TORONTO – After a long, fulfilling career as a screed-writer for one of Canada’s newspapers of note, columnist Eustace Tibbs has retired to spend more time disparaging his children.
“I’m forever grateful to the Post for teaching me how to phrase unworthy thoughts in an elegant way,” said Tibbs. “But it’s time to start spewing bile onto the people I really care about.”
Since joining the Post’s editorial board in 1998, Tibbs has used his platform to sneer at a variety of people: from gay marriage advocates (‘godless oysterboys’), to climate scientists (‘charlatans’), indigenous activists (‘<unpublishable slur>’), and feminists (‘shrieking violets’).
But years of long hours have meant missed hockey games, school plays, and ballet recitals, each one a milestone in his children’s lives that could have been heckled, lambasted, or shit all over.
“I’m persuaded his children will be elated to observe more of him,” said Post founder Conrad Black, employing the publication’s characteristic sarcasm in an absolutely withering farewell speech. “Eustace Tibbs is the sort of person often bequeathed with the sardonic appellation of, ‘father of the year’: a suitable euphemism for ‘having accomplished nothing better’.”
Black then smiled thinly at his own joke instead of laughing, which he never does.
“I don’t care what Mr. Black says, I’m happy to see more of my dad,” said Tibb’s son, Kyle, an intellectual welterweight who squanders his eyesight on middlebrow publications like the Toronto Star. “I know he loves me, even though he said my science project was ‘the work of two apes sharing one brain, and the brain a monkey’s brain at that’.”
This marks the first time a National Post columnist has actually retired, instead of bursting into a damp cloud of mold spores.
