel of his Toyota Camry.

“Well, beyond the histrionics of that possessed makeup artist, I thought that went rather well,” he opened.

As a participant, Angus had obviously heard the show, but clearly he had not seen it.

“Absolutely! It was a great interview, Angus. Strong answers. And you looked … uhm … good.”

“I could have done without those women wrestlin’ with my locks every five minutes.”

Oh no, you couldn’t, I wanted to say.

“They were just doing their job.” I glanced over and noticed a stray toothpick resting on his right shoulder. I brushed it off casually and shoved it down the crack in the seat.

“So tell me what you know about Alden Stonehouse,” I asked. “I thought Emerson Fox was running unopposed.”

“Aye, I’m surprised to hear that Stonehouse might enter the fray. I’ve met him once or twice in Cumberland, and he came in to the constituency office once a while back about graffiti.”

“Right, I remember him now. Very polite. Nice guy. Has a way with words, as I recall,” I ventured.

“Aye. He’s very high on what he calls family morals, which I took to mean he’s about as right wing as they come, but cloaks it in the civility and charm of a country clergyman.”

“Well then, this is good news for our side,” I noted.

“How do you figure?”

“Emerson Fox can’t turn his flamethrower in our direction
until he’s taken care of the opponent in his own party. That buys us some time to observe, learn, and plan,” I replied. “But not too much time. The Tory nomination meeting is in a few days.”

Angus was rifling through his beard as if searching for his house key. He found what he was looking for, lowered his window, and tossed out a corn kernel.

Later that night, while Lindsay slept beside me, Google, my laptop, and I got together to learn a bit more about Alden Stonehouse. He was the spiritual leader of the Assembly of the Divine Life of the Enlightenment. Yes, that does in fact become ADLE, an unfortunate appellation. ADLE had grown considerably in the last few years and now boasted a congregation of about 2,500 from the surrounding rural communities. Many of the congregants would be voters in Cumberland-Prescott. Some news reports I read, including an article by André Fontaine in the
Crier
, attributed a recent surge in new church members to the impending recession. A brush with death or the prospect of hard economic times often turned ambivalent church-goers into more devout followers. ADLE professed predictable views on the major social issues. Homosexuality: bad. Marriage between a man and woman resulting in the classic nuclear family: good. Premarital sex: bad. Post-marital sex: good, but only for procreation. Mothers who work outside the home: bad. A national child-care program: nope. Teaching
Slaughterhouse-Five
in high schools: no, I don’t think so. Etc., etc.

But despite Stonehouse’s living next door to Genghis Khan on the ideological spectrum, I found it hard to dislike him based on my online trolling. YouTube served up plenty of clips, from TV interviews to Sunday sermons. He was certainly doctrinaire in his right-wingedness, yet he sounded reasonable when espousing views I deplored. He accepted the right of others to hold their own opinions and relied heavily on lines like “Well, I understand your position but we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that.” He wasn’t a screamer. He wasn’t rude. He wasn’t a
caricature of a corrupt TV evangelist. He was calm, polite, courteous, well groomed, even handsome. And he could talk up a storm. He was articulate, bordering on eloquent, with the needle occasionally slipping into the charismatic zone. In other words, he was a danger to us and, more immediately, to Emerson Fox. His extreme views aside, he was much closer as a package to the Honourable Eric Cameron, whom he sought to replace, than was Emerson Fox. Most importantly, I assumed he enjoyed the monolithic support of his congregation. If he were as smart as he appeared, he’d be distributing Conservative Party memberships to his flock on the collection plate Sunday mornings. If I were Fox, I’d be a little uneasy.

Before I left YouTube, and against my better judgment, I typed
Angus McLintock
into the search bar. Just as I feared, there were already four separate uploads of that morning’s
Face to Face
interview. As well, some online political junkie with far too much time on his hands had produced a hilarious accelerated version of the interview under the title
Angus McLintock’s Hair: The 8th Wonder of the World
. The wannabe filmmaker had zoomed in so that Angus’s head and shoulders filled the frame. He then sped up the interview so the fourteen minutes zipped by in two minutes. I had to admit, watching the eruption on Angus’s head in compressed time was quite amazing. The pièce de résistance? The entire two-minute clip ran accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The soundtrack so often really makes the film.

The next day, we got our first Emerson Fox wake-up call, and we weren’t even the target. Cumberland’s two radio stations started running the following two ads in heavy rotation, featuring a baritone movie-trailer voice-over with an alarmist tone.

“In every corner of the world, religious fanaticism has led to anarchy, violence, and bloodshed. There is no place in Canada, and no place in Cumberland, for religious zealots of any denomination. Who knows where it will end? This has been a paid political message from the Committee to Nominate Emerson Fox as the
Progressive Conservative Candidate in Cumberland-Prescott.”

“What do conservative voters really know about Alden Stonehouse? That he’s the leader of an extreme Christian splinter group. That he’s only lived in Cumberland for the last two years. That he rules his church with an iron fist. We’ve seen extreme religious leaders before, from Jonestown, Guyana, to Waco, Texas. Let’s not add Cumberland to the list. This has been a paid political message from the Committee to Nominate Emerson Fox as the Progressive Conservative Candidate in Cumberland-Prescott.”

I’d been waiting for Emerson Fox to fire his first shot across Alden Stonehouse’s bow. I just hadn’t expected him to fire directly
into
Alden Stonehouse’s bow. Beyond how ridiculous and specious the ads were, it was odd for Fox to use such a public vehicle for his initial attack on Stonehouse when he was really only targeting PC party members who could vote in the upcoming Tory nomination. It was clear to me that Emerson Fox was not just lobbing a grenade, or more accurately a six-megaton cluster bomb, in Alden Stonehouse’s direction, he was sending us a message, too.

Over the next two days, Emerson Fox and Alden Stonehouse waged a bitter and public battle for the hearts, minds, and votes of the Cumberland-Prescott Progressive Conservative Association. Both placed ads in the
Cumberland Crier
outlining their positions. Well, that’s not quite accurate. Stonehouse’s half-page ad laid out a series of policy planks that would make a hardcore libertarian blush. Fox’s space in the
Crier
merely warned of the dangers of nominating a religious extremist-outsider-newcomer-cult leader as the PC candidate.

I kept the radio on in the campaign office, in the car, and at the boathouse as Fox’s scorched-earth offensive played out before my ears. There were more incendiary radio spots, interview sound bites that were explosive enough to warrant hourly replays with each newscast, and a screen crawler on the Emerson Fox website that endlessly scrolled through troubling “facts”
about the fanatical Alden Stonehouse and his messianic hold over his followers.

As I drove to and from the McLintock HQ, I saw choirs of Stonehouse supporters on busy street corners singing hymns, badly, and waving what I can only describe as blue campaign crucifixes with “Stonehouse” emblazoned on the horizontal cross-piece. It was the most blatant merging of church and state I’d seen since Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the pulpit politics he brought to the United States in the early eighties. For a good part of Monday, a Stonehouse choir swayed on the sidewalk outside the McLintock campaign office serenading our staff. Muriel sent out coffee to them and a request to sing one of her favourites, “Oh God Our Help in Ages Past.” They did a commendable job of it, although Muriel thought they’d botched the descant on the last verse. We smiled and applauded anyway. The choir looked perplexed and broke up shortly thereafter.

Monday night, Lindsay and I were just finishing up burgers I’d brought home before another night on the door-to-door canvass, when the phone rang.

“Hi André,” Lindsay opened. “Loved your photo in the
Crier
last week. I know you had to do it. I would have done the same thing.”

Pause.

“Angus will get over it soon enough.”

Pause.

“He’s right here.” She handed the phone to me.

Three minutes later my evening plans had changed. Despite some misgivings on my part, André had talked me into attending the PC nomination meeting at the Cumberland Motor Inn. Lindsay agreed to coordinate the evening’s canvass in my stead.

“Okay, tell me again how the campaign manager for the Liberal candidate is going to gain admittance to the Progressive Conservative nomination meeting,” I asked as I slid into the front seat of André’s Subaru.

“Here, put these on,” André replied, handing me
Cumberland Crier
ball cap and parka. “You’ll be shooting video for the
Crier
website at the meeting so I can concentrate on taking stills.”

I glanced into the back seat and saw a tripod and sparkling new HD digital camera.

“It used to be that newspapers were just newspapers,” I observed.

“The damned Internet means we have to be broadcasters as well as writers and shooters now, so I could use your help. Plus, I thought you might want to be there for this.”

“But what if someone recognizes me at the meeting? It could be embarrassing to be thrown out. You’d probably report on my ejection and plaster a photo on the front page.”

“I probably would, but that won’t happen. Nobody is going to recognize you. When you work for someone who looks like Charles Darwin in a force nine gale, no one remembers the clean-cut Joe standing next to him. You’re safe.”

We parked two blocks away in the closest spot we could find. It was going to be a long night. I donned the parka, pulling the cap down low, and grabbed the tripod with the camera already mounted on it. I tried my best to look like an experienced camera operator sauntering casually with it slung over my shoulder. In the five-minute walk to the motel, I inadvertently struck a stop sign and then André with the tripod. Curly, Larry, and Moe were smiling down on me.

I stood behind André, looking at my feet, as he signed us in at the media check-in table, and we then took our place at the back of the ballroom. After about ten minutes of tinkering, I finally figured out how to spread the tripod’s legs and fix them in place. The breakthrough came when a miniature woman, who must have been about eighty-five, shuffled over and pointed with her cane to the release button where the legs locked together. I thanked her and looked around to see if anyone else had been watching. It was a breeze after that. I spent the rest of the time with my eye in the viewfinder, hiding my face in the lee of the
camera. André just stood beside me, enjoying my anxiety.