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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-12-08, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2011. PAGE 5. This column is about Conrad Moffat Black, OK, KCSG, PC. AKA Lord Black of Crossharbour, not to mention mogul, tycoon, poobah, master of the universe and convicted felon. This man is no relation to A. Black, Esq. The scribbler of this column is perfectly okay with that. I do not care for Conrad Black for a multitude of reasons but chief among them stems from a conversation I had years ago with a Quebec journalist. At the time Conrad was acquiring small Canadian dailies and weeklies like a Monopoly player on coke. My friend was a columnist and a veteran of two Conradian takeovers. He told me the phrase Conrad Black used to describe the inevitable flurry of firings and dismissals that occurred whenever Conrad assumed control of a newspaper. Black, smiling, called the procedure ‘drowning the puppies’. As a newspaper lover and a dog fancier, that humour was just a little too black, even for me. Conrad Black is easy to dislike. He is arrogant, boastful, pompous and utterly contemptuous of all lesser beings, which is pretty well everyone this side of the Pope. As a newspaper proprietor he even sneered at newspaper people. In a submission to a Canadian Senate committee, Black, characteristically employing the royal ‘we’, sniffed: “We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute ‘commitment’ for insight.” So much for his colleagues. His enemies fared worse. He called the Bishop of Calgary ‘a jumped up twerp’, and his business partner David Ratner ‘the rat’. He dismissed the U.S. Vice President as a ‘mendacious hypocrite’. He belittled his own investors as “a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites and ingrates.” Mister Black is fond of calling people hypocrites. Interesting, coming from a man who tossed off his Canadian citizenship like a used Kleenex when a British knighthood winked in his direction. Not surprisingly, Conrad Black became a giant neocon pinata for legions of journalists who didn’t have to work for him – and for many who did. The now-defunct Canadian satirical magazine Frank dubbed him ‘Tubby’ after Tubby Tompkins, a character in the Little Lulu comic strip. Tubby Tompkins was a rotund and nasty, scheming child of privilege who often became a victim of his own shortcomings. The analogy stuck. Not that Conrad ever gave a rap. He was mega-bright, he was filthy rich and he was utterly impervious to the pot-shots and putdowns that percolated up from the little people. He had money, fame and fortune. And then the roof fell in. Lord Black of Crossharbour ended up swatting mosquitoes in a cell in a Florida jail. Never in my lifetime has any mortal fallen so far and so utterly. But here’s the thing. Conrad Black was not beaten. He served his time like a pro. He never cried the blues or begged for mercy or murmured contrition. He spent $100 million on his defence; still faces over $1 billion in civil suits – and yet the man is unbowed. Is he magnificent – Or deluded? Maybe he just has sisu in spades. Sisu is a Finnish word that means, roughly, extraordinary bravery and tenacity. The Finns showed sisu when they fought the militarily superior Russians to a standstill in World War ll. I once asked a Finlander to explain sisu to me. “It means having the hide of a rhinoceros,” he told me. Then, after a pause he added: “And perhaps the brain of one too.” Arthur Black Other Views The unsinkable Tubby Black On Nov. 30, as I sat in Clinton watching Huron County Council go about its business, I was reminded of two things: an earlier conversation I had with Warden Neil Vincent and The Hurt Locker. Of course Huron County Warden and North Huron Reeve Neil Vincent and the 2009 Academy Award winner for Best Picture are two very different things, but what I saw play out at this current council’s final meeting reminded me of them both. In talking with Vincent, he feared that his last meeting as warden would be marred with disagreements and a splintering of council after the decision was made late last month to cut four councillors from the table with no phase-out period. Unfortunately he was right. Councillors from one side yelled at councillors from the other side of the taxpayer- funded lawsuit in a way I had never seen before. Vincent predicted this in the Dec. 1 issue of The Citizen, saying that he feared councillors would abandon their Huron County-minded views and now act solely on behalf of their home municipalities. The accusation, of course, was that they were already acting that way. This is where we make our way into The Hurt Locker. In one of the first scenes of the film set in the modern day conflict in Iraq, a bomb squad is called out to take a look at a suspicious stack of trash when a car blows through a roadblock and stops just short of Sargeant First Class William James, who is on his way to investigate a potential IED. James pulls a gun on the driver, shouts at him and eventually fires a warning shot or two through the windshield of his car. When the driver eventually flees the scene, James then says to his fellow soldiers “well, if he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure as hell is now.” This concept, also explored heavily in the Academy Award-winning documentary about the US military’s interrogation tactics Taxi To The Dark Side, proposes that if residents of the Middle East weren’t involved with terrorist organizations when they were first picked up, incarcerated and tortured, they certainly would be by the time they left. The idea is that rather than discovering their enemies, some overly- aggressive officials were in fact creating them through heavy-handed policing tactics. So while Huron County Council had been operating harmoniously by many accounts, including Vincent’s, the divide many had feared between the municipalities is now very real, where it was non-existent before. At the Nov. 30 meeting I saw normally soft- spoken councillors yelling and beating their fists on tables during discussion surrounding Superior Court Justice Gorman’s late- November decision. And the issues were merely discussed; no clear resolution has been reached, and one may never be reached. In his outgoing comments at the Nov. 30 meeting, Vincent stated that 2011 was billed by many as “a quiet year” and it turned out to be anything but. It will be forever remembered as the year of the tornado, he said. And in addition, no doubt people will remember it as the year of Huron County’s civil war. Going forward, Huron County’s next warden will have his hands full reining councillors back in after this rift. There will be plenty of issues to resolve and plenty of obstacles to overcome. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who would forecast 2012 as a quiet year with plenty of work to do and four fewer bodies around to do it. How to lose friends... Bob Dylan had it right; the times they are a-changing; I don’t like what the world is changing into. Walking through the halls of Central Huron Secondary School and scarcely recognizing the majority of the teaching staff (and relishing the fact that I did still recognize some), I realized that despite the fact that my brother and sister will be graduating from the same school I did, and despite the fact that they are involved in many of the same things that I was, their experience is going to be one wholly different from my own. On my trip through the school last week I saw students on their cell phones more often than not and noticed a completely different attitude about the school. I suppose that isn’t odd given that, when I was there, there was a schism between “original” Central Huron Secondary School students (or Redmen, if you prefer) and those who had just been relocated from Seaforth District High School (Golden Bears, and yes, I do prefer that). It got me thinking about how else the world has changed and it wasn’t long before I thought back to the experiences that denoted my high school experiences. While we did graduate less some bright and funny individuals that were tragically taken from their families and their friends, none of those people took their own lives. Yet today, the act of someone taking their own life has become a common sight and if they did it to escape bullying at elementary or high school, society has even developed a term for it: bullycide. I realize that I have a tendency to view my past through rose-coloured glasses, however this is one circumstance where I think that my generation had it better or were better off. Maybe we were tougher; maybe we just didn’t let insults get to us. Maybe we were kinder and we didn’t taunt or tease people to the extent they are taunted or teased today. I’m not sure. All I know is that suicide, or bullycide, was not anywhere near as common then as it is now. Last week a young girl named Marjorie Raymond in Quebec took her own life. Her family says that persistent bullying drove her to the act and, in a note she left in which she apologized to her family for the trauma she would be causing, she said that “The jealous people in this world who only want to destroy happinesss” led her to taking her own life. Her mother stated that she had contacted her daughter’s school and informed the administration of the bullying, but it resulted in some suspensions and nothing more. Here in Ontario, thanks to Premier Dalton McGuinty, people found to be harassing or bullying in the school can be expelled, but I find that’s like cutting off your hand because you have a splinter. Sure, it may result in dealing with the issue, but it throws the baby out with the bathwater. If we can teach people not to bully isn’t that better than simply setting them aside? Bullying is, as far as I can see, always going to be a part of life until parents put a stop to it. Many of us have seen the after-school special where someone gets bullied and then, one by one, everyone else stands up for them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen in real life. Bullying is often looked at with blind eyes. People see it happening, but ignore it. Or worse yet, they believe it’s their children’s right to bully others. Once, on my way home from the half-hour bus ride that took me to and from school and work at the main campus of Wilfrid Laurier University, I passed by some public school students bullying another student. I won’t get into details but I will say the boy was different than the rest of the group, and that was enough for them to begin bullying him. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t make much of an intimidating presence carrying a new mop and bucket back to my apartment that I had picked up on the way home. In the end, I decided to do something about it. I put the bucket down and mop down (a mistake, in hindsight) and intervened. Once I had broken up the bullying, what I can only assume to be the ring leader grabbed my cleaning supplies and took off for a house less than a block away. Chalking up the goods to a loss, I turned to the victim of the mob and saw him back to the school. As I left the school, I was soon approached by a parent who less-than-politely told me that the incident was none of my business and that she’d report me to the police if she ever saw me near her children again. I stood in awe as the woman walked away and wondered what kind of parent would say something like that. I can’t imagine how she would feel if I had intervened on behalf of her son. Suffice to say, I never saw the mop and bucket again, but I did learn a very important lesson. Bullies pick up their habits from somewhere, and that somewhere, as much as lazy parents want to think so, is not usually the media. That kind of behaviour starts, and needs to end, at home. Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Denny Scott Denny’s Den Bullycide and other signs of the times Animals are such agreeable friends, they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. – George Eliot Final Thought