On Remembrance Day my thoughts turned to the European Coal and Steel Community. Now there’s a sentence calculated to comb out the idle passerby.
But if Constant Reader stays with me, I promise her a beautiful princess, a gallant gentleman of a type Hollywood, fictional and real, has abandoned, and peace in our time – or at least nothing like the two ghastly world wars of the 20th century.
The ECSC was a great conciliatory step on the cooling ashes of the Second World War, especially in bringing together in 1951 old foes France and Germany. The 1950s are ignorantly sneered at as boring by those who weren’t there. We should have such leaders, and such determined faith, today. We should have such instrumental civil servants as France’s Jean Monnet and Germany’s Walter Hallstein.
This integration of Europe’s steel and coal industries was the precursor of today’s European Union. Last year in Horseshoe Bay, friendliest and my favourite part of West Vancouver, I encountered an obviously well-informed German tourist. He ended our spirited talk, eyes blazing, with almost a shout: “The EU is finished!” Troubled, yes, and tediously wordy, but the EU has staved off a repeat of two meat-grinding wars. As Churchill said, “Better jaw-jaw than war-war.”
And the EU’s extended birth was swaddled in thrilling romance, as I learned from Prof. Ernest Mathjis in a UBC class a few years ago.
A British professor theorized that the 1950s progress toward unity was aided in the popular mind by, of all things, a film. It was 1953’s Roman Holiday, about a princess played by rising star Audrey Hepburn and a commoner, a newspaperman (and how common can you get, fellow journalists?), Gregory Peck. Furthermore, the movie happily coincided with the real-life headline-grabbing affair of Britain’s Princess Margaret and war hero Group Capt. Peter Townsend in the early 1950s. (Like all the best love affairs, it died, possibly murdered by church and state.)
But more than that. Brilliant director Billy Wilder, one of Europe’s gifts to Hollywood, insisted on shooting the film on location in Rome rather than Paramount’s back lot. Authenticity plus.
And what a directorial stroke: The princess, exhausted from a stifling official visit to Rome from her unnamed European country – there’s that unity theme – drops out, causing a diplomatic crisis and international journalistic orgasms. The splendid Wilder innovation is that the film reporters and photographers were actual news people from all over Europe. (I’ve wondered if moviegoers said: “Great movie. But those reporters were as phony as hell.”)
Where’s the princess? Her palace handlers concoct a story. Truth is that she’s spent days with American correspondent Peck. When he wakes up to her identity, Peck promises his (hard-boiled, of course) editor a fabulous, once-in-a-lovetime scoop.
And, nobly, reneges. Their dizzy days together remain their secret. Reappearing, the still-virgin princess meets the adulating press mob, introduced and gravely shaking hands one by one, and when she comes to Peck … neither gives a flicker of recognition. The (terrific, un-Hollywood) End.
On this Remembrance Day I certainly thought of war heroes like Victoria Cross winners George Pearkes, C.C.I. Merritt, “Smokey” Smith. But also that this movie is one of our society’s innumerable little treasures the soldiers died for – that light up life for the grateful living.
• • •
Out of office, Christy Clark is still digging a deeper hole for the Liberals to climb out of. Sam Cooper’s story in Tuesday’s Vancouver Sun detailing her meetings with top Chinese developers to sell off – or sell out – B.C. property is another surveyor’s stake in the party’s heart, and gladdens that of “Honest John” Horgan. (That’s sarcasm, you knew that.)
• • •
Out of the gate, stumbling Julie Payette’s un-governor general-like mockeries, including of the horoscope, would annoy me – if I didn’t generously weigh every point of view, a trait of all Libras.
Which handily leads into the next item …
• • •
Ghost story. Real. And North Shore.
I won’t divulge all. I regret having to be mysterious. Adds to the story, though.
This appropriately occurred just a few nights after Halloween.
Around 1 a.m. a staff member was at her work station in a health facility. She saw a figure – male or female, unclear – pass by in the corridor. The figure waved.
In response, the staff member walked to the corridor and saw – nothing.
She went down the corridor, checked the elevator, the stairs. There simply hadn’t been enough time for the passing figure to disappear from sight. It just – vanished.
Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Couldn’t have been the whispy ghost of Canada’s UN peacekeeping commitment, could it?
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