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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1994-04-06, Page 5Arthur Black Morse Code, Braille, NHL referee hand leopard has lost its spots. The baobab (tree) Language a form of organized stutter Language is a form of organized stutter. -Marshall McLuhan McLuhan was right. Every syllable of spoken word we know, from Hamlet's soliloquy on the battlements to Jean Chretien's sound bites on Prime Time News - nothing but organized stutter. How did that come to be? Nobody knows precisely when Grok the Caveman grew tired of waving his hairy arms around and decided to use grunts, growls and snorts to express himself, but anthropologists know that the human throat was capable of speech anywhere from 20,000 to 35,000 years ago, so it's a safe bet that we nattered at each other for several thousand years before somebody got a bright idea and said "I say chaps, how be we call all these noises we're making ’English'?" And not just English. There are some 9,000 languages and dialects spoken around the world. The most popular is Mandarin Chinese. English is second, then Hindi, Russian, and Spanish. Ottawa Valley Speak is not in the top 100. Not all languages are spoken either. The deaf and the mute have sign language. Boy Scouts and aircraft carrier signalmen use semaphore. Various Indian tribes used to communicate by smoke signal. There is Panama — 5 years later Back in January, 1989 the Americans "invaded" the small Central American country of Panama in order to correct what they believed to be an intolerable situation. I use the world "invaded" advisedly since the U.S. already had large military bases there and were still, to a certain degree, in control of the Panama Canal. The expressed reason for the invasion was to turf out the then president, General Manuel Noriega, on the grounds that he had turned the country into a happy hunting ground for drug dealers. The invasion came off successfully, in that the notorious general was captured, taken to the United States where he was subsequently found guilty of assorted drug charges and sentenced to 40 years in prison. With Noriega out of the way, it was hoped by Washington that Panama could be made into not only a democracy but a modem example of the benefits of free market economics. Little has been heard about those reforms since. This is not surprising since Panama must be something of an embarrassment to the American government. The drug trade is, if anything, even more visible than it was in the 1980s when Noriega was running things. There has been a considerable amount of construction but it is interesting to note that the rate of construction far outstrips the amount reported by local banks in the form of building loans. In short, much of the money going into buildings is what is considered to be "hot". Many of the same signals. And there is the drum. Most of us in North America don't consider the drum to be a prime source of communication among human beings. For us the drum is a loud, rather tiresome quasi­ musical instrument employed to drown out other musicians. It owes its current popularity to Mister Ringo Starr, a large­ nosed Liverpudlian who regularly assaulted a drum kit on behalf of the Beatles. But we in North America don't know diddley-squat about drums. They do in West Africa. The Akan people, who are found throughout the West African countries, have been using drums to talk with each other for centuries. Very effectively too. A good West African drummer can pound out a message that will carry for nearly 40 miles. That message will in turn be picked up by other drummers in all directions who will each transmit it to their "listening audience". In hours a message can sweep across thousands of miles without benefit of telephone poles, highways or communi­ cations satellite. And how does a drum message "read"? Not cut and dried like Morse Code. More like a soliloquy from Hamlet. West African drumspeak is highly poetic and beautiful. A plane crash translates as "a canoe that flies like a bird has fallen out of the sky." And when the much-revered President of the Ivory Coast died last year, the tribal drums throbbed out a dirge that translated as "The great elephant has lost its teeth. The By Raymond Canon buildings are paid for in cash. That should tell you something. Panama has a reputation as an international banking centre but that has not exactly been an example of monetary virtue lately. A sting operation in Florida by the Americans turned up a number of people laundering drug money through Panama. Among those caught were a vice-president and a senior employee of the well-known financial firm Merrill Lynch's office in Panama. The general feeling was that the two men accused were only representative of what almost every bank in Panama is doing. Laundering money appears to be nothing short of a growth industry. Meanwhile back on the political front, the successor of General Noriega, Guillermo Endara, has proven to be something less than a success since it is he who has failed to come up with the tough measures needed to weed out the corruption and money laundering. Presidential elections are coming up in May and, if current polls are any indication, Mr. Endara is going to find himself on the outside looking in. The leader to date is Perez Balladares, and guess what? He belongs to the same political party as the deposed or exiled Noriega. This should not be taken to mean that the latter is pulling the strings from his cell in the United States but that some parties have staying powers. Also, in the words of one Pana­ manian journalist, the Endara government has been so bad that Noriega starts to look good. What are the Americans doing about all this? Well, about all that they can do is grin and bear it. After all, the Panamanians now have democracy; they can get out and vote for the candidate of their choice and, if he happens to belong to the same party as has crashed down." A little more majestic than "Kennedy Shot!" wouldn't you say? Reminds me of my most memorable encounter with a non-spoken language. Actually it was a second-hand encounter. I heard the story from two wandering Canucks I met on a Spanish freighter waddling along the west coast of Africa. The two Canadians had been living on the island of Gomera, a tiny, volcanic atoll among the Canary Islands. They told a story of climbing one of the many rugged mountains on the island. What they couldn't understand was how every villager they met seemed to be expecting them. Odd, considering they were climbing a goat path and there were no roads or telephones on their route. When they reached a village on the top of the mountain they were astounded to find that the townsfolk had killed and cooked a goat in their honour. Yes, the head man told them, they'd been expecting "two foreigners" "Bienvenido." But how? How could they know? The two Canucks were masters of suspense. They waited until I paid for a round of drinks in the ship's saloon before they explained. It was whistling. The people on the island of Gomera speak a language of whistles called silbo. The piercing whistles carry so well across valleys (or up mountains) that a "speaker" can be heard up to five miles away. I wonder what Marshall McLuhan would say about that. I Noriega, that is politics. There is, perhaps, some consolation to be had from the fact that Balladares is not (at least he says he isn't) an admirer of General Noriega. He prefers to make a great deal out of his American education and his membership in the country's upper crust. There is a bit of irony in all this. The Americans invaded Panama to restore democracy and get rid of a drug baron. While they did achieve the latter, the rest of the script did not turn out to be as expected. Something the same happened in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In return for American help, both the Kuwaitis and Saudis were supposed to liberalize their governments. Not much has come of that either. Paul’s Perspective The Ontario government will help fight youth unemployment this summer by creating up to 24,000 government-funded jobs through jobsOntario Summer Employment, a new co-ordinated approach to summer employment. This new initiative means local young people will have province-wide access to $51.6 million in summer jobs created by the Ontario government. jobsOntario Summer Employment will help fight youth unemployment, which reached 20 per cent in July 1993. We will help 24,000 youth find jobs this summer. jobsOntario Summer Employment will fund close to 24,000 jobs in the following programs: • jobsOntario Youth (JOY) • Student Venture Program • Summer Experience Program • Northern Training Opportunity Program (NORTOP) • Environmental Youth Corps (EYC) Continued on page 6 THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6,1994. PAGE 5. Menace may have a familiar face If anyone had told me when I was a teenager that I would choose to live in a small town I would have told them they didn't know me very well. Like most young people I was enticed by the adventure, independence and excitement that seem to typify living as an urbanite. I grew up in a small town which to me exemplified childhood; becoming an adult would logically, and ultimately I presumed, mean moving out and up to a more cosmopolitan place. As luck would have it, that was not the way things worked and I found myself instead moving a step further from the big city. Circumstance had more control over the direction of my life's course at that point than choice did, but I am grateful for the path taken. It wasn't long after moving there with two small children, that I discovered the freedom of small town life. There is a security in knowing so many of your neighbours, in the friendly atmosphere. Il felt safe raising my family in this rural area, away from the craziness we read and hear of in the news every day. Evil things can happen in small places, but they are rare occurrences. For a parent it is a nice feeling to have that comfort. However as our children approach adulthood they often want to break free of the familiar environs and we are proud to see their independence bloom. But, as they awaken to their new future, they also experience some of the world's harsh realities and we, as parents, can't always shelter them. It was with a degree of trepidation that I watched my daughter leave for college. An overprotective mom who sees the boogey man around every comer, it was no small feat for me to stay put when just a few short weeks after she settled in there was a triple homicide just a few doors away from where she was living. The killer had not been caught and while my imagination tortured me my daughter's insoucience with regards to the incident reminded me that she was a big girl now, one ready to take care of herself. She had been taught to be careful and wary of strangers. But, what happens when the boogey man wears the mask of friendship? Last week, a young woman was gunned down in her McMaster University dorm. Joan Heimbecker was from Clifford. She grew up with the same small town safety net that our children have. The normal life she led before, she carried with her to her new life. She was not consorting with criminals, nor was she destroyed by some crazed serial killer. The man being hunted for her murder is an ex-boyfriend. The person who cut her precious life short was someone she must once have trusted, of whom she was fond. Someone from whom her parents would probably never have thought she needed protection. As our children grow, we try our best to prepare them for the dangers, from most of which in small towns they are fairly far removed. Parents can't always be there to protect their kids from the evils and young people can't grow if they aren't allowed the freedom to do so. But one of the hardest lessons to learn, is that the world is not always a fair place. There are no rules and no guarantees. Menace doesn't always come in the form of a stranger and there’s, fritie protection when that happens.