When future prime minister Stephen Harper famously descended from the lunar module to the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969, an estimated half-billion viewers hung on his now immortal words.
“Luke, I am your father.”
Just kidding.
What Harper really said was: “That’s one small step for me, and one (crackle, crackle) giant step for the Progressive Conservative Party, which, if I get my way, will one day be renamed the Conservative Party because we’d save a ton on our business cards. Boy, I bet that’d burn Ignatieff’s bushy old brow.”
For reasons I am unable to explain but will probably blame on the Internet, my eight-year-old daughter Meghan believes Stephen Harper was the first man to walk on the moon.
She said so during a recent visit to the Kennedy Space Centre, located on Florida’s east coast, next to Crazy Ed’s Angry Alligator Outlet and Stun Gun Emporium.
The Kennedy Space Centre does not include among its many impressive exhibits a life-size model of Canada’s 22nd prime minister pocketing moon rocks, or strapping himself into one of the vacuum-powered toilets astronauts rely on for space-age relief.
Yet a mention of Neil Armstrong draws only a blank stare from Meghan, despite ample evidence proving that Armstrong did in fact land on the moon, including a framed and signed poster for sale in the official NASA gift shop next to the “I brake for asteroids” coffee mugs.
This apparent contradiction has not dissuaded Meghan from openly proclaiming that Harper was indeed the first person to bounce around on the lunar surface to the delight of millions.
She cannot point me to the source of her information, saying only that she knows it to be a widely known fact in her schoolyard.
(Word in the yard is that Harper is also the world’s greatest golfer and possibly the only man to ever have travelled by canoe across Canada while blindfolded. Silly kids – everyone knows that was Trudeau.)
I was months away from being born when the inaugural moon landing happened, and have seen only reruns of grainy film footage featuring a heavily suited astronaut whose face is obscured by the bubble-like visor of his helmet.
For all I know, it really was Stephen Harper inside that space suit.
If I know him – and I think I don’t – he was no doubt hatching a plan to invite future Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff on the next mission to explore “how our parties might better work together to make this world – no, this universe, a better place to live, work and play.”
I can see it now.
“Iggy, you really must come over to this side of the canyon. The view is utterly spectacular. Just hop across and I’ll grab your hand.”
Someone I know claims that the moon landing was a hoax perpetrated on a gullible public by the U.S. government, which, of course, is crazy talk because as we all know government has no reason to lie to us and is always honest.
Also, I have an official NASA-sanctioned t-shirt depicting the dog Snoopy planting a flag on the moon, and there is nobody more wholesome and honest than Snoopy.
Crazy friends aside, it is important to celebrate important occasions such as the 40th anniversary of the moon landing not because it was easy, but because it was hard.
I believe Stephen Harper first said that.
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