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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1979-05-02, Page 2WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 1979 Serving Brussels and the surrounding community. Published each. Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario By McLean Bros. Publishers Limited Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Pat Langlois - Advertising Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $10.00 a Year. Others $20,00 a Year. Single Copies 25 cents each. Wfilf 9.41TA,00 em Behind the scenes by Keith Roulston Newspapers via TV? By Bill Smiley INTWOOND von g Brussels Post The real Supermen It was nice of Warner Brothers to give us the New improved Superman. The old one was getting a bit tacky. "More powerful than a locomotive" does sound a bit dated. So for a mere $78 million we have a glossier knight in shining armor, a lonelier Lone Ranger, a super-special Superman to be the symbol of our cultural cop-out. Animals have two basic instincts when confronted with danger - fight or flight. During the '60s there was a tendency (at least for a few) to fight. Now in the '70s, with the problems getting more and more complex, the human animal has taken flight. A good traditional way of doing that is to invest ourselves in simplistic solutions and their champions. Sup6rman catches the bad guys and throws them in the lock-up. That's alot easier to understand than an analysis of how those bad guys got to be bad in the first place. Trudeau promised us the "just society". Then it turned out. this super-politician had feet of clay and couldn't bring about quick solutions to complex problems without getting us to give up something. So we are now turning to another hero, his image newly polished for the adoring media. But Joe Clark won't be able to do anything either, without involving us. So soon we'll be after a new hero who says he can. Meanwhile, the entertainment, world provides us with a host of heroes who know what they're against. TV sports, for instance, provides us with clean cut battle lines, issues we can understand without thinking too much, and tactics that get immediate results. We don't have to do a thing. Fundamental religionists do much the same thing on TV. They tell us "Jesus is the answer" to whatever the question may be, and they say, "Write to us, send us money, and we'll pray for you. All your problems will be solved." Our saintly heroes in medialand can solve all the world's ills with one easy slogan. But a few ordinary people such as Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Jean Vanier and Bob McClure showed us the stuff of which real heroes are made . . . they risked with a purpose. If the experts are right, someday you won't be going to the mailbox to pick up the newspaper that Contains this column. If the experts are right, you'll simply turn on your television instead and your newspaper will appear on the screen upon demand along with all kinds of other information, I've been hearing this kind of prediction since back in the sixties when I went off to learn all there was about the newspaper business. While we were busy studying how to put words on paper, the experts were telling us that all this would someday be obsolete. The age of electronics was here they said. Someday people would get everything they needed off their television set. Flick the switch and there'd be the weather forecasat. Switch another and get the sports or another and get the business news and so on. Well I guess I'm old fasioned but I hope that day will never come. I mean theoretically, we could all have copies of expensive art like the Mona Lisa too by turning a switch and looking at it on television but I don't think it would be quite the same. Newspapers aren't quite an art form to the scale of a Mona Lisa but they are a heck of a lot more than just the information that is printed on them. A newspaper has a life of its own:Most newspaper take on their own personality, a combination of the manage- ment and the individual personalities of the people who work and of the particular equipment used by each newspaper. Thus, in a city like Toronto which has three newspapers there are three distinct alter- natives for the person wanting to pick up a newspaper at the corner newstand: there's the conservative (and Conservative) Globe and Mail, known as the great grey Globe because of it's design and the heaviness of its reading material; then the big and brassy Star that shouts everything in red ink except it's financial statement; and finally the Sun which specializes in second hand gossip and right hand politics and is so obsessed with scandal that many claim it is one. Somehow I can't see how these differing personalities could be put forward on a television screen as it slowly flips line after line of a news story. Nor do I see how the personality of the community • the newspaper represents can be properly expressed on a television screen as is so often the case with our weekly news papers. Of course there's another problem as well. There are two common causes of domestic disputes, one over who will have what section of the newspaper and another over which television channel will be watched by wham at what time. Can you imagine the fun when all this arguing is rolled into one big argument about who's going to read what section of the news- paper instead of watching re-runs of Green Acres? Of course it's also a bit more difficult to take your paper to the washroom for a little relief and relaxation when you've got to carry the whole television along. And what about reading outside under a tree? I realize, of course there are advantages to the newspaper being delivered on television. First of all, it would save us cutting down all those trees. It would also, of course put a few hundred thousand. people out of work cutting down those trees and making newsprint from them but what the heck, that's progress. If we continue to progress at the present rate, we'll soon get to that glorious state where everybody's out of a job except the people who look after processing and sending out the unemployment cheques. There's no doubt that one advantage would be the reduction of our output of garbage. (I mean the newspapers after they've been read, not what's printed in them, like this column). A big part of our garbage costs these days go towards collecting and burying old newspapers. I'm sure my.wife would long for the day when newspaper came on television. I'm a newspaper addict and it's also part of my job to keep up with what's going on so we end up with three daily newspapers and close to a dozen weekly newspapers around the house. It means wehave our own major garbage disposal problem as the pile of old newspapers mounts steadily toward the ceiling and threatens to topple over smoothering the dog, a cat or a kid. She'd also like it I'm sure on those frequent days when she's trying to carry on a conversation and I'm managing to ignore her (all the while managing well-timed "un hubs") while I read the newspaper. It would be so much easier to get my attention if she could just pull the plug. But if the newspaper is replaced by the television just think how we'd suffer. What would we ever use to line the bird cage? And wow. Idn't it be hard to paper train a new batch of kittens if we had to use used televisions? Sugar and, spice Meanw'hile, problems have become more complex, issues have become less clear and solutions cry out for our involvement. So we rush to the local theatre for a two-hour bath in the comforting cop-out of super-simple solutions, and we tell ourselves we don't really believe the Superman story. The festival business Warner Brothers, by way of atonement for their sins, are forced to settle for a puny seven and a half million dollars in the bank after three Whole days. (The United Church) Time running out for grain storage grants Farmers' money for the grain storage 'rid handling program is running otitl It you plan to take advantage of this ederally sponsored program ; have your vork done quickly then apply for the grant 4' 30% of your cost up to $1;500. There is less than $f million left Of the 13 million appropriated for this program in Ontario. Contact the Agricultural Office in Clinton about eligibility of items and applications: Don Pullen, P.. Ag,, Agricultural Representative for Huron County. My old lady is back in the music festival business, after an absence of some years, and it's just like old times around here; hectic. We quarrel frequently about great issues such as who put out the garbage last week or whose turn it is to do the dishes. When these tiffs become heated, I am frequently told, in a typical wifely digression, when she is logically cornered, that. I know almost nothing about music, It has nothing to do with the argument, but fhear, "You couldn't even find middle C on the piano," in tones of contempt. I cheerfully admit to that fact and the further fact that I don't give a diddle, which fans the flames. This always non-complusses her, which is the object. But, when a music festival looms, and looms is the words, I suddenly discover that "Lou have a good ear, and a great sense of rhythm and tempo,'' and I realize, With an inward groan, that I'm in for hours of listening to minuets and gavottes and sonatinas, and making judgments based on my good ear and great sense of etc. It all began about 20 years ago, Both our kids were taking piano lessons, and doing well. One evening I was sitting idly, reading my paper and wagging my foot in tithe to the sonatina my son was preparing for a music festival. My foot got going so fast I couldn't even read the printed word for the vibration. "Hey," I thought, "this kid isn't Chopin or Paderewski. That's a mite quick for a grade six piece." I made my wife sit down and listen. She checked the tempo in the book, He was playing about double speed. She brought it to the attention of his music teacher, who was a little shocked and embarrassed to realize that old tin ear-was right, Happy ending. We got the kid slowed to half-speed, and he won first prize, That was the end of any peace for me, around festival time. Ever since, I've had to listen to dozens of kids play all their festival pieces, and come up with some enlightening comment about things of which I have absolutely no knowledge, like pace, tone, rhythm, tempo, appogiaturo, forte, crescendo and the like. I don't even know what the words mean. In self-defence, I've concocted a number of Comments about as useful as the things teachers write on report carcig. Things like; "perhaps the second movement is a bit subtitled:" of, "Yesi^ that's holding to- gether nicely," or "don't you think the andante allegro is a bit turgid?" When yoti don't know an andante from an allegro, if one were to crawl out of your soup, it (Continued on Page 8) To the editor: