HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-01-06, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 2011. PAGE 5.
It is important for us, my brothers, that we
exterminate from our lands this nation
which seeks only to destroy us. You see as
well as I that we can no longer supply our
needs.... Therefore, my brothers, we must all
swear their destruction and wait no longer.
Nothing prevents us; they are few in numbers,
and we can accomplish it.
Obwandiyag, chief of the Ottawas, was no
friend of the British – that was the nation that
he was advocating for extermination. He did it
best to make it happen too. Obwandyag and
his warriors laid siege to the British fort at
Detroit and massacred a British detachment at
The Battle of Bloody Run nearby.
Was Obwandiyag American or Canadian?
Older than both. He lived and fought back in
the mid-1700s along what would one day
become the Ontario-Michigan border. He was
decades in advance of the American
Declaration of Independence and a century
before the notion of a nation called Canada
began to float about.
Oh, and one other thing: Obwandyag had
another name. Pontiac.
I didn’t learn any of the above in class.
In my school years, teachers of Canadian
history treated the entire aboriginal presence
as colourful but slightly inconvenient
background to the story of the founding of
Canada. We learned little of native customs,
traditions and way of life, nor of the fact that
when we whiteys arrived, they’d already lived
on this continent for milliennia.
For me as a kid, Pontiac wasn’t a fierce
warrior. It was blue and black 1952 two-door
sedan.
It was my dad’s first car and I learned to
drive in it. There was a headlight dimmer
switch on the floor beside the clutch (look it
up, youngsters); a stick shift on the steering
column and no power anything, although it did
have air conditioning – provided you cranked
the windows down.
It was a boringly conventional, resolutely
bourgeois buggy. The only hint of the
aboriginal origin of its name was the hood
ornament – a stylized, Art Deco style Indian
head which may or may not have looked like
Pontiac the man – no authenticated drawings
or paintings of him survive.
Even the Indian head icon would disappear
as Pontiacs underwent a radical transformation
in the 60s and 70s. It stopped being
The Car Your Father Drove and mutated into a
roaring, low-slung, over-powered “muscle
car” favoured by high-testosterone, low-
browed young males. Guys with mullets
and vocabularies that peaked at around 20
words, most of them blue. Guys who thought
gold chains, fu manchu moustaches and
tattooed knuckles were killer fashion
statements.
Pontiac was the brand that invented the
muscle car and nobody made them louder,
faster or in-your-face down and dirty.
And they sold like cold beer in a heat wave.
“Sportier than a Chevrolet but less uppity
than an Oldsmobile or Buick” is what the
Pontiac car advertisements promised and for
years the company surfed a rich wave of
customer loyalty.
But car manufacturers are born tinkerers.
They love to fix things, even if they
aren’t broken (remember Edsel?) Somewhere
in the mid-80s the big thinkers who gave the
world GTOs. Firebirds and Trans Ams got
restless and decided it was time for Pontiac
to undergo a ‘brand re-think’. They summoned
their designers and engineers and instructed
them to come up with The Next Big
Thing.
They came up with a lot of things, among
them a minivan called the Montana which
looked like a breadtruck, and later, a ‘cross-
over’ compact called the Aztek. Do you
remember the Aztek? Probably not. It was
around just long enough to win the coveted
Daily Telegraph title of Ugliest Car of All
Time.
Perhaps the car was doomed from the start –
its creators couldn’t even spell ‘Aztec’
correctly.
The Aztek was the beginning of a death
spiral for Pontiac. That spiral ended in a flush
last October when General Motors announced
that after 84 years and 40 million cars, the
brand was officially dead. The world would
see no more automobiles with the word
Pontiac on the grille.
Chief Obwandiyag can finally have his
other name back.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Car names require research
One of the staples of the year’s first issue
of The Citizen is the Year in Review.
And 2010 certainly has been a year
worth reviewing.
It wasn’t easy, of course. As journalists, we
tend to focus on the ‘here and now’ so Denny
and I often have to stop and think about what
happened over the course of the last seven days
in our weekly staff meetings. So looking back
on an entire year can be tough.
When asked to review some of last year’s
columns for submission in the Ontario
Community Newspaper Association’s
Columnist of the Year category, I had to go
back and read them all. There were some I
didn’t remember writing and others I could
never forget, but they have all come out of
what has been as eventful a year as I’ve seen in
my life.
I joke often about nobody reading this
column, but the reality is that there are plenty
of people who read what I have to say week
after week, so I have always taken filling this
space every week very seriously.
Sometimes I’ve written about what I want to
write, sometimes I’ve written what I think
people might want to read and other times
there have been entire columns that end up in
the recycling bin for one reason or another.
I’ve covered the good, the bad and the ugly
in this community and throughout the country,
starting in February with my thoughts on
moving out of my childhood home. And since
that week, I have never had a problem filling
this space.
The first competition submission I chose was
from March when I wrote “A Hero’s
Farewell”. I re-read the column and was nearly
brought to tears. Not because of the beauty of
my prose of course, but because of the
emotions that were stirred up in facing the
untimely death of OPP officer Vu Pham.
Coming from a family of police officers, I
still have a hard time comprehending the
reasoning behind Pham’s death, but I am glad
to see this great man being honoured as he has
been throughout Huron County.
My second submission was from July 1, a
column entitled “Mending Our Fences”.
After the Avon Maitland District School
Board trustees made the decision to close
Brussels Public School, discussion began as to
whether Brussels should be the school to close,
or whether it should have been Grey Central
Public School. The Citizen published letters for
weeks from concerned citizens, community
leaders and even municipal councillors in
which strong opinions were expressed and then
subsequently opposed and challenged.
I’m glad to say that I think the process of
mending fences between the Brussels and Grey
communities is well underway.
My third and final submission was called
“Eat Pray Puke”, an entry in which a book
called Eat Pray Love makes me, you guessed
it, want to puke.
In between I explored fire coverage that still
has members of the community concerned, an
interesting trail of phone calls to the Wingham
and District Hospital, Robert Munsch
considering Brussels as a setting for his new
book, local veterans, not-so-local veterans,
dirtbags, being out of shape, snow and a
mustache that raised nearly $2,000 for Prostate
Cancer Canada, among countless other issues.
There has been no shortage of things to talk
about and I have had no shortage of things to
say.
I’m sure that 2011 will provide its own set of
challenges and its own set of triumphs and I’ll
have plenty to write about once again.
A brand new year
Apiece of construction scaffolding fell
on Premier Dalton McGuinty’s car
parked outside the legislature a few
days before Christmas and he had enough
wit, despite a grim legislature session
to comment tongue-in-cheek on his website
“the opposition will stop at nothing to keep me
from my people.”
The premier naturally got calls from curious
reporters asking for more and he replied again
somewhat inventively both New Democrat
leader Andrea Horwath and Progressive
Conservative leader Tim Hudak were seen
fleeing the scene.
This was the closest, in fact, the
only attempt at humour in the last few months
of a session whose daily question periods
consisted mainly of the opposition parties
and particularly the Conservatives daily
trying to force the Liberals, who have
failed often to volunteer the truth, the
whole truth and nothing, to admit they were
liars.
The Conservatives usually started by calling
the Liberals liars and Speaker Steve Peters
ruled this was out of order because it could
prompt a flood of other name-calling and
disrupt the House.
The Conservatives would then switch to
suggesting the Liberals were dishonest, or
flirting with the truth, or asking why the
Liberals were fibbing or say people in their
riding felt were lying.
The Speaker also has ruled many times
MPPs cannot use forbidden words merely
by saying someone else was using them
and some of these squabbles end with
an MP, usually a Conservative, being thrown
out.
No one ever uses Winston Churchill’s
famous claim an opponent was guilty of
“terminological inexactitude,” which he
appeared to have got away with in the British
Parliament.
Ontario politicians have not been as known
for their elegance of expression, but a few over
the year have shown command of language
and even warmth and admiration for
opponents they were assessing, which is
unheard of today.
William Davis, Conservative premier in the
1970s and 1980s and the longest-
serving premier of recent decades, was noted
for his rambling style of speaking, which
seemed to flow like a torrent almost
forever.
One reporter wrote he enjoyed covering a
Davis speech, because he could slip outside
for a coffee, knowing by the time he returned,
the premier would still be on the same
sentence.
Liberal Sean Conway, one of the few recent
entertaining orators, said Davis’s circuitous
speech-making was “like the route of
the old Colonial Railway, which puffed
and chugged, twisted and turned, clattered
up hill and down dale, turned to the north,
east, south and west, and meandered
through the remotest villages and
sidings before eventually reaching its
destination.”
Conway was forgiving, because Davis once
said (again in his tortuous way) if someone
poured all the convictions and principles
of the Ontario Liberal party into he
bottom of swimming pool, “we could all walk
through it without getting the tops of our feet
wet.”
Andy Brandt, who was Conservative interim
leader for four years, but never ran for full
leader, was its speaker most in demand at
roasts of party luminaries. He once told a
gathering he was surprised to see a former
Tory finance minister “standing with his hands
in his own pockets, instead of someone else’s,”
and pointed to another former minister as
“able to speak for an hour without a note and
without making a point.”
John Rhodes, another Conservative, had
an unforgettable description of an Ontarian,
who he said, watches a French arts movie,
climbs in his German-made car, drives to
an Italian restaurant, orders Dutch beer and
Danish cheese, drives home, takes off his
shirt made in Thailand, switches on his
Japanese stereo, picks up his U.S.-made
ballpoint pen and writes a letter to his MPP
complaining about the lack of jobs in
Canada.
Where has all the humour gone? Parties are
scared a joke may help them lose them a
crucial election and McGuinty has been the
only leader willing to take this risk, but it is a
minor one.
Eric
Dowd
From
Queen’s Park
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Campaign humour in short supply
Queen’s Park correspondent and
contributor to The Citizen Eric Dowd
passed away on Dec. 25 at St. Michael’s
Hospital in Toronto after a battle with
cancer.
He submitted this column on Dec. 22.
It was his last submission.
For Dowd’s full obituary, see page 20.
If your actions inspire others to dream
more, learn more, do more and become
more, you are a leader.
– John Quincy Adams
Final Thought