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The Citizen, 1997-02-26, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26,1997 PAGE 5. Arthur Black 1997 — The Year of Disillusion Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you like. Mark Twain No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney. Alfred Smith It's a little early in the calendar year, but I’m ready to nominate 1997 as the Year of Disillusion. I can't believe the number of verifiable certainties that I've seen shot down in the past few weeks. First it was Saint Patrick. Everybody knows that St. Pat was an ancient Irishman famous because he single-handedly drove the snakes out of Ireland, right? Wrong. He wasn't even Irish. Patrick was an Englishman, who spent a few years as a slave in Ireland, returned to England and became a priest, then set about converting the Irish to Christianity. The snake story is 100 per cent Irish blarney. It's a pure myth that didn't even appear until Patrick had been dead for 300 years. Then there's Sherlock Holmes. What's the most famous phrase the great detective ever uttered? International Scene ___ ___ ____ ____________________________________________________________ History — too much, too little? Sir John A. MacDonald, the first prime minister of Canada, is reported to have said that our country’s problem was that we had too much geography and too little history. Given that we have the second biggest nation in the world and yet a population that hovers around the 30,000,000 mark, there is probably some merit to the remark. I would hazard a guess that most Canadians have not seen more than a fraction of their country while, given the paucity of history courses that our current crop of high school students are required to take, it is highly unlikely that they know very much of what history of Canada there is. However, there are some countries about which it might be said they have too little geography and too much history. What is even worse, they let some of this history dominate their thinking and the results of this are anything but positive. Let’s take a look at what used to be Yugoslavia. The country, which was formed out of the members of World War II, has had a checkered career but probably reached its zenith during the time of Marshall Josef Tito. While some countries prefer to remember their victories (witness Nov. 11), the Serbs of Yugoslavia tended to dwell on one of their defeats and, more importantly, one centuries in the past. It was on June 28, 1389 that the Serbs decided to fight the Ottoman Turks rather than submit and, against hopeless odds, went into battle only to lose. This loss resulted in \ \ Elementary, my dear Watson. Everybody knows that. Except Sherlock never said it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote nearly 60 short stories and four full-length novels starring the cerebral mystery solver. You can read them 'til your eyeballs fall out and you'll never come across the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson". Holmes says "Elementary" a lot, and he addresses his slow-witted partner as "my dear Watson" a good deal - but he never once, combines the two of them. It’s enough to make you lose your faith in...Betty Crocker. Which you might as well do. Most of us grew up with the friendly matronly mug of Betty staring back at us from the back covers of our own mothers' cookbooks. For a couple of decades in the middle of the century, OF Bet had to be one of the most familiar faces in North America. Except there never was a Betty Crocker. She was an invention. The figment of some ad agency flack's imagination. Lab technicians at General Mills came up with a whole bunch of recipes using GM products that they wanted to flog to the public. The company needed a name to put on the cookbook covers. The ad flack picked 'Betty' because it was a nice, inoffensive name - and 'Crocker' because, well, the director of General Mills was one William G. Crocker, heh, heh. Oh yeah, you don’t wanna examine those By RaymondCanon 500 years of subjugation by the Turks. But even more, it seemed to be a date on which the Serbs could fix their star. Take, for instance, that date in 1914 when a dedicated Serb nationalist chose to assassinate the archduke of Austria, thus throwing the world into the first of our century’s two world wars. More frequently Slovodan Milosovic used it as a rallying point for Serbs to take over all of Yugoslavia, or at least as much of it as possible. One that date in 1989 Milsovic was able to rally no less than 1,000,000 Serbs to hear him deliver an address which succeeded in igniting the flames of Serb nationalism which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia. The irony of the situation is that Milosovic, like many of the perpetrators of the French Revolution in 1789, seems ready to be hoisted on his own petard, and fatally at that. One could argue, just as forceably, that the Battle of the Boyne, fought in 1690, and which affirmed the ascendency of Protestantism in Northern Ireland, has been causing trouble ever since, due to the attention given it by Catholic and Protestant Irish. For four long months each summer Irish Protestants celebrate that and other victories with a not unexpected reaction by the Catholics. This attention to history by the Irish has spread to the United States where it is reintroduced especially when there are votes to be won. The state of New York, at the request of its governor, recently passed legislation to make the Irish potato famine an essential part of the state's history curriculum. This "deliberate campaign" of the British to deny food to the Irish is linked with slavery, genocide and the Holocaust as Accepted Truths too closely. Remember The Christmas Song? Chestnuts roasting on an open fire... Jack Frost nipping at your nose... Sounds like it must have been written in Montreal or Winnipeg in deepest February, right? Or during a winter in Upstate New York at least... Actually, Mel Torme and his lyricist tossed that off in less than an hour during a California heat wave while consuming cold drinks and putting ice on their foreheads. Remember the Beach Boys - the group that made surfing a world-wide mania? They never surfed. Their leader, Brian Wilson, was afraid of the ocean. The only Beach Boy who ever rode a-surfboard was the drummer, Brian’s brother Dennis. He drowned in 1983. Christopher Columbus? He not only didn't discover America (the Vikings beat him by about five centuries) - Columbus didn’t even see America. The closest Chris go was a small island in the Caribbean. Oh me, oh my ... do a little digging and you discover that french fries aren’t French and English muffins aren't English and Polish sausage comes from Hungary. That Great Danes do not hail from Denmark and that French poodles originated in Germany, while German Shepherds are native to Alsace. Sure is disillusioning. Next thing you know somebody will try to tell us there's no Santa Claus. the four most horrible examples in history, New York style. Speaking of the Holocaust, few if any countries can match Israel when it comes to recalling history to suit its purpose. Israel goes all the way back to Biblical times to determine the borders of its country. They should it is argued, be the same as 2,000 years ago. Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt because it had no Biblical significance. The West Bank is different because it was part of Israel's territory during the time of the Old Testament. One can only wonder how long the Holocaust will continue to play a role in that country's political thinking. Finally we should take a look at India and the struggle between Hindus and Muslims. Many of their struggles are exacerbated by feelings of resentment which go all the way back to the arrival of the first Muslims in the 11th century. When the Hindus tore down a mosque, it was argued that it desecrated the birthplace of the Hindu God, Ram. Strange that it took four centuries since the mosque was built to come to that decision. Maybe it is just as well that Canada has not, at least so far, much history. As it is, some separatist-minded Quebequers are having a good look at what history we do have to find slights, real or imaginary, to bolster their argument that Quebec has to go. A Final Thought , If you don't know where you're going, you'll never recognize your destination when you arrive. In the name of what?, What an amazing world we live in. If we were to really stop and think of the advancements made over the course of this century I believe even the most sophisticated would feel slightly overwhelmed. Technologically, change has been swift. We can meet people without ever being physically near them. We can conduct business from our cars and do our banking from our home. We can complete any number of transactions over the telelphone without actually speaking to another human being. The world of science and medicine, too, has had its share of Star Warr-like experimentation. With talk of such things as genetic engineering, we are entering a future that has endless, though as yet unknown possibilities, which are simultaneously fascinating and scary. I caught part of a news story the other day, which stated that a researcher had successfully cloned an adult sheep. The key point of this accomplishment, they said, is that the knowledge will be effective in the treatment and curing of many human diseases. That it won't be happening tomorrow, was made clear, however. To experiment at this time on us homo sapiens would be ethically unpractical, the researcher noted. Too bad experts haven't always felt that way. Proceeding with something new, before conclusive evidence to its side effects has been drawn has, we are all aware, undoubtedly happened in the past. Actually, so has the 'understanding that'a test may result in the loss of human life, but for the good of science it's a small sacrifice' attitude. Ask the people exposed to radiation when the nuclear bombs were tested. Or if you really want your sensibilities rocked watch the movie Miss Evers’ Boys. I happened to catch this one the other evening. The story is factual. The title character is a nurse involved in a scientific test conducted by the U.S. government in the 1930s. A number of African-American men were given syphillis and denied treatment so that the effects of the disease and its progress could be studied. Miss Evers, also African-American, was hired to care for them. Her co-operation was with the understanding that the data would be collected over a period of a few weeks, after which the men would be treated. By the time she was told that the intent was to let them die so autopsies would reveal even more about the disease, she also believed it was too late for penicillin to help them. The study, the African-American doctor told her, would eventually help their people, though how is still a mystery to me. And don't think the American government wasn't appreciative of the sacrifice. Before the first man died, he received a certificate and $10. Thankfully, an inquest held years later curtailed the possible repetition of any such horror. Obviously while the issue of power- mad goverment, and advancement at whatever cost is evident, there is another one in this story. The idea that any life is expendable in the name of science is tragic enough. That some were more so than others is still, despite our successes, a sad testimony.