HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1996-12-04, Page 5A Final Thought
You have to be a little different if you
want to be noticed. After all, would
anyone give the Tower of Pisa a second
glance if it were standing straight?
International Scene
By Raymond Canon
THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1996 PAGE 5.
No lawyers
on Gilligan's
Island
Trivia time, folks. What springs to mind
when I throw the following pair of words at
you?
Gilligan's
Island
Wow! A damburst of memories, right?
Your brain explodes with an Aladdin's Cave
of TV reveries. You see a desert
island...palm trees... and seven castaways
about as different from each other as human
beings can get. There's the professor and the
skipper and prissy Mary Ann and sultry
Ginger and of course, dopey Gilligan
himself with eyes like golf balls staring out
from under the ridiculous cloth hat...
There's one other thing to remember too.
You remember that Gilligan's Island was on
the air for your entire youth. Forever,
practically.
Well...not quite. Believe it or not,
Gilligan's Island only lasted for three
A gripe
with some critics
If you are going to be a writer, you have to
be prepared to be on the receiving end of
some criticism; there is literally no way that
you are going to please everybody.
So it is that I have come on the receiving
end of some criticism, some downright nasty
and some more humorous than anything
else. I have yet to think of an effective put-
down for those people who see something
less than infinite wisdom in my writing and
who are not fussy about the way they impart
this to me.
There are a couple comments which I like
and which I will relate to you. Needless to
say they come from writers. The first, fresh
from the mind of Brendan Behan, goes as
follows: "Critics are like eunuchs in a
narem; they know how it's done, they've
seen it done every day, but they're unable to
do it themselves." The second, from John
Osborne, says that "asking a working writer
what he feels about critics is like asking a
lamp-post what it feels about dogs."
Having got that out of the way, I cart now
pass on to some of the bad things said about
me. The first is from a retired Latin teacher.
She wasted no time in questioning
something I wrote about the origins of the
English language. I had pointed out that it
was one of the Germanic languages, having
descended from the Anglo-Saxon spoken by
the inhabitants of Britain at the time of the
Battle of Hastings in 1066 which was won
by the Normans under William the
seasons. There are exactly 98 original
episodes of the show. And they all aired
between 1964 and 1967.
Of course, that's not counting reruns. If
you count reruns, Gilligan's Island has been
on the air more times than Elizabeth Taylor's
said 'I do'.
I'll tell you a few other things you
probably didn't know about Gilligan's
Island.
• Gilligan's first name was Willie.
• The castaways less-than-fabled craft the
SS Minnow was not named after the
diminutive, immature fish of that name. It
was a thinly disguised slap in the face of
one Newton S. Minow, a TV executive
who was loathed by Sheldon Schwartz, the
creator of Gilligan's Island.
All of which should not lead you to the
conclusion that I am some kind of a
Gilligan's Island Trivia Nut. That distinction
belongs to Robert Jarvis, who, when he isn't
watching reruns with names like St. Gilligan
and The Dragon or Love Me, Love My
Skipper can be found teaching Maritime
Law at Nova Eastern University in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida. Like most middle-
aging, middle-class North Americans,
Professor Jarvis grew up watching Gilligan's
Island, but he watched each episode with a
sense that something was...missing.
After some years of meditation, Professor
Conqueror.
This all seemed pretty clear to me, but not
to this teacher. She presumed I had never
studied Latin and was, therefore, ignorant of
the role Latin had played in English. She
also questioned my educational background
as well as my right to call myself a
journalist. "When misinformation is edited,
many people accept it and get an incorrect
impression."
She was, she said, truly upset that I did not
state that Latin was the origin of English, not
German. She did not use the word
ignoramus but I'm sure she thought it.
Any of my Swiss readers will get a charge
out of the next one. A reader came back
from a visit (her first) to Switzerland and
phoned me. "How", she asked, "can you
write so many nice things about that country
when it is nothing but a police state. All I
saw from the time I got there were soldiers,
tanks, artillery and the like. I was afraid to
go out at night."
I explained that she had probably run into
the Swiss army on exercises and, given that
the Swiss had to do military service, there
were probably quite a few of the soldiers
around.
She wasn't convinced, adding that she had
been stopped and told to take another road.
She ended by maintaining that, regardless of
what I had said, she didn't believe me; it was
a police state, pure and simple.
When you have blinkers on like that, what
can one say? I'm thinking now of writing a
book in which Switzerland is turned into a
dictatorship. I'll dedicate it to her!
I am still waiting to win the Nobel Prize in
Economics but I like to think that I am fairly
well versed in that subject. Not so, in the
eyes of one reader, who took me to task in
Jarvis realized what was missing.
There were no lawyers on Gilligan's
Island.
Well, then the professor did what any self-
respecting lawyer would do under the
circumstances. He set out to prove through
complicated reasoning and interminable
evidence that there actually was a lawyer on
the island. According to the diligent and
painstaking Jarvis — who watched all 98.
episodes with a yellow lined legal pad on his
knee — the absent-minded Professor Roy
Hinkley actually had a law degree among his
many academic honours — he just forgot to
mention it on air. Jarvis points out that in
one Gilligan's Island episode — Court
Martial — the castaways set up a mock court
with the professor presiding as judge.
As I say, Professor Jarvis' evidence is all
circumstantial and for me, about as
convincing as O.J.'s defense. I may not have
watched all 98 episodes of Gilligan's Island,
but I watched enough shows to conclude that
Gilligan's Island lacked a great many things.
It had no urban sprawl, no traffic jams, no
air pollution, muggings, swarmings, or
income tax. Gilligan's Island had no Newt
Gingrich, no Lucien Bouchard.
And it had no lawyers.
Hell, why do you think millions of TV
viewers fell in love with Gilligan's Island in
the first place?
my explanation of what is called purchasing
power parity." This is where the exchange
rate of, say, the Canadian and American
dollars is such that, if you take $1,000
Canadian and exchange it into the equivalent
in U.S. dollars, you can buy the same
amount there as you could for $1,000 in
Canada.
So far, so good, but not good enough for
my reader. He claimed that he could not
remember when the two currencies were last
at parity and that I should, therefore state
that this parity seldom, if ever, takes place.
I pointed out to him that I was limited as
to the space I had for an article and so could
not write everything about it. However, I
have decided that the next time I write about
parity, I will reserve the entire newspaper.
You won't get any local news, but you will
certainly know everything there is to know
about purchasing power parity.
Finally I was taken to task by another
writer because of some economic data I had
used to describe the current situation in his
country of origin.. My data was flawed, he
exclaimed and I should check the reliability
of my source.
It gave me no end of pleasure to inform
him that the data had come from the
country's central bank. He could challenge
them if he wanted, I wasn't about to.
Every once in a while you win one.
Opinion
EDITOR'S NOTE: This letter from
Gerald Caplan was sent to The Citizen by
John Clarke of the Ontario Seco,ndary
School Teachers Federation with the
request that it be published.
Dear Mr. Snoblen:
I write to protest your frequent assertions
that some of your policies are based on
recommendations of the Royal Commission
on Learning, of which I was co-chair. Your
activities as education minister so greatly
violate the spirit and purpose of our report
that even when you forni.ally adopt one of
our recommendations. it's done in a way that
distorts our intention and undermines the
value of the proposal. I call on you to stop
misrepresenting the work of our
commission. The school system we
envisioned to prepare Ontario's children for
the great challenges of the 21st century can't
be crafted out of the division and havoc you
are wreaking.
Take the assertion that the move to cut the
fifth year of high school is based on our
work. It's true we recommend that year be
eliminated, but only within an overall
context that you have deliberately
repudiated. We called for a revamped
education system beginning with voluntary
early childhood education (ECE) for all
three-year-olds and upgraded junior
kindergarten taught by specially trained
teachers. As a mountain of research makes
overwhelmingly clear, children who've had
the benefit of ECE gain superior academic,
social and psychological skills that improve
their chances for success both in school and
in life. In fact one of the most exciting
successes of ECE, is to make young kids
enthusiastic about the very idea of schooling.
The value-added of early childhood
education, we concluded, would allow a
revamping of the entire school curriculum
from Grade 1 on that would be far more
advanced and challenging than anything
possible now. By the time students
completed Grade 12, they'd actually be
further ahead than they are now after 13
years. That's why we argued that Ontario
should do away with that final year, with the
money saved going towards the funding of
early childhood education.
But what does Ontario get from your
government? First, Mike Harris, when our
report came out, states that our ECE
proposal was "the stupidest single
recommendation" he'd ever heard — a
statement as ignorant as ever a responsible
politician has uttered. Then you make junior
kindergarten an option for each school board
to decide on individuality. And finally you
slash grants to these boards guaranteeing
that all but the richest will abolish their JK
programs. (By the way, I assume you've now
briefed the premier on the report issued two
months ago by the Carnegie Foundation, the
prestigious American research organization,
adding its voice to those who call for high
quality pre-school programs for all three and
four year olds).
Let's set the record straight, Mr. Minister.
Every part of this is dramatically opposed to
what we recommended, and you have no
right to associate any of it with our report.
Let me go further. We spent a great deal of
time studying the best ways to achieve
change in a system as vast and complex as
the Ontario education system. Our
conclusions were clear. Major changes
cannot be expected to happen swiftly.
Thorough preparation and planning is
crucial. The involvement of all concerned
stakeholders is imperative. The enthusiastic
co-operation of the classroom teacher is
absolutely critical. No policy, we concluded,
however sensible it might seem in isolation,
can be implemented effectively under any
Continued on page 6
Arthur Black