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I feel so much safer. The mystery of the Red Poppy has been solved.It could have been something right out of Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy, but they didn’t make this up, and neither did I.
It all pointed to a vast Canadian plot to infiltrate our nation and economy — and jam up our vending machines to boot.
Yeah, there was something funny about that coin one of those top-secret-type fellows from our Department of Defense found in the cupholder of his rental car back in 2004. He’d been to Canada — who wouldn’t be suspicious? He turned it over for analysis.
“It did not appear to be electronic [analog] in nature or have a power source,” the report read. “Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top.”
It was a Canadian maple-leaf quarter with a strange, bright red poppy dead in the center.
Nanotechnology was suspected. The Defense Security Service warned of mysterious coins fitted with ingenious transmitters. It was all very top secret — all very hush-hush.
Meanwhile, north of the border, the Royal Canadian Mint cranked out 30 million of the suckers. Clearly, this was no two-bit operation. But you can just bet we were on to them hosers, eh?
Those Canadians must think they’re pretty clever — going around talking in English, driving on the right side of the road, watching baseball and playing hockey — but we’re on to ’em.
They think we don’t notice all those people speaking French, don’t notice their un-American universal health care, their legal gay marriages and the fact that dang near everyone of them uses the metric system and likes it. They can’t fool us. Those hamburgers might look American, but they eat their fries with gravy ...
And now those quarters were slipping across our border, jingling in fishermen’s pockets, in little kids’ souvenir collections, under the seats of who knows how many cars crossing our virtually undefended northern border with no more difficulty than the folks going back and forth across the border between Iraq and Iran.
No doubt we put our best minds to the problem — the same folks who sniffed out Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
The red poppy coin was traced to Winnipeg, and the Pentagon braced for an invasion of North Dakota. The White House prepared to target the Canadian capital — but they had to look it up first and then couldn’t find Ottawa on the map. They settled for the Molson brewery instead.
Security bulletins went out warning of potential Canadian terrorists entering the country — they’re too polite to be suicide bombers, but they will wait until they have really bad colds, then go to American shopping malls and salad bars and sneeze without covering their mouths and noses. Civil defense authorities were advised to double their stocks of Vapo-Rub — just in case.
Homeland Security was ready to raise the threat level to red — maple leaf red — poppy red ...
You can just bet the Marines would be in the Yukon by now, and they’d have added Labrador and Vancouver Island to the “halls of Montezuma and the shores of Tripoli” if somebody from the Royal Canadian Mint hadn’t let slip that the red poppy quarter was a special issue to honor and commemorate Canada’s war dead and the nanotechnology was just a special tough coating put on to keep the red from coming off when the coins bounced their way through Canadian vending machines and jingled around in pants pockets.
Somewhere in Washington, somebody quietly said, “Oops,” and the CIA guys got back in their black helicopters and headed for home. The Minnesota National Guard called off plans for mining Lake of the Woods and went back to smuggling contraband live-bait across the Rainy River. FBI files on Americans who hummed along to “Oh! Canada!” when the Blue Jays play the Red Sox were quietly closed. Ordering a CC and Seven no longer ran a man afoul of the Patriot Act.
Don Rumsfeld was fitted for a new tinfoil hat and soon began feeling much better.
And with that, America’s security experts turned their attention back to figuring out how much shampoo it would take to blow up an airliner, and we continued to shuffle shoeless and thirsty through the X-rays and past the metal detectors, keeping an eye out for those who would dare to pray in public.
I really feel safer … so much safer.
Jerome Christenson can be reached at (507) 453-3522 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com.
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Traveler wrote on May 15, 2007 5:32 PM: