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.