The Citizen, 2010-06-10, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 2010. PAGE 5.
C elebrities in general are chosen, like
the Calendar of Saints, to meet certain
needs: thus Frank Sinatra is the patron
celebrity of comebacks, Liza Minnelli of
daughters, and Jackie Onassis of curious
marriages. – Wilfrid Sheed
And what of another celebrity from that era?
What of James Earl Carter, 39th President of
the United States? What’s he the patron saint
of?
Republican one-liners, mostly. Jimmy
Carter had the misfortune to serve during a
sluggish patch for the U.S. economy. He
wasn’t the cause, but he carried the can for it.
Mister Carter also lacked the hard-nosed, lick-
‘em-in-the-alley posture American voters
seem to favour in their presidents. He didn’t
strut and boast like George W., lacked the
matinee idol profile of Reagan, wasn’t slick
like Clinton or wily like Nixon.
He was also responsible for some highly
questionable decisions in foreign affairs. He
gave the Panama Canal back to the
Panamanians for God’s sake! And he wasted a
lot of time and energy over pansy issues like
world peace and the eradication of disease in
developing nations. American voters rewarded
Carter by booting him out of office in 1981
and handing his opponent, Ronald Reagan, a
44-state landslide.
But celebrityhood lasts a lifetime, if not
longer, and being a failure as president is no
liability to the bank account. Richard Nixon
was an Oval Office disgrace, but he
subsequently got $600,000 for two interviews
with David Frost and $2.3 million for his
memoirs. Gerald Ford, the man Lyndon
Johnson said “couldn’t chew gum and walk at
the same time” earned a post-presidential
income of over $1 million a year.
Even George W., who left his country’s
economy in smoking ruins while earning an
approval rating of 22 per cent, still manages to
find audiences willing to hear him
mispronounce some speechwriter’s platitudes
at $150,000 a pop.
Jimmy Carter didn’t go on the celebrity
speakers’ circuit when he left the Oval Office.
Instead, he donned a carpenters’ apron and
(more derisive snickers from the Tuskers on
the U.S. Right) went out to help build
affordable houses on behalf of Habitat for
Humanity.
He also continued his fight against diseases
endemic to emerging nations. Diseases like
AIDS, Dengue fever, malaria and a
particularly nasty little bastard called the
Guinea worm.
It is a pestilence that has been with us for
thousands of years. The Bible refers to the
creature as ‘the fiery serpent’. Guinea worms
are rather snakelike – they can grow to a meter
in length. Their preferred hangout: inside your
body.
Or rather, inside the bodies of the
desperately poor in countries like Ethiopia,
Mali, Ghana and Sudan. The modus operandi
of the Guinea worm reads like a plot summary
for a Stephen King novel. It hatches in ponds,
enters a victim’s body, usually through a cut or
scratch, then proceeds to grow. In its mature
stage when the Guinea worm is as long as a
man’s belt, it gnaws a hole through the skin
and sticks its head out, looking for more water
than it can find in its host. This is when the
Guinea worm can be removed. Slowly,
excruciatingly, millimetres at a time, by
laboriously winding the emerged portion
around a stick. The pain, I am told, is in
Technicolor.
You don’t ever want to make the
acquaintance of the Guinea worm – bad
enough to see them infesting someone else. In
places like Sudan, victims can have up to a
dozen of the creatures dangling from their
bodies, a sight one imagines Jimmy Carter has
seen all too frequently. In 1986, as part of his
post-Presidential career, he established the
Carter Centre to lead a global battle against the
epidemic. At that time, nearly four million
people in 20 countries carried the Guinea
worm. Today, there are just 3,200 known cases
world wide, mostly in Sudan.
The solution is simple and decidedly low-
tech. Find the victims, move them into
compounds to feed and treat them and provide
them with clean water to keep them away from
ponds. Hostless, the Guinea worms are left to
starve. Experts predict that in two more years,
the disease will be officially extinct.
That’s what Jimmy Carter’s living for these
days. He’s 85 now, still ensconced on his
famous peanut farm in Plains, Georgia.
Asked by a reporter if he had any unfinished
goals in life, Carter replied, “to outlive the
Guinea worm.”
Then he laughed and added “all I have to do
is live two more years and I’ll achieve my
goal.”
Quite a legacy: President of the USA,
recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, conqueror
of the Guinea worm.
And my nomination for Patron Saint of
Decency.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Peanut farmers and guinea worms
On May 28, as I finished last week’s
column, little did I know that my
grandfather, Benno Hesse, lay in his
bed after peacefully passing away during the
previous night.
No one had heard from him on Friday, so it
was later that night when our suspicions were
confirmed as my mom and sister rolled up to
an unlit house to find him, inside, in his bed
and still bundled up.
When I came home and found out, I felt
strange to say the least, knowing all I had done
throughout the day while he lay there.
We laid him to rest on June 2 and considered
holding a private ceremony. However, after a
modest visitation, I stood in front of a crowd of
over 100 people alongside my sister Dana and
told them stories about our Opa.
Opa was a complicated man and fittingly he
and I had a complicated relationship, which I
summed up for everyone at the memorial in a
story that took place just two years ago.
My grandfather, an avid soccer fan who
watched English and North American soccer,
but quietly pined for his native German
Bundesliga, which wasn’t on Canadian
television nearly enough in his opinion.
He complained to my mom that he hadn’t
seen me in a while, so when I was back in
Pickering one weekend, I invited him to our
house to watch a soccer game with me. He
showed up at halftime, chatted for a few
minutes and when the game started back up,
the score being 4-0, he declared the game a
blow-out and headed home.
Readers may remember my story from the
2008 Christmas issue of The Citizen, where I
reported that the one constant in my life around
the holidays was my grandfather, along with
my grandmother, who died in 1996.
Opa was never the same after that. He made
friends and took up hobbies, but his favourite
place to be was still at my Oma’s gravesite. So
it was standing on the hill at the site,
underneath the Canadian flag at half mast,
where I finally felt peace knowing that he had
returned to his favourite place, laid beside his
beloved wife for all of eternity.
I didn’t know as much about him as I would
have liked, learning about his time in the Tank
Corps and as a prisoner of war in World War II,
as an amateur boxer in Germany and as a
businessman who was a good friend to his
employees at the funeral. Through talking to
everyone, an image was painted by dozens of
brushes of a hard-working man who was
tolerant, understanding and loving.
He related well to other international
Canadian residents. He loved Canada, but he
also knew what it was like in the old days to
come here with just a few dollars in his pocket.
He was active and he loved to dance. Even
until he died, he would travel to Toronto on
Sundays to go dancing with his friends. The
day before he died he was out swimming with
his friends, which he did three times a week.
Those in his family, however, didn’t always
feel the love that his friends would report back.
That is, until, a thorough search of his house
revealed hundreds of pictures of his family.
Most touching, was a picture that hung in his
house for as long as I can remember of a young
boy and girl, always a favourite of my Oma’s.
The boy was labeled with marker as Shawn
and the girl as Dana. Our familiarity with the
picture told us that he kept the picture close to
him in his bedroom, but it also told us that he
had labeled them recently, in the last year.
He must have missed us, but couldn’t bring
himself to speak up. Hopefully he knows that
he too will be missed by many.
McGuinty’s Israel precedent
Opa remembered
An Ontario premier visiting Israel
has had sympathetic words for
Palestinians, which shows miracles
still happen in the Holy Land, and they have
even been timely.
No premier before Dalton McGuinty had
said anything remotely favorable to
Palestinians, very much the underdogs in
their dispute with Israeli Jews that is one of
the world’s longest-running and most
dangerous conflicts and is always in danger of
spreading.
Only two members of the legislature had
ever said Palestinians have a case that should
be considered and one of these was forced to
retract quickly by his party, indications of how
powerful the pro-Israel lobby has been in
Ontario.
McGuinty did not take sides on his visit,
timed particularly at promoting trade in high
technology between the two countries, and
praised Israel for overcoming its lack of
natural resources and creating industries based
on innovation.
The Liberal premier said he will emulate
Israel in appointing a chief scientist to advise
how Ontario can use science to set up new
commercial ventures and improve residents’
lives.
He said also he will consider Israel’s
invitation to join it in creating an institute to
study the brain, which could particularly help
those suffering from dementia and depression.
But McGuinty went much further
than his predecessors, first by apologiz-
ing that Ontario’s relationship with
Palestinians is not as mature as with Israel,
which is an understatement, because it is non-
existent.
He said he knows Palestinians, like others,
are looking for good education, healthcare,
jobs and a world at peace.
He promised Ontario will partner its
universities with those in Palestinian territory
and help improve other education and
healthcare and added “let’s lift each other up,"
showing a respect for Palestinian abilities
others have not.
McGuinty’s tone was quite different from
that of a long procession of premiers who have
visited Israel, far more than any other country
of comparable size, which has underlined the
importance of Jewish voters, who have been
crucial to winning half a dozen Toronto
ridings.
Progressive Conservative premier William
Davis went in the 1970s and announced he
would bring in a law to prevent Ontario
companies joining a trade boycott of Israel
threatened by some Arab neighbors, which
never materialized, but Davis became a hero to
Jews back home.
Davis on another visit declared “I am a
Jerusalemite" and “premiers aren’t supposed
to get involved in international matters and I
don’t often, but this is different.”
Davis’s closest confidante and contact with
ethnic groups, attorney general Roy
McMurtry, went to Israel no fewer than three
times in six years.
McMurtry declared he was a “Christian
Zionist," proud always to stand in support of
Israel and urged it not to give up the militarily
important Golan Heights it seized, although
most western nations including Canada and
the United States condemned it.
New Democrat premier Bob Rae went to
Israel and talked about the “sense of vibrancy
and tremendous dynamism” he found there,
but had no word about its Palestinian
residents.
Conservative premier Mike Harris praised
Israel’s people as industrious and stayed in a
kibbutz, which appealed to Jews here.
McGuinty will be suspected of looking for
votes among immigrants of Arab descent, who
have increased rapidly and are attaining
prominent positions in the community and
becoming more politically active.
But it also is possible he has come to
recognize, as have many Ontarians of all
backgrounds judging from their public
comments, that the mid-east conflict is not as
one-sided as they thought, that western
countries designated only a small part of
Palestine as a state for Jews, trying impossibly
to atone for the Holocaust in which Europeans
murdered six million Jews.
They have seized much more by force,
expelled hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians, brought in several million Jews
from around the world to replace them and as
recent events showed, sometimes deal harshly
with those who protest, and this is becoming
increasingly difficult for Ontario politicians to
defend.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
Shawn
Loughlin
SShhaawwnn’’ss SSeennssee
Beware of little expenses. A small leak will
sink a great ship.
– Benjamin Franklin
Final Thought