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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1994-11-09, Page 5(3 ArthuHMack Please explain why political bios sell Can someone please explain why political biographies are best-sellers? Who wants to shell out actual loonies to read what a politician thinks of himself? Millions of book buyers, apparently. Richard Nixon cranked out six best-selling volumes before he shuffled off to the Big Holding Tank in the Sky. Sir Winston Churchill's been dead for three decades but his collected thoughts still sell briskly. Last year's most talked about book in Canada? Trudeau's Memoirs. A best seller in the bookstores of the nation, and for insomniacs, better than a fist full of Valium and a rap in the head with a fish billy. Nine times out of 10 political autobiographies are boring - and 10 times out of 10 they're liberally laced with lies. I prefer the unplanned biographies - the snippets of revelation that politicians sometimes commit to their personal journals in the privacy of their chambers after the working day of false smiles and phony handshakes is finished. They often reveal human, almost honest disclosures that the authors would do By Raymond Canon Are we well offin Canada? I have been known to say on occasion something to the effect that, if every Canadian could spend a few weeks in Russia or some similar country, they would come back vowing never to criticize our country again. I still think that is more or less true; I can vouch for the fact that, after my stint in the Soviet Union, I was more than delighted to see Finland, not to mention Canada. However, in the interests of some form of objectivity, let’s take a look at some of the things that we complain about and see what they are like elsewhere. Right now the federal government, and more particularly Lloyd Axworthy, is coming in for criticism from all sides as Ottawa makes the attempt to bring our social welfare program into step with the fiscal realities of the 1990s. Books on tarring and. feathering are being taken out of the local libraries in record numbers but are we really any different in this respect than other industrialized countries? Hardly! Social welfare programs in all major countries are in something of a mess. As I pointed out recently, Holland has three people on some form of welfare for every four working, while Italy has such generous pensions for seniors that this alone has put the Italian government in a worse crisis than ours. The Americans, who like to think they are on the cutting edge of just about everything, have not even got a national health program even though they spend one-third more than we do on health care. One of the greatest fiascos of the Clinton administration has been its widely touted program put together by Clinton's wife, no intellectual lightweight anything this side of initiating nuclear Armageddon to keep secret from the press and ultimately the public. This, for instance, from the personal diary of a man who gave most of the world nightmares not long ago: "April 10: Was in dacha - had borscht for lunch. Had a rest in yard, then finished reading some stuff.. .had hair washed." The author? Leonid Brezhnev, supreme commander of the USSR for nearly 20 years. God knows why Brezhnev would commit such banality to paper. Even a megalo­ maniac couldn't imagine that anyone would ever want to read such stuff. But Leonid was positively lyrical compared to Louis XVI, of France. On July 14, 1789 a social earthquake slammed into Paris and turned French society upside down. Eight thousand enraged citizens stormed the Bastille and liberated the government prisoners. The French Revolution, the greatest civil uprising in the history of western Europe, had begun. King Louis XVI was in the process of becoming King Louis the Last. A femme fatale named Madame Guillotine was already pencilling his name on her dance card. And what do we read in Louis' own handwriting in his diary for July 14, 1789? Just one word. Rien. As far as Louis was concerned, nothing happened. Just another boring day at the palace. Then there’s a Richard Milhous Nixon. by any stretch of the imagination. It has just been totally shot down by Congress for many of the wrong reasons. I sometimes think that separatism is an even bigger issue in the rest of Canada than it is in Quebec, regardless of what Jacques Parizeau may say. However, other countries have their own brands of separatism, with Belgium being a prime example. Many of the French speaking Belgians of the south cannot stand the Flemish speaking country­ men of the north and vice versa, yet the country still sticks together. There are also quite a few Scots who would like to give the back of their hand to England. German speaking parts of northern Italy feel more akin to Austrians than they do to the rest of Italy while the Basque minority of Spain, who have little in common with the rest of the country, would dearly love to set up their own country as would the Catalans in northeast Spain. The latter, while speaking a Latin dialect close to Spanish, do not feel close to the Castillian Spanish in Madrid and the government has deemed it necessary to give them a great deal of autonomy in order to keep them in the country. In short, it does not take very long to look internationally before you realize that Parizeau and Bouchard are not a unique breed of political cat. Our giant deficit is likened frequently to a sword of Damocles hanging over us and I would tend to agree. However, here again we do not have a monopoly on deficits. Both the Belgians and the Italians exceed ours by a considerable degree and there are any number of countries that are right behind us. In short, deficit financing has taken on a life of its own, not surprising when it is considered that the progenitor of all this, the British economist John Maynard Keynes made it sound like a virtue and, if used properly, that is what it is. However, I have The 37th President of the United States didn't keep a diary. He taped himself instead, which turned out to be even more damning. Nevertheless he was surrounded by lackeys who did keep notes and diaries. And some of them are more revealing than anything Nixon ever recorded on cassette. Here, for instance, is a note from the files of H.R. Bob Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff and lead pit bull. It refers to a meeting with the President on May 12, 1971: The President wants a study done for his own knowledge. The baseball game on WTOP was rained out last night. CBS...then put on a show to fill time. Star of show - square type - named Arch. Hippy son in law. This show was total glorification of homosex. Made Arch look bad - homo look good. Is this common on TV? Destruction of civilization to build homos. Made the homos as the most attractive type. Followed Hee- Haw. But it ill behooves we Canucks to snicker at the poverty of other nations' politicians. Canada after all had William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest serving prime minister and a man who had regular chats with his dog, slipped down to the seedy streets of Ottawa on dark nights to "counsel" prostitutes, and made conference calls to his dead mother through his shaving mirror. Come to think of it, that makes old WLM a helluva lot more interesting than Brezhnev, Louis XVI or Tricky Dick. the distinct feeling that Keynes would roll in his grave all the way to the South Pole if he knew how profligate nations have been in applying his economic policies. Do you get the impression that anarchy is frequently just around the comer in Canada? People have so many rights and are not afraid to use them and we witness a plethora of single interest groups trying to foist their thinking off on the nation as a whole. Most of them do have one thing in common; they feel hard done by and I, for one, think frequently about what has happened to the "common good." However, again we should feel at home anywhere in the western world. There is the same display of self interest. We have the extreme right in Germany trying to take out their frustrations on any immigrant that comes along while Xenophobia has reached a new high in France. To top it all we have ethnic cleansing in what used io be the beautiful country of Yugoslavia. Where will it all end? By now you will understand that the frustrations that we are experiencing in Canada can be matched almost anywhere else. Sometimes I arrive at the conclusion that we handle many of them as well as anywhere else but they do seem to be present at all times. I would like to think that the pendulum is now swinging back to a more enlightened approach in our search for solutions but, like any other previous phase in history, it seems to take forever and a day to get to the point you want it. By that time we have other afflictions to beset us. I DON’T FORGET I TO VOTE ON MONDAY THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1994. PAGE 5. The Short of it By Bonnie Gropp History that can’t be learned in a classroom Sometimes we learn too late. When we are young we seldom have time for the history our grandparents are usually ready to share. Having them reveal the past to us through their stories was at times just not the 'cool' thing to do. It is only after we get older that we realize the value of their memories. As a youngster, I was, like most, a little self-absorbed and too busy to hear of the good old days. Thus my grandparents, who knew and understood, shared with me what I allowed them to of their years of wisdom and experience. I recall my paternal grandfather's smile as he taught me some words of German upon my enthusiastic request, then his gentle acceptance as my childish need for headier stuff took me away from his tutelage. My maternal grandfather was a gifted storyteller whose tales and poems from his childhood readers were memorized and repeated with colourful expression to me in my early youth, only to have me tum away, too embarrassed to be amused by such innocence, when I hit my teens. Then one day I grew up awakening to the fact that I hadn't heard the best stories, and now never would. My grandparents lived through an amazing several decades, experiencing things I regrettably or hopefully never will and because of my naivete will never fully understand. They saw change, depression and lived through two World Wars. What it meant to them I never heard, probabl,y I admit, because I never listened. The people who endured the wars are gradually leaving us. According to information released by the Royal Canadian Legion, the average age of the Second World War veterans is now 73, while Korean veterans are in their mid-60s. This past June we watched on television as veterans made their way to Europe for the 50th anniversary of D-Day, the beginning of the end of World War II. It was a history lesson which reminded those of us who weren't there of the sacrifice for us. Seen through the eyes of many veterans, war brides and others who lived amidst it, we could for a time imagine a little more clearly how it felt and what it meant. This is what the stories our ancestors told can do. What they saw and heard is not an education that can be taught in history class. Their stories can't come from books; they are human, dealing not simply with the horrors of war, but glossed self-effacingly with romance and realism through descriptive narration. What we can not allow to happen is that these personal narratives cease to be for lack of an audience. The veterans ask that we remember by wearing a poppy and on Friday by attending a Remembrance Day service. But we can go one step further than that. We can ask and we can listen to their stories, in tum passing them on to each generation to follow, the ones who will hopefully never know firsthand the way it really was, but will remember just the same.