FUDGE: Regaining control of cocky Canadian currency

It’s always the ones you don’t expect. Honestly, you think you know someone. You think you’re on friendly terms. You help each other out when need be, nod approvingly as you pass each other and exchange pleasant stories about how the weekend went.

Then, out of nowhere: BOOM. For no good reason whatsoever, your so-called buddy goes Benedict Arnold on you and makes you look like a jerk in front of everyone else. Sure, maybe you borrowed some of his stuff and never gave it back, or maybe you got blackout drunk and threw up in his sock drawer. But those are hardly good reasons for a friend to betray you.

But that’s exactly what happened — not just to me, not just to you, but to all of us — to every American. Our best friend sold us out, threw us under a bus, had metaphoric sexual contact with our metaphoric girlfriend. And who is this lowly coward, this conniving snake that sold its soul for international acceptance? None other than freakin’ Canada.

In case you are one of the few who haven’t been keeping up with global economic affairs and monetary exchange rates, let me be the first to inform you of this atrocious display of disloyalty. After years of the Canadian currency playing Robin to the American currency’s Batman, the Canuck buck stole the spotlight and is now of equal value with our dignified dollar.

You heard me correctly. Money featuring noble patriots and revolutionaries such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Herbie Hancock is worth the same amount as a currency decorated with little Canuckleheads playing hockey and some silly loons.

Listen, I live in Maine. We have loons, and they’re annoying as hell. Try sleeping a night when your bedroom is within 500 yards of a loon’s nest. They’ll haunt your dreams with their infernal harping, to a point where you’ll want to lay a tight shotgun pattern on ’em with a Benelli or run ’em over with your Boston Whaler. But can you? No, ’cause they’re protected. And that’s the crap equal to our dollar? Jesus Christ.

How could those no-good Icebacks have the audacity to pull this crap? I’d expect this underhanded kind of play from those snobs across the Atlantic and their gaily colored Euros, but not from Canada — not the loonies and toonies.

What did the good old red, white and blue do to deserve this kind of treatment from those maple leaf-loving goons? Didn’t we help them win World War II? Did we not allow them to dump their useless waste like the Barenaked Ladies, Kim Cattrall and Tom Green onto our shores?

And correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the Toronto Blue Jays in the “American” League? We felt such a tight brotherhood with those hockey stick humpers that we invited a Canadian team into an “American” organization of America’s greatest pastime. Seems to me we treated those thankless ‘Nades with nothing but generosity and hospitality, just to have them spit it back into our faces.

Well, dammit, I’m an American. And I refuse to sit idly by while my beloved money is being devalued by some stockbroker in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, wearing goofy boots and drinking his Molson purchased on the lost nickels and dimes of the American economy.

I decided to figure out the inner workings of the Canadian economy so I could plot my revenge. Because I know little about economics, I consulted my roommate Andy, who’s not only an economist, but also part Native-American — which makes him doubly qualified as someone who knows about money and also someone who knows about getting royally screwed over by a group of foreigners you think are your friends.

He started ranting about the rising price of rubber and its correlation to hockey puck manufacturing, the unsettling proliferation of Tim Horton’s restaurants into the American market and something else about it being too damn cold for those “snow monkeys” to go out and spend money, so they just hoard it like the frugal hosers that they are.

At first, it seemed like incoherent babbling. “Must be the white man’s firewater in him,” I thought. But when I actually started to listen to him, things began to make sense. And before long, I had a plan.

You see, to cripple the Canadian economy, we have to destroy their most precious resource: the cold. Without snow, ice, glaciers, icebergs and shrinking Eskimo testicles, the Canadians have nothing.

So come on, my fellow Americans, we have some global warming to do. Start a tire fire. Spray aerosol into the air. Cut down any tree you see. Without you, we’ll never drown those cocky Canadians in their own hubris. Without us, the United States won’t be able to take its rightful place — below Canada in longitude, but above it in everything else.

Brian Fudge, a senior in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at bfudge@bu.edu.