| The Salt Treaty |
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If the reader will presently permit me to be serious for a change, I feel it my civic duty to write about a situation that from time to time has been occurring hither and thither. Moreover, there is a distinct danger that it might occur yon. Against the advice of the constabulary, retail business proprietors and employees have been resisting would-be robbers by drawing guns, taking beads and splintering their stilts. In itself, this is not a phenomenon without merit; in fact I am quite convinced that the Gideons would approve of it. Heiman and Yehudi Gideon (the attorneys) would anyway. Vigilantism is, as the reader may already know, next to godliness or at least one of the highest manifestations of the government systems of taxation and assassination. Where the merits of vigilantism may of late have come up short becomes apparent when I suggest the danger that the robber community could become au courant with this new reality. They might take it upon themselves, de jure, to meet the merchants’ armed challenge by increasing their own ordnance, in both calibre and effect. Let us suppose that they do and see where events lead... Only the other month a home improvement store in Kenora and a tackle shop in Sioux Lookout were knocked off by assailants brandishing Thompson submachine guns. Admittedly, there was a tense but brief deadlock in the doorway of the Kenora outlet until the merchant, armed with a puny, war surplus, snub-nose, Walther P -38K pistol realized he was outgunned. He chose to surrender and let the outlaw run away pushing an end-of-season sale electric snow thrower. But the merchants wasted no time at all in regaining the initiative as the next report came in from Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. There, a would-be bandit demanding postcards showed up at a general store. Neither the proprietor’s Sten gun nor his protestations that there simply were not then and never had been any postcards commemorating Tatamagouche because tourists generally disliked dry salt cod and preferred to bypass the village would deter the intruder. He turned tail only after he spotted the proprietor’s wife drawing a bead on him from behind a war surplus, water-cooled, Vickers machine gun. Wearing a Pickelhaube and a false moustache, a potato masher grenade between her teeth, and huddled behind 25 kilogram bags of Robin Hood All Purpose Unbleached Flour, she looked every bit the cross between a British bulldog and a rabid Count Otto von Bismarck. Possibly you heard the news from Fredericton? An ex-paratrooper gone bad rolled a live grenade through the doorway of a florist shop and hollered, “Geronimo!” As the fuschia buds and thank you cards ricocheted around the clerk’s ears, she returned fire with twelve rounds from a bazooka. Right here in my hometown of Milton, some dummy ran into a supermarket with a flamethrower and popped forty-nine dollars’ worth of Orville Redenbacher Extra Butter Flavour Microwaveable Popcorn. Thinking from the cacophony that he was surrounded, he dropped the flamethrower, melting the store’s entire stock of back-to-school jujubes, and threw up his arms in surrender. He was held by the dairy department clerk until the police arrived. Orville Redenbacher was awarded the Civicus Bulbus Anulus hic Absentia et hic Posterum (A&P). This is the English Canadian equivalent of the French Canadian Croix des Patates avec Fromage, or France’s Croix du Coquille Doodle-doo, but it is awarded on the basis of a quota system, which in turn involves uttering a secret chant that goes “One potato, two potato, three potato, four!” or “Hiding around the goal’s it!” To return to the present polemic, meaning serious matters, a draw was called in Moose Jaw when an assailant and a shopkeeper tried to moon each other into submission from opposite ends of the frozen food aisle. Both of them were rushed to the hospital with severe frostbite. In Charlottetown a Canada Post kiosk was blown away by three-inch mortar fire. The only reason there were no casualties was because the kiosk had been unattended for eight years as a cost-cutting measure. Welland was next to hit the news when four crooks in an armoured scout car drove over a land mine buried in the drive-through lane at a fast food outlet. Miraculously the quartet managed to escape without injury, but they were subsequently taken prisoner by an armed pizzeria platoon out on reconnaissance patrol. A pet shop in Medicine Hat took an 80 mm heavy mortar round through the roof, touching off the city’s first ever rainstorm of cats and dogs. Meanwhile, a three-hour duel was fought on the outskirts of Grimsby between a pair of crooks with a 25-pounder gun and a bankrupt Lada dealer in a Russian T-54 tank. Things might have gone right on getting worse if it hadn’t been for the Sifto incident, named for an attempted robbery in Portage la Prairie during which several bags of Sifto Salt (Iodized to prevent goiter) were sprayed with machine gun fire by a near-sighted bandit. The clerk laughed so intensely that he ruptured his entire internal organ inventory and dropped dead on the spot from shock. It was this tragic turn that prompted the robbers and the merchants to convene a disarmament conference. They took very little time to settle on an agreement that when signed became known as the Iodized Salt Treaty, which the indulgent reader will readily distinguish as being disconnected from the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), the latter having been jointly decided upon by the Pentagon and the Kremlin after their senior military officials got wind of the former, considered it catchy and figured they could formulate some words to fit an acronym. But I didn’t mean to leave the Canadian government out of this. No — not at all. The Canadian government never stands still in a crisis. Sensing that something exceptional had to be done to prevent another all out war between the good and bad factions, they appointed a Royal Commission. The Commission was so Royal that even Queen Victoria would not have been amused. At one of their formal dinners held to celebrate the fifth anniversary of their appointment, a waiter clad in a toque was taking orders for Thai vegetable soup and jerk chicken (or maybe it was pulled chicken) and was heard to ask the chair if she would like “Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more.” In time the Commission released its report recommending that capital punishment be reinstated in the form of a sentence requiring that convicted murderers be required to print their capitals a hundred times on a blackboard. The report was shelved due to a lack of funding. |
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