One skill that the president does seem to possess is doling out “clever” nicknames to those people he encounters regularly, including his family (his wife, first lady Laura Bush, is “First”), Cabinet members (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is “Rummy,” Secretary of State Colin Powell is “Balloonfoot”), journalists in the White House press corps (New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is “Cobra”), key figures on Capitol Hill (House Speaker Dennis Hastert is “Speak”) and even those pesky foreign heads-of-state whose names he can’t remember (Russian president Vladimir Putin is “Ostrich Legs”).

Well, perhaps by harnessing this “talent,” there might be a simple way to comfortably ease President Bush into the circle of nations, a method as elementary as a political “Hooked on Phonics.”

Call it the Chris Berman-ization of international politics, after the ESPN broadcaster who also likes to give creative nicknames to athletes on the highlight parade. If Berman can dub players Derek “Liberty” Bell or Jose “Can You See” Canseco, why wouldn’t there be room for “Swinging” Chad or “Mary Tyler” Mauritania?

Not only will this mnemonic device dramatically reduce potentially embarrassing Bushian malapropisms and help us surreptitiously steer clear of impending international incidents, but it could also foster better relations with our fellow nations. What international leader’s heart would not be warmed were Dubya to affectionately refer to his or her state by a nickname (like “Edgar Allen” Poland) in a press conference, as opposed to some stodgy ol’ “federated republic of whatever”?

We all just might sleep better at night, too.

The following 50 nicknames should help the president begin to find his mark on the world stage:

“You’ve Got” Mali
“Help Me” Rwanda
“Head” Laos
“Milk of” Malaysia
“Cold” Turkey
“Elbow” Greece
“Shake” Djibouti
Malta “Cronkite”
“Seven-Up, The” Angola
“Jailhouse” Iraq
“Electric” Qatar
“Rubber” Czech Republic
Belarus “Lugosi”
“Hand” Grenada
Belize “Navidad”
“Ice” Cuba
“Four-Door” Sudan
“Jacket and” Thailand
“Steady” Cambodia
“Tea for” Tunisia
Ghana “Get a Witness?”
“Vanilla” Iceland
“Perry” Comoros
“Gentle” Benin
“Neither” Norway
“Either” Andorra
“Killer” Wales
“Wig” Guam
Tonga “Depressor”
“Wheat” Germany
“Dee” Luxembourg
“Six” Pakistan
“Frasier” Ukraine
“Sir Thomas” Malawi
“Al” Gabon
“The Cat’s” Macau
“East of” Sweden
“Ebony and” Ivory Coast
“Night of the” Botswana
“Thurgood” Marshall Islands
“Willy” Oman
Hungary “Heart”
“Things I” Haiti “About You”
“Have You Ever Been Ex” Syria
“Less Talk” Morocco
“When It Rains, It” Singapore
Libya? “I Hardly Know Her”
“Two Big Macs” Togo
“I Promise I’ll” Palau
“Martina Navra” Moldova

Had it come to this? The United States and Canada, the two nations that share the world’s longest unprotected border, on the verge of becoming another Bosnia — all because of a bunch of fish? Not exactly. But there is plenty of empirical evidence to point to a serious worsening of U.S.-Canadian relations.

In fact, ever since the Toronto Blue Jays won baseball’s World Series for two consecutive years in 1992 and 1993 (during which a U.S. Marine color guard accidentally carried a Canadian flag upside-down at a pre-game ceremony), Americans’ tolerance for cute and cuddly Canada has fallen considerably, the relationship now having chilled to a temperature slightly frostier than a March midnight in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Consider the following:

1. Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act — sponsored by America’s No. 1 loon, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. — not only gives Americans the right to sue foreign companies that own property in Cuba seized from Americans during Fidel Castro’s revolution but also prevents executives of such companies and their family members from entering the United States. (This law has kept many Canadians from gaining entry to the States, and Canada officially complained that the law violated the North American Free Trade Agreement.)

2. An additional piece of legislation, a 1996 bill known as “IRA IRA” (a nickname for the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act), contains a hotly disputed passage, Section 110, that would subject all foreigners — including Canadians — to odious border checks before entering the United States. Presently, most Canadians are simply waved through, but if Section 110 passes, officials in both countries are predicting up to 20-hour traffic tie-ups at border crossings, which could cause irreparable damage to the $1 billion worth of business we do with our No. 1 trading partner, Canada, every day. (The act was to go into effect in 1998 but has been postponed until the end of 2001.)

3. In 1997, a concerned shopper in a Winnipeg, Manitoba, Wal-Mart noticed that some of the pajamas on the shelves were made in (gasp!) Cuba. Amazingly, tensions between Washington and Ottawa rose over this incident, and anti-Canadian sentiments on this side of the border stirred as Wal-Mart vowed to continue selling the pj’s in its 136 Canadian stores. The pajamas were actually on the agenda when Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chritien visited the White House that year. Thumbing his nose at Washington, Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy later paid a state visit to Cuba, in further bold defiance of the American-led boycott and isolation policy.

4. The Malaspina incident also strained U.S.-Canadian relations over the summer of 1997, and things got even worse in December of that year, when Canada attempted to take center stage in the international political arena by hosting a landmark convention intent on banning land mines the world over.

The United States snubbed the Ottawa Treaty, denying Canada its moment in the sun and embarrassing the Chritien government. (More than 120 countries signed the treaty, while the United States joined Yugoslavia, Libya, Iran and Albania among the 30 or so countries that did not.)

5. As recently as this January, Washington became concerned with seemingly lax Canadian border patrols, after a couple of Algerian terrorists managed to enter the United States via Canada.

“We have excellent relations with Canada,” argued a U.S. State Department official who requested anonymity. “Yes, the things you pointed out have happened, but they’re by no means any indicators of the state of relations between the U.S. and Canada. The fact of the matter is that Canada is our largest trading partner, millions of people cross the border freely every day and we continue to work together on any number of bilateral and multilateral issues. These are minor bumps in an overall excellent relationship.”

Sure, Canada may be our most important neighbor to the north — indeed, it’s our only neighbor to the north — but it seems that even American media outlets are feuding with the Canadian government. The New York Times’ Canada correspondent, James Brooke, actually covers Canada from the quite un-Canuck bureau in Denver.

Meanwhile, in some sort of reverse geographical gamesmanship, the Los Angeles Times’ Canada correspondent apparently covers the country from its New York bureau. (The Boston Globe has a bureau in Montreal, though its bureau chief lives in Vermont.)

The reason few American newspapers operate a Canadian bureau, or let their reporters live in Canada, has to do with a dispute between the newspapers and the Canadian government over taxable income for journalists. (To make up for the extra amount that a Canadian-based American journalist would have to pay in Canadian taxes, the newspapers would give them more money, which in turn would also be taxed.)

And then suddenly, last summer, those two fart-happy vulgarians Terrance and Phillip “warped the fragile little minds” of (fictional) American kids in South Park, Colo. It turns out these anti-intellectual anti-heroes are from — you guessed it — Canada, leading one angry and animated mother in the “South Park” movie to “Blame Canada!” in a highly memorable musical number, during which American troops pound Canadian cities with artillery fire. Amusingly, the song was nominated for an Oscar. But was it the humor of the lyrics that garnered the song a nomination?

This might be a stretch, but the song may also have been nominated as a message from the movie industry to Ottawa, hinting at underlying tensions between, believe it or not, Canada and Hollywood.

Dozens of film and television projects are being lured north of the border because of cheaper production costs in Canada, which is putting the hurt on Hollywood. Plus, if a movie is deemed a “Canadian production” by the powers that be in Ottawa, it can qualify for direct financial subsidies from the Canadian government.

Hollywood guilds and trade papers have angrily labeled these film and TV operations “runaway productions,” in that they are fleeing Hollywood for cheaper costs elsewhere. “The Canadian government has adopted an array of policies to promote Canadian culture, some of which American media and entertainment companies claim are protectionist in restricting access to the market,” said a Canadian diplomat who requested anonymity. “We say that film is a global industry and that these are films that would never have been made because of what they would cost in California.”

Perhaps these sentiments were present when recent films such as Michael Moore’s “Canadian Bacon” and Trey Parker’s “South Park” — both of which contain a scenario in which the United States and Canada go to war — received green lights from U.S. studio executives.

The American government also believes that the Canadian entertainment market is restricted — for magazines, newspapers and radio, for example. “Americans cannot establish or create magazines with more than 49 percent ownership,” said the Canadian diplomat. “And we have quotas on radio airplay in Canada — 35 percent of the programming has to be Canadian in origin.” There is even a point system for determining what is “Canadian”: Two of the three main entities involved in each song — the artist, writer and producer — have to be Canadian for the song to qualify.

Meanwhile, Canadian women dominated the Grammy Awards earlier this month, as Shania Twain, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Diana Krall and Sarah McLachlan all were nominated, three of them taking home trophies for their mantels.

Perhaps to alleviate the escalating tensions, the Canadians are sponsoring a couple of lighthearted cultural events in New York. Monday was the kickoff of Canadian Restaurant Week, in which a few Canadian chefs are visiting Gotham restaurants, bringing with them their recipes for peppered strip loin of arctic caribou with merlot-blueberry reduction, Prince Edward Island oysters with sunchoke cream and sevruga caviar, and pea-meal-wrapped buffalo fillet. And on April 14, the Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater will present, with the Canadian Consulate’s approval, a mini-film festival cheekily titled “Blame Canada!”

“For many supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers,” reads the program of the festival, which will feature Canadian-made films by directors such as Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, “the image of Canada remains a stereotype: a land filled with lumberjacks in ear muffs, trudging around the frozen tundra on their snowshoes, humming Gordon Lightfoot songs. But if you take a close look at the steady output of fine movies being made north of the border, the view changes.”

What kind of insidious propaganda is this? First the Oscar ballots are mysteriously “misplaced” before turning up again. Then the Oscar statues themselves go missing.

Everybody has his or her own theories, but I smell a maple thief.

The Academy Awards and the Golden Globes both license the rights to their programs to other nations around the world. Both of these awards programs can get very self-congratulatory about the alleged billions of people tuning in. These numbers are hopelessly exaggerated, usually the product of adding together each broadcast-licensed nation’s entire population, rather than an estimated, Nielsen-like figure approximating actual viewers. Even if the Academy Awards were to be broadcast in China and India — which, as of press time, they were not to be this year — it certainly would not mean that every citizen from Bombay to Beijing would be able to tune in the program. Or even give a crap.

Still, these two major Hollywood shows have turned the planet into their own private, John Travolta-less Battlefield Earth, each apparently attempting to corner — and license — different parts of the world. Using distribution documents obtained exclusively by Salon from both awards shows’ personnel, I was able to determine exactly which nations had received licensing rights to which shows.

The Academy Awards are dominant in the European market. The show is licensed to be broadcast in 33 of the 36 European countries that are members of the United Nations (plus Switzerland and Vatican City, which are not U.N. member states), failing to crack only elusive Andorra, Albania and Liechtenstein.

The Golden Globes, on the other hand, which broadcast their 2000 awards in February, have had their problems with Europe, having licensed their show to only 18 of those same 38 markets. (The Globes, for some reason, were able to break through that tricky Liechtenstein demographic.)

But the Globes more than lived up to their name in Latin America and Asia, where the show kicked some major Oscar booty. The double G’s were broadcast in all 12 South American countries, all seven Central American countries and 32 of 36 Asian countries (plus non-U.N. member states Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao). Oscar, on the other hand, got absolutely clobbered in those markets, as of press time securing licensing agreements from only seven South American states, two Central American countries and eight Asian markets (plus Hong Kong).

Anyone looking to use Africa as a rubber match would first have to sort out a few confusing factors. Of the 53 countries constituting the Organization of African Unity, the Academy Awards will be seen in at least 21, including Rwanda and Burkina Faso. But another entry on the Academy Awards roster lists “Africa (English Speaking)” as one entity, making it impossible to determine exactly how many African countries will hold their collective breath until they learn whether it is Jude Law or Haley Joel Osment who gets the nod for best supporting actor. The Golden Globes were broadcast in 34 of Africa’s 53 countries, straight up. And while the Globes were not seen in Rwanda, surely Libyan and Liberian viewers rejoiced in the streets as they watched Jim Carrey snag best actor in a musical or comedy.

One thing the staffs of both awards programs have in common is a shocking ignorance of world geography. The Oscar people apparently did not receive the memo that “Zaire” is now Congo, “Holland” is actually Netherlands and “Eire” is, in the English-speaking world, pronounced “Ireland.” The Globes may have an even worse geopolitical track record, referring as they do to licensees “British Guiana” (which has been known simply as Guyana since it achieved independence in 1966) and two states listed individually as “Tobago” and “Trinidad,” which have actually been the one state of Trinidad and Tobago since 1962.

The Globes might also want to invest in a spell-checker program, as they incorrectly listed licensees “Columbia” (Colombia with an “o”), “Comores” (the Comoro Islands), “Nambia” (Namibia), “Luxemburg” (Luxembourg) and “Surinam” (Suriname).

But at least the Globes don’t seem to have padded their stats, as Oscar has, with dubious “countries” such as “Alto Adige” (a primarily German-speaking Italian province), “Capodistria” (a primarily Italian-speaking city in western Slovenia, now known as Koper), the “Cook Islands” and “Niue” (both Oceanic territories of New Zealand), “Dom Tom” (a collective name for the odd French island territory, as near as I can determine; an ABC representative who requested anonymity said, “I can’t tell you exactly where it is”), “Fijian Islands” (listed separately from and in addition to “Fiji”), “Puerto Rico” (not even a state, much less a country) and “Vatican City” (the pope, presumably, wants his O-TV).

No one representing either the Academy Awards or ABC would respond on the record to these peculiarities. Even off the record, matters were difficult to confirm. Last year, the 71st annual Academy Awards show was broadcast to 143 countries. This year’s tally, as of press time, was 130. But no one would elaborate on which countries had fallen off Oscar’s atlas.

It may seem odd, but in the context of Fonda’s public life, her letting Jesus into her heart might be easier to comprehend. Jane Fonda has changed personas enough times to make David Bowie blush and has worn more hats than Hillary Clinton during baseball season. Having already been a fashion model, social activist, Academy Award-winning actress, pinup sex goddess, government gadfly, fitness goddess and trophy wife, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that she would add born-again Christian to her risumi.

The more interesting aspect of this story is how she seems to have stumbled upon this faith. Apparently, the person who showed Fonda the light was her chauffeur. Again, according to the Washington Times, the “chauffeur invited her to attend his church, the predominantly black Providence Missionary Baptist Church.”

Sound familiar? A batty older white woman driven around Atlanta by her black limo driver who ends up teaching her a thing or two? Call it “Driving Miss Crazy.” Let’s listen in:

Chauffeur: Where now, Miss Jane? The airport? CNN? The Braves game? The gym?
Fonda: No, Clayton. Take me to my prayer session. I’m having a special guest today — George W. Bush.
Chauffeur: Governor Bush?

Fonda: Right. You know his initials also stand for “George Washington Bridge”? Pretty prophetic, eh? George Washington was one of our presidents as well. And George W. is building a bridge to the 21st century.
Chauffeur: I think that was President Clinton, Miss Jane.

Fonda: Oh, you’re right, Clayton. Wow — I don’t know who did more drugs in college, me or George W., but we both seem to have been bitten by the Jesus bug. Maybe it was the brown acid?
Chauffeur: Will you be wanting to stop for lunch, Miss Jane?
Fonda: Yes, lunch. Although I want to make sure I don’t overdo the whole “snacking” thing. I mean, look at Sally Struthers. In her case, the Lord’s calling seems to have been a Pavlovian dinner bell.
Chauffeur: Yes, ma’am.
Fonda: Good thing I’m a workout wizard.
Chauffeur: Indeed, Miss Jane.
Fonda: Clayton, this whole born-again business — how will that affect my actual age? Now that I’m no longer going to be with Ted, I’ll need to get back to Hollywood, and you know how difficult it is to get good roles when you’re a woman pushing senior citizen. I don’t want to be doing any of that dreck they’ve been giving Meryl.

Throughout the course of her very public life, Fonda has clearly telegraphed the end of one disparate phase and the start of another by making spectacular leaps in character. The rather squeaky clean daughter Henry Fonda sent to Vassar later went off to Paris, married auteur Roger Vadim and scandalized her father by appearing scantily clad in numerous Vadim-directed French art films (such as 1964′s “La Ronde,” 1966′s “La Curie” and, of course, 1968′s “Barbarella,” the cult classic that not only showcased Fonda doing a campy striptease, but also, regrettably, gave ’80s schnooks Duran Duran their moniker).

She returned to the States in the late 1960s with a political bent, becoming the celebrity face of various anti-establishment causes, such as the Black Panthers and assorted Native American groups. Her most infamous revolutionary gambit was her stint supporting the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, a turn not soon forgotten in some circles.

Just before she closed the chapter on her radical political days, which ended symbolically with her assisting her second husband, Tom Hayden (himself a ’60s figurehead as both author of the 1962 Port Huron Statement — the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society — and one of the Chicago Seven), win election to the very establishment position of California state legislator, she was off in a completely new direction, that of female workout guru.

Fonda almost single-handedly started the home exercise craze, and to date has released 18 (!!) workout videos. Though one can make a case for Fonda’s fitness turn as one that empowered women as masters of their own body images and exercise regimens, the more prevalent interpretation saw this onetime feminist thinker leading a frivolous squat-thrust revolution.

Even more startling was her next transformation, to billionaire businessman Turner’s eye-candy/trophy wife. And sure, she continued to work with Native American groups below the radar, but in paparazzi-land she aggravated more indigenous Americans by co-leading the baseball Braves’ demeaning Tomahawk Chop chant.

Fonda is indubitably an accomplished actress. In addition to her two Best Actress Academy Awards and five other Oscar nominations (including one for Best Supporting Actress), she has played each of her life roles convincingly. See Jane be daddy’s good girl in the ’50s. See Jane symbolize radical chic in the ’60s. See Jane pose with a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun in the ’70s. See Jane limber up in a skintight leotard in the ’80s. See Jane waving to the camera on the Turner ranch in Montana, in fringe-leather jacket and cowboy hat in the ’90s. And now see Jane pray to the Lord for salvation in the new millennium.

Perhaps the dreariest part of the Jane Fonda saga, other than the fact that her retirement from acting has allowed her once-formidable skills to have officially been eclipsed by those of her sappy sibling Peter and — worse yet — her niece Bridget, is that there is something dismal about her drifting from one personality to another. It’s as if her whole life can be summed up as “Six Characters in Search of a Screenwriter.” Certainly, many of her spiritual swings seem to have been unduly influenced by the men in her life — the piggish Pygmalion Vadim molding her raw clay into sex symbol, the opulent Turner ka-chinging her into happy housewife, the mysterious chauffeur driving her to Jesus.

These are the tendencies of a woman who doesn’t really know — or trust — herself. So maybe Jesus is the best fellow to turn to at this stage in her life. After all, her husbands haven’t exactly been the three wise men. When Turner likened the elation he felt when AOL and Time Warner merged to “that night when I first made love some 42 years ago,” living up to his nickname the Mouth from the South, you kind of got the feeling that turning to Jesus is a sensible alternative.

Here’s hoping that she finds what she’s looking for, after all these years, in the Lord. And if she sees him walking on the water, it will be a golden pond, indeed.