HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2009-06-04, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2009. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Back in the 1920s there was a debate in
the Texas legislature over whether to
introduce Spanish language instruction
in state schools.
Story goes that Miriam ‘Ma’ Ferguson, the
first female governor of Texas, ended the
debate by standing up, waving a Bible and
declaring “If English was good enough for
Jesus, it’s good enough for the children of
Texas.”
Okay, the story is probably too good to be
true, but it does resonate, especially for the
several hundred million non-Americans
around the world who get to watch the
ongoing antics of the Excited States of
America on a daily basis.
And most especially for Canadians. Try as
they might (and they don’t try very hard) most
Americans suffer from North American tunnel
vision. They simply cannot see their northern
neighbours very clearly.
Instead they take comfort by concocting
Canadian myths. We all wear plaid. There’s a
Mountie on a horse outside every donut shop.
We all say ‘aboot’ and ‘hoose’ for ‘about’ and
‘house’.
I have never heard a Canadian say aboot or
hoose – have you?
Willie, the janitor on The Simpsons maybe –
but not a Canuck.
Americans tell themselves we ‘suffer’under
socialized medicine in this country and that as
a result, Canadians line up around the block to
see a doctor and can’t get into hospitals even
for urgent surgery.
This from a country in which 47 million of
its own citizens – 18 per cent of the population
under 65 – have no medical insurance
whatsoever.
When actor Natasha Richardson died
following a fall while skiing in Quebec last
winter U.S. tabloids blazed with cautionary
headlines such as: SOCIALIZED MEDICINE
KILLED RICHARDSON. The fact that she
was walking and talking after the fall and
actually refused an ambulance wasn’t
mentioned by American reporters.
And then there’s the terrorism thing. Shortly
after the 9/11 attacks, several American TV
commentators, radio show hosts and
newspaper headline writers reported that the
hijackers had infiltrated from Canada.
Well, okay … it was a confusing time and
rumours ran rampant. Turned out, that not one
of the hijackers – zero, zilch, ninguno – had
entered the U.S. from Canada.
A spokesman for the Canadian government
pointed that fact out in the House of Commons
a few days after the attack.
Peter Mansbridge mentioned it on The
National.
Frank McKenna, then-Canadian Ambassador
to the United States, called a press conference
in Washington to correct the misapprehension.
But America wasn’t listening.
In the ensuing eight years, Canada has been
regularly and routinely bad-mouthed as a
careless conduit for the nine-eleven hijackers.
Then-senator Hillary Clinton told reporters
the terrorists had crossed from Canada into
New York.
Texas congressman Ruben Hinojosa assured
a congressional committee that the hijackers
had crossed the border “using passports that
Canadians accepted as valid despite the fact
that the documents were doctored.”
“It's something that won't go away,” Bill
Graham, Canada's defense minister, moaned
back in 2003. “We’re very resentful . . .
because not one suspect had been in Canada.
All had been in the U.S., training in the U.S.,
with valid U.S. visas.”
That’s right, America. It was your border
guards, not ours, that waved the hijackers
through customs. You even went so far as to
teach them how to pilot passenger jets.
But it’s a correction that American ears
won’t hear. Last month Janet Napolitano
assured reporters that the 9/11 hijackers had
come through Canada. Later she said that
she’d been misunderstood, but she’s on tape,
and the tape doesn’t lie.
She’s the head of U.S. Homeland Security,
for cripes sake.
And just days after that John McCain – who
could have been the president – repeated the
bogus legend yet again.
Ah, well. When it comes to borders
Americans have always tended towards the
paranoid and illogical.
There is the story of FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover and his penchant for scribbling his
views in bright blue ink in the margins of
memos and reports he received from
underlings. Sometimes he would fill all
four borders of a typewritten sheet with
his observations handwritten with a fountain
pen.
Once an assistant made the mistake of
sending him a typewritten page in which the
copy ran almost to the edges of the paper,
leaving Hoover very little room to write.
‘WATCH THE BORDERS!’Hoover printed
in angry, bright blue block letters across the
top of the page.
And nothing moved across the Canadian and
Mexican frontiers for the next five days.
Arthur
Black
Other Views The ongoing antics of the Excited States
Apolitical party has room for only one
leader and those in Ontario politics
who refused to accept this usually
have had their political careers cut brutally
short.
This has happened to Liberal Michael
Bryant, who held several cabinet posts
competently in a decade as an MPP and made
no secret he wanted to succeed Dalton
McGuinty as premier and the sooner the
better.
Premiers want ministers to be enthusiastic,
but not breathing down their necks, and the
strained relations between the two have
prompted Bryant to leave for a less influential
post with the city of Toronto.
Bryant joins other politicians whose careers
were cut short because they were over-eager to
have the top job. William Davis, Progressive
Conservative premier from 1971-85 and the
longest-serving premier of recent years, faced
no fewer than three such challenges.
Davis, the establishment choice, won by
only 44 of the 1580 votes cast in a leadership
convention because of an unexpectedly strong
run by a little known minister, Allan
Lawrence, that showed their party was divided
and prompted suggestions they should almost
share power.
Davis was cool to this and gave Lawrence a
newly-created job developing justice policy
that kept him out of the public eye, which is
death to a politician. Soon after he left and
was elected federally, but never came
close to the prominence his earlier march to
the threshold of being premier promised.
Davis also felt threatened by Bert Lawrence
(no relation), another losing candidate for
leader who provided some of the brightest
ideas. But he found an excuse to drop him
from cabinet when he used a government
plane to take his wife and two children to Cuba
without clearing it with the premier.
Lawrence explained he was trying to
promote trade, but it appeared as misuse of
public funds and a second pretender to the
throne quit provincial politics.
After the Conservatives under Davis won
only minority governments in two successive
elections, the most serious attempt to replace
him was launched by Darcy McKeough,
another of those people Davis had defeated.
He had built up a following as an innovative
and powerful treasurer.
Davis made it clear he was in for the long
haul and had no intention of quitting as
premier and McKeough, when it was clear his
path to premier was blocked, joined the ranks
of the disappointed and left.
The patient Davis hung in and even won
back the Conservatives’ cherished majority.
The Liberals had a similar episode in
opposition in the 1960s, after they narrowly
chose Andrew Thompson, a former aide to
federal leader Lester Pearson, as leader with a
push from the party’s federal wing, over an
unusual outsider, evangelist preacher turned
newspaper editor and TV personality Charles
Templeton.
Templeton hoped for a worthwhile role in
the party, but its comfortably entrenched
MPPs feared a newcomer telling them what to
do and froze him out.
When Thompson resigned because of
sickness and faltering leadership only two
years later, the party went to Templeton
and begged him to take over, but he
had had enough of deceitful politicians and
refused.
Ambitious politicians have forced out
leaders twice in recent decades. Conservative
premier Frank Miller lost the party’s majority
and then government in 1985, when the
Liberals and New Democrats forced him out,
but tried to stay as opposition leader.
Larry Grossman undermined him with the
cry the party needed a younger and fresher
face, only to lose the next election by an even
bigger margin.
Stephen Lewis as a young, oratorically
inspiring New Democrat MPP in 1970
collected overwhelming support behind
the scenes for himself as leader and
presented it quietly to the long-serving leader,
Donald C. MacDonald. MacDonald accepted
he would have difficulty holding on and
stepped down, but not without a fight, because
he supported another candidate in the
leadership race Lewis won.
Those who have managed to push out
leaders usually have had a strong case for it
and there is none now against McGuinty.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
It would seem they have a lot of explaining
to do. They really should be ashamed of
themselves. They have lied, twisted facts,
gossiped and hurt a lot of people without
stepping forward to take responsibility.
Everyone’s heard their stories. Sadly, too
everyone’s repeated them.
“They say...”
They say that she married her brother-in-law
because they’d been having an affair before her
sister died. They say that the kid’s really
messed up on drugs, but his problems are
because his mother’s a wacko. They say that
she’ll never be able to cope on her own. They
say that he really thinks highly of himself.
Well, I’ve come to the decision that maybe
‘they’should just keep their mouths shut. What
they say is bandied about with ease. The words
are often taken as gospel with little thought to
who ‘they’ are in each case and if the
information is on good authority.
Then sadly too, their often misleading views
are carelessly passed along and even expanded
upon. And that’s where we’re to blame.
Recently, they helped add to the pain,
confusion and anger over the Tori Stafford
abduction. Stories were told about her mother,
her father, and the accused. Comments were
thrown out by a number of sources and
casually repeated by the media. And then as is
the norm, spoken again in day-to-day
conversations by a caring and concerned, but
unfortunately occasionally insensitive public.
In a need for more detail, more titillating
substance, these tales take on a life of their own
and the story of what happened and how do we
fix it gets lost.
A portion of a documentary on director
Roman Polanski that I watched recently
underlined that cruel reality. Tabloids reported
stories ‘they’ told of his late wife Sharon Tate
and the couple’s lifestyle that twisted things to
turn the victim into the accused.
Following her death, Polanski made some
serious mistakes that certainly didn’t raise him
up in the eyes of the general public. But
watching him coping with this horrific tragedy,
standing up to defend the name and honour of
his brutally-murdered wife, who by all
accounts was a sweet person loved by everyone
who met her, was heartbreaking.
It’s a terrible thing that anyone would have to
expose their grief in this manner, but
unforgivable that he had to do so because of
what ‘they’ said.
I’d like to be able to say I’ve never been
guilty of helping to spread their word. I wish I
could puff out my chest and boldly state that
the words, “Well, they say...” had never come
from my mouth.
Such is not the case, however. And sadly I
don’t know anyone for whom it is.
But what I can say, and I expect the same is
true of others, is while repeating the they-says
may be thoughtless, it is done with gentle
intent. Often times the words are repeated to
try and share an understanding of another
person or their suffering. When something
terrible happens, people also struggle to
comprehend and will eagerly absorb as much
information or details as they can in the hope
that it will help them. Unfortunately that
generally includes supposition and innuendo as
well as facts and reality.
Society is probably never going to reject
‘they’ as a source of information. They are the
go-to resource on a variety of subjects. But we
can start to think about what repeating what we
hear can do to others and see the sense in
keeping some information to ourselves.
Political rivals get crushed
They say too much
To show a child what once delighted you, to
find the child’s delight added to your own,
this is happiness.
– J. B. Priestley
Final Thought