Feisty "Jumpin' Joe" Oliver is 72 years young and unofficially is Canada's Minister of Natural Resources (officially he is the Minister responsible for the War on the Environment and Environmentalists.)
To understand why he got the role of the pitbull in the Harperville movie, it helps to recall that "Jumpin' Joe" was conceived the week that Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany.
Hard to say exactly what happened more than 72 years ago, but in every war and in every country around the world many, many couples suddenly get 'frisky' when war is declared.
Because, at the very least, becoming a brand new daddy can help keep him out of the war.
At 72, "Jumpin' Joe" is one of the oldest cabinet ministers since the heyday of the Old Man Canadian federal cabinets of the 1950s.
But "Jumpin' Joe" wasn't an old man back then - far from it.
He was still just 15 when Canada's fabulous Fifties Resource Boom got under way, in the days when cars had fins like dinosaurs and were the size of small aircraft carriers.
If the age of fifteen is the time when our most formative experiences happen, that "Jumpin' Joe" never forgot those heady days after Leduc #1 gushed black oil and the sky was as big and as blue as the eyes of an Alberta rancher.
Now finally - 50 years later - he is finally getting a chance to relive those teenage dreams.
Limits to what Canada can do in Tomorrow Country ?
Joe denies all that as just tommyrot from a bunch of defeatist young 'uns.
In his youth, young people believed, they had faith.
In Progress and in an Ever-Better Tomorrow.
Joe is still 16 , still behind the wheel of a cherry-red '37 coupe.
Only this time, the hot rod vehicle he is burning up the rubber with is called 'Canada's Tar Sands'.
So look carefully, both ways, on any road this 72 year old 'perpetual teenager' might be joyriding down, behind his souped-up, Syncrude-sized, gas-guzzling machine.....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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