Cartoon puts life in perspective

With all that snow and ice, Canada's been a marketing nightmare.

But not anymore.

A Vancouver immigration lawyer thinks he can sell former Kerry supporters on the merits of moving north of the border and away from all those red states.

He's so certain of it that he plans to hold seminars in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles to tell Americans how to legally move to Canada. Relocating citizenship costs money, including a $500 application fee and a $975 landing tax.

The re-election of President Bush has been a boon for Canadians intent on marketing their country to blue Americans who feel there just aren't enough blue states anymore to keep them happy.

Canadian Web sites are aggressively pushing relocation. One Web site even suggests that Canadians have a civic duty to marry Americans and save their southern neighbors from "four more years of cowboy conservatism."

In Canada you can find more than hockey and moose. You can find universal health care, gay rights, abortion rights, gun-control laws and a ban on capital punishment.

Of course, the taxes are higher. But that's a small price to pay when you're feeling down and out about a presidential election.

Still, plenty of Americans aren't ready to move to a refrigerator of a nation where baseball is a minor distraction, not a sport.

Perhaps the Bush administration should market our nation to all those freezing Canadians who would trade places with blue Americans in a heartbeat, particularly if it involves a winter trip to some beach in Florida.

The great thing about this country is that presidential elections come and go, but parents have more important things to worry about -- like raising children and keeping track of the school lunch menu.

On Saturday, a whole lot of families in Cape Girardeau weren't thinking of moving to Canada. They were all crowded into a movie theater to watch "The Incredibles."

By the time our family walked into the theater, the place was packed. We had to sit near the front of the theater. We haven't sat that close to the screen in years.

Remember when cartoons preceded the showing of the movie at the local cinema? Now they are the featured presentations.

Thanks to computer technology, cartoons look increasingly realistic. It's only a matter of time until presidential candidates quit campaigning with Hollywood actors and start holding rallies with cartoon characters.

The movie focused on a family of modern-day superheroes who save the day after trying to fit in with normal life in suburbia. There are no immigration seminars in this film.

Leave it to Pixar Studios to make us all proud to be Americans crammed into a movie theater and eating big buckets of popcorn.

What else is there to do on a brisk fall day, except perhaps rake up all those leaves in your yard? But since I already spent most of the day pushing a mountain of leaves to the curb, I figured it was time to relax with a crowd of animation-loving families.

There's nothing like a superhero cartoon to put life into perspective. Canadian immigration lawyers would do well to remember that.

Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.