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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2003-04-02, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2003. PAGE 5. Other Views Go ahead. Have a banana Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Consider the humble banana. Was there ever a more perfect fruit? No leaves to shuck, no rinds to claw away, no pits or stones to loosen your fillings. No need to add sugar or milk or any other thing. Just unzip....and eat. The banana is a delicious, convenient self- contained meal. But even if it was as tart as rhubarb, as prickly as an artichoke and as impenetrable as a coconut, we would sjill be beholden to the banana. If only for its linguistic contributions. We have banana seats on bicycles and banana peppers in the spice department. We have the banana fish, the banana boa and Harry Belafonte singing the Banana Boat song. Australia has the banana bird, Ontario has its banana belt; various Mafia families pay homage to their Head Bananas and Second Bananas.....and South and Central America have all manner of tin-pot dictatorships familiarly known as banana republics. And where, pray tell, would humour be without the humble banana skin? Humour needs the banana skin. Stephen Leacock opined (although he disapproved) that the archetypal joke is the proverbial man walking down the street and slipping on the proverbial banana skin. Whether the bard of Mariposa approved cut not, there is something wonderfully amusing about the outsized, canary-hued, goofily phallic banana. Too bad it’s doomed. Black Sigatoka is the culprit. It’s a fungal disease that is lashing through banana plantations around the world even as I type. Don’t they have fungicides that can knock out Black Sigatoka? Well, yes, but that only helps for a while. Spin doctors highly over-rated The first casualties of the Ontario election are the Progressive Conservative spin doctors and it couldn't happen to more deserving people. These are the executives from public relations and advertising firms who run election campaigns and often are called masterminds, but are vastly over-rated. They are much more talented in selling the inside knowledge of government they pick up and making money for themselves. Their tactic of having Premier Ernie Eves, a willing accomplice, stay away from the legislature for weeks and unveil his budget in an auto plant to avoid giving opposition parties a forum has hurt their own cause and may outweigh the benefits it gets from all the budget promises designed to catch votes. But no-one should be surprised, because these people the media call election whizzes are rarely the geniuses they are made out to be. The Tories who suggested Eves dodge the legislature have been identified as campaign co-chairs Leslie Noble and Jaime Watt and media adviser Paul Rhodes. They have been praised for running “flawless” campaigns when Eves’s predecessor, Mike Harris, won in 1995 and 1999. But in 1995 Harris latched onto the theme of cutting government and taxes that had proved attractive to many voters elsewhere and - Ontario was waiting and ripe for it and it needed little selling. Harris won a second time because the theme had not quite worn off, although it was becoming a bit threadbare as services suffered. But when backroom whizzes are given a tougher job, they do not look as dynamic. Arthur Black “As soon as you bring in a new fungicide” says one expert, “the fungi develops resistance. One thing we can be sure of is that the Sigatoka won’t lose this battle.” The problem is intensified by the fact that the bananas we buy are highly hybridized. Bananas in the wild are scrawny, tough as leather and full of seeds — virtually inedible. Over the centuries growers cultivated various mutant strains that had a sweet taste and no seeds. No seeds in the banana is a real plus for the eater, but it means the fruit is sterile; it can’t be crossed with other strains to breed for disease resistance. So is the situation hopeless? Some experts think so. Last month’s edition of The New Scientist contains an article saying flatly that the banana as we know it could be a thing of the past within 10 years. There’s always the potential of new and more powerful fungicides, but that’s not a mouth-watering prospect. Neither is another possibility: the genetically modified banana. Researchers have already developed genetically modified bananas that are resistant to Black Sigatoka, but lots of folks - including a columnist I know - are very leery of popping genetically tinkered comestibles down their cake holes. But this is solemn stuff. Far too sober-sided for a treat as inherently cheerful as your humble banana. Eric Dowd From Queens Park There was the time Noble and Rhodes tried to get their former backroom colleague, Tom Long, elected leader of the federal Canadian Alliance and there has never been a more disastrous campaign anywhere. Their team was caught trying to include as party members names of people who either did not give it permission or did not exist, which could be phoned in as votes, and their campaign fell apart even before the counting began. Noble tried to get the federal Tories under Jean Charest elected without conspicuous success and Rhodes was the public relations adviser for Ontario leader Larry Grossman in 1987 when he won the party its fewest seats ever and lost his own. The most praised strategists in recent decades worked for Conservative premier William Davis, who won four elections. They are still referred to in hushed tones as the fabled, legendary Big Blue Machine. But in two tries they won only minority governments despite having immense resources. Remember their incessant, government-paid “Ontario is great - preserve it, conserve it” commercials? The Machine also tended to break down in more equal contests. When Davis retired, most Let me leave you with the only banana joke I know: It’s a story about a bus conductor. He works a downtown bus in Dallas. One day he rings the bell just as a passenger is coming through the door. The driver takes off and the passenger is run over and killed. This being Texas, the conductor is put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair. Comes the day of his execution, he’s about to be strapped in the chair and the executioner asks if he has any last requests. “Well,” says the guy, “is that your lunch over there?” The executioner tells him it is. “Could I have your banana?” The executioner gives the condemned man his banana, allows him to eat it, then straps him down and throws the switch. When the smoke clears, the guy is sitting in the chair, looking around, totally unharmed. The executioner can’t believe it. “Can I go now?” asks the guy. “I suppose so,” says the executioner. “This never happened before.” The conductor is released, gets his old job on the bus back and six months later the same thing happens. He rings his bell before the riders have boarded, the bus takes off and another rider is run over. The conductor gets the death penalty again and exactly the same scenario unfolds. He eats the executioner’s banana, the switch is thrown, millions of volts course through his body - the room fills with smoke and when it clears the guy is sitting in the chair, unharmed. “This is insane!” yells the executioner. “What’s your secret? Is it the bananas?” “Not really” says the guy in the chair. “I’m just a really bad conductor.” of its top strategists supported attorney general Roy McMurtry in the race to replace him, but managed to get him only fourth place in a field of four. Frank Miller, who did not have a single BBM luminary helping him, won the leadership. But when Miller called an election, he called in one of the Machine’s chief mechanics, Patrick Kinsella, to run his campaign and Kinsella prompted him into making his first of several mistakes. Miller, whose strength was having a warm, down-to-earth, likeable speaking style, refused to debate the opposition leaders on TV after Kinsella said “people want to see the party leaders as they really are and not in the sterile and artificial environment of a TV studio.” This started him down a slope in which he appeared out of touch and he was turfed out. Other parties’ strategists also have fumbled. When a Liberal government was struggling for re-election in 1990, backroom boys Martin Goldfarb and David MacNaughton pushed it in the late stages of the campaign to promise to cut retail sales tax from eight to seven per cent. Finance Minister Robert Nixon first told them “you’ve got to be out of your bloody minds,” but was prevailed on to go along and the Liberals were seen as making a blatant, last-minute attempt to buy votes and the whiz kids hastened them to defeat. Final Thought The toughest thing about success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success. - Irving Berlin Bonnie Gropp The short of it A baby’s story For those of you who bore the burdens of being the eldest child in a family, or those who drifted along with the anonymity of the middle child, let me tell you something you may not have known about being the youngest. My siblings, two of them by the way, who are muuuuch older than I, to this day will tell you I was spoiled. I, of course, have a tendency to disagree. However, if I am to be honest 1 would have to admit that 1 was definitely babied more than the others. The benefit, or problem depending on your point of view, in being the youngest child is that no one ever sees you as having grown up. Therefore there is a tendency to pamper, cajole and nurture well past the time it’s necessary. And this treatment is not just by the parents. Older siblings can be equally guilty of coddling the family baby. Speaking from my experience as last in the family order, when you’re young you don’t seem to notice the excessive adulation and attention coming at you from all sides. This changes however, by the time you reach adolescence, and in typical teenage fashion you leam to take advantage of a good thing. Throw a little aren’t-I-a-cutie expression onto your face and you could pretty much fool anybody. It is probably for this reason that at this point of your life you will begin to notice the novelty of you starting to wear off a bit with your elders. Don’t underestimate its hold, however. It never fully disappears and by the time you hit your 20s this attention has worn thin. Now independent, mature, capable of standing on your own you would like the opportunity please, dear family, to prove it to the world. (Of course, when things go wrong, you’ll gladly let them come in and clean up, as long as they know you're onlv letting them because it’s what they want to do.) You probably do have it a’l together b> the time you reach your 30s at which time being introduced as “the baby of the family” is downright embarrassing. But, as middle age approaches we babies finally, gently acquiesce. It’s time to face it. As the youngest child you are never going to be allowed to grow up. So at 48 I have accepted the inevitable. My chin is sagging, my aches intensifying. 1 can set a mousetrap, drive to downtown Toronto alone, balance a cheque book. Yet in the eyes of my family, I am wrinkle-free. I am a helpless innocent. Which really isn’t all that bad. Being thought of as somewhat of a use'ess child has its perks. People do things for me. This past weekend, following a plea from me, my sister and her husband came up to help me paint. Sometimes I think even my husband bought into the family notion that I’m just not quite as ready to face the world as the other adults in my family. So he looks after the intimidating and challenging in our house. And I have decided to let him. It could be a dangerous move on my part. Someday, babying Bonnie may end. But I will be prepared. I have been learning. For example it wasn’t that I couldn’t paint, it’s that I haven t and my brother-in-law does, very well. I thought, therefore that a little mentoring from a master might be a wise move. Knowing the baby of the family well, he probably thought so too.