What do sharks call a crowded beach? A takeout menu. Some are suggesting that the buffet off certain U.S. beaches is some weird shark revenge. I've read Jaws and find the theory more than plausible.
To qualify as a genuine act of literary criticism, though, we'd have to have proof that the sharks are only attacking those who liked the book. And if you're 700 pounds of angry muscle and teeth, a species apart and living in an ocean, this might be difficult to determine. From that vantage point, how do you tell the Peter Benchley connoisseur from, say, that other large guy in a Speedo who's a Tom Clancy nut?
It's not an easy question -- for the sharks, I mean -- to research. Paperbacks are notoriously hard to read underwater. They get soggy very quickly. Unless, of course, they're soggy already. In which case, they're still on land, dripping in the Oprah section of your local bookstore. (In the better shops, rubber gloves and fake glasses are provided.)
Perhaps, however, the sharks are only angry with the film. No one has escaped Jaws the movie. Its synthetic and Dolby terrors have made sharkophobes of us all. Under this scenario, grabbing whatever tidbits the coastline or beach happens to be offering might be seen as a piece of wild justice, indiscriminate to be sure but more or less foolproof. A happy-meal marine backlash against Spielbergiana.
We can only rue that the sharks hadn't acted earlier. The world might have been spared E.T. and (glug! glug!) Saving Private Ryan.
The only other mixed-species terror of the week was Jean Chrétien on the links with the Tiger. As between Tiger Woods and Jean Chrétien, as golfers, the distance is so great that the Prime Minister could be from Mars. Except Mars is too close.
People who know and love golf tell me that watching it ripped divots from their hearts. Many are still experiencing post-mulligan stress disorder. It's an ugly business. The few still composed enough to articulate a response said they admired the PM's nerve in merely showing up, but wondered what the hell he was doing there. You don't have to be a particularly sharp caddy to see that golf is just politics with balls.
Struggling back to the world of purely human interaction, the coup of the week -- the hole-in-one, if I may suffocate the analogy -- belongs to Joe Clark. Joe -- it is impossible to call him anything else -- was waltzing around in Washington with the second most powerful man on Earth, Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Joe Clark is no Tiger Woods. But he may be the figure and the type of those players who flash early and once only and then, against the opinion of the critics, observers, even some fans, stays and plays regardless. And then just as it seems there is nothing left to play, that even hanging around the game is getting to be a kind of unspoken embarrassment for all concerned, there's a sudden flare and the hope that, just maybe, all that doggedness and determination will blossom into one last triumph.
The arc here -- if an early spike followed by a near infinite flat line can be called an arc -- is something nearer fiction, a novel, than a career. I don't know what Joe may accomplish in the next little while in politics. But he is surely feeding the appetite for a redemptive narrative. Maybe part of the charm of this latter-day Joe is not so much due to his politics as to the story he seems to be living. Northrop Frye is probably more useful to understanding Joe Clark than the latest poll.
The pictures of him this week in Washington fit. The Alliance was still busy with its multiple apostates, fine-tuning its cabals or recalling the heretics. Meantime, perdurable Joe is on solo in Washington acting -- in contrast to the Alliance's Survivor marathon -- for all the world like an adult. He leads a much smaller band, but he's larger and they're coherent.
Whether any of this means that Joe has a serious chance of extending his streak back to the PM's chair he once occupied with such bitter brevity is, at the kindest, an open question. One measure of his changed fortunes is that, however slim his chances, they're better than Stockwell Day's. Those with the memory of his attaining the highest office in the first place will know it wasn't so much a long shot as the political equal of a hole-in-one.
To do it a second time, at the end of a career as opposed to the beginning, to bottle lightning twice, defy the soothsayers, outrage all the probabilities of life or fiction -- well, this would be some miracle. A hole-in-one, while changing water into wine, during an unscheduled solar eclipse, with Joe in a wet suit.
What are the odds? Pretty spacious -- but just to show it's possible, better than Deborah Grey's chances of returning to the Alliance under the terms of this week's ultimatum. Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's National Magazine and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup .