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The Citizen, 1997-11-26, Page 5Arthur Black THE CITIZEN. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 26,1997. PAGE 5. Designer water sells like hotcakes All day I face The barren waste And crave the taste Of waler. Coooooooooooool Water. Old song lyric Some day, thousands of years from now, anthropologists from a distant galaxy will come to Earth to study the fossilized traces of the human population that once thrived here. And they're going to be mystified. Not by the hulking relics of our skyscrapers. Not by what's left of our libraries or our computers or our cracked and crumbling superhighway systems. No...it's the water bottle empties that will drive them nuts. They're made of plastic, for starters. That means they’ll probably still be around thousands of years from now. Our garbage dumps and landfill sites ('middens' the archeologists will call them) — will be raddled and infested with empty water containers — Evian, Perrier, Canada Glacier, Pelligrino and several dozen other brand names. And the alien archeologists won't be able to figure out why. Religious artifact? Fetish symbol? Primitive form of currency? Advanced chemical analysis will reveal that all the bottles ever contained was water. International Scene By Raymond Canon That Nazi gold The Swiss have come in for a lot of bad publicity over the past year or so. More precisely the banking system has been forced to bear the brunt of the criticism that has found fault with just about everything that the Swiss did during World War II. This attack has been led by the World Jewish Congress which claims that billions of dollars worth of gold that belonged to Jews in Germany found its way into Swiss banks and should be given back. The latest estimate is that about $3 billion worth of this gold out of the $9 billion looted by the Nazis during the period 1933-1945 ended up illegally in Swiss banks. Many articles have condemned the Swiss banking system and the Swiss in general and frankly I am getting a bit tired of it all. I'll be the first to admit that there were unscrupulous bankers in Switzerland during the above-mentioned period but every country has them. In fact, bankers don't seem to enjoy a very good reputation anywhere, whether you live in Europe or in Canada. I don’t doubt for a minute that some dubious practices went on. I do doubt, however, that the Swiss deserve all the abuse they have been getting and I thought it was about time to present something of the other side of the picture. I note, for openers, that the World Jewish Congress only estimates the amount of gold Why would a civilization (even one as barbarous as the human one) carry around containers full of the cheapest, most plentiful substance on the planet? A substance that was readily available from lakes, rivers, wells, fire hydrants — even hot and cold running faucets in each and every domestic household? It's not hard to figure out why folks in Beirut or Acapulco or even Paris buy bottled water. The stuff that comes out of their taps is undrinkable. I even understand why people in Toronto drink bottled water. (The stuff that comes out of Toronto taps is safe to drink - but it tastes like it was piped in from the shallow end of the swimming pool). Similarly I can understand why folks in Winnipeg were snapping up cases of bottled water during and after the horrible spring floods they lived through last spring. What I don't fully understand is how companies like Evian, Perrier and Canada Glacier can make a living selling water to the other 95 per cent of Canadians, the vast majority of whom have perfectly good drinking water in their kitchens, their bathrooms - hell, even in their washing machines. Is spring water better than tap water? There's no guarantee. Springs can be as easily contaminated as any other ground water. Besides, who says the stuff you paid a couple of bucks a pop for ever saw a spring? It wasn't until last year that U.S. authorities got around to regulating the term "spring water". Until then, any entrepreneur could drain dump truck radiators into bottles and sell it legally over the counter as Honest in question and you can believe that it is on the high side. All self-interest groups tend to act in that way. However, why did it take so long for the WJC to go public? This matter was being discussed in Switzerland as far back as 1945/46. Waiting 50 years is a long time to make an accusation. A little known fact is that the Americans, prior to any German gold finding its way to Switzerland, seized all Swiss gold and currency holdings in the U.S. at the time. The only place the Swiss could find gold to replace it was in Germany; the Swiss central bank asked repeatedly about the origin of any German gold which they received. Some of the German statements on the matter were later shown to be false but hindsight is great when it comes to castigating someone. How about the U.S. and its unwarranted seizure of Swiss gold. Some TV stations have taken to showing looted Nazi gold with the suggestion that it was this gold that was transferred to Switzerland. There is absolutely no connection. This gold was discovered by allied soldiers at the end of World War II. Also dragged into the controversy is the morality of the Swiss neutrality during the War. Neutrality has been a comerstone of the country for over 400 years; it was not a sudden impulse. If Swiss neutrality is bad, why not criticize the U.S. for remaining neutral until they were attacked in 1941? As for Swiss relations with Germany during the war, nobody who is conversant Fred's Pure Spring Water. Since 1996, anything labelled "spring water" must actually come from a spring. One giant step for mankind. No, the truth is Designer Water is selling like hotcakes because a handful of Hollywood types like Pamela Lee Anderson, Tom Cruise and Melanie Griffiths have appeared in public clutching their Designer Water bottles the way Linus clutches his security blanket. This has made it chic and trendy to be seen in public sucking on a bottle of water. Indeed some Yupoid types won't leave home without it. I hate to be the one to tell them they've been had....so I'll let The New York Times do it. A couple of months ago, The Times ran an expose that showed more than a third of all bottled water sold in the U.S. is merely filtered tap water. In other words some Yankee hustlers are selling water for a dollar a quart that costs them 1/1 Oth of a cent to draw from their lap. Even P.T. Barnum never figured out a scam that brazen. The Times further reports that several American cities, including Houston, Texas, are finalizing plans to put their municipal water in plastic bottles and sell it up on the shelves right alongside the expensive, exotic brands. They figure if people are dumb enough to pay for a substance they can get for free, then the municipal coffers might as well see some of the action too. After all, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what Evian spells backwards. with Switzerland can deny that it was extremely difficult to keep the population fed and housed. Swiss trade with Germany did nothing to prolong the war as has been claimed. One note! The Swiss bought fighter aircraft from Germany; these same aircraft then shot down German planes entering Swiss air space. Don't forget that the U.S., while neutral, did business with both Germany and Japan right up to Pearl Harbour. Finally, I have the feeling that the World Jewish Congress is attempting to browbeat the Swiss into making as large a payment as possible, just as they have in the past. Nobody is denying the Holocaust, but genocide has occurred elsewhere without demands for large compensatory payments. There was undoubtedly some shady dealings in Nazi gold but shady is the word that came to my mind when I read of Israel using Canadian passports in an attempt to kill a Palestinian in Jordan. The Swiss government has taken a number of steps to rectify the situation but, if it took 50 years to get at the problem, let's not rush in with a lot of accusations and expect that intimidation will make up for lost time. A Final Thought When I measure myself by a grass blade, I am so very tall; When I measure myself by a mountain I scarely exist at all. Scary similarities The creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. Animal Farm — George Orwell My youngest daughter loved this political satire when she studied it at school. Her brother on the other hand just doesn't seem quite as enthralled, which has prompted a few discussions around the dinner table of late on the meaning and merit of this classic. For anyone who doesn't know, Animal Farm tells the tale of a livestock rebellion, where the animals drive the humans off the property, then establish a society of their own. Il doesn't take long, however, before utopia dies. The pigs form a hierarchy where their word is law. Napoleon, a didactic dictator is leader; Squealer, his voice among the people. The other pigs are bright, but shallow, looking down on those they believe less intelligent. Napoleon's dogs arc a dim-witted bunch trained to follow and protect. Trying to spark my son's interest I asked what sort of person Napoleon represented. It was with much amusement that I heard my daughter reply, "Napoleon is like Mike Harris." Out of the mouths of babes! This prompted me to have another look al the book and it didn't take long before I could see her rationale. As a matter of fact the similarities didn't really stop there; I recognized quite a few characters and they all have offices in Queen's Park. Let's start at the top. Napoleon wants power and is not above telling a few while lies to get it. He has his agenda for the future and lets nothing impede its progress. Squealer is his mouthpiece, the one who walks among the hardworking regular folk espousing rhetoric and propaganda. Snowball, the deposed other leader, is clearly the opposition, whom Squealer denounces and blames al every turn in non­ answer to every question. Obviously these similarities can be said of many governments. However, there is one paragraph in Animal Farm that seems to forecast the beliefs of this provincial government — that being that they are the only ones with the answers, the only ones who can solve the problems, the only ones who know what's best. Don't listen to the professionals in each field, don't gather ideas from those who will be most affected. Don't slow down your revolution in order to consult and consider before making change. In health care and at the municipal level, the government has wrapped the knuckles of their wasteful children and taken control. In education, they have openly stated the elected officials are not smart enough to make the decisions. Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer — except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs. Perhaps this was partly because there were so many pigs and so many dogs. It was not that these creatures did not work after their fashion. There was, as Squealer was never tired of explaining, endless work in the supervision and organization of the farm. Much of this work was of a kind that the other animals were too ignorant to understand." Scary, don't you think? I would not dispute that there is change needed, but no one has all the answers. It lakes time and thought, open dialogue and an open mind to change things for the better. There is no place for a dictator in a democratic human society.