HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2009-03-12, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2009. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Let’s turn it around
M en love war because it allows them
to look serious. Because it is the
only thing that stops women
laughing at them.
– John Fowles
I’m not big on war heroes, but if I had to
pick one, I’d choose Muntazer al Zaidi.
Never heard of him? Sure you have. He’s the
Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George
W. Bush in Baghdad last December.
Gotta love the optics – smirky, smug and
swaggering leader of the most bellicose and
heavily armed nation on the planet cringing
under the onslaught of a pair of incoming
wingtips.
The shoes missed their mark and that’s a
good thing too. No physical damage done, but
the most powerful anti-war statement since a
kid in a white shirt faced down a column of
Chinese army tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Who knows? After years of murder and
mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan, Palestine
and Israel, Sudan and Zimbabwe, perhaps the
quaint concept of non-violent protest is
making a teensy-weensy comeback.
That would explain The Yarnbombers.
Never heard of them either? You will. Their
strike capacity is international in scope.
Yarnbombers have already left their mark on
the Great Wall of China, France’s Notre Dame
Cathedral and San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Bridge. In Mexico City they immobilized a
city bus.
And if you think the placid Great White
North is immune from attack, think again.
Yarnbombers have already struck in
Vancouver and Montreal.
Chances are you’ll see their handiwork
around your hometown someday very soon.
Yarnbombing, or Stealth Knitting as it’s also
known, started, ironically enough, in Bush’s
home state of Texas about four years ago. A
bunch of frustrated knitters sitting around in
Houston got to talking about half-finished
sweaters, abandoned doilies, dust-gathering
balls of yarn AND the woefully shabby
and soulless appearance of their
downtown area….and suddenly the light went
on.
What if a guerrilla team of craftspeople,
operating in secret and under cover of
darkness, just went out and adorned the uglier
parts of the neighbourhood with…knitting?
Thus was born Knitta, the world’s first gang
of derring-do darners and crochet commandos.
Their mandate is simple: cloak everything
from bar stools to utility poles with vibrant,
colourful hand-stitched works of art.
As I said, the movement has since gone
global. In Paris in 2007, thousands of pairs of
knitted socks suddenly appeared on street
corners and café tables in the Marais district.
In Mexico City a team of commandos knitted
up a mammoth tea cosy that covers an entire
bus, (which has since been retired and turned
into an arts studio).
Here in Canada, yarnbombers first surfaced
in Quebec last year, where, one January
morning, Montrealers awoke to find several
‘Arret’ signs sporting snug and nifty knitted
tubes around their poles. In Vancouver’s
Strathcona district a local yarnbomber –
or perhaps a brigade of them – has been
knitting mantillas for wire fences, leg warmers
for utility poles and pompoms for car
antennae.
Yarnbombing isn’t anti-war per se. In fact it
isn’t anything per se. It’s just…freelance
knitting.
Yarnbombers frequently take flak for what’s
perceived as a lack of practicality. Why aren’t
they knitting sweaters and socks for widows
and orphans? Afghans for Afghanis and
turtlenecks for abandoned seals? Why don’t
they do something useful, for crying out loud?
What’s the point of knitting woollen graffiti
for park benches, lawn ornaments and stop
signs?
There is no point.
That’s the point.
Mandy Moore, a Vancouver practitioner,
told a Globe and Mail reporter that she and her
colleagues reject the hoary tradition of knitting
products for altruistic causes.
Yarnbombers do it just for the hell of it.
And why not? There’s something life-
affirming and whimsical about ‘found’
knitting that serves no useful purpose other
than to make an object look less industrial,
more cared for.
Best of all, it does no harm. Guerrilla
knitting doesn’t damage property.
And if it’s your property and you disagree
the remedy is simple: tear it off. But it makes
you look like Mr. Crankypants.
The comedian Elaine Boosler once riffed on
the deceptively pacific names we assign to
‘anti-personnel devices’ – aka weapons of
terror and death.
“Peacekeeper Missile,” she mused.
“Doesn’t that sound like Axe-Murderer
Babysitter?”
Indeed. Give me yarnbombers and shoe
tossers anytime.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Yarnbombers? Shoe ‘nuff
T he good news for Liberal Premier
Dalton McGuinty as he struggles with
an economic recession is there will be
fewer watchdogs around to scrutinize how he
handles it.
The number of reporters, photographers and
columnists covering the legislature full-time is
dwindling fast and only about half what it was
a couple of decades ago.
The latest casualty is Globe and Mail
columnist Murray Campbell, who after six
years has been told by his newspaper he
will be returning to head office and not
replaced.
The Globe will now have to cover the
legislature with only one reporter, which is
two fewer than it had during legislature
sessions when this reporter worked for it more
than four decades ago.
This is worrying for journalists, who see
many jobs in their profession disappearing, as
they are in others. But it’s also a blow to the
public, which needs media able to report and
interpret events that affect it.
The Globe also is a special newspaper, if a
bit pretentious about it. It’s read more than
others by the more literate, which includes
those wanting to be informed on politics.
The Times in Britain boasts “Top People
Read The Times” and this also is true of The
Globe.
This writer has covered politics provincially
and federally for several newspapers, but
doors opened more quickly when he could say
he was from for The Globe and Mail.
The Globe’s columnists at the legislature
going back to the 1960s have included
Norman Webster, related to the paper’s then
owner, Howard Webster, but thoroughly able
in his own right, Hugh Winsor, Robert
Sheppard, Tom Walkom, now writing columns
on national affairs for the Toronto Star, and
Orland French, who had a rare flair for
humour.
These Globe columnists probably were as
well known and are as much remembered as
some politicians they wrote about. They
needed abilities including that of
understanding legislation sometimes so
complex they almost had to be lawyers to find
their way around it.
They needed to understand what motivates
politicians to introduce, or refuse to introduce,
legislation, which often is not what they claim
it is, and their countless other maneouvers.
They needed to build contacts in the parties,
to know what is going on there, and know the
past, because it has huge bearing on the
present.
Usually they had experience of politics
provincially and elsewhere. Campbell covered
provincial issues on and off for a decade
before becoming legislature columnist. A
good memory was as essential as a pen and
paper.
The Globe columnists also tended to be less
politically partisan than those on other Toronto
newspapers and more independent of their
paper’s official opinions, as expressed through
its editorial page, which once were moderately
Conservative, but have become dominantly
far-right wing.
Columnists on other Toronto newspapers,
with a few exceptions, have tended to echo
their employers’ editorial stances, which in
the Star have been overwhelmingly pro-
Liberal, while those on The Sun and National
Post mostly have stuck like Krazy Glue to
their papers’ pronounced extreme-right
preachings.
This does not mean The Globe has led in all
areas of coverage. The Star notably and to
some extent The Sun have done more in recent
years to expose inadequacies in government,
while The Globe has not provided enough staff
for this. But there are reasons to miss Globe
columnists.
The Toronto papers, and particularly The
Globe, are replacing journalists commenting
on politics by offering endless space to non-
journalists to write on political issues.
They include retired politicians, back room
strategists, spokespersons for think tanks,
company CEOs and many organizations from
taxpayers’ associations to unions.
They cost nothing or little and sometimes
have views worth knowing, but they lobby for
partisan causes.
The papers seem to operate on the premise if
they provide many opinions that are biased,
they wind up presenting a balanced picture,
but a single account by a journalist striving to
be non-partisan probably will get closer to the
truth.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
I was prepared, the promise had been
issued. But opening my door I was
nonetheless momentarily bewitched by
what greeted me.
Despite the dreary backdrop that started
things off, there was no trace of the frosty bite
that had blown in at the beginning of the week.
Instead a soft breeze delivered a relatively
warm kiss on the cheek as I exited the cozy
indoors. Spring may not have arrived, but there
was certainly a welcome harbinger in the air on
this day that brought a smile to my face.
Everything’s wonderful about spring. It’s
romantic, it’s rebirth and awakening. Having
even just a hint of that magic a few weeks
earlier than expected was invigorating.
Hanging on to any of that chipperness,
however, turned out to be a challenge. Within
the first few hours of the day, I heard no less
than three times that, yes, the weather was nice,
but keep in mind, we would be paying for these
unseasonably high temperatures.
Not said, I might add, with any hint of
uncertainty, but rather as firm conviction of
fact.
Why is it that when we experience some
pleasant weather at an unexpected time, or of
an unlikely duration, we assume a price must
be exacted. We will pay, these blasted bubble
bursters inevitably toss our way. We will pay,
they staunchly assure, for the open winter, the
early spring, the summer blessed with cheery
days and just enough gentle rain at night to
keep flowers and crops happy.
Yet, where are these same seers when winter
hits early and hard, when blustery weather dogs
us for days? When summer fails to live up to its
promise, when we are besieged by rains and
thunderstorms, why do assurances of a short
visit from Old Man Winter not follow? Not
once has anyone ever suggested to me that
withstanding an assault of nasty weather means
sunny skies would be the ultimate result down
the road.
So, as Toronto radio announced Friday could
have a record-breaking high of 16 degrees, as
spirits lifted with the rising temperatures, I
refused to listen to the purveyors of
meteorological negativity. I decided to look at
it from the other side. And they do say that the
right attitude can have a positive effect on many
things.
Seeing the down side, assuming the worst,
looking at the half-empty glass are all aspects
of human nature we should learn to do without.
Many times, life is a struggle and it’s not
always easy to remember that with the fights
come many things to celebrate, enjoy and be
grateful for.
And I simply can’t let myself believe that
they are not given out in equal portions. I can’t
believe that Mother Nature is a nasty wench,
cackling gleefully while dishing out an unfair
imbalance of bad over good.
With that in mind, therefore, let’s flip this
thing around. Let’s start believing that not only
will we not be punished for a taste of early
spring, but that the warming trend was simply
what we had coming. It should be easy,
because, I think we’d all agree that anyone who
copes with a Huron County winter deserves
reward not punishment.
Friday was one of those treats. After a long,
typical snow-full Snowbelt winter the warmth,
the opportunity to literally watch the white melt
away were welcome respite. Let’s accept it as
one of this world’s many blessings — an
unexpected surprise, meant to be appreciated,
not looked upon as a precursor of something
less pleasant.
Fewer watchdogs watching McGuinty
To have what we want, is riches, but to be
able to do without, is power.
– George MacDonald
Final Thought