Rod McQueen's Blog, page 5

Taking charge

There seems to be a rash of terrible deaths in recent days. Fourteen-year-olds shooting classmates. Someone being set on fire outside a school. Such events lead the news so often that we are all becoming inured to such behaviour. Let’s call it what it is: evil incarnate. I can’t put my finger on exactly when such violence had its beginnings, but my best guess would be twenty-five years ago, about when iPhones began to become all-pervasive.
Contrast what is happening now to the days of your own youth. There was none of this. In my day (you knew I was going to get around to that phrase), we didn’t have a television at home until I was twelve and even then viewing was limited. I blame poor parenting for much of this new world. I recently saw a woman pushing what looked like a three-year-old in a pram. The little girl was clutching an iPhone and watching who-knows-what. It was probably a pointless parade of colours but isn’t that one sure way to get hooked?
Walk any busy street and most people in their twenties and early thirties are coming toward you with their eyes glued to an iPhone. Maybe they’re texting some important message, but my guess is that whatever it is, it could probably wait until after there’s no longer any risk of barging into someone.
I worry even more about the young men holed up in their bedrooms watching porn. As for their girlfriends and eventual spouses, I can’t imagine those guys will hold them at any loving level of esteem. In schools, teachers seem to find it impossible to halt iPhone use in the classroom. How much learning will occur if many student minds are elsewhere? Ontario this month took action and banned classroom use.
Changing the world even more is beyond any one person’s capacity, but how about starting at home with parents? Permissive mothers and fathers are simply not paying attention to what their children are doing and watching. Snapchat’s ceaseless messages and TikTok’s senseless videos govern kids’ lives.
Instead, why don’t parents have long talks with their children at bedtime to discover what’s going on in their minds? Why not limit their time watching both big and little screens? Why not open doors beyond social media? It’s high time parents took back control of their own offspring.

To be or not to be

You know you’re getting older when your youngest grandchild goes off to college. When getting out of a car takes longer than it used to. When you sometimes have to ask for people to repeat themselves.
But you know things are still generally all right when you read a wondrous book like “A River Runs Through It” and revel in the wording that flows as smoothly as the rippling water described therein. When you see a shooting star in the nighttime sky. When you hold someone you love in your arms. When you bite into a juicy peach. When you spend time with friends who go back fifty years. When you read a well-written opinion piece on almost any topic. Being together with family.
There are also multiple far-off memories to hold and to treasure. Parents and grandparents along with aunts and uncles who used to be at table but are now long gone. The first girl you kissed when you were only five years old. Music from the 60s and 70s. Paddling on a five-day wilderness canoe trip while at YMCA camp. 
Also all those teachers and others who taught you how to build the basic platform of what you know. Plus special individuals who showed you what really matters: how to live a life.
A few things bug me like those individuals who complain about a few days of cold weather in the summer but then when it turns hot the next week they complain about that, too. I’d list more such cases but there aren’t many irritants that really rise to the occasion.
That’s because most former exasperations don’t bug me like they once did. Noisy music on the subway. A book that’s a bust. A restaurant meal that’s less tasty than what it should have been. I came to realize that when I worried about such things in the past, fretting didn’t change anything.
Some of that new understanding has arisen from discovering stoicism. Stoicism has its roots in ancient Rome and Greece but I just recently learned about it. Stoicism can be defined by saying it doesn’t matter what happens, what matters is how you deal with it. Who knows what else is out there to learn? As long as I’m still looking for revelations, large and small, life will continue to be worth living. Praise be.

To be decided

Last night as I watched the opening of the four-day Democratic Party convention in Chicago, I was impressed by the high level of speech-making and the choreography of events. Speaker after speaker sounded like a professional with words written that seemed to come – and may have – from a small cadre of writers who produced fine work.
Whether it was New York Governor Kathy Hochul, former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, or the three Bidens, daughter Ashley, First Lady Jill, or the President himself, all climbed the pinnacle to give one of the best speeches of their lives.
The president overcame all befuddlement that had previously plagued him. He even told a few jokes on himself, something a wise politician should always include. For example, he quipped that he was too young to join the Senate when he was elected at 29 and “too old” to be president. And there was a frank admission: “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you.” I must admit, however, I could have done with more spoken paragraphs and fewer shouted lines throughout his more than fifty minutes at the podium. 
More importantly, the concluding three hours – the event didn’t end until after midnight – rolled along without any interruption from any of those CNN panels of which we’ve seen all too many. For a political junkie like myself, however, the whole thing was an end-to-end success. Kamala Harris, who is scheduled to deliver her main speech Thursday, gave a brief address that was a foretaste of things to come. 
Another aspect why last night worked both at home and in the arena were the signs that individuals held up at the appropriate moment. Each attendee must have been given a pack of signs that included such slogans as USA; We Fight, We Win; Union YES!; Jill; and Thank You Joe. All showed a unity of approach.
In January, when I blogged my predictions for 2024, I said Donald Trump would be elected president. For the first time, I’m happy to say I might have been wrong. Most polls now give Harris a slight edge – but it’s still early days before the November vote.
We don’t yet know where the Democrats and their leaders stand on matters relating to Canada, but a teenaged Harris lived in Montreal for five years and graduated from Westmount High School. Her running mate, Tim Walz, is the governor of Minnesota, a border state, so he knows about trade and other relations with Canada. Those backgrounds are two twigs to hang onto which is better than us trying to make any kind of point to a blustering Donald Trump who thinks the world revolves around him.

See the light

Of all the people I met while living in England in 1987-8, among the most memorable was Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was not too available to us out-of-country types, so every Monday while Parliament was in session, Ingham would brief members of the Foreign Press Association. 
Journalists, myself included as a columnist for the Financial Post, who attended the Economic Summit in London in 1988, agreed that of all the briefings by staff of leaders, Ingham was the best. Not just information, either, but performance as well. Ingham’s manner was gruff, his face ruddy, and he had a bushy pair of eyebrows that danced about like two grasshoppers in a sun-filled field.
As for his capacity to offer insights to Thatcher’s thinking, I was reminded of a quote from novelist Edith Wharton, who said, “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Ingham was too brash to be a candle, he was the mirror. 
And an anonymous one at that. The strength of the briefings to the Foreign Press Association was that we got inside information. The weakness was that it was all off the record, which, by tradition means that journalists can use what they hear but cannot attribute any of it directly to the person who said it. So we’d get such phrases as how Thatcher was as “tough as old boots.” As for relations with the U.S., his comment on the attempt by Michael Dukakis to become president was, “We are old enough and long enough in the tooth not to pay much attention to what people say during an election.”
After about six months of such off-the-record sessions, I got fed up and wrote a column that opened with a description of Ingham by name, his role, and said that “a certain mirror was feeling bold and ebullient.” I then went on to refer to him as Mr. Not-For-Attribution or Mr. NFA and used quotes from the briefing.
As you might imagine, I was persona non grata. For several weeks, Ingham refused to hold any Foreign Press Association briefings at all. When he did finally return, I was not allowed to attend. Looking back, I’m comfortable with what I did. Off-the-record is fine once in a while, but not holus-bolus. In a world where there is a candle and a mirror, I’d rather be the journalist who let the light shine in.

Works in progress

Pardon me for blowing my own horn, but I was asked to write a column in the Saturday Business section of the Toronto Star, the largest circulation newspaper in Canada. The criteria set out was to describe people I had interviewed during my journalism career and talk about lessons I learned from those sessions.
So far I’ve done five columns: Martha Billes of Canadian Tire, Conrad Black who needs no introduction, former Royal Bank president Earle McLaughlin, real estate developer Don Matthews, and grocer Galen Weston. Weston was the most recent, appearing last Saturday. The column runs biweekly so look for the next one August 10.
Over the years I’ve written for Maclean’s, Toronto Life, Saturday Night, Fortune, and Financial Post among other outlets but never for the Star. So far, I have to say the editors I’ve dealt with have been knowledgeable and helpful, two ingredients you don’t always find in such folks. The Star recently appointed a new editor-in-chief, Nicole MacIntyre, and has a relatively new publisher, Jordan Bitove, so the place is all fired up as a result. I’m happy to be aboard.
The toughest part of my job is editing my own work down to 800 words, which is my assigned length. I start thinking about who’ll be featured next as early as the Monday after a column has run. Once I’ve picked my subject, I start writing and in some cases produce as many as 2,000 words before spending several days editing that first draft down to nearer the permitted length.
Writing is an interesting process because you’re walking with your words all the time. Ideas combust. You decide an anecdote doesn’t work. You polish a particular phrase until it’s just right. Stay away for an hour and you’re drawn back to do touch-ups. Edit a hard-copy print-out. A new train of thought comes along that might be tucked in or perhaps discarded. Finally, off it goes to an editor who always has helpful advice, writes the headline and chooses a photo.
Next comes the surprise part: response from readers. The column on Earle McLaughlin who was retiring after forty-four years with the bank when I interviewed him in 1980 drew emails from his son and his grandson, both living in Montreal. The column on Conrad Black precipitated numerous outbursts from people who couldn’t believe I found something positive to say about him.
And then, the whole process begins anew. Who to feature? What to say? I can’t imagine having more fun at the keyboard than this.

Top ten books

Why do we read? To escape. To learn. To swim in someone’s wonderful words. To pass the time on the bus. To lull a child to sleep. But what books do we choose? Here are brief descriptions of my top ten selections for your own reading pleasure.
“Surfacing” by Margaret Atwood is her best novel. For me, all others since 1973 are unreadable. A nameless narrator as alienated loser is an unusual device, to say the least, but I appreciate her anti-American stance. Only the ending confuses by offering so many possibilities. Does she stop being a victim? Pregnant, does she go with her lover Joe?
Among Canadian political memoirs, “Gentlemen, Players and Politicians” by Dalton Camp is by far the best. His cadences, use of language and insider knowledge shine. Here’s his first meeting with Robert Stanfield: “Well, I thought, at least he’s not pretty. Long-headed, with shrewd heavily lidded eyes, a long nose, and a full mouth. All else was elbows and knees.”
I’m going to bend my own rules and nominate all four volumes in the “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” by Robert A. Caro. After twelve years, the fifth volume is beyond overdue. Caro planned to live in Vietnam to do research but Covid-19 intervened. He claims to have written hundreds of pages of manuscript but his editor of fifty years recently died. Caro is 88. I fear we may never see the final volume.
We’re all Nick Carraway living next door in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” watching the spectacle of Jay Gatsby live a hollow life entertaining fair-weather friends. But what of the mysterious green light across the water? I’m sure PhD theses have been written about what it means but I believe it stands for dreams just beyond reach.
In “The Scotch,” economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s memoir about growing up in southwestern Ontario, my favourite scene has the young Galbraith and a hoped-for girlfriend at a fence watching a bull serve a heifer in the field. Says the romantic Galbraith, “I think it would be fun to do that.” “Well,” says his companion, “It’s your cow.”
Jane Leavy’s “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood,” is about baseball, drinking and sex. Mostly the latter two. Asked once by the team PR department to relate his most outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium, the man who holds the World Series home run record replied, “I [had sex] under the right field bleachers by the Yankee bull pen.” (My square brackets soften his wording).
To call “Blue Highways: A Journey into America” by William Least Heat Moon a travel book doesn’t do it justice. Driving a van on backroads he visits Dime Box, Texas, Nameless, Tennessee, and Pitt, Washington among countless stops, writing with inspiration and launching conversations. “A good life, a harmonious life, is a prayer,” a Hopi dancer tells him. “We don’t just pray for ourselves, we pray for all things.”
Among Roy MacGregor’s many books, my choice is “A Life in the Bush,” celebrating his father with melodic prose. Roy’s boyhood clumsy deeds made his father believe there must have been a mistake. “This could not be his child. There must have been a mix-up at the hospital. Good theory, except there was no hospital back in June 1948 and I’d been the only one born that month at the Whitney Red Cross outpost.”
William Manchester fought the Japanese on Okinawa during the Pacific War. He returned years later to do research for “Goodbye, Darkness” and wrote: “The last time I was here anyone standing where I now stand would have had a life expectancy of about seven seconds.” Why did he fight? “It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home.”
You can’t carry this while in the field, but the best book on birding is “The Sibley Guide to Birds” by David Allen Sibley. The 545 pages and descriptions of 810 species with more than 6,000 coloured illustrations comprise the tome you consult at home to identify that which you could not name for certain during your traipsing. All arguments will be resolved, all queries safely settled. Well, maybe not all. 
What’s your favourite?

The write stuff

A line popped out at me in an opinion piece I was reading yesterday: there are 4,350 journalists working in Ontario. In a province of 14 million, that number is so minuscule I can’t even determine what it is as a percentage of the total population. There must be more people cleaning windows right now than there are researching and writing newspaper articles.
My writing career began in 1960 with the simple act of putting up my hand. As a member of the Athletic Council at John F. Ross Collegiate in Guelph, Ont., I was attending a regular meeting led by J.R. “Jiggs” Morrison, the science teacher, so we were all perched on stools at his lab desks. The agenda was mostly uninteresting until he said, “The Guelph Mercury is looking for someone to write a weekly high school news column.” My hand shot up automatically, like it wasn’t part of my body, as if it hadn’t even been activated by my brain. “OK, Rod, the job’s yours. Get in touch with Peter Marucci at the paper.”
My conversation with Marucci, the city editor, was equally brief. The column should be typed and double spaced, was due Monday mornings, and they would pay me nine-and-half-cents a column inch. When I got home, I measured one inch in that day’s paper. It was about twenty-five words. Not that it mattered. At that point I didn’t even know what I was going to say.
I began by typing my column at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. I was already demonstrating one of the worst habits of journalists. I waited until just before the deadline to begin.
On Wednesday, there it all was in the evening newspaper, just as I had sent it. Nobody had altered a word. I had written forty inches. I got a cheque in the mail for $3.80 – enough to take my then girlfriend to the movies on Friday night and go after to the Treanon restaurant for cherry Cokes, chips and gravy. What was wrong with that? I was hooked.
With the demise in the years since of so many newspapers, if I were in high school today, I would not likely be able to launch a similar career of writing books and articles as the one that I enjoyed. This unfortunate situation will only be exacerbated by ChatGPT, the mean machine that will eventually replace many of the few remaining journalists. You’ll miss us when we’re gone.

 

 

Sir John to the rescue

As someone who writes for a living, you want your words to satisfy the editor of a book or a politician if you’re a speechwriter. But wordsmiths can sometimes suffer. Joe Clark once told me that when he was an aide to Robert Stanfield, then leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, he became fed up by Stanfield’s consistent refusal to use speech material that Clark wrote for him.
As a result, Clark quit his job to run for Parliament in 1972 in order to champion his own ideas. Just as well for me that Clark left – I replaced him in Stanfield’s office. I did some speechwriting but for the most part acted as press secretary.
I did, however, inherit the typewriter, a sturdy Royal upright, that Clark had used. When I left Parliament Hill in 1976, I asked if I could buy the machine for personal use. The House of Commons charged me all of $5. I used that device to write my first book, The Moneyspinners.
Clark did well on the hustings, first as an MP, and then as Prime Minister in 1979, but never seemed to lose his naivete. As PM, Clark met with Ontario Premier Bill Davis at the Ontario Legislature. Davis staffers thought they’d have a little fun. The meeting room was tricked up as if it were a full-fledged federal-provincial conference. Canadian and Ontario flags were placed near the two chairs as were plaques and lapel pins saying “Ontario” and “Canada.” A bust of Sir John A. Macdonald, the party’s patron saint, was pulled in close as if he were a delegate. Clark had no reaction to all the nonsense.
After Clark later lost the leadership, I read that there was to be a museum in Alberta dedicated to the former prime minister. I brought Clark’s Royal upright typewriter out of storage so it could become part of any such tribute. I didn’t have any contact information for Clark, so tracked down his daughter, Catherine, who was working in Ottawa. I dispatched the typewriter to her at a delivery cost to me of $75. I also included a note saying that when the museum was established, maybe I could at least receive a tax deductible receipt to cover my expenses.
I’ve never heard anything from anyone. I just happen to have a bust of Sir John. If I sent that along, maybe this time it would attract Clark’s attention.

 

 

Seeking consensus

I am saddened to see the result of acrimonious protests at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University. Things have become so heated over the Israel-Hamas war that some Toronto law firms have said, never mind which side you’re on, we won’t be hiring you to come and work at our firm. I have never before heard of a student demonstration extinguishing a career in that individual’s hoped-for profession.
When Alexander’s name was given to the law school earlier this decade, I was delighted. After all, Alexander was among the first Black lawyers to graduate from Osgoode Hall Law School, the first Black Member of Parliament, first Black cabinet minister, and first Black Lieutenant-Governor. 
I saw Alexander perform in the caucus of Robert Stanfield, leader of her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Caucus was not always united; some meetings were fractious. Time and again in the 1970s I saw Alexander rise, all 6’3″ of him and say, “I think I can see a consensus emerging.” I’d think, “Whaaat?” But Alexander would take a few strands from this diatribe and a few threads from that tirade, until he had woven a garment that everyone could wear. 
In the 1990s, I was involved in organizing an event to honour the philanthropic efforts benefitting Ryerson, before it was called Toronto Metropolitan University. Among my assignments was obtaining a videotaped message from Alexander. I called him in Hamilton, and asked him to film a tribute interview in front of the Ontario Legislature where he had served as lieutenant-governor for six years.
Just as we were finishing, two busloads of students arrived. As it turned out, they were from Hamilton. The teachers recognized Alexander and introduced him to the kids. The cameraman and I organized everybody into three rows so we could get some additional footage of Alexander surrounded by the children. Even from twenty-five feet away, I could hear Alexander saying in a low voice: “Vote for Alexander, vote for Alexander.” Bidding goodbye to the students, he said, “When you go home tonight, don’t forget to tell your parents you saw Linc Alexander today.” He was ever the campaigner, even though he hadn’t held public office in almost twenty years.
I think of Alexander watching the brouhaha at “his” law school and know that he would be upset. If he were alive, I know he’d be able to achieve a consensus, but he can’t. I’m just certain that he’d like the participants to find a solution on their own. Let’s hope they follow his lead.

 

Get the word out

Words are nothing. Words are everything. Both statements are accurate, depending on the circumstances. Some words can get used far too often and become annoying. For example, take the phrase “not so much.” I’m sure you’ve recently read some columnist who’s describing Person A in glowing terms and then goes on to compare Person A to Person B, by saying, “Person B, not so much.” As soon as I see that phrase I search for something else to read that doesn’t contain those all-too-easy, dare I say lazy, words: “not so much.”
But fancy words can cause just as much trouble. One of the posher words that suffers from severe overuse these days is “existential.” I ‘m not even sure that every writer who dapples that word into a sentence knows what it means. Maybe they hope that using “existential” will turn them into thoughtful commentators when just the opposite may be true. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the meaning of existential is a philosophy in which “the world has no meaning” or “each person is alone and completely responsible for his/her own actions.”
In Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll, Alice and Humpty Dumpty taught us everything we need to know about words. “When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Replied Humpty Dumpty, “The question is, which is to be master, that’s all.”
Some journalists have taken Humpty Dumpty literally and employ a word like “existential” not in its proper usage but instead charged with any meaning the writer deigns to give it. My morning paper has published such blithe phrases as, “In a hybrid work world, Toronto’s downtown core faces an existential crisis.” ” Or how about: “In the digital economy, accountancy faces an existential threat.” And, “Canada Post is in an existential struggle for its very survival.” When Canada Post becomes involved in an existential struggle, you know they must have run out of reasons for their continued existence.
Other writers have sung this same tune. Indeed, no less a voice than Charles Lane, deputy opinion editor and columnist at the Washington Post held forth on May 3, 2023 with a column bolstered by the headline, “Overuse of ‘existential threat’ is a crisis of existential proportions.” Just because he has obviously made no progress toward ridding the world of “existential threat” doesn’t signify I shouldn’t try. Or risk an existential existence in so doing. Whatever that might mean.