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The Citizen, 1999-12-15, Page 5Arthur Black THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1999. PAGE 5. Queen Victoria wouldn’t believe it Wanna know my least favourite cliche making the rounds these days? It’s a one-word expression: inappropriate. It’s a designation the Holier Than Thous amongst us can use to brand anything they don't personally approve of. A Hollywood movie can be ’inappropriate’. So can an attitude, the shortness of your skirt or the length of your hair. What a prissy, Pecksniffian declaration that is! Cowardly, too. Recently I watched as a high school basketball coach whistled a stoppage in practice and called a noisy, foul-mouthed student off the court. Looking down his nose (actually, up his nose — the kid was really tall) the teacher priggishly announced, “Walter, I find your language inappropriate.” He could have just said, “Stop swearing”. Ah well, all part of the Political Correctness Crusade that continues to wash over us. I’d call it a return to the Victorian Age, except that would be doing Victorians a disservice. Recent tortured manifestations of Political Correctness make Queen Victoria look like the proprietress of a bawdy house. In California, a painting of a nude was recently removed from a public building at the University of Berkeley. Detractors had complained that the portrait “exploits and objectifies women”. It was a print of Goya’s The Naked Maja — Irrational behaviour All economists and other people associated with the realm of financial activities should be required to take some courses at university in clinical psychology. Otherwise they will not be able to understand what goes on in some areas of the business world. Things happen there that defy rational explanation; the “experts” then have a field day explaining why they failed to predict it. Take, for example, exchange rates. You are planning on taking a trip to France and the economic picture looks stable if not bright. However, about a week or two before you are scheduled to depart, the Canadian dollar takes a nosedive in terms of the U.S. dollar and, as you feared, in the French franc as well. As a result the trip ends up costing you about 10 per cent more than you had counted on. In all honesty the drop in the value of our currency had little to do with Canada. It seems that somebody either wrote an article or made a speech about the potential rise in the value of the euro, the new currency being introduced into a number of countries in the European Union. Currency traders decide, rightly or wrongly, that there might, just might, mind you, be some truth in this and out goes the order to buy a painting that has been considered a priceless classic for the past two centuries. Oh well. At least they didn’t try to paint a bra and panties on her. George Washington should be so lucky. You’re familiar with that famous painting of Washington by the artist Emanuel Leutz — the one that shows the Father of The Nation standing gallantly at the prow of a rowboat while his soldiers ferry him to shore? The painting is called Washington Crossing the Delaware and it’s been a fixture in American mythology almost as long as the U.S. has been around. Alas, thanks to the author’s lubriciousness, the painting’s days are numbered. Last August, a school district in Columbus, Georgia recalled 2,300 fifth-grade textbooks. Reason? Well, the text books contained a photograph of the illustrious painting and some sharp-eyed reviewer on the school board noticed that if you squint your eyes almost shut and use your imagination, the pocket watch innocently dangling against Washington’s left thigh might be misconstrued by a fifth-grader’s eyes as the Founding Father’s penis. So the books were recalled and school district flunkies spent two weeks assiduously airbrushing the suggestive timepiece out of the picture. We had an example closer to home this month — in our capital, as a matter of fact. The directors of the Federal Agriculture Museum in Ottawa came down with an interesting variation of Mad Cow disease. They announced that the giving of feminine names to cows in the museum had been the euro and sell Canadian dollars. We haven’t done anything wrong;' the Canadian economy may be, in fact, humming along nicely. But those neurotic currency traders can get skittish with little or no provocation and, before you know it, down goes our currency. To cite one example, the German mark went up from 79 to 86 cents Canadian in just a little over a week. That certainly is a shock to anybody planning on going to that country in the near future. Don’t come to me to complain; it won’t do you any good! I get caught by things like that too since all the currency traders, at least the ones that count, don’t phone me every day and tell me their latest currency neuroses. I was at least telling people prior to this jolt that our dollar was more likely to go down than up; all other things being equal (economists love that expression). It might be better to buy the currency at the time instead of waiting until you were about to leave for* the airport. The cousins of all these irrational money traders are to be found in stock markets. They are nothing, if not more neurotic. A central banker frowns on his way to work and down go the markets. Or else the Tokyo market does something that was not expected; Frankfurt copies it and both Toronto and New York have to get into the act. Just as often as not, the rumour or whatever the initial cause was proves to be false but by deemed ’inappropriate’ and would henceforth be banned. The reasoning — if it can be called that — was that if a cow named, say, Bessie, was being displayed to a school class on a trip to the museum and there happened to be a little girl in the class named Bessie, well, she might be ... embarrassed and humiliated. Particularly if the cow in question happened to be, as a blushing spokesman for the museum put it “doing certain bodily functions.” Heil, you know how depraved cows can be. Hence the banning of feminine names for cows. Once the decision was made public, the outcry was so loud the museum officials hastily changed their minds and rescinded the ban. Pity. I was dying to know what names they would have deemed appropriate. Lance the Cow perhaps? Spike? Theodore? Even cartoons are not immune to the ‘inappropriate’ virus. A recent Disney production featured Donald and Daisy Duck doing a little white-water rafting. Half-way through the cartoon, their raft upsets and Donald and Daisy are thrown into the river. And that’s where the standard board of Walt Disney Enterprises halted the production. They called the animators before them and demanded to know why the characters weren’t wearing regulation life jackets. One of the animators, Robert Gannoway, waited for several seconds and replied in a meek and plaintive little voice: “Because ... they’re ducks?” that time traders have forgotten all about it and have found something else to be worried about. It could well be that they get excited over some positive little thing and up the index goes. Does the word roller-coaster come to mind? I once visited the foreign exchange room of one of the major banks and asked a trader there how long people worked in the department. His comment was that most of them were burnt out by the age of 30-35. There were chances of making a lot of money in just a few transactions but it was just as possible that you could lose a bundle. In all likelihood they were totally neurotic even before they were burnt out. Going home from work like that would put a strain on anybody's family life. My life has been somewhat more mundane but I have, at least, kept my neuroses under control. At least I think I have. Even teaching about these idiosyncrasies can make you jumpy at times. A Final Thought Never give up then, for that is just the place and the time that the tide will turn. - Harriet Beecher Stowe The Short of it A friendlier place Cruising down the 400 recently, I was suddenly aware and awed by the obvious. In this dizzying whir of activity around me, and past me, were people, all just like me, but not. Knowing that in each car was a story, individuals or families living out their lives comfortable in their surroundings, anonymous in others put my existence in perspective. Recognizing your place in this great majestic world of ours isn’t really so difficult. The expanse of azure blue above us, a blazing red sunset reaffirm our pecking order in this feast of life. And it’s humbling to admit you’re just another ant at the picnic. Yet, prepared to accept your relative insignificance in the universe, occasions will unexpectedly pop up to contradict this theme and illustrate that unless you’re going to paint it, this really is a small world. I recall an anecdote about a small town fellow being introduced to a man from Toronto. Looking for common ground, he asks his cosmopolitan acquaintance if he knows this friend of his, who also lives in big TO. While it probably seems ridiculous that anyone would assume residing in the same place means you should know everyone in it, on closer consideration you have to wonder. I have learned, no matter how big the place from which another comes, it doesn’t hurt to throw out a name and see where it takes you. It can be enlightening. Last week for example, I found myself on two separate occasions in conversation with some older gentlemen. Talk, which was quite enjoyable, went from occupation to habitation and each time I mentioned names familiar to those places and to me. And each time a connection was made. Now granted we were discussing a neighbouring county, but both these men knew of my parents, and remembered them from their dancing days at Parkview Gardens. Was my dad, one wondered, a man with dark, curly hair? “He used to be a man with dark, curly hair,” I smiled. As our chat continued I realized I knew his mother and his brother. And both of us, having heard each other’s name many times before, now had faces to put to them. The other man knew my in-laws, particularly after I told him the farm on which my husband had grown up. Mentioning where he was raised, brought more conversation regarding the current owners of the property. Needless to say, my two meetings that day made for an enjoyable passing of a morning. How many times have you found yourself amongst strangers only to find the familiar in the mention of a name? How many times have you felt adrift from a conversation, then a casual reference to someone leads you to common ground? In the company of strangers I can be reticent. Therefore, I reach for that one something which may bridge the gap of unfamiliarity. What surprises me is how often it works. In this wide wonderful world, we wander into and out of each other’s lives. Sometimes we make a difference, sometimes we’re just a name. But either way it makes this place a little friendlier.