If only all those anti-American Canadians could see the light

TORONTO - The day after the war started, the People in Favour of the Continuation of One of the World's Most Brutal Dictatorships made me an hour late for dinner with my brother. They managed to shut down Toronto's downtown core. Stuck on a streetcar, I had time to read the placards of Saddam's fans, many of which read "Bush is a Moron," "America is the Real Threat" and similar slobber.

The anti-America/anti-Bush message is endemic in the peace-at-any-cost movement. The idea that not liking the United States, or George W. Bush, has nothing to do with whether one ought to support this war, is clearly too nuanced a thought for the minds of the anti-warniks to grasp. But they really should exercise their underused grey matter and think this one through.

Last week in this paper, a columnist raided the great crypt of the 1960s, and -- never letting the facts get in the way of her "arguments" -- opined that "we" Canadians hate Americans. The reasons she listed were only vaguely related to the situation in Iraq. She included, of course, the requisite digs at Bush and the 2000 election. The fact that the events around Florida 2000 have nothing to do with this war is, again, a shade of grey beyond the reach of the anti-war crowd. As is the fact that most of us who are "pro-war" are simply so because we see the risk of not dealing with Saddam as being greater than the risk of dealing with him.

Susan McMaster, one of Ottawa's Poets Against the War, a group that threatens far more painful punishment than a Massive Ordnance Air Blast ever could, included in her opus, Against the War, the following lines: "Against the war I'll laugh/ at Bush's foot-in-mouth." Against the war, she continued,
mercilessly and in blatant disregard for my pain at having to read such efforts, she would learn to spell "Qur'an."

Ah yes, there it is, Americans are bigots. One wonders whether the anti-war crowd on the left sees how embarrassing its carriage is, right in goose-step with the anti-war right. No western boys and girls, no sir, should ever die to improve the lives of Arabs. For one thing I noticed about the crowd in Toronto was its shining whiteness. No crosses to bear for the pasty. We should only be willing to die for our own spoiled selves.

Do these people, most of whom call themselves "liberal," not see their hypocrisy? They scream about Iraqi babies being killed this week, scarce giving a thought to the hundreds of thousands of babies who have died at the hands of Saddam. Should we have not intervened in Kosovo? Milosevic did nothing to us. Should our soldiers (including an uncle of mine) not have stopped and helped Holocaust victims on their march into Germany? Should we have been there at all? Germany never attacked North America.

The same crowd that lambasts the United States for interventions in Latin America --which, arguably, made people's lives worse -- now denounce it for an intervention that will make the Iraqi people's lives better and ours safer. I wonder how these munificents feel about being allied with the Vatican which, probably thrilled at the fact that we've stopped discussing child molestation, has kept up its tradition of sidestepping confrontations with anti-Semitic dictators.

What sickens me most is the attempt to portray the Bush administration as a force more sinister than Saddam or the Islamonazis. One wonders how long the Poets Against the War would last in Baghdad if any of them tried to write anything with a title other than "Saddam is Great" and "I Hate America."

Sadly, one suspects many of them wouldn't mind writing such a poem, if they haven't already.

The contempt many Canadians feel for the United States is nowhere more evident than on the CBC, which, after Sept. 11, I began to refer to as "the al-Qaeda Broadcasting Corporation." Watching CBC coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I think "the Baath Party Broadcasting Corporation" would be fitting.

The barely concealed gloating with every (small) setback, the complete trivialization of genuine gains, the lack of shame in regards our own lily-livered leader's lack of commitment to the United States ... it's all there. Our military may be emasculated, but whatever we have to offer -- one tank, one troop, one ball -- ought to be offered.

I was once anti-American. I grew out of it when I lived overseas and realized that in my ideals I was American, and that that was a good thing. I grew out of it when I realized that American values far outweigh American flaws, and that those values, when possible, should be exported.

Let's Forget the Past and Welcome Polanski Back to Hollywood

TORONTO - Kilometres away, as the crow flies, from Operation Iraqi Freedom, is the land of Oscar. The Academy Awards will, barring something unforeseen, take place tonight. I would like to see The Pianist take a troika -- best picture, best director and best actor. It is only a shame the director in question, Roman Polanski, cannot attend the ceremonies without fear of arrest.

In my first year in Paris, I worked as a jeune fille au pair (a horror story unto itself) and I lived in the same quartier as the great director. As I walked my young charges home from school, we would often run into Polanski, and he would playfully, somewhat suggestively, ruffle the hair of the nearly teenage girl I looked after. She was not many years younger than myself at the time. It was hilarious, done with a wink and knowing smile in my direction. Boy, was he a cutie pie.

It was clear he was making light of his reputation, playing up to the crowd. His sense of humour was, I felt, mutinous and admirable (two things that so often go together), something best displayed only in select company. He was lucky for my dark and realistic (amazing, given my tender age back then) view of the universe. Another girl may have gone screaming to the authorities.

In my second year in Paris, I was liberated from my employers/oppressors and began working as a teacher. One night, out at a dance club with friends, we began to hear shouts of "C'est Polanski!" It was Polanski, all right, showing up at three or so in the morning with the French actress Emmanuelle Seignier, a woman who has since become his wife and the mother of his children. That night, he struck me as looking, well, debauched. Maybe it was the environment, but on his forehead could have been written "I am a man who has done everything, imbibed and snorted everything, slept with everything and been through everything."

But he also seemed vulnerable.

All these years later, I have been devastated by The Pianist, a movie scarce seen on this continent as people queue up for the imcomprehensibly popular Chicago, the puerile The Two Towers and the tedious, tedious display that is The Hours. Only Gangs of New York comes close to rivalling The Pianist. Yet because people seem unable to separate art from artist, The Pianist probably won't score big tonight.

Polanski, for those of you from Mars, was charged with raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977. The girl was not a 13-year-old girl the way most of us were. She was sexually active (with her 17-year-old boyfriend), she could identify a quaalude and she had a mother who apparently thought it was acceptable for her daughter to pose topless.

Her mother also felt it sensible to leave her alone with the man who made Repulsion, the bloody decapitation fest, MacBeth, and Rosemary's Baby.

Polanski said he believed the girl consented. She says she said "no." Whether she did or not does not change the fact that he did something wrong. But this case represents one of the few times celebrity justice seems to have worked against the celebrity. Polanski agreed to a plea bargain and was promised he would be sentenced to time already served. At the last minute, under public pressure, the judge decided to make an example of Polanski and put him behind bars for years. Polanski fled to France, where, ever the rebel, he made the lyrical and romantic Tess and took up with its star, the then teenage Nastassja Kinski.

But there are other things to know about Roman Polanski. His family was interned in death camps during the Second World War. His pregnant mother died in Auschwitz. Only he escaped the camps and the Krakow ghetto and spent the war hiding and being hid, crawling through sewage pipes, on the lam and afraid. Decades later, his eight-months-pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by members of the Manson family. After his exile in France, Steven Spielberg offered him the chance to direct Schindler's List and Polanski turned it down because the movie, set in the Krakow ghetto, hit too close to home. The Pianist, set in Warsaw, offered him catharsis with a slight distance. The film is painful -- and necessary -- viewing, and given the director's past, must have been sheer hell to make.

Lucky for us, he walked through the fire. Surely the time has come not only to reward him for that, but for the Los Angeles district attorney to drop the warrant for Polanski's arrest and allow him safe passage.
 

Look How Far We've, Er, Come

TORONTO -- For International Woman's Day, my sister e-mailed me a list of tips for hiring women, dated July 1943, taken from Transportation Magazine. It was written for supervisors of potential Rosie the Riveters, and my sister attached a note suggesting that by today's standards, these tips were patronizing. But not only are most of them still relevant, many of the supposedly sexist standards of the 1940s have simply morphed themselves into politically correct standards for the new millennium.

Tip 1. "Pick young married women. They have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they're less likely to be flirtatious and they have the pep to work hard and deal with the public efficiently." Well, I should hope married women would be less flirtatious than unmarried women, be it 1943 or 2003. And as for pep, there is nothing outmoded about suggesting that single women lack it. There's nothing like dating to kill a girl's pep.

Tip 2. "General experience indicates that 'husky' girls --those who are a little on the heavy side -- are more even-tempered." This is true. I have gained 15 pounds in the last five years and I am much sweeter now than I was in 1998. And you can just tell that Anne McLellan is nicer than Adrienne Clarkson.

Tip 3. "Retain a physician to give each woman you hire a special physical examination -- one covering female conditions. This step not only protects the property against lawsuits, but also reveals whether the employee-to-be has any female weaknesses which would make her mentally or physically unfit for the job." How is this sexist? The whole lawsuit issue is timeless, not to mention how frequently feminists whinge because "female conditions" are not taken seriously. And all wise employers should take into consideration that women, up until menopause, anyway, only have one good week a month.

Tip 4. "Stress at the outset the importance of time, the fact that a minute or two lost makes serious inroads on schedules. Until this point is got across, service is likely to be slowed up." Again, isn't this a consideration for the ages? All the more since the people addressed here were hiring mostly women who weren't accustomed to a factory environment, and people who managed production lines, not poetry workshops.

Tip 5. "Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied and apply fresh lipstick several times a day." This is very true. For some women, it's all about lipstick. For me, it's all about hair. If my hair isn't working, I'm not working. Better to allot time for insecurity/vanity from the get-go.

Tip 6. "Be tactful when issuing instructions or in making criticisms. Women are often sensitive; they can't shrug off harsh words the way men do. Never ridicule a woman -- it breaks her spirit and cuts off her efficiency." I'm not sure why this is laughable. I would love it if bosses nowadays would take cues from this tip. I am definitely sensitive, and I can't shrug off harsh words. A few years ago, I worked at a magazine where my boss had as much empathy as an SS torturer, and my spirit has yet to recover fully. I hold that man personally responsible for my weight gain (see Tip 2). Not to mention that if you ridicule someone, you can damage their self-esteem, and that's against the law.

Tip 7. "Be reasonably considerate about using strong language around women. Even though a girl's husband or father may swear vociferously, she'll grow to dislike a place of business where she hears too much of this." In 2003, you can sue a man or cry "hostile work environment" if he tells a risqué joke or uses strong language. We have gone from the over-protectiveness of the 1940s, which at least was somewhat endearing, to Victorian feminist political correctness, which is just tiresome.

Tip 8. "Get enough size variety in operator's uniforms so that each girl can have a proper fit. This point can't be stressed too much in keeping women happy." Hey, I wouldn't want to have to squeeze myself into a size 4. And if Erin Brockovich had only had bigger shirts and baggier skirts, she wouldn't have had so much conflict with her dowdy female colleagues. Which would seem to indicate that her crime was not wearing a short skirt, but looking good in one.

You see what "sisterhood" has wrought? Boy, oh boy. We have come a long way (baby).
 

Peaceniks should grow up instead of just pretending to

TORONTO - There has been harsh criticism in the print media of last weekend's protests against a war with Iraq. The protesters have been mocked and picked apart as though they were subjects of vivisection at some sick laboratory, and I think that's unfair. Those protesters were adorable. Simply adorable.

Listen to what little 11-year-old Barbara Merasty of Saskatchewan's Flying Dust reserve said on a network news report: "I came out to stop the war so no one will die." That's darling, Barbara, just darling. And with young people like you, there's hope for mankind.

And I think it's appalling for grizzled, old, drunken journalists to take the mickey out of pre-pubescent children in ... Oops! Someone just informed me that not all of the marchers were in the fifth grade! Apparently some of them were adults. Most, even.

Now that's scary. For it would never occur to me that people over the age of 11 would think it necessary to carry a placard saying they were "for peace." What sane human isn't "for peace"?

And it would never occur to me that anyone over the age of 11 would not be able to clearly think through to their logical conclusion the implications of attending a rally that essentially attacks the leader of the free world in favour of a vicious tyrant.

Had any of the protesters been carrying placards saying things that constituted arguments against a war, those "peace rallies" might have been worth the while. There are arguments against this war -- there are none that convince me this war is not necessary for us, or that it will not be beneficial to the Iraqi people, but there are arguments, nonetheless.

What I saw, however, were a lot of banners that insulted President George Bush, that insulted the United States and American "imperialism," that called Bush and Rumsfeld "terrorists." There was even a group of people carrying a large photo of Bush with a Hitler moustache. In Ottawa, protesters carried signs that said "Morons make War" and "Terrorists wear Suits." I guess this kind of nonsense is what passes for polemics these days, as morons also attend anti-war protests and terrorists wear bandannas and drum and dance their way to Parliament Hill and the U.S. Embassy. It's a new movement called "Terror Through Mind-Numbing Stupidity and Knee-Jerk America Bashing."

Another news report featured an Ontario protester who said the protest reminded her of the good old days. "I protested in the border area of Windsor-Detroit 30 years ago to help draft dodgers. We're just going to have to keep doing this every 30 years or every 10 years until there's no more war. We can't have war in the 21st century."

This kind of infantile posturing would be funny were it not so terrifying. That folks who may have smoked a little too much dope or gone to one too many love-ins might still like to fight the establishment is cute. Except that in this case it does not simply represent an opinion. It represents, I think, a frightening set of values -- and by that I don't mean the belief that tie-dyed shirts or the Grateful Dead are fashionable. I mean values that have convinced these people that peace is preferable to freedom, and that the protector of our freedom, the United States, deserves only to be loathed.

On what terms, one would like to ask them, are you willing to have "peace." On whose dictates? In fact, what is going on here is not a movement for peace but a movement to win a few more days of denial, nothing more. It is also indicative of some odd kind of guilt about what we in this part of the world ought to represent.

For the world would not be a better place if the United States had less power. It would be an infinitely worse place. For those who say the United States should listen to the UN, perhaps it would be more fitting to suggest that the UN do its job and respect its own resolutions. Hans and Mohammed can take permanent suites at the Tikrit Marriott if they wish; after 12 years, we ought to know that "more time" is a joke.

Most of the marchers "for peace" could not tell you which countries border Iraq, who the main ethnic and religious groups in that country are or how long Saddam Hussein has been in power. Nor, for that matter, could most of them see the irony in the fact that one of their own in the U.K. held a banner saying "Peace in Our Time." But then, that's to be expected ... of 11-year-olds.
 

The Bachelorette can teach the UN a few lessons about Saddam

TORONTO - Trista is the Hans Blix of reality television. She talks tough but does she ever let a lot of infractions get by. It takes her forever to act on something she should have taken care of weeks ago. I speak, of course, of Trista Rehn, the lovely physical therapist/Miami Heat dancer/Bachelorette, and the Saddam Hussein to her Herr Doktor Blix has got to be that awful stalker guy, Russ.

Trista finally gave old Russ, the, um, "writer," the heave-ho this week, and it was high time. It was time for a change of regime ... and it has been time for, if not 12 years, then at least since Jan. 8, when glistening, slimy Russ showed up, Tiffany-box bribe in hand, and declared his refusal to give up without first putting up the mother of all cockfights.

From the first episode, Russ has worn his true colours like a peacock in raging heat. He sweats like a crack addict waiting for his dealer in one of those dingy alleyways behind my apartment building. He has shown about as much respect for Trista's boundaries as Saddam has for the borders of his neighbours and for the Kurds who live within his own nation. He has accepted criticisms and attempts at reason with a Saddam-esque level of equanimity. Without asking Trista's permission, Russ stuck his tongue halfway down to her knees during the second epi-sode, in much the same way that a certain despot stuck his troops on someone else's sand once upon a time.

It's lucky for our friend, Trista, that Russ didn't manage to smuggle a vial of nerve gas or smallpox along with him on their trip to Arizona this week. Anyone who saw the rage and desperate need for control in Russ's eyes when Trista put the kaibosh on the possibility of nookie with him had to know that she was fortunate to have a camera crew around to protect her. Trista may be a trained cheerleader and all, but I doubt if one of those high kicks she learned to do in Florida could take down anyone as furious and loopy as Russ -- any more than a team of timorous, Coke-bottle-eyeglass-wearing UN "inspectors" can put the fear of our Lord into the crazy mustachioed, beret-wearing one.

Like Blix, frustrated by Saddam's tricks and dishonesty, Trista, has -- up until now -- ignored the signs and fallen for every ruse Russ has put before her. A couple of weeks back, Trista's best girlfriends joined her in her candle-laden Bachelorette pad to help her suss out which fella she should trust. Her pals resoundingly dissed Russ, telling Trista to lose him or live to rue the day. But did she listen? Noooo. Proclaiming a "connection" with psycho-guy, she allowed Russ and his numerous contraventions to thrive.

Sound familiar? Reminds me of a certain Saddam whose myriad transgressions haven't seemed to cause much concern to certain Eurotypes and geekish UN employees who look much like boys we wouldn't have dated in high school. Reminds me of listening to Colin Powell on Wednesday, speaking before a crowd of UN representatives who were so fascinated, many of them were yawning, rolling their eyes or looking as bored as if they were at a screening of The Hours. For heaven's sake, people -- the man had a teaspoon of anthrax in his pocket! Pay attention!

The poor U.S. secretary of state was preaching, I fear, to the opposite of the choir (the tone-deaf?). A shame, really, since he made sense. One argument Powell tried to put to rest was the oft-repeated assertion that Saddam would never link up with al-Qaeda, since the former is secular and the latter fundamentalist. Of course, the best rebuttal to that weak logic is this: Hitler and Stalin in 1939.

OK, Trista probably wouldn't get that reference, but I'm still glad she came to her senses, however belatedly. As a result of her early unfortunate choices, Russ got too confident and behaved so abominably this week that he self-destructed, imploded, so much so that even the slow-witted cheerleader had to face the truth. It is quite possible that if we leave Saddam Hussein alone, he, too, will self-destruct. But waiting for that to happen may allow him time to develop weapons of mass destruction and get up to other lethal endeavours.

I am not a hawk any more than I want people to kill their babies. I am, however, pro-choice, because I believe that abortion, like war and dumping icky guys, is sometimes necessary. How foolish would we look if the Bachelorette were smarter than us?
 

Learning Some Lessons about Tolerance from George Clooney

The 65-year-old Saint Laurent was a fashion radical, popularizing the pantsuit for women and using his name as a brand on perfume and makeup. His very un-French openness about his dependence on alcohol and anti-depressants set him apart in a culture mercifully unfettered by the Barbara Walters special.

Above all, he understood that fashion was important. Sadly, in Ottawa that point of view is treated with all the respect given polyester and stretch pants at Calvin Klein's house.

Ottawans use the city's climate as a perfect excuse for not looking good. I noticed, when I visited my mum at Christmas, that I had to break out my "lesbian boots," as I call them, to walk a block without falling over and breaking my neck.

My lesbian boots are from Roots -- big, clunky, tough urban-chick things with massive tread and no heels, totally necessary for an Ottawa winter. You won't get far on ice, at least not upright, with four-inch heels and no tread.

In Ottawa, you have to accept looking "blobby" in winter, unless you're willing to lose your fingers and ears to frostbite. You need layers and hats and mittens -- gloves won't do when it's wickedly cold -- to survive. Bulky coats are the order du jour, and mere tights won't protect your legs from the wind.

So that explains the winter.

But what about Ottawa fashion in the other season(s)? In the other six months of the year, I have noticed three distinct looks. The first is what I like to call "aging hippie" and is the result, I figure, of what seems to be the disproportionate number of aging hippies in the Ottawa Valley. The Valley is, I believe, second only to Vancouver in this regard. It's the silver ponytail (on men and women), Indian cotton, silver jewelry, Birkenstocks, bulky sweaters, "I work in a health-food store" statement, and it does have its charm.

Then there's the "I'm going on a hike/public servant" look, favoured by the many outdoorsy types among you who, thanks to your impressive salaries working for our government, can afford canoes and cottages. Your style comes from Roots, Eddie Bauer and the like. And finally, the most offensive of the three, the "high tech/I never have sex and I can't match my shirt to my pants" look. Sadly, this is the one favoured by those among you who could probably afford to shop at Yves Saint Laurent. Ah, the irony.

I lived in France for more than four years, and I learned much there for which I am eternally grateful. I learned about wine, cheese, Jerry Lewis, the importance of maintaining Everest levels of denial about national behaviour during the Second World War, and, of course, fashion. When I moved to France, I was just out of university and attired in the North American college student uniform: jeans, Nikes, Polo sweater and windbreaker. What a vision I was.

Within a few weeks, my Nikes were relegated to the gym, which is the only place a woman should wear them, the sweater and windbreaker were shamefully stuffed in my closet for trips back to Canada, and the jeans were worn only with smart tops and peacoats.

In Ottawa this past summer, I winced at the sight of adult women in business suits and ... it was tragique ... Nikes. For heaven's sake, women, I would think, how can you stand to be seen in public like that? Don't you know how you look? Put some grown-up shoes on and learn to navigate Elgin Street in heels. If French women can do it, you can too. You're at least as clever as them.

Lest you think I'm Ottawa-bashing, 'tis not so. Toronto only has two looks: "I think I'm cool, so I wear black" and "I'm incredibly uptight." (I alternate, depending on my mood).

The bottom line is, all Canadians need fashion help. Our prime minister should strike while the iron is hot and make a personal appeal to Mr. Saint Laurent to spend his retirement on this side of the Atlantic.

In fact, there's a little town called Shawinigan, with a beautiful resort and golf course ...

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

Support Your Global Sweatshop and make Third World Kids Happy

Better to have chequebook journalism than no journalism at all

Rene Michaud, one of the accused killers of Ottawa couple Robert and Bonnie Dagenais, recently made an offer to the media. He said he would sell us his story. The Citizen turned his offer down, and that is a good thing. But I don't believe it is always objectionable for journalists to pay their sources.

We are told that "real" journalists don't pay sources, that no one serious would do such a thing, and that serious issues would never be discussed as a result of chequebook journalism. Leave that to the Enquirer and don't taint the sacred world of "serious" media with such talk.

People have short memories. The late William Bradford Huie, a prominent Alabama journalist and novelist from the 1940s to the 1960s, was famous for the use of his chequebook. Huie's book, The Execution of Private Slovik, about the only U.S. serviceman to be executed for desertion and cowardice in the Second World War, is considered to be one of the two best American non-fiction reportage books, along with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Huie also held the sales record for three of the news-magazines that published his articles. He was no tabloid reporter. He was able to give the public information about important stories -- information that others were not able to provide.

In 1955, Emmett Till, a teenage African-American from Chicago was visiting family in Mississippi and became, tragically, the victim of a hate crime, long before we called them hate crimes. Two white men had seen him talking to a white woman and deemed his behaviour too forward. They tracked him down, beat, tortured and shot him, tied him to a cotton gin fan and tossed him in the Tallahatchie River.

The men were tried for the case, and acquitted by an all-white jury. After their trial, Huie paid them $4,000 for an interview which was published in the then widely read Look magazine. In the interview they confessed to the murders, knowing that because of double jeopardy, they could not be tried again. And they did not simply confess. They described, with some pride, what they had done. The story was shocking and was said to have brought about awareness to many Americans of just how bad race relations were in the South.

The Look magazine in question sold off the stands.

However, many fellow journalists denounced Huie, as he had paid the men. Huie defended himself: The truth would never have been revealed otherwise, he said. The FBI frequently pays for information, he said. He was not, however, cavalier about it. He was a cold, hard realist: "A lot of people resent using informers. I don't recommend it. I just don't know any better way."

Huie continued his work, continued to expose civil rights violations and continued, unapologetically, to pay sources. In 1964 he co-wrote, along with Martin Luther King Jr., Three Lives for Mississippi, a book about the young civil rights workers who had been killed in that state. In spite of his tactics, Huie had become known as a courageous journalist who helped the civil rights movement along by revealing brutal truths.

Huie, however, lost many of his supporters when he paid James Earl Ray, the convicted killer of Martin Luther King Jr., $40,000 for an in-prison interview in 1968. (He concluded, after speaking with Ray, that he had acted alone in killing King.) After this, Huie was ostracized more than ever and his work for civil rights had earned him enemies in the Ku Klux Klan. On one occasion he defended himself with a shotgun as the Klan burned a cross in his yard.

It's a long way from that world to Monica Lewinsky, but two years ago the Washington Post accused ABC of compensating Lewinsky indirectly for her 1999 interview with Barbara Walters by paying one of her legal bills. The lawyer who was paid had apparently convinced Ken Starr to allow Lewinsky to appear on the broadcast.

Whatever happened there, I'm not sure Monica Lewinsky was worth the money. I don't think we need to know what Rene Michaud has to say. I'm not suggesting that it is a good thing for criminals to be given money for their time. But few things are as cut and dried as we would like, least of all the line between "serious" journalism and the tabloid world. The Enquirer, after all, gets a lot right. "I'm in the truth business," said William Bradford Huie, a most serious journalist. He may have let the ends blind him to the means, but his contributions were invaluable.

Too few journalists, tabloid or "serious," can claim the latter about themselves.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

It's the height of folly to worry about your date's high heels

TORONTO - A recent study at Britain's Open University indicates that shorter women are more likely to be married and have children than their taller peers.

For men, on the other hand, greater height means greater success in both the financial and romantic fields of the Darwinian struggle.

Scientists who conducted the survey say there is no reason to believe shorter women are more intelligent, attractive or fertile than taller women. It appears that the issue is simply that most men and women prefer that the man be taller.

In other words, most of the people procreating out there are insecure men and shallow women. Is it any wonder mankind seems to be devolving, rather than evolving? I am, for a woman, fairly tall -- though I have young nieces who are well on their way to towering over me -- and I would love to be taller, which is why I often wear high heels. My mother is 5' 10" and my brothers are all over six feet tall. My father was just an inch taller than my mother. But dad was secure enough to not be intimidated by that fact, and I think that's why in my family we all have triple-digit IQs and good values. We weren't co-produced by a superficial woman and a frightened, quivering man who needed to feel closer to the clouds than his wife.

I have dated many men who are shorter than me and invariably friends will comment on how "nice" I am to do so, or they'll say something like "good for you, Rondi," as though I am donating to a charity. Call me crazy, but what matters to me in a romantic partner is that he be kind, that he make an honest living, that he not abuse any substances, that he know how to read (and that he actually do so) and that I feel lust for him. Only one of my boyfriends has ever said anything negative to me about my height, and he was a fellow who was taller than me. He deemed me "too tall" and a big red flag went up in my mind, one that had "insecure, pathetic loser" written on it. All his previous girlfriends had been dowdy little twerps, and I guess girls like that made him feel like a big, strong man.

Real men are not afraid to have a girlfriend who is tall or taller than them. This is how we separate the men from the boys. Diana, Princess of Wa-les, was 5'10" and Prince Char-les, a bit taller, apparently had some "issues" with that. He didn't like her to wear high heels and he left her for a shorter woman who looked like she was related to the Royal Family via their horses. Now that's depressing.

In sharp contrast, American historian Arthur Schlesinger is married to a taller woman, the six-foot-plus Alexandra Cushing. In a recent issue of Vogue, he commented that he was "all in favour of tall women" and that he wished his wife would wear heels higher than her customary two inches. Sigh. He's brainy and self-confident. Not too many men like that around. And of all of Woody Allen's wives and girlfriends, the pick of the crop -- Diane Keaton --was taller than him.

For a famous tale of real cojones, think of the first ever meeting between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, on the set of the 1942 film Woman of the Year. "I fear," said Hepburn, "that I may be a little too tall for you, Mr. Tracy." "Don't worry, Miss Hepburn," Tracy replied, "I'll cut you down to size." Now there was the start of a great love story, and for the strong-willed and proud Hepburn, it was surely a sign that she had met her match. OK, her match happened to be married, but her other options were probably single, short men who wanted her to walk in a ditch so they could feel superior, or single, tall men who felt threatened.

I could be catty and suggest that shorter women are, in every sense, average, and that therein lies their appeal, but that would be so unlike me. And it wouldn't be constructive. So, instead, I'll suggest that if we want to turn the tide on the dumbing-down of the universe, you men ought to wake up and figure out that your strength does not come from the fact that your girlfriend can't reach the top shelf.

And girls -- wouldn't you rather be with a man whose spine was in working order, even if it was a spine on a short body?

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Don't blame the beauty queens, blame radical Muslims

Ottawa's Lynsey Bennett came back from the Miss World pageant in Nigeria saying the violence she saw there was not something with which she wanted to be associated. With that comment, young Lynsey shows how much she has been suckered into the received wisdom on the matter, as have some writers at this paper, where an editorial about Bennett's participation recently asserted that "allowing one's good name to be associated with such acts (human-rights abuses in Nigeria) ... was a bad idea." Ah yes. Let's put the blame squarely on the pageant and on the contestants.

The Miss World pageant was surrounded by controversy from the start, because of the case of Amina Lawal. Lawal is the Nigerian woman who was sentenced, under Islamic law, to be stoned to death for bearing a child outside of wedlock. (But she won't be stoned until her child is weaned in 2004. I'll say this for Nigeria's Islamic law: At least it recognizes the importance of breastfeeding, which is more than I can say for us.)

Bennett hemmed and hawed about the matter and finally decided to go to Nigeria, saying that the pageant had drawn, and would continue to draw, more attention to Lawal's plight than holding the competition elsewhere would. I believe she was right about that. I doubt most of us would have heard of Lawal were it not for Miss World, a show that more than 1.5 billion people (and far more women than men) watch.

So the beauties descended upon Abuja and things broke loose. Isioma Daniel, a female journalist at the Nigerian newspaper ThisDay, wrote a comment piece suggesting that the Prophet Mohammed would not only have approved of the pageant, but might have chosen one of the lovelies to be his bride. A protest erupted in a mosque in Kaduna, which turned into a riot, which ended up killing hundreds of people.

Christians are said to be fleeing the area altogether. Kaduna is a city in the north of Nigeria, which is predominantly Muslim. The pageant has been relocated to London, and a death sentence -- a "fatwa," like the one placed on Salman Rushdie years ago -- was placed on Daniel.

The fatwa was just removed by the provincial Nigerian government that placed it, though one wonders whether true believers will care. What frightens me is where we are focusing our attention. This paper talked about the contestants whose good names were associated with the goings-on in Nigeria. Bennett herself bravely said that she didn't "agree" with the violence and didn't want to be affiliated with it. As though anyone with even a double-digit IQ would hold Miss Canada, Miss Israel, Miss Scotland or Miss Anywhere Else responsible for either what may happen to Lawal, or for the violence that has gone on in the past 10 days.

Speaking of double-digit IQs, Jurassic feminists -- never ones to ignore slights against women, real or imagined -- haven't been much better. Germaine Greer and a number of other commentators tried to suggest a moral equivalence between the pageant itself and Islamic law. Yes, a spectacle where girls prance about in a bikini and talk about world peace may be silly, but comparing the fact that some women freely choose to participate in it with the facts of harsh sharia law -- under which there is sweet little a woman can choose to do or not do -- is absurd. British Labour Party politician/actress Glenda Jackson said that, considering the bloodshed, the competition should be cancelled. Writer Muriel Gray said that should the show go on, the girls involved would be wearing "swimwear dripping with blood." Say again? The girls are responsible for the bloodshed?

The CEO of Miss World, Julia Morley, hasn't made things better, saying of Daniel that "a journalist has made this problem and we hope journalists can put it right." So Daniel should have written something toeing the party line, rather than challenge Nigerians to reframe things? The media started the riots. One wonders whether Morley, Gray, Greer or any of the other old darlings understand who created this problem (violent Islamists). Do they "get" what the real problem is? (Violent Islam). What's worse is how many mainstream newspapers, including a number of Canadian dailies, have referred to the "Christian/Muslim riots" in Nigeria, when the responsibility for them lies within the radical Muslim movement. If a Christian loony shoots an abortion doctor, we don't blame the abortion doctor. We blame the Christian loony, as well we should. Let's talk about who is truly responsible here, and about what truly matters.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Life lessons from Monsieur Dagenais

TORONTO - To us he was Bobby D, Daggy, Bob or, when we were being well-behaved, Monsieur Dagenais. I had the great fortune to be taught by Robert Dagenais when I attended Glebe Collegiate and was, like many who knew him and many who didn't, heartbroken to hear of his slaying on the weekend. His wife, Bonnie, was also killed when two burglars broke into their West Quebec cottage and shot the couple at point-blank range.

It was the tail end of the Trudeau era when I attended French literature and language courses taught by Dagenais. And like our prime minister at the time, Dagenais loved red roses and wore them in his lapel almost every day. I realize now how young he was at the time -- 33 or so -- but to us he seemed like a venerable, and funny, sage.

As is often the case in language courses, the desks were mostly filled by girls, and I don't believe it would be an exaggeration to say we all had a crush on Monsieur Dagenais. In fact, it used to make us ill, yet very pleased, to hear him gush (as he often did) about Bonnie.

With his big limpid eyes, his slight and very cute accent, he was utterly charming. He was also a natty dresser and considerably slimmer back then than his recent pictures reveal. I remember one Valentine's Day when a classmate of mine made me extremely jealous with her nerve -- she walked up to Bobby, handed him a red rose and gave him a kiss on the cheek. I'm not sure whether he blushed more than her, but as usual, he treated her and the situation with the utmost grace.

For there is nothing so insufferably pretentious as a group full of teenagers living through its first exposure to Sartre, Camus and Malraux. With Dagenais, we read La Nausee, L'Etranger and La Condition Humaine, and he navigated us all through those heady waters with ease, and in a second language, yet. Like teens everywhere, we thought we were the first people on the planet, apart from the old French guys whose books we were reading, to come up with deep thoughts about man, the existence of God, our place in the world and responsibility toward each other.

The height of teen cool for us, thanks to the influence of our French literature class, was dressing in black and going to cafes in the Byward Market and talking about existentialism. Pretty tame next to raves and ecstasy, but I do not once remember feeling that Monsieur Dagenais took all of us anything but completely seriously.

(I wish I could say as much for all my other teachers at the time).

No smirks from him, no rolling of the eyes, just an ear and a challenge when we needed it. His catch- phrase was "Questions, suggestions, opinions, commentaires, objections?" And he listened to every one of them.

It was my first experience learning to debate and speak publicly in French, and to write clear and logical arguments in that language. As someone who is fairly shy even in her own language, it could have been an ordeal, but it wasn't, because of the sense of confidence we had in our teacher. Still, he never let us out of our assignments. I can remember, on one occasion, trying to get out of having to talk in front of the class and Bobby giving me a steadfast "no. You can do it, and you will do it if you want to pass." Good for him. For though he was friendly, he wasn't there to be our friend, and he knew that. I read that he and Bonnie did not have children and part of me thinks they didn't need to, since they gave away so much of themselves to kids each day.

After university, I went to Paris, where I stayed for a number of years. There I learned French without the Quebecois accent and vocabulary, and came home all snobby and pleased with myself. On the weekend, I remembered the man who made me want to go to Paris in the first place. He was the man who gave us an assignment about L'Etranger, titled "Meursault, est-il coupable?" (Is Meursault guilty?). The irony of that question, and of the topics we discussed with Robert Dagenais years ago, cannot be lost on anyone thinking about how he and Bonnie died, the nihilism and stupidity of the act, and the number of young minds influenced by Monsieur et Madame Dagenais.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Mistry's finished with border checks. Now he needs a reality check

TORONTO - In various Canadian newspaper columns this week, Rohinton Mistry was declared a modern-day Rosa Parks, a modern-day Jew under the Nuremberg laws, a modern-day merchant in Munich having
his windows smashed on Kristallnacht while neighbours turned a blind eye. Oh, please. These comments represent the kind of righteous hysteria many Canadians have been spouting since Mistry announced the cancellation of his U.S. book tour earlier this month. The Indian-born Mistry decided to renege on promises to stop in six American cities because of what he felt was discriminatory treatment at airports. Mistry was touring the United States to promote his new book, Family Matters.

I do not doubt that Mistry had to undergo embarrassing questioning and luggage checks, even rude comments, while travelling in the U.S. But comparing him to Rosa Parks? Aren't we getting a bit carried away? First of all, that means Jean Chretien is Ike. I think not. But for a shared love of golf, I would not compare our leader to Eisenhower, who was a war hero, a superior military strategist, an enemy of communism and a man who showed, time and time again, that he would overlook his own beliefs and feelings in order to uphold his country's constitution.

Rosa Parks lived in a world where her rights were not upheld, where indeed, by law, she did not have equal rights with a white woman. Mistry lives in a world, where, because of the unfortunate vicissitudes of history, his luggage is likely to be checked. But if nothing untoward is discovered on his being or in his belongings, he can go back to his life, back to his book tour, back to nice hotels and appearances on Oprah, one of the most popular TV shows in the world. A show, need I point out, hosted by a woman of colour.

A Jew under the Nuremberg laws found his rights fast dwindling to nothing, friends and neighbours turning on him and, ultimately, he found himself on a train to a death camp, if he lasted that long. Is this what Mistry's life is like? Somehow I doubt it. He experienced the unpleasant experience of a security check and, perhaps a few unkind words, and then he was sent on his way. A Jew on Kristallnacht found himself under merciless attack from a mob, while "good" people closed their shutters and hunkered down until it was over. Is this what Mistry has gone through? Again, no. He found himself questioned by authorities and then let go. And not only have people not looked away, but most of his compatriots have rallied to his defence and made absurd and histrionic declarations.

Mistry is being, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit whiny. He commented that "when it (the security check) keeps happening every single time, you get into this convoluted logic, trying to convince yourself about why it's happening. 'Perhaps it's something about my beard, maybe I should change my beard.' " He characterized this line of thinking as "trying to appease a bad policy."

I'm not so sure this policy is bad. Unfair? Certainly. Foolproof? No way. But the fact is that the next terrorist will probably not be ethnic Japanese or Finnish or Scottish. And we should stop pretending otherwise. We should also stop pretending that the U.S. does not have good reason to be concerned about people from certain countries who currently live in Canada, given the number of terrorist operatives found living within our borders after Sept. 11. Sadly for Canadians and Americans of Arab or Muslim backgrounds, or immigrants from Arab countries who are not yet citizens, we must ask them to tolerate a period of forbearance.

As a foreigner living in Japan, I was fingerprinted. It was an odd experience. What was odd was that my German colleague was spared the ordeal -- nostalgia for the Axis, I gathered. Countries pick and choose, based on their history, who they trust and who they don't. On a trip to Israel, I was hauled out of the check-in line for a rather unforgiving search and questioning. But the El Al people had their reasons. I resembled the Scandinavian girlfriend of an Arab terrorist, a woman who had been helping her beau blow people up. It was humiliating, to be sure. But El Al has not had a hijacking in more than 30 years.

During the part of the book tour he did finish, Mistry was not sent to segregated hotels or made to drink from a separate water fountain. He should have kept things in perspective and honoured his commitments.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Yes, politically correct professionals, there is a Christmas

I was recently invited to spend an afternoon with a group of teachers. I've long had issues with teachers, because they always seem to be whining. And while I have been known to whine myself, I don't have a job where I get a good salary, finish work at 4 p.m. each day and get three months' holiday. So I hoped the teachers I was meeting with would change my mind. And ... they didn't.

Plaid-shirted and earnest to a man, they spent the first half-hour of our time together whin-ging about Mike Harris. Who? Isn't he long gone? Time to join a support group, people. Time to meet in church basements and work through the pain.

Anyway, after the Harris-bashing died down, one of the teachers told a story about how he had explained to a student-teacher that the phrase "Christmas is coming" was "culturally insensitive." Huh? Trustingly, as I had been told my questions were welcome, I put up my hand and said "excuse me, but how is it culturally insensitive to say Christmas is coming?" I added that it wasn't as though what was being said was "Christmas is coming and it's way better than anyone else's holiday!" That would be culturally insensitive, I said.

The wrath that then fell upon me was a shock until I realized -- at my advanced age -- that when people say your feedback is "welcome," what they really mean is "we want you to sit there and nod." One of the plaid-shirted crowd then spelled out for me, pointing a finger in my face, that "Christmas is coming" was a culturally insensitive phrase because "one-third of Canadians aren't Christian and that is reflected in the classroom. We want to be inclusive."

Now that's a point. I don't know if it's a good one, but it is a point. If that one-third of Canadians who aren't Christian were all of the same faith or background, then perhaps it would be a good point. Because then they would represent some kind of lobby and might have more reason to insist that their holidays be included on Canadian calendars and so forth. But the one-third of Canadians who aren't Christian are of many different backgrounds. And while I believe they deserve freedom of religious practice, and respect from other Canadians, I don't think they ought to feel that the mention of Christmas is some kind of attack on them. And I rather doubt that they do.

It has been my experience that most of the people who kvetch and carry on about diversity and inclusivity are white people. Immigrants to Canada generally have more important things to worry about and don't need to be patronized by the condescending majority. And, if one-third of Canadians are not Christian, then that leaves two-thirds who are, at least in name. And in a democracy, I think it is the majority that is supposed to rule, not the politically correct.

Even if the majority of Canadians were not Christian, this country remains one that was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and immigrants to this country know as much. They are not going to be surprised or traumatized by the fact that we talk about Christmas. The idea of a decorated tree or Santa Claus oughtn't send them reeling. They know they are not coming to Saudi Arabia. It should be noted, as well, that Judeo-Christian countries are probably the only ones in the world where we have this kind of debate.

I challenged my plaid-shirted friends with the aforementioned ideas, and was met first with a long silence, and then a with question from a woman who looked positively shell-shocked. "Are you saying," she asked, "that immigrants to Canada should adapt to our culture?" Um, yeah. When I lived in Turkey, I put away my miniskirts and made sure my hair was covered before entering mosques. In Japan, I tried not to blow my nose in public. In France, I argued with people a lot.

Here in Canada, we have reached new levels of the absurd. A friend of mine works in an office where she is not allowed to wish anyone a Merry Christmas. She has been instructed to wish people a happy "winter holiday," as though they were all headed off to St. Moritz for a week's skiing. And on that note, I'd like to wish my Druid readers a happy new moon ceremony tomorrow -- Oops! Sorry, that wasn't very inclusive of me. My werewolf readers -- who prefer the full moon -- may feel excluded.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Belafonte hits a sour note when he sings the blues at Colin Powell

TORONTO - Harry Belafonte and Colin Powell have much in common. They are both impossibly handsome men who seem to get more handsome with each new silver hair. They both look great in uniform. They are both of Jamaican background, both well-read and articulate.

They are both high achievers, idealists, men of integrity who have risen to the heights of their chosen fields and who aren't finished yet. And they have both worked within the system to get to where they are, to help pave the way for other visible minorities.

And that final point is one everyone seems to have missed in the furore surrounding Belafonte's recent dismissive comments concerning Powell. Belafonte has gone too far, we have heard, confusing political disagreement with below-the-belt blows and name-calling. And those things are probably true. But above all, Belafonte should keep in mind that if Powell is the house slave, then he is the house calypso singer, who married the master's daughter (his second wife is white) and helped organize the biggest, most mainstream, most cloying smarmfest known to mankind, the "We are the World" atrocity of the mid- 1980s. Powell may no longer live in the 'hood, but Belafonte has moved to Sesame Street.

Belafonte is a man who has spent his career wearing tight pants, low-cut floral print shirts and gold medallions and singing counterfeit Caribbean music in an affected accent for well-off white people at Carnegie Hall. Not to downplay his mellifluous voice and shining charisma, but Belafonte's career in music and film has largely benefited from his appearance -- not just his good looks, but his light complexion. He was acceptable to American audiences in the 1950s and '60s in a way that his darker-skinned contemporary, Sidney Poitier, was not -- though decades later the always-opinionated Belafonte would accuse Poitier of kowtowing to the white psyche.

A part in the very bad 1957 movie Island in the Sun, in which a romance between the Belafonte character and Joan Fontaine was suggested, would not have been given to a darker-skinned actor at the time, movie historians agree. And while Nat King Cole, about 10 years Belafonte's senior and also darker skinned, suffered from a lack of sponsors on his 1956-57 variety show (the first ever primetime television show in the U.S. hosted by an African-American), Belafonte took home an Emmy for his 1960 variety special. He was the first African-American to win that award. It has often been suggested that Belafonte was able to become popular across the board in the United States because he seemed "foreign," not a threat, not a black from home. The long-suffering Cole was the latter, a gentle man who got hell from the Klan for being on TV and hell from blacks for living in Beverly Hills.

Ironically, the same criticism that Belafonte directed at Powell has plagued him throughout his own career. He was accused of being an "Uncle Tom" by some civil-rights workers and by folk-music purists in the 1960s. His music -- and his manners and appearance -- were criticized virulently for being too "assimilationist" and, that most biting of insults, "too white." Such claims actually placed far too much importance not just on Belafonte's relatively light skin but also on his considerable popularity. Belafonte is successful -- the first recording artist of any colour to sell more than a million copies of an album -- the mantra went, therefore he has sold out. Sound familiar? Sound like something we heard last week?

For this is at the root of the Belafonte-Powell kerfuffle: the belief that if you are successful, you have forgotten your own.

After the civil war, Frederick Douglass gave some famous advice to African-Americans and newly freed slaves: "Agitate, agitate, agitate." Back then, that was what was needed. And it is sometimes needed now. But there are other ways to succeed and help others do the same. A cursory look at both Powell and Belafonte's careers should make it crystal-clear that neither gentleman could have avoided working well within the system.

In the antebellum South, slaves who were musicians were granted privileges other slaves could only dream of, including travel, getting to stay inside the master's house, eat the master's food and bathe and dress in fancy clothes before performing at plantation balls. If Powell weren't such a class act, he could throw out a choice insult or two along those lines in Belafonte's direction. Because the latter's comments are really only a case of the calypso singer calling the general black.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

In praise of all the Earth's living creatures, great and small

TORONTO - I took my kitties to church on Sunday. It was the day the animals are blessed, following the feast of St. Francis -- a man who was very nice to the critters -- on Oct. 4. I have never done this before and rarely go to church. I am concerned about one of my cats, Pushkin, who suffers from kitty bulimia, and I thought this might help. Besides, I have a friend who is an Anglican minister and she told me the high point of her year is the day the animals are blessed. It's a lot more pleasant, she says, to look out and see animals in the pews than a sea of people.

Woody Allen once announced that if five more years of therapy didn't help him, he was going to Lourdes. Pushkin is in the same boat. She lived on the streets until I took her in, and according to her favourite vet -- a man she has only hissed at a dozen or so times -- she has no "off" switch when she eats and there's not much to be done. But I figured a blessing couldn't hurt (beyond all the scratches I got sticking her and her brother in their carrier).

This week is World Animal Day in many countries, some on Oct. 6, some on the 7th and so forth. It's not co-ordinated but I think it's important. I'm an animal lover and an animal advocate, as much as I can be. This does not mean, contrary to what some might think, that I hold vigils in the forest with my little woodland creature friends, or that I think animals should have the vote. Though they probably wouldn't make worse choices than we do.

It means I think animals are living creatures who feel fear and pain and should benefit from the same legal and moral protections as us. It means I do not believe animals are here to entertain us, or to serve us without getting proper reward, kindness and respect for that service, or for that matter, to be eaten by us. I accept that some people are going to eat animals, however, and I have never given anyone grief for doing so. I simply suggest, when they do so, that they take care the animal in question had a decent life and humane death before they decided to fill their faces with him or her.

My pilgrimage on Sunday was interesting. I am an atheist and I have a hard time with the arrogant notion that humans are the sum of all creation and therefore deserve to lord it over everything else because of our superior intelligence. This is an argument often put forward by those who think animals are here to serve and entertain us.

If we took that argument literally, then I guess it would be all right for me to abuse and torture people who weren't as smart as me. What fun! According to that line of thinking, I guess people can beat their kids and make them jump through hoops when they're babies because they aren't very smart then.

I used to have a Christian friend who would roll her eyes at me and snicker when I would tell her about the volunteer work I do for animals. I pointed out to her that I never rolled my eyes or snickered when she talked about church. I also pointed out that if Jesus came back, I had a sneaking feeling that not only would he approve of my helping animals, he would probably join me in my work.

And he would probably give the thumbs up (if Jesus did stuff like that) to Pope John Paul II, who has said that animals are imbued with the same spirit as man, that animals have souls.

I just wish more of Christ's followers would reflect on the words of one of their fellow believers, pastor/medical missionary/vegetarian Albert Schweitzer, who wrote that "the human spirit can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to man-kind."

On Sunday, my Anglican minister friend read from Ecclesiastes: "I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts ... as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast." It was really beautiful.

Except for when Pushkin barfed all over the hymnal.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Abolish craven thinking about the guilt of the white race

TORONTO - It's a scary world where a novel by Alice Walker or Amy Tan is on the reading list of a university student's 20th-century English-language literature course, and books by William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway are nowhere to be seen. And yet this is so often the case, as a young friend just starting university revealed to me.

I knew things were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. That third-rate writers (and I think I'm being generous) should take precedence over first-rate writers because the latter happen to be white and male -- and in the case of Hemingway, a macho, hunting, fishing and womanizing white male -- is something I knew had been happening for the past 10 years, but I had hoped the tide was turning.

Then I heard about a magazine called Race Traitor, founded by Harvard academic Dr. Noel Ignatiev. Ignatiev found himself in the news last week for an article he penned in the current issue of Harvard magazine titled "Abolish the White Race." "Every group within white America," wrote Ignatiev, "has advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race." He goes on to say that abolishing the white race -- culturally, psychologically and emotionally on campuses and in corporations -- would rectify imbalances of the past. The article is sort of a composite version of what you'd find if you went to the Race Traitor Web site. Ignatiev, who seems to think white people are responsible for everything bad on this planet, is really no different from those who would have you believe white people are responsible for everything worthy of praise on this planet.

That aspects of North American history, specifically slavery and segregation, have led to deep schisms and "success gaps" if you will, is indisputable. What is objectionable is Ignatiev's "solution." How encouraging people to hate other people based on race, class or political passion, and to see themselves as members of a group or "community" (Lord, how I hate that word) rather than citizens of a country, capable of making choices, gains and losses on their own strengths, is ever going to help them is beyond me. When you find yourself in a hole, the saying goes, stop digging. History is full of proponents of Ignatiev's philosophy -- Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Milosevic -- if not his methods, and we all know how well those worked out. But Ignatiev encourages us to dig away, all the same.

Also objectionable, not to mention hopelessly naive, is Ignatiev's seeming belief that white people all stand side-by-side, unified in our goals and looking out for each other. Take a look around. There's enough hatred between various white people to fill a death camp. Many famous wars have been fought because of, and between, white people, often to the benefit of non-white people. Ignatiev has probably heard of the Civil War, just for starters.

Look at the current situation in Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe is doing what he can to abolish whites (literally) in that country, but he is also doing what he can to destroy his considerable black opposition. Not to mention that, as American journalist Paul Craig Roberts noted this week, "if whites had race loyalty or even racial awareness, wouldn't they do something about Mugabe's decimation of their brothers and sisters? One British regiment or one U.S. Marine division could topple Mugabe in a few hours. However, instead of displaying race loyalty, white governments are enabling Mugabe by sending him food."

White people are not all equal. And all whites are not "privileged," a word that is so often carelessly thrown about in these discussions. Ignatiev says he wants African-Americans to destroy the white "social construct" without having much to say about what social construct would be left. The ideas that Ignatiev puts forward deserve to be hooted out of polite society. It makes one wonder, at what price hate? And under the aegis of the esteemed Harvard, no less.

But should that really surprise us? North American universities, for the past decade or so, have not only become home to the quota and places where one reads Alice Walker over William Faulkner, but environments almost Stalinistic in their intolerance of "unpalatable" viewpoints. Unpalatable, that is, to the diverso-fascists, the feminazis and the politically correct pod people -- most of whom, interestingly, are white. (Ignatiev himself received two degrees from Harvard.)

Because he has provoked debate, we should thank Dr. Ignatiev. Let's make sure we also challenge and "deconstruct" what he has to say.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

And so, too, will Sept. 11 pass when a new tragedy takes its place

On March 11 this year, my mother called to tell me that she had been feeling sad. "You know," she said, "it's the anniversary." The anniversary ... my mind immediately wandered to what I had seen on the morning shows that day, a Monday: memorial services for the six-month anniversary of Sept. 11. "It would be 55 years," mum continued. And I realized she was talking about my parents' wedding anniversary. My father died seven years ago, four months after my parents' 48th anniversary, also on the 11th of a month, in July.

To borrow a line from George W. Bush, the 11th has been hijacked. This is understandable. And not just Sept. 11, but the 11th of every month. Each month this year, we have been reminded, in case we have forgotten, that it is two, six, nine, 11 months since that day last fall. And now at the one-year mark, the shock is fading to facts.

We know now the number of casualties is not what we had thought -- down from almost 7,000 to closer to 3,000, not many more deaths, in fact, than at Pearl Harbor, and less than at Antietam, Maryland. What was called "the deadliest day on U.S. soil" is now not that, coming second behind a battle that took place another September, in 1862. The Civil War still provides Americans with so many watersheds.

I know a man who was born on Pearl Harbor Day, and by that I mean he was actually born on Dec. 7, 1941. He is Czech, and never felt his birthday had any significance beyond the fact that it was his birthday, until he moved to North America at age 27. All of a sudden, he told me, his birthday meant something to other people -- something that got patriotic blood boiling and stirred up angry memories. Something that was marked with ceremonies and not just a cake.

This summer, I taught cross-cultural skills to a group of educated and intelligent Asian businessmen. When I first used the phrase "9/11" with them, they didn't understand. And not because their English was lacking. It was simply not on their radar. Important, yes. But their internal compasses were not forever jammed on Sept. 11. (Not to mention that for much of the world, it would be "11/9," since we do the dates backwards here.) Dec. 7, 1941 on the other hand, never needed to be explained to the Japanese among them.

Now, Dec. 7 takes a backseat to Sept. 11, as do June 6, May 8, Aug. 14 and another 11th, one in November. My Czech friend told me that on Dec. 7, 2001, his 60th birthday and the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, he noticed that he heard more speeches referring to Sept. 11 than talk about the United States' forced entry into the Second World War. My friend still enjoys hearing "Day of Infamy" jokes when he tells people his birthday, but that does not happen so often anymore.

John Still, in his book, The Jungle Tide, wrote that "the memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from." But we can hang something more personal from them.

For my mother, there are many significant 11ths. There was her wedding day, of course, and the death of my father. But long before that, there were others: Her favourite brother was born on April 11, 1919. He died on Aug. 11, 1944, at the Falaise Gap, some two months after being part of Canada's D-Day effort on Juno Beach. He is buried in a Canadian war cemetery in Normandy, and the dates are engraved there: the 11th to the 11th. This year, those days did not belong to her. They were seven- and 11-month anniversaries.

I have a friend whose birthday is Sept. 11. I was sending her a birthday e-mail greeting last year when I saw the news in its early stages and thought -- momentarily -- that perhaps a Cessna pilot had goofed. I mentioned it to her in the e-mail, and no sooner had I clicked on "send" than I knew it was no Cessna. "My birthday has been ruined," she announced shortly thereafter.

But a lot can change in 12 months. People are talking about celebrities and feeling free to hate each other openly again. And while the world tilted a year ago, it will tilt again. This year, the 11th of each month will not be singled out. And in 28 years, when my friend is 60, she will probably find, like my Czech buddy, that some other atrocity has bumped her birthday out of the top spot.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Why are we so afraid to learn about the faiths of others?

It's not fair but it is her call

Mother Nature made the final decision, it turns out. Tanya Meyers suffered a miscarriage Monday night.

Meyers is the 23-year-old Pennsylvania woman who, during her 10th week of pregnancy, found herself in the spotlight and embroiled in a legal battle with the baby's father over her decision to end her pregnancy. In late July, her ex-boyfriend, 27-year-old John Stachokus, won a temporary injunction to prevent her from having an abortion. Both she and Stachokus agreed that he was the father; that was not the issue. The issue was who got to decide whether the baby should even be born.

Stachokus's legal action galvanized anti-abortion activists as well as fathers' rights groups. Luzerne County Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Conahan, soon after Stach-okus's legal success, ruled, after hearing both arguments, that the baby's father had no grounds to interfere with Meyers's constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy before the fetus could survive on its own. In spite of the ruling, Meyers, according to her mother, was having second thoughts about her choice. And then she miscarried.

It's a really sad story. The fathers' rights advocates who supported Stachokus throughout the saga said that it was not fair that Meyers alone should have been able to make the decision about her and Stachokus's unborn child. Don't men who don't want to be fathers, they argued, often have to pay child support to a woman who got pregnant and gave birth without consulting them? Well, yes. That happens and it's not fair. But it is a chance anyone, male or female, takes when they become intimately involved with someone else.

What is really not "fair" is that women get to live through the wonders of carrying the children during gestation and get to experience so many of the joys of childrearing -- breastfeeding, just for example -- all alone. It is also not fair that women, frequently, are left alone to raise their children when some loser decides to bail rather than accept his responsibilities. We all have our crosses to bear, we all have things that work to our advantage. Still, anyone who has ever been romantically involved with anyone can tell you that the easiest part of any relationship is the not-getting-pregnant part (it's the rest of relationships that are a massive challenge). It's quite simple to remain childless. In fact, it's so simple I don't understand why anyone in the West -- except for a rape victim -- would ever become pregnant without wanting as much to happen. There are any number of birth control methods available out there, without a prescription, and the combination of two or more of them will pretty much always prevent conception.

In an ideal world, Stachokus and Meyers would have been married before Meyers got pregnant. In an ideal world, they would have both discussed things and planned on this child. But Stachokus and Meyers, it seems, have both behaved in far from ideal ways. Meyers, at her tender age, already has a two-year- child from another man, a man she is not married to. She only met Stachokus last fall and got pregnant this spring. Stachokus, clearly, has "issues." He is, by many accounts, abusive and certainly, his legal action would indicate, is manipulative in the extreme. In a way they seem like a match made in hell, curiously well-suited.

Having said all of that, it seems clear that Stachokus should not have won the right to force Meyers to have their baby. In China this week, the government introduced its new law on family planning and population, to take effect in September. In it, husbands will be able to take legal action against their wives if the latter are planning to have an abortion. I doubt if Americans or Canadians want to model themselves on a decision from a government not exactly famous for its consideration of human rights.

What is particularly distressing is how much the Meyers case has galvanized both sides of the abortion debate. Both sides seem unreasonable. And it brings home how nice it would be if we had an actual abortion law in this country. One where we could face the facts: The woman is the one who bears the weight during pregnancy, for better or for worse, and therefore should make the decision. And yet, it should be apparent, even if you are of the belief that life begins precisely at the moment of conception, that there is a difference between a four-week-old fetus and a 16-week-old fetus, that even an abortion law that favours choice should have limits.

For many of the pro-choice persuasion, however, admitting as much would be inconceivable.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

Ottawa, where cab travel can be taxing

Taxis are a necessity for the car-challenged in Ottawa. Unless, that is, you are willing to wait three hours for a bus, then pay a $17 fare and then transfer seven times in order to get to your destination, which is probably about three yards away. Slow boats to China would be faster.

Ottawa has no subway, no dogsleds, no flying carpets. Without a car, it's the buses you must take, and for me, in the heat, that's a hellish thing to contemplate.

So during a recent trip to Ottawa, I personally contributed more money to Ottawa cabs then I generally spend on FancyFeast for my kitties in a year -- and that's a lot. To make matters worse, my, like, very best friend in the world, a girl I've known since high school, a girl with whom I immediately regress into teenspeak, had her car in the shop. Like, oh my God!

The first mistake I made was thinking you could hail a cab on the street, like one can do anywhere in Toronto. Ottawa cabs only seem readily available at one in the morning in Centretown. One afternoon I stood on a busy stretch of Bank Street and watched about a dozen busy cabs fly by. So I took out my cell, called the easy-to-remember Blue Line number and sweet Jesus, within 20 minutes a kind gentleman showed up.

Calling for a cab certainly improves your chances of getting one in Ottawa, but within what time frame? One night I phoned for a cab and the woman who answered -- Doreen, if I recall correctly -- greeted me with a perky, "I believe you, honey," when I said, "I need a cab." Ah, I thought, it's that wonderful Ottawa Valley chirpiness, that down-home friendliness that you can find nowhere else.

After being assured there would be a cab outside my mother's building "soon," I went down to the lobby and waited. And waited. And waited. When I called back, Doreen answered. "Hi," I said. "I just called, well, not 'just.' About 25 minutes ago. I asked for a cab and it hasn't arrived."

"Oh," said the ever cheery Doreen. "Are you in a hurry?"

I toyed with the idea of answering sarcastically, of saying, "Oh no, I just felt like talking to you again, Doreen. I'd be perfectly happy to sit here for the next three or so hours, until, you know, one of your cabbies can be bothered to drive along this way." But I fought back the urge and said, "Well, I wasn't in a hurry when I first called you, but I am now." The cab showed about 15 minutes later.

The day after that, I felt I had learned my lesson and called for another cab to take me from Mum's place to a friend's place barely a kilometre away. "I need the cab very soon," I said, not to Doreen this time. The cab arrived quickly and off we went. But the driver did not know the way to my friend's house. He had not heard of the street and asked: "Can you give me directions?"

"Well," I hesitated, "I don't live here and I haven't for years ...um, shouldn't you know your way around?"

The cabbie reached for a map of Ottawa and handed it back to me. "You tell me the way." OK, I thought, do I get a discount? I read out the instructions and as he drove along each street he read the names out loud.

"And now we're going on along Hunt Club Road ... and now I'm turning on Paul Anka Drive ... and now we're heading up to the A & P ..." The play-by-play was amusing.

On the way back I asked the cabbie (a different one) if he had air conditioning.

"It doesn't work," he said. "Could you try," I pleaded, suffering in the humidity. He turned it on and lo, it worked, though not well since he left the windows open. Don't you think you ought to close the windows, I suggested. Begrudgingly, he complied, and the non-functioning air-conditioning worked just fine. "You're pretty demanding, ma'am," he concluded.

On my trip to the train station to return to Toronto, the driver was my little friend who didn't know his way around, the one who liked to say the names of the streets aloud. It was a fitting bon voyage for me but as nice he was, I just hope my girlfriend's car is like, so totally out of the shop next time I visit.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Sometimes the sins of the parents are visited on their children

I'm hooked on Court TV. And since early June I've been following California vs. David Westerfield, the trial of the 50-year-old engineer charged with the kidnap and murder of seven-year-old Danielle van Dam.

It is believed that Westerfield also raped the little girl, but her body was so decomposed when it was discovered -- a month after she disappeared -- that there could not be a charge. Westerfield, it is alleged, took Danielle from her home some time in the early hours of Feb. 2, assaulted her, killed her, put her body in his motorhome and took a trip to dump the blond Girl Guide like yesterday's trash. Westerfield has also been charged with a misdemeanour for possessing child pornography.

The trial is drawing to a close and will probably be sent to jury this week. If Westerfield is guilty, as DNA evidence indicates, he should at least be locked away forever, at most given the death penalty. One thing that may be considered a mitigating factor in the penalty phase of this trial, should Westerfield be convicted, is the relative role of Danielle's parents in her disappearance.

Brenda and Damon van Dam, it seems, have a "swinging" lifestyle, and the issue of whether that lifestyle should have been considered during the trial caused a furore in March. Many cried that it was an invasion of the van Dams' privacy, others said it was "irrelevant." Danielle, people said, was the victim of a random act of violence. It is an invasion of their privacy, but unfortunately, once your child goes missing, your privacy does as well.

What it is not, is irrelevant. According to U.S. crime statistics, under one per cent of the 850,000 children gone missing in 2001 were taken by total strangers. Samantha Runnion appears to be one of those rare cases. Most children are taken by a divorced parent and many by other relatives or family acquaintances. In other words, the decisions you make in terms of keeping your family together, and in terms of who you associate with, may haunt you -- and your child.

Judge William Mudd decided in favour of allowing some evidence of the parents' private life into the trial. And much of the testimony so far makes their neighbourhood of Sabre Springs seem like a regular "Peyton Place." We have Brenda and Damon, a good-looking pair in their late 30s, who, in spite of their wedding vows (and the fact that they had three children) saw fit to bring strangers home from bars for the purpose of wife-swapping. They smoked a lot of marijuana and had their sex parties in a locked- from-the-inside garage, presumably so their children couldn't accidentally stumble upon them in flagrante. Brenda, on the stand, told Westerfield's defence attorney that an evening during which she, her husband, and two other couples had group sex did not qualify as a "sex party." Denise Kemal, a friend of the van Dams, was defensive when it was suggested she had slept with two people other than her husband one night. "No," she said, "I only slept with one -- Damon."

The night Danielle was taken, Brenda was out partying with her girlfriends until 2 a.m. One witness testified that Brenda said of her and her boyfriend, "boy, I'd really like to take those two home." Brenda also, by many witness accounts, danced suggestively with Westerfield that night, though she denies it. Once home, Brenda did not check on her daughter but sat by as her husband "cuddled" with another woman. They had all smoked marijuana and had all been drinking. One of the doors was unlocked, the alarm system was tripped and their gate was open.

One theory as to Westerfield's alleged motivation is that he wanted to punish the van Dams for excluding him from their "fun," as he did not have a partner to bring to their garage get-togethers. It is not difficult to believe that Westerfield was titillated by their lifestyle. He also had good reason to speculate that he could get away with it, as there would be plenty of other suspects, given the number of low- lives and unsavoury characters the van Dams welcomed into their home.

Do not misunderstand. Brenda and Damon van Dam need compassion and sympathy, for not only have they lost their daughter, but they also must surely feel burdened by their choices. The only person who should be held responsible for the death of Danielle van Dam is whoever killed her. But these things are not always beyond our control. The greatest shame is that some of the van Dams' sins were visited on Danielle.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

A drink or smoke during pregnancy shouldn't get you all puffed up

Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London (England), found himself in the headlines recently for a reason unrelated to politics. At a party, he saw his pregnant girlfriend smoking, and intervened. Some sort of fight ensued and gossip columnists gleefully reported. A few months back, a pregnant Kate Moss caught it from the press and general public when she was photographed at a party with a drink in her hand.

And unknown women are judged. A six-months pregnant friend of mine, two weeks short of 41, recently found herself harangued by a waitress (who looked about 22) when she ordered a beer with lunch. She said, "Listen honey, I'm probably two decades older than you, I'm easily 10 times smarter than you and I have an ob-gyn. So I don't need advice from a waitress." She got her beer.

That we should intervene when we see a pregnant woman sniffing gallons of glue, shooting up heroin, guzzling cases of muscatel, smoking packs of cigarettes or bungee-jumping goes without saying. Yes, a woman's body is her own ... up to a point. But Livingstone's girlfriend was having one cigarette, and by all accounts it was the first one she'd had in weeks. Livingstone's behaviour proved he has some "control issues," not that he is a caring father.

Of course, smoking at any time, but especially during pregnancy, is stupid and self-destructive. Smoking is in no way good for you, is vulgar, costly, makes your teeth and fingers turn yellow, increases your chances of getting several diseases and gives you extra wrinkles.

Regular smoking during pregnancy increases chances of miscarriage and crib death, among other things. But there is no proof that a pregnant woman smoking, say, two cigarettes a month, especially when she is beyond the first eight weeks of her pregnancy, is putting her baby at risk.

Drinking, on the other hand, is not stupid or self-destructive. In moderation it is widely agreed to be beneficial to one's health.

And the hysteria around fetal alcohol syndrome is just that. Even the physicians who did the initial research and coined the term have said as much. The initial work, done by Ernest Abel and Robert Sokol in the early 1980s, seemed to suggest that even a drop of liquor during gestation would turn a baby into a slobbering, handicapped basket case. That became the received wisdom. The good doctors themselves, though, in 1991, issued a statement saying that "we now estimate that the incidence of FAS in the western world ... is about six times lower than our previous estimate." No one seems to have read that.

In studies since, Abel and Sokol have pointed out that FAS is most likely not related to drinking alone, but to combined factors, such as the mother's level of nutrition before and during her pregnancy, her education level, IQ, social class, previous health history, genetic susceptibility to disease, use of drugs and/or frequent smoking. In other words, if a pregnant woman drinks moderately, but also smokes, has an IQ of 80, eats a steady diet of meat and Cheetos and cohabits with a crack addict in a tenement in an inner-city, she is probably at a higher risk of giving birth to an FAS baby than is a pregnant woman who drinks a couple of glasses of wine a week, doesn't smoke, eats well, has an IQ of 125 and lives with her husband in an apartment on a nice enough street.

Well, duh.

No one knows what a safe amount of alcohol during pregnancy is. And if you want to err on the side of caution and not drink at all, more power to you. But even that is not a guarantee your child will be healthy. Preaching to a woman who has a drink or two during pregnancy is unseemly, especially as -- I would argue -- there are far worse things women do to their children after giving birth to them. Not breast-feeding them and sticking them in daycare are but two.

Anecdotal evidence alone should show us that light to moderate drinking during pregnancy is not a cause for concern. Most of our mothers drank during pregnancy. Mine had the occasional martini or brandy Alexander during all seven of hers. And none of us were born with that dreaded "low-birth weight" FAS fearmongers love to talk about.

Or were we? Four of us weighed nine pounds, three (including me) weighed in at 10. As mum likes to say, "I'm so glad I drank when I was carrying you all, because just imagine what you would have weighed otherwise."

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Welcome to Toronto: Sorry about the garbage, rats and politicians

Martha Stewart: Don't stir the pot before you try her recipes

Judging from the headlines, the news shows, the jokes about the possible feng-shuiing of death row and  crafts in the prison yard, the most important thing happening in the world right now is the ongoing investigation of Martha Stewart. My Lordy, it's splashed on the cover of bloody Newsweek. The possibility that the high profile CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. may have profited from insider trading has overtaken Arafat, Sharon, Osama, India and even JLo's divorce as today's top story. Most insider trading accusations get into very tiny print. But Stewart is not just a celebrity, she is an unprecedented phenomenon, and a woman.

People hate Stewart. I don't. The recipes in her popular magazine, contrary to the received wisdom, are not complicated and made up of foods no one but kings and gay men would want to eat. They are usually simple and healthy. Stewart's television show is uneven -- at times it seems like a parody of itself, but at other times you can actually learn something. A recent episode was devoted to pet care, something I found informative and hilarious to watch (as the ever calm Stewart gave a bath to a very concerned and not so calm kitten). Don't get me wrong. I seriously doubt Stewart bathes her own pets or does her own gardening or shopping. But that isn't the issue. People shred Stewart without ever having tried one of her recipes or listened to her speak. By many accounts, Stewart is not the most patient woman. And perhaps some of the glee out there is fuelled by people she snapped at while stirring one of her many pots.

What people don't get about her is her edge. They don't get the sarcasm in her voice -- even though her intonation never actually varies -- or the mockery in her eyes. They can't have seen her on David Letterman's Late Show where she willingly pokes fun at herself by reading Top Ten lists that take the mickey out of her entire persona. Stewart is a woman whose husband left her for a bimbo, and Stewart, apparently devastated, did the sensible thing. She took her hurt and anger and channelled them into linens, phyllo pastry, making decorative thumb tacks out of old buttons and becoming a millionairess many times over. You go, sister.

The centre of the current tempest in a teapot is under 4,000 shares of ImClone stock worth $228,000 U.S. To you and me that sounds impressive. To a woman worth hundreds of millions of dollars, it is insignificant. Consider the last large insider trading scandal in the late 1980s, where financiers were holding stock under hidden ownership and planting false rumours to help their cause and get rich. And here we have the already beyond-wealthy Stewart, who (maybe) heard from a friend that a certain stock might be in trouble and tried to avoid a loss. For the stock market to function properly, people need to act on information. Further, Stewart has been portrayed as the ultimate insider, when in fact she is not even a director at ImClone. What is being discussed is not years of conduct, but a single trade. Stewart has a good professional reputation, having stood by K-Mart when they declared bankruptcy.

So much of the anti-Stewartisms spring, I think, from snobbery. For Stewart has made tasteful housewares available to all through her inexpensive products. Having a nice livingroom is no longer something for a select few. She has succeeded in making life prettier for nearly all. Also, much anti- Stewart backlash comes from feminists who dislike what her very success seems to scream out: that looking after a home is something to take pride in. And, I suspect, a lot of women who feel mighty guilty about doing a bad job in their own kitchens aren't convinced Stewart is such a good thing.

The allegations -- and at this point that is all they are -- are serious. But even if they're true, put them in perspective. The focus should be on the person who may have told her secrets he shouldn't have, rather than on Martha who (maybe) did what most of us would have done.

I don't know if Stewart is guilty. But the notion that she may not be does not seem to have been entertained.

Martha Stewart stock has tumbled 34 per cent since the ImClone furor began and Stewart watchers, the ones who buy stock -- and not linens -- are worried and wondering how much she knew and when she knew it. But don't count Stewart out. Remember, Martha is a buy right now.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

Don't turn a blind eye when boys are sexually exploited by women

TORONTO - All people make a connection in their minds between sex and love. Except for men. Nah, I'm just kidding ... although reading about a recent legal decision in New Jersey could certainly give one that impression. However, I have been blessed with four brothers and I know from years of observation that they do have actual emotions, and a couple of the more evolved among them can even occasionally identify and quantify those emotions. And I'm sure my brothers aren't the only males out there with feelings.

Which makes last week's lenient sentencing of Pamela Diehl-Moore, the now 43-year-old New Jersey teacher accused of having a sexual relationship with one of her 13-year-old students, worthy of scrutiny and criticism. Many people in Diehl-Moore's community are angry that Judge Bruce Gaeta sentenced her to a mere five years' probation. "I really don't see the harm that was done here," the judge said. "And certainly society doesn't need to be worried." He also said the relationship may have helped the youngster "satisfy his sexual needs ... It's just something that clicked between two people beyond the teacher-student relationship."

I'll say. According to trial records, Diehl-Moore began inviting the boy, now 16, to her home during the spring of 1999. Over a period of six months, they carried on a "consensual" sexual relationship. Can a 13- year-old "consent" to sex with an adult? If the 13-year-old is male, apparently he can. For there can be little doubt that were Diehl-Moore male and the student a girl, Diehl-Moore would have been sentenced to prison, lest all hell break loose. The judge in this case seems to have fallen into the "nudge, wink" line of thinking, as though boys are by nature callous, as though somehow the fledgling emotional life and vulnerabilities of young males are not to be protected.

It is true that there are many teenagers, male and female, who would happily engage in sexual relations with certain adults. But that doesn't mean the adults should allow it to happen. It is also true that there is a difference between a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old. But we seem to forget that when the 13-year-old is male.

Consider the reaction five years ago when popular Tacoma, Washington teacher Mary Kay Letourneau became pregnant during an affair with one of her 13-year-old students. There was also a considerable nudge-wink chorus then, and she was given a short prison term. Even the victim's mother defended Letourneau. And it seems mere seconds after Letourneau was released, she became pregnant again by the same boy. She was subsequently locked away for a long time. Only now is Vili Fualaau, the father of Letourneau's second "family" (she already had four children with her husband) speaking openly about the negative emotional effects the relationship has had on him, not to mention that he became the father of two before he turned 16. Fualaau and his mother recently filed a lawsuit against their school district and local police for failing to protect him. (The jurors awarded the Fualaaus no damages, suggesting that perhaps Mrs. Fualaau was the one who ought to have been looking out for her son.)

There is currently considerable and justifiable outrage over the Catholic Church sex scandal. Boston Bernard Cardinal Law's failing memory -- his I-don't-recalls could challenge Bill Clinton's -- is reported on a regular basis. And every day it seems, another priest is accused, shot or kills himself. The priests in question have not behaved in a way very far off from Diehl-Moore or Letourneau. But because they engaged in relations many are uncomfortable even contemplating, we treat it like the outrage it is. No nudging or winking.

We are appalled that people in positions of trust took advantage while the church turned the other cheek. But the suicides of priests offer at least an indication that these people knew they had done something wrong. By all accounts, neither Diehl-Moore nor Letourneau thinks she has. In a way, it is difficult to blame the frisky teachers.

Reaction when an adult male has sex with a young girl or boy is one of outrage. But a grown woman with a young boy ... the prevailing sentiment seems to be that this is not a big deal.

Have we watched too many French films? I don't know. What I do believe is that if we start treating young males as though their emotional life matters, perhaps when they grow up they won't be so clueless when it comes to their own hearts.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

When the creator joins the ranks of the politically correct

TORONTO - Alan Watts wrote that you "can't get wet from the word 'water.' " I wish the people at Zondervan Publishing House had thought about that before they capitulated to politically correct gender-equity loony-tunes, creating a new edition of their already popular New International Version Bible.

Zondervan is the world's largest publisher of Bibles and it has recently decided to replace words such as "men," "son," and "he" with words such as "people," "children," and "they" in its just released Today's New International Version New Testament. The complete "inclusive" version is planned for a 2005 release.

I hate that I agree with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on this topic, but I do. Dobson is a radio personality and psychologist who advocates swatting your children when they misbehave and, like Robertson and Falwell, has that patronizing "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude about homosexuals.

True, Dobson's reason for railing against the changes in the Zondervan Bible are not the same as mine. In an interview in USA Today, he recently said that the new words "dilute the masculinity intended by the authors of Scripture." I wouldn't pretend to know what the authors of Scripture intended. But I think I'm more qualified to talk about this than Dobson and his posse because I do not believe in God. Therefore, I have no stake here, no romanticized, childlike notions about some guy in the sky who had his son killed to make up for our sins or who apparently made us in his image. Hard to believe when I look around me. As Woody Allen said in Love and Death, "You think God wears glasses?" (To which Diane Keaton replied "not with those frames.")

Organized religion is something I find tiresome, divisive and a hotbed of hypocrisy and violence. But for the openness and discussion allowed in Judaism and the vegetarianism of the Hare Krishna, little of it attracts me. So I am able to look at the Bible as exactly what it is: a book, a piece of fictionalized history with some magnificent poetry, worthwhile philosophy and cool ideas thrown in for good measure.

Ezra Pound called Ecclesiastes the most beautiful piece of poetry ever written (I concur) and I don't see how it could be improved by making the language in it gender-neutral. Would we make Shakespeare gender-neutral? Well, there are probably people out there who would, and, who, Horatio forbid, already have.

What I would say to them is what I've often said to feminist friends of mine (yes, I do have those, I just don't see them very often) who go all hormonal when someone says "he" in a story instead of "he or she": If you can be so profoundly traumatized, if you can be made to feel excluded, offended or lacking because of a pronoun, then you must have bigger problems to contend with in your life than a few measly gender-equity "issues." (Sweet Jesus, I hate that word). Run, don't walk, to your nearest therapist and work on that self-esteem.

Zondervan is actually an admirable holdout in the gender-equity wars, being one of the last to crumble. Even the usually gloriously intransigent Catholics have, in some North American congregations, used "inclusive" Bible versions, though the Vatican opposes that. But Zondervan's New International Version, with more than 150 million Bibles out there, is second only to the King James Version (which, praise be given, reads exactly as it did the day it first went to print in 1611) in terms of circulation, and therefore its newspeakisms are worth talking about.

A religious friend of mine (yep, I've got those, too), who also happens to have been indoctrinated into  pc-ism, told me he felt the changes could help communicate "biblical truth" to readers. Biblical truth? Isn't that something like "male sensitivity," "Canadian military" or "jumbo shrimp"? An oxymoron, I mean. According to Biblical truth, insects have four legs, bats are birds and Noah was able to get two of all the animals in the world (that's 50 million species, so 100 million critters) onto his ark in one day, even though even with the kind of boats and loading equipment we have today, that wouldn't be possible.

Which makes me wonder: If you can buy all of that, if you can check your IQ at the door and drop money into the collection plate, if you can suspend reality in such an impressive fashion, why on earth do you need "our Father" to be turned into "our Gender Neutral Parent Figure" or anything else?

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

No one ever said that fighting a war was going to be a picnic

TORONTO - That we should honour our soldiers and veterans, dead or alive, goes without saying. I am proud of the sacrifice my uncle made in the Second World War, being part of the D-Day invasion and, ultimately, giving his life at Falaise Gap in August 1944. I do my best to make sure he isn't forgotten. I am proud of my other uncles, who served as medics with our forces in Europe, also in the Second World War.

But the reaction to the deaths of four Canadian soldiers as the result of a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan almost a month ago was unprecedented. Even over the top. Not dignified, as soldiers deserve.

All four funerals were covered live on the major Canadian networks, as were the arrivals of the coffins beforehand and the memorial service afterwards. At the latter, our Governor General spoke and my brother asked, quite rightly, "Haven't the relatives of those poor guys suffered enough?"

Our reaction these past weeks stands in stark contrast to our apathy at the deaths of more than 100 Canadian soldiers in peacekeeping operations in the last 50 years. In the Balkans alone, more than 20 died, and some died from enemy fire. No funeral coverage, no governor general, no flag-waving or hysterical headlines.

I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that these four young men died in a friendly fire incident, not in battle. We have so overly romanticized our vision of ourselves as the great peacekeepers of the world (surely you've all seen the Heritage Moment about that? Excuse me while I choke back tears) that we don't like it when we have to admit that Canadian soldiers might actually be in a battle, or worse, be trying to kill someone.

Shortly after Sept. 11, the great military strategist Svend Robinson said that yes, perhaps Canadians ought to help the United States fight al-Qaeda, um, as long as no one gets hurt. Sorry Svend, people generally get hurt in wars. That's why they're called "wars" and not "picnics." And, when the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry -- the regiment in which the four dead soldiers served -- went to Afghanistan, Prime Minister Jean Chretien hinted that they might be brought back home should actual warfare begin.

The second reason for the reaction is that these four young men died at the hands of Americans, our favourite people to hate.

In a way, these deaths have been cynically exploited by the many Canadians with an anti-American axe to grind. NDP leader Alexa McDonough, always at the forefront of mindless, unfounded attacks on our neighbours, said she felt "rage" that we were being taken for granted by the U.S. I would suggest the opposite is true. We take them for granted.

Enemies on the horizon? Don't worry. The U.S. will keep them in line. Goodness knows we can't, what with the way our military has been castrated in the past three decades, old equipment, totally wrong outfits, and the most recent federal budget providing yet another slap in our Armed Forces' face.

An otherwise intelligent friend of mine said to me, quite snidely, last week, "Did you hear, Rond? The Americans have raised $5,000 for our soldiers. Great, eh?" She was speaking of some regular American citizens, everyday Janes and Joes, who had raised money for the families of our soldiers as a kind of apology/compensation. Well, I said, I'm not sure it's their responsibility to raise any money at all for our soldiers. It was a kind gesture, made by hard-working people. The proper reaction would have been "thanks." Our soldiers have their own administration which is supposed to compensate their families.

As for American responsibility, that will be (and may already have been) decided by an inquiry set up after this incident. An inquiry, I might add, which is headed by a Canadian, at the insistence of our prime minister, who seemed to suggest that Americans would not be as trustworthy in reporting their findings.

Finally, as in all things Canadian, we had to involve hockey. That U.S. fans booed our anthem at a game shortly after the soldiers' deaths was somehow seen as a deliberate attempt to add insult to injury. But expecting classy behaviour in a hockey arena is like trying to find a virgin in a brothel. Please look elsewhere.

Friendly fire deaths are an unfortunate fact of war, not a soapbox. The four soldiers who died deserve better than to be dragged down to the level of your average sports fan, or your average U.S.-bashing Canadian.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.
 

French voters must do their duty and defeat Jean-Marie Le Pen

TORONTO - Since National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of France's presidential elections, sending shockwaves to the sensible, there have been a number of reactions. One of the scariest and most ignorant is of the it's-not-that-big-a-deal-don't-worry variety. One such column, printed in this paper, said Le Pen was more a "Mussolini buffoon than Hitler tyrant." The columnist even said he got some "malicious pleasure" from Le Pen's success.

I would be loath to tell Italian Jews, and other Italians, for that matter, that Il Duce was simply a buffoon. I also do not see, having lived in France for five years, what pleasure can be taken from the election results, malicious or otherwise. As has been well-chronicled, this is a man who has denied the importance of the Holocaust, and who has said that people who have AIDS ("SIDA" in French) should be made to live in "sidatoriums." The word sounds eerily like "crematorium," dredging up memories the French would sooner block out.

What is more frightening is that the 17 per cent of the vote that Le Pen got two weeks ago is not really that far off from what he has won in the past. But this time, the French political system has allowed such a splintering of candidates that the moderate left couldn't hold its own.

I hope that by the time you read this, today's exit polls in France will be declaring Jacques Chirac president. I suspect they will, though what we must keep our eyes on is by how wide a margin. Most people approached by pollsters are ashamed, as well they should be, to admit they might vote for Le Pen.

Chirac was recently described in The Economist as "a washed-up, if amiable opportunist." In fact, he is possessed of great warmth and personality and can be gregarious, humorous and connect with a crowd.

But in terms of renewal, it's a different story. The French have been seeing Chirac, Lionel Jospin, Le Pen et al. for decades. Chirac has been mayor of Paris, prime minister, president, you name it. The French political class, and that includes Le Pen, seems unable to bring forth a fresh face.

The received wisdom about Le Pen's success is that it is a result of a failure on the part of Jospin and Chirac to listen to the concerns of the working class. This is somewhat true, but a simplification. His success is also a result of low voter turn-out, a chronic French condition. A French friend of mine told me this week: "I never vote, but on May 5 I will be obliged." It is inaccurate to suggest all of Le Pen's support comes from a disaffected blue-collar crowd. My own experiences in France can attest to that, and the crowd greeting Le Pen's recent May Day speech looked considerably more mainstream than in previous years. French fundamentalists come in all classes and, it must be said, harken back to a France that never existed.

But more than a million people in cities across France who oppose Le Pen gathered on May Day as well. One rally took place on the banks of the Seine at a memorial where, after Le Pen and his admirers marched seven years ago, some of his thug followers threw a Moroccan immigrant into the water where he drowned. The May Day numbers were a hopeful sign, but the French love to demonstrate and they do so with gusto. The key is whether enough of them love to vote.

One of Le Pen's preferred issues is that of immigration --stopping it. France is home to the biggest Muslim population outside the Arab world (a good thing, since without them, you would never find a convenience store open in France past 7 p.m.), and home to the largest Jewish population in Europe. This must confuse Le Pen, since he hates both Jews and Arabs, and seems to go back and forth between who he hates most. It's all too bleak.

The only bright side is that the French will now have to think twice before sneering at Americans. True, in 1968, 13 per cent of American voters chose George Wallace. But Wallace had evolved in his views, moving away from a racist platform and toward the mainstream. Had his career not been stopped by a bullet, who knows how much more he may have changed.

What we do know is that Le Pen is 73 and spews forth the same kind of fear-mongering he always has. He will not be moved. Fine, as long as he isn't elected.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

You're around all the time anyway -- mind if we just shack up?

TORONTO - A study produced by the Heritage Foundation in the United States last week indicates that married women are far less likely to suffer from domestic abuse than unmarried women who live with men. The study, based on the 1999 findings of the U.S. Justice Department, indicates that unmarried mothers who live with men suffer domestic violence at almost twice the rate of married women with children.

This shouldn't be considered news. Especially as it comes after years of statistics proving that the divorce rate in North America is nearly 50-per-cent higher among couples who lived together before marriage than among couples who did not. True, the divorce rate is already high, with estimates anywhere from 40 per cent to 60 per cent, but the fact remains that the rate is considerably higher when a couple has cohabited prior to that walk down the aisle.

A February study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that people who live together before taking their vows enter the marriage with a lower level of commitment. According to one of the researchers, "The couples who lived together before marriage showed poorer communication skills."

In other words, a woman will be treated better by her partner and will have more stability and a greater chance of a marriage and family life that last if she does not live with her boyfriend before marrying him.

Well, duh. For when a woman agrees to live with a man without asking for a real commitment from him first, she is telegraphing one loud and clear message to the universe: "I'm cheap, and you can have sex with me on a regular basis, a built-in housekeeper and help with the rent, all without giving me your name or giving up your freedom, because I don't feel I deserve any better."

Send a message like that to a man and why on earth would he not answer with a great big "yeah, baby!"

Send a message like that to a man and exactly how much respect do you think you will get from him? Not that that is any justification for domestic abuse, but it surely explains why living together before marriage increases the likelihood that you will become an "ex." Most importantly though, treat living together as though it were marriage, and how much respect do you think the institution of marriage itself will get?

I have heard, from friends, all the justifications:

- "We want to try things out." Well, if you are approaching a relationship as though you have to "try it out," then it's a safe bet it won't last. Human beings deserve a little better than to be "tried out." We are not Toyotas. Anyway, isn't that what dating is for? To try people out/on/over/under? That's when you find out if you're compatible, sexually and otherwise.

- "We're just as committed to each other as married people." No you're not. If you were, you'd get married. Anyone who actually believes that cohabitation is "the same" as being married is someone who is seriously deluded. Living together is the same as keeping that door slightly ajar, just in case you want to run, and it doesn't matter if the government has decided that you are "common-law married" after an arbitrary amount of time. True, you can still leave someone after you have married them, but it isn't as easy, and you will probably think more carefully about your decision because of the complications involved.

- I think the worst I've ever heard was from a girlfriend who decided to move in with her boyfriend because "we're together all the time anyway, and we're tired of paying two rents." Ah, how romantic. I know that's what I've always dreamed of hearing a man say to me: "Rondi, you're around all the time anyway, and we could save money on rent if we shacked up. How about it, blondie?"

I am not suggesting living together should be outlawed, or that people who do so should wear scarlet letters, but it strikes me as odd that the government will bestow marital status on a couple who cannot be bothered to make that heroic trek all the way to City Hall on their own.

Would it not be better to create policy that encourages marriage and discourages cohabitation? And, if we legalized gay marriage -- in my books, a good idea -- the need for "common law" would be forever removed. It is difficult to argue that society doesn't benefit from stable couples and stable families, but if people can't make the decision to commit to each other themselves, how stable could their relationship be?

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

Listen up ladies: It's not Vogue's job to make you like yourself

TORONTO - Former Bazaar editor Kate Betts wrote an apology to Renee Zellweger in last Sunday's New York Times. The offence? Last year, Betts scrap-ped a Zellweger Bazaar cover because the actress had put on weight for her role in the film Bridget Jones's Diary and, according to Betts, "Zellweger's girl-next-door charisma was nowhere to be seen." Betts's Times piece was a designer mea culpa of sorts, uncovering fashion's "secret" -- skinny is preferred! Who knew? Now that's a "secret" right up there with Jean Chretien's accent.

The story was interesting to me as in it, Betts implied that fashion magazines are by their very nature insensitive to heavier women and don't give a hoot for their readership. But if anything, great efforts have been made by editors at fashion magazines to soothe the fragile egos of the more-endowed-with- flesh among us. A recent issue of Vogue titled "The Shape Issue" was devoted to women "of all shapes and sizes" as the comforting phrase goes. Seventeen and other teen magazines are featuring more fashion layouts starring size 12 girls. And there is at least one magazine out there -- Mode -- devoted entirely to the anti-Kate Moss crowd.

None of this is because fashion editors are sitting around saying, "Gosh, those fat women look great in designer clothing, why didn't we see it before?" No, it is because fashion editors are smart enough to know that such gestures make them look good, make them look kind, make them look as though they  actually believe your self-esteem is their problem.

Your self-esteem isn't their problem, of course. Nor should it be up to Kate Betts, Anna Wintour, Calvin Klein or anyone else to make sure fat -- or any -- women like themselves. It is entirely understandable that Klein would prefer his clothes to be worn by someone who is a size 6, rather than a size 16. But it is no longer politically correct to say as much, or to say that if Vogue were full of pictures of Roseanne and Mama Cass, you wouldn't buy it.

But the fat-acceptance movement -- as though we have an option -- and the hysteria around eating disorders have helped guarantee such reactions.

Five years ago, I wrote a story for a women's magazine about this very issue. I suggested that being overweight isn't healthy, that patting overweight women on the back is not exactly in their best interests and that a fashion magazine is just that.

A paean to fashion and to looking good, not to self-love. (Ah, if only those things actually went together. Wouldn't life be easy?) For the record, I also said that showing larger women wearing designer clothes was fine and dandy, just not the dire necessity it is often purported to be.

When I finished the piece, the editors were all aglow. "You've said what I've always thought but haven't been brave enough to say," one of them cooed. "These arguments really need to be made," sighed another. My sister, who is, shall we say, buxom, read it and pronounced it entirely "reasonable." But as the months creaked by, the piece kept getting bumped, only because, I was assured, "something more time-sensitive came up."

Finally, an editor took me aside and told me the publisher had seen the piece and was "uncomfortable" with it. When it did appear, more than a year after it had been purchased, it ran in a considerably subdued and edited incarnation. It had lost the little bite it had.

I must have underestimated the sensitivity of readers, though, because all hell broke loose. Absurd numbers of letters, for a mere 1,000 words of copy, piled into the magazine office. To a woman (they were all written by women), they were angry. One teenage girl, in a letter I have framed because it was so glorious, told me, "your entire article is totally gross." There was so much mail I was initially asked to pen a reply to my "fans." That idea was cancelled, again I was told in a whisper, because of the uncomfortable publisher.

Many of the women who wrote me asked what size I was, as though that mattered. For the record, I'm 5-10 and a size 10 to 12, depending on the time of the month. But I don't make a living the way Zellweger does. And I'm sure Renee did not allow the Bazaar decision to send her reeling. She probably knows it isn't up to Kate Betts to help make her feel attractive.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

Unfortunately, some modern artwork is just about deficient IQs

The exhibit Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art at the Jewish Museum in New York was already controversial when it opened earlier this month. The show features works by 13 European and American artists -- four of whom are Jewish -- and has been accused of trivializing the Holocaust.

Among the "oeuvres" in the exhibit are a Lego concentration camp, canisters of poison gas with designer labels, busts of Josef Mengele, bar codes that morph into Holocaust victims, a famous Margaret Bourke- White photograph of newly liberated Buchenwald inmates with the image of artist Alan Schechner holding a tin of Diet Coke inserted among them, and a collage of movie stars portraying Nazis. Charming.

Jewish Museum curator Norman Kleeblatt, the grandson and great-grandson of Jews killed in the camps, explained away some of the works for the less enlightened among us. The Lego concentration camp? It shows how "innocent things can be perverted and turned into implements of destruction." The designer poison-gas cans? They show how you can "make something glamorous out of something that is poisonous."

Ah, now I get it. That's deep. Tom Sachs, the mind behind the designer gas cans, surely didn't help his case with recent comments in the New York Times Magazine: "I'm using the iconography of the Holocaust to bring attention to fashion. Fashion, like fascism, is about loss of identity." And clearly, some modern art is all about the loss of IQ points.

Menachem Rosensaft, the son of Holocaust survivors and a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, said he found it offensive. "This is not a First Amendment issue. It's a matter of moral judgment." Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel echoed him, saying while he did not doubt the good intentions of the artists, he also believed that "to turn a tragedy unparalleled in history into a grotesque caricature is not only to rob it of its meaning, but also to turn it into a lie. I call it a betrayal."

The exhibit isn't the first to cause a stir in New York. Last year, then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani became incensed by a photograph at the city-funded Brooklyn Museum of Art. Called Yo Mama's Last Supper, it showed a nude, black woman surrounded by disciples. Giuliani and the museum got into a similar flap in 1999 over The Holy Virgin Mary, a portrait of Mary decorated with elephant dung. But people are wrong to make comparisons, as many are, between that controversy and Mirroring Evil. The Holocaust actually happened. Whether Mary was the mother of a god, or just a mother whose kid became a carpenter is open for debate. The horror of the Holocaust is not.

Still, I admire Guiliani for his willingness to take a stand. New York's current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, on the other hand, stated, through a spokesman, that he found "the Holocaust and anything associated with it offensive." But he wouldn't comment on Mirroring Evil.

Right after the Second World War, Holocaust survivors chose not to speak, or were discouraged from doing so. After the Adolf Eichmann trial, things began to change. Survivors felt less shame, and the rest of us, perhaps suffering delayed guilt feelings, were ready to listen. There were so many movies, documentaries, books and plays that bigots held it all up as proof of the famed "World Jewish Conspiracy."

And now, tragically, though we are not silent about the Holocaust, it appears to be acceptable to turn it into kitsch, treat it with disrespect and excuse it in the name of "art." Other artists, people say, offended the sensibilities of their day. Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling fuelled outrage. Yes, it did. But comparing that ceiling to a Lego death camp is like comparing champagne to Kool-Aid.

I am not suggesting the exhibit should be closed. I believe it to be a matter of discretion -- and timing. There are still survivors. Something this tasteless should maybe have been given a rain delay ... of about 100 years. In the meantime, perhaps we can get over our naive notion of the artist as great free-speech martyr and accept the fact that some are just, well, tacky.

Blocks away from the Jewish Museum, The Producers plays to sold-out houses. If you don't know, the play, originally a movie in 1967, is about two schemers who plan to overfinance a huge flop and pocket the excess budget. To their astonishment, their surefire bomb, a musical comedy about Hitler, becomes a huge success. Who knew Mel Brooks was so prescient?

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

Wherever we find war-crime suspects, let's prosecute them

TORONTO - Fifty-six years ago this week, Winston Churchill delivered a speech at a small college in Fulton, Missouri. Most of us can quote part of it: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." So, soon after the Second World War, Churchill said out loud what many had been thinking for some time: That the necessary alliance between the Soviets and the free world was over, and that fresh alliances would have to form. And if those ominous words, portents of a dangerous new era, seem as distant as the dinosaurs to us now, they are also proof that there is nothing new under the sun.

At the time of the Fulton speech, the Nuremberg trials were in full swing. In fact, the speech was made the day before the prosecution, with the final words of the Soviet segment of the presentation, rested its case. While there could have been no question that the prosecution, led by American Robert Jackson, had proven its case against the Nazi defendants beyond reasonable doubt, Churchill's speech nonetheless gave glimmers of hope to some of Hitler's acolytes.

In his book, Nuremberg, Joseph Persico describes the scene: "The defence counsels held up their newspapers so that their clients could read the Churchill headlines. Knowing smiles flashed from defendant to defendant." Soviet staff at the courthouse became anxious and Hermann Goering "virtually did a jig in the dock." He believed, as did Hans Frank, Alfred Jodl and others, that the new world order would guarantee not only his life, but that most of that life would be spent on the outside. Rudolf Hess predicted that Goering would "yet be the fuehrer of Germany."

Mercifully, that was not how things worked out. Justice was served. The defendants listed above -- as well as others -- were hanged, except for Goering, who beat the hangman with the help of cyanide. Others, such as Hess and Speer, were imprisoned, and a couple were acquitted. The Cold War may have begun, but in the courtroom the temperature remained the same. Still, from the beginning, there had been tensions between all the teams that made up the prosecution.

Plus ca change. There are still old Nazis out there posing as beloved grandfathers and good citizens, many in Canada. In a St. Catharines nursing home, 91-year-old Jacob Fast, deaf and suffering from Alzheimer's, is accused of misrepresentation and may be stripped of his Canadian citizenship, the first step that could see him tried elsewhere for war crimes. It astonishes me how many people I speak to about Fast actually feel we ought to just "forget about it." Or, they say, if he has Alzheimer's and does not remember what he may have done, what is the point of prosecution?

The point is this: Other people remember what he may have done; prosecution is also about punishment. His case brings to life one of my mother's favourite expressions: "The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine." And grind away, I say. Wherever we find old Nazis, let's nail 'em.

But don't forget the "young" ones, either. Last week, NATO forces launched a raid in a remote region of southeastern Bosnia in an attempt to capture war-crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic. The raid was botched, but a NATO spokesman in Bosnia-Herzegovina said, "We will try again, you can be sure of that." Karadzic has been on a war crimes "most-wanted" list for more than six years, since being indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. In particular, Karadzic is wanted for the slaughter of thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995. He is thought to be guarded by a group of loyal militia as well as some Serbian Orthodox clergy.

The public relations coup for the West, if it captures Karadzic now, cannot be overstated. Since Sept. 11, the United States has been particularly sensitive, some might say overly so, to the reactions of Muslims to its policies. And since then, the U.S. has received help from the Bosnian government in the transfer to Guantanamo of six Algerian terror suspects. This has caused many Bosnian-Muslims to cry American hypocrisy: Why help them send anyone to Cuba while Karadzic eludes capture?

Better yet, why choose? There may not be a new iron curtain; it's more like one that's been there for a while without our having noticed. But whatever its strength or height, we shouldn't forget about Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic. Not any more than Churchill would have wanted Goering to become a post-war fuehrer.

Rondi Adamson is a freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

And the winner of the gold medal for petty anti-Americanism is ...

TORONTO - The Winter Olympics will be over tonight, mercifully, and in honour of this long-awaited day, I'd like to announce the winners of the Rondi Adamson Medals at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

Gold medal for sordid tale of media power and mob mentality: I am the only person on the planet who has never seen a Star Wars movie, and I understand this sets me apart from the rest of the human cesspool. Now, apparently, I am the only person on the planet who thought the Russian skating pair deserved the gold medal -- and that there should have been just one gold awarded. Well, except for the considerable number of figure-skating experts who got sweet little press in the orgiastic fury following the competition. Many of them, when allowed to speak, have pointed out that the Russian pair, Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, skated a far more artistic and daring routine than Canada's beloved twosome. A sportswriter for one of our national papers, appearing on Rex Murphy's CBC radio show, told the listening audience that he "had to admit" there were many in the know who felt Jamie Sale and David Pelletier only merited a silver.

Indeed, the Canadians skated what I thought was a boring, schmaltzy, elongate-your-arms-and-neck-and- pretend-you're-Peggy-Fleming type routine, complete with appalling music (Love Story? Oh please!) drab costumes and little that was captivating. The one moment that was even remotely interesting was when Pelletier lifted Sale over his head and her pants seemed to get pulled up a bit. And that would only have been interesting for men or lesbians.

The Russians, on the other hand, were athletic and vibrant. They may have stumbled somewhat technically, but their artistic interpretation more than made up for it. Surely this is why separate marks are given for artistic interpretation and technique, and surely this is why those marks are averaged out?

That Sale and Pelletier were content to accept a gold medal they won with the help of the media and the angry masses is their own business, I suppose. If, as they have repeatedly claimed, what's important is that they know they did their best, then surely they ought to have carried on silently and contentedly with those embarrassing silver medals around their necks. Instead, they took their case to the court of Larry King.

It was stunning how widespread the coverage of Skategate was, and how quickly the received wisdom was pummelled into people's brains, not to mention how reluctant those brains were to offer it even the slightest challenge.

Gold medal for happiest agent: Sale and Pelletier's agent, obviously. He or she must be wholly thrilled these days, and has taught the skaters exactly how to behave: Be brave and gracious, but do make sure everyone sees that lower lip quiver.

Gold and silver medals for most absurd sport: Ice dancing and ski jumping, respectively. Both could be improved, though: Ice dancing if they ice danced down the bobsled or luge track, and ski jumping if they did it while smoking or talking on a cellphone.

Gold and silver medals for best names: Apolo Anton Ohno and Irina Slutskaya, respectively. Slutskaya's parents, I suspect, had little choice where her last name was concerned, and that is why she gets the silver. Ohno's, on the other hand, chose Apolo for their son, and that's worth a gold in my books.

Gold medal for proving that the one and only 'Great One' was Jackie Gleason: To Wayne Gretzky, for his ode to victimhood, and for, along with Sale and Pelletier, making Canada the international spokesnation for Chronic Whining Syndrome.

Gold medal for tackiest costumes and worst hair: The figure skaters. Far from being too sexy, most of the women look like country stars, or like elders at the Church of the Latter Day Sacred Sequinned Miniskirts. And someone should tell those ice-dancing men that they are not at a Fabio lookalike contest.

Gold medal for petty anti-Americanism: Ah, so much to choose from. One painful morning last week, I was watching Canada AM and the hosts were mocking Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric because they pronounced Pelletier's name "Pel-teer." Apart from the questionable level of professionalism involved in such a smug display was the hypocrisy demonstrated two seconds later when those same hosts gleefully introduced a montage of clips of American television coverage of Skategate. First Leno, then Rosie ... you get the picture. In other words, "Gosh, those Americans are stupid ... but they noticed us!"

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

Celebrity deaths leave real martyrs spinning in their graves

TORONTO - 'Canadians never sounded as intelligent as when they were talking to Peter Gzowski." So said Silken Laumann, the woman who apparently was not able to read the side of a Benadryl box a few years back, on the day of Gzowski's death. Now, I suspect that what constitutes "sounding intelligent" in Laumann's books may be different than in mine, but I thought the fulsome quote was telling.

I know it is a natural human inclination to exaggerate the greatness of someone (or in this case, someone's career) when that person dies, but isn't this Gzowski worship a little overblown? When I turned on CBC Newsworld that Thursday night, I briefly considered the possibility that Jesus had come back from the dead and died again. But no, it wasn't that. It was, apparently, that Jesus had been with us all along in the form of Peter Gzowski. Oy vey.

The reactions in most of Toronto's dailies the morning after were along the same lines. In fact, they pretty much amounted to this: "Why him, Lord?? Why? Whhhhyyyyyyy??? Oh please God, take me instead! Take me instead!!" When I heard our Governor General being interviewed the day after, I should have known how bad it was going to get, and avoided watching or listening to the CBC -- not much of a sacrifice -- for a while. But I was foolish.

This is not an attack on Gzowski, so stop clicking that mouse right now if you're writing an outraged letter, please. I am simply wondering about the level of coverage his death received, and the reactions people had. One news clip showed people weeping on the streets, something, my father once told me, that did not even happen on VE-Day.

The CBC coverage over the days following made my point. True, he was one of their own, but what I witnessed was horrific. Painful montages of "man-in-the-street" interviews, followed by panels of "famous" Canadians, including the "famous" Douglas Gibson, president of McLelland & Stewart. And, since our public broadcaster is always desperate to prove it is hip and diverse, one panel included someone from either the Barenaked Ladies or the Tragically Hip and also that Inuit girl singer, I can't remember her name, but she looks like Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of the new Oprah's Book Club choice.

"He brought us together" seemed to be the comment du jour. "He made Canadians proud of who they were" was another variation. Isn't this what people said when Frank Shuster died? Or when Pierre Trudeau died?

First, may I suggest that Canadians come up with better comments about our high-profile dead? And second, may I suggest that Frank Shuster's career was far more deserving of such genuflection? More Canadians enjoyed Wayne and Shuster specials -- on the CBC, might I add -- than listened to Morningside. And surely more of us can quote from Wayne and Shuster sketches than can remember the name of the person in Placentia Bay who made the best potato pancakes in our Dominion. Heck, Frank Shuster was even offered a career in the United States -- the dream of many Canadians -- and turned it down because he wanted to come home. Talk about a Canadian hero.

Gzowski's years on Morningside were commendable, of course, as was his work for literacy, but let's keep it in perspective. He reached an audience of one million, in a country of 30 million, so I don't know about his "bringing us together." He was also not "Mr. Canada." He was "Mr. CBC" and probably also "Mr. CN Tower." His romanticized vision of the North aside, his point of view was very much that of the Toronto media elite, vaguely leftish and extremely urban.

Journalist Claire Hoy, speaking on the Michael Coren Show soon after Gzowski's death, pointed out that even though he had been co-author of one of the biggest non-fiction best-sellers in Canadian history (By Way of Deception), he had never been interviewed on Morningside.

"There is a club in Canadian media, and he was one of the ringleaders," Hoy said, "and if you're not part of it, you're chopped liver."

A memorial service was held for Gzowski a week after his death and was televised on the CBC. The usual suspects were trotted out, and that's fair enough, but when it was the top item on CBC news that night, I thought about ... oh, Daniel Pearl? Canadian troops overseas, wearing totally wrong outfits? The former is a true media hero, the latter something that ought to concern all Canadians.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

Here's what the modern American female soldier is wearing

New in 2002: The politically correct disaster-relief worker

TORONTO - The day of my father's funeral, my mother, desperately trying to displace her grief, obsessed aloud about whether or not we had enough crackers for the reception. People, she assured me, will complain. Mum, I said, no one on this planet would be tacky enough, in your hour of loss, to ask you if you have any more Ritz boxes tucked away in the kitchen somewhere. I was right: No one said a word, though we ran out of all kinds of things.

I thought about that exchange a week after Sept. 11, when Canadians whined about George W. Bush's alleged snub to us in his speech to Congress. Canadian nationalists were tacky enough to press their neighbours about something trivial when they should have been offering comfort and condolences.

The only thing more humourless and self-absorbed than a Canadian nationalist, of course, is a feminist, and leave it to a group of them to turn the rescue-and-recovery efforts at Ground Zero into a gender-equality litmus test.

It all started when the National Organization for Women (NOW) put out a video called The Women at Ground Zero. It featured closeups and slow-motions of all the dust-covered, brave female rescue workers and volunteers at the World Trade Center site. Innocuous enough, if perhaps embarrassingly earnest and definitely a waste of money.

But soon after the video was produced, the lobbying began, starting with a comment from New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The former first lady, speaking of the video, asserted that women had played a "crucial" role at Ground Zero on Sept. 11 and the days shortly thereafter, and that they would continue to do so in helping to rebuild. Mrs. Clinton has never been one to let the facts interfere with her opinions, and this case was no exception. A couple of quick phone calls to the New York City fire department later, I was informed that less than 30 of the city's almost 12,000 firefighters are women. So much for "crucial." Maybe what Mrs. Clinton meant to say was "negligible." I make those slips of the tongue all the time.

If that wasn't bad enough, Kathy Rodgers, president of NOW's Legal Defence and Education Fund, announced NOW's willingness to file a "gender-discrimination" lawsuit in order to get at federal relief intended for the WTC efforts. Why? According to a Dec. 28 story in the Washington Post, Rodgers and her NOW cohorts view the relief funds as "the best chance in years to move thousands of women into higher-paying jobs." In other words, NOW wants to use federal relief funding intended for victims of Sept. 11 to promote its own agenda, in particular, affirmative action.

This selfish nonsense could be dismissed, if not for the fact that it is getting serious attention. Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. House subcommittee on terrorism and homeland security, says she plans to "monitor" relief spending to "ensure gender fairness." Harman also issued a news release stating that the role of women had been "substantially overlooked by the media and Congress" and replaced by tales of the "heroic men" and, you know, that isn't fair. She also made this rather frightening comment: "We must all make it our fight to raise the profile of women combating terrorism."

Oh yes, we must. That is the most important thing in the world. Am I the only one who can't decide whether to vomit or laugh when I hear that kind of thing? It is particularly interesting that much of this brouhaha centres on firefighters, one of the jobs in which Rodgers feels women are under-represented. Many of the standards and physical tests required to become a firefighter have been watered down over the years in order to help women make the cut.

Personally, I would rather survive a fire thanks to a man than have a woman try, and fail, to save me. And I have a feeling most women would rather not burn to death so that "she died for gender fairness"  could be written on their tombstones. But that's another matter.

The issue here is focus. The focus at Ground Zero should be rebuilding and recovery. The focus for the relief funds should be family members with no more breadwinner, and also recovery.

The focus should not be the childish self-absorbedness of women  stuck in some feminist parallel universe. Kim Gandy, NOW's president, quite rightly attacked Jerry Falwell for his ignorant homophobic comments following Sept. 11, saying he was promoting his own agenda. But are Gandy and her friends not doing exactly the same thing?

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2002 All Rights Reserved.

The silliest stories since the invention of sliced peanut butter

TORONTO - Writing a column just before year's end is challenging. I could do a "resolutions" story, but since I never make any except "don't fight with mum" and "be less opinionated and more open to the notion that I could possibly be wrong about things," and since I never go the distance on either, anything I write would be unconvincing.

There's the "headline of the year" idea, but that's just as banal and anyway, 2001 only contained one big story worth fussing over: Sept. 11.

The year about to end however, contained several smaller stories, many worth fussing over, and even if not, that has never stopped me before (see my second resolution, above). And because of Sept. 11, they mostly got ignored, at least by me. So I'd like to put my two cents in on some 2001 headlines.

1. "Dying boy has last wish granted -- to go on a deer hunt." Yeesh. Now here's a tough one. Not which side to come down on, but to talk about. Anything that involves dying children makes people mad. But a young fellow with a horrible disease decided that he couldn't think of anything better to do, in the little time he had left, than to slaughter a fellow innocent. What's worse is, his family and friends and angry letter-to-the-editor writing people cheered him on and he got someone to pay for his wish. No, I don't mean the preyed upon, though it paid with its life; I mean a charity. Apparently there is an entire charity ("Hunt of a Lifetime" -- whose lifetime?) devoted to such endeavours.

Yikes.

I'm truly sorry the child was ill, but one would like to believe that someone who is dying might learn compassion. More important, since children learn from their parents, one would like to think that one of the adults in this child's life would have sat him down and said something like: "You know how sad you are about dying? Well, that deer/elk/moose probably won't like it much either."

It's one of those stories that makes me think there is no hope at all.

2. "Pre-sliced peanut butter to appear on supermarket shelves before the end of 2001." Peanut butter is, it cannot be argued, the food of the gods. It's what they eat in Valhalla and on Mount Olympus, I'm quite certain. And I think that if there had been peanut butter in ancient Israel, Jesus would have been responsible for the Miracle of the Loaves and the Many Jars of Skippy (super chunk), rather than that loaves-and-fishes thing. Who knows? Maybe more of his "followers" would have stuck by him as a consequence.

So while I applaud the efforts to make peanut butter more easily accessible to toddlers, say, it does seem to send children one very loud and clear message: "Mom doesn't love you."

3. "PETA launches anti-dairy campaign." The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals launched a campaign discouraging children and teenagers from drinking or eating dairy products, and a lot of folks, including -- surprise, surprise -- several dairy manufacturers, got their nipples in a bind.

First, let me say that I eat cheese. I love cheese. Almost as much as I love peanut butter. But I know I shouldn't eat it any more than I should drink milk or eat ice cream. Cow's milk is for baby cows.

Every time you eat or drink dairy you are suckling off another species. I think that ought to tell us something. The only species we are meant to suckle off is our own. However, most of us don't get enough mother's milk, if we are lucky enough to get any at all. If we were meant to drink cow's milk, Mother Nature would have had our mothers' breasts fill up with cow's milk when she was carrying us. Use your common sense.

4. "Ceramic penises stolen and replaced with flag." Artist Susanne Walker, whose anti-domestic violence oeuvre Hangin' Em Out to Dry (21 brightly coloured ceramic penises suspended from a clothesline) was stolen from a public library in Colorado and replaced with an American flag, said the theft "made a joke of the pain and suffering" of battered women. Gee, Susanne, I would say your "artwork" itself makes a joke of the pain and suffering of battered women.

5. "The CBC identified as possible al-Qaeda cell."

Oops! Sorry. That wasn't a headline from 2001. That was just the conclusion I came to watching our public broadcaster during the weeks following Sept. 11.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Some celebrities just don't understand when it's time to go

Can I be Frank? No, you can't: Why would anyone pay to see George Clooney when they can watch 'The Voice' in the real thing?

Ocean's Eleven is one holiday movie I don't plan to see. Not because I think it will be bad, not because of my deep hatred of both George Clooney and Julia Roberts, but because it is a remake of a Frank Sinatra movie.

The original Ocean's Eleven, made in 1960, was not that good. But it had Frank in it (who, even if I were a man or a lesbian, I'd take over Roberts any day). Respecting Sinatra's legacy is reason enough to leave the original be. As today would have been his 86th birthday, it's a good time to think about that legacy.

Frank Sinatra was "The Voice." (It enraged and astonished me when Scottish welder/singer Russell Watson released a CD earlier this year titled The Voice and no one called him on it.) No one's phrasing was purer than Sinatra's, no one's technique more perfect. He could have sung about linoleum and made you feel like falling in love. As my father used to say, "Only Sinatra could take a stupid song like New York, New York and actually make you sing along." Recently deceased George Harrison's beautiful Something got its greatest treatment from Sinatra in his 1980 Trilogy. And Woody Allen, making a list of things that made him happy in his movie Manhattan, put Sinatra at the top.

I grew up in the original Sinatra- worshipping family. His records, movies and persona were our holy trinity -- one more worth worshipping than that other one, I am convinced -- and where you slagged him at your own risk. The occasion of his death, May 14, 1998, was one of the very few times in my life that I have received e-mail from all four of my brothers. One of my nieces, who was 10, remembers being awakened that morning, with her eight-year-old brother, and told the news, as though it should mean something to them. My sister mockingly refers to pale Sinatra-imitator Harry Connick Jr. as "Harry Crooner junior."

Unsuspecting visitors to our home, making the usual disparaging comments about Sinatra's Mafia connections, would be treated to the full "anyone who worked in Las Vegas in the 1950s and '60s had to hang around with gangsters" rebuttal, and the argument would be allowed to go no further.

All my siblings and I can sing every song with the same inflections and variations as Frank, and I believe we all know every word of the monologues from the classic Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie album by heart. One of those monologues included the line Sinatra got from Joe E. Louis, and which my dad never tired of repeating: "I feel sorry for people who don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel for the rest of the day." Many can aspire to Sinatra's swagger and style, but who can match it?

His image has been forever tainted by the underworld connections and, because of that, so much of what he did -- his musical genius, his courage on civil rights, his personal generosity -- has gone unappreciated by most people. After his death, Lena Horne told the story of how one night in the 1950s, Sinatra took her to dinner in the restaurant of a hotel where she was performing. The maitre d' tried to prevent her from taking a seat and asked, "Who made the reservation?" Sinatra replied, "Abraham Lincoln." Horne was allowed to stay.

African-American musicians who travelled with him in his Harry James and Tommy Dorsey days, before he was famous enough to get any glory for it, tell of his refusing to stay in the better hotels unless they were allowed to stay, too. More often than not, he ended up staying with them at "coloured hotels." Such decisions earned him respect from many -- and an investigation from Joe McCarthy and his Un- American Activities Committee.

In the early 1990s, as he approached his 80th birthday, a wave of sentiment ushered in some much- deserved attention but, unfortunately, it involved Frank singing with younger "artists." The Duets album, released in 1994, inspired this comment from my brother: "Why on Earth would you want to listen to Frank singing with Bono, when you could listen to just Frank?" Touche. And yet it sold well. Some people have aspirations to good taste, and aren't quite smart enough to buy a Sinatra/Basie collaboration instead.

So I'll skip the new Ocean's Eleven and pray there are no Clooney/Roberts or Pitt/Aniston remakes of Robin and the Seven Hoods or Pal Joey in the offing. Clooney's Aunt Rosemary, a friend and colleague of The Voice, ought to have taught him better.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Call me sexist, but those male war correspondents are dreamy

People are still talking about a story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. Given the short memory most of us have, this is remarkable. The story was a piece by Tunku Varadarajan about female war correspondents. In it, Varadarajan focused on their appearance, criticizing the hair, clothing and speech patterns of several female reporters. He also gave praise, in particular, to Canada's Lyse Doucet for being "unostentatious."

Ashleigh Banfield -- Vara-darajan called her "fine-boned" -- was incensed. In an interview with a Canadian Press reporter last week, she called such musings "despicable" and decried her reputation as an "infobabe." The Web site of the Poynter Institute, a U.S. journalism school that monitors the media, has been home to a rousing message-board debate on the matter. This week, a critic in a Toronto newspaper called Varadarajan's story "snooty and sexist."

But isn't the appearance of any television reporter important? And wouldn't Banfield, for example, use the fact that her looks appeal in her contract negotiations? People talk about her glasses all the time. Isn't something that makes a reporter easily identifiable a good thing from the point of view of a network executive? Couldn't Christiane Amanpour use her British accent -- Varadarajan made fun of it -- as some sort of "listen-to-how-serious-and-authoritative-I- sound" card in her contract negotiations? And with regard to Amanpour, surely it would be far more "sexist" to write a story about how she has a toddler she ought to be looking after rather than risking her life in war zones. I have yet to hear anyone speak about that, and yet as far as I'm concerned, that's far more worth getting riled up about. What on earth is she thinking? What on earth did she have the baby for?

And does anyone believe we don't take note of male journalists' appearance? I tried a little word association, saying the names of certain newsmen to friends, and here were the responses: Peter Mansbridge? Bald jokes, and cynical comments about his private life. Ian Hanomansing? "Great dresser." Mike Duffy? "Fat." "Balding." Gwynne Dyer? "Who?" No one said, "Oh my, what a grasp of the issues he has," or "no other reporter talks about Mullah Omar the way he does." It could be that I have shallow friends, but I don't think my crowd is so different from the rest.

With newsmen, we focus on the outside as much as with newswomen. Arthur Kent was "the Scud Stud." Dan Rather was taken to task -- mocked, really -- years ago, in Afghanistan, when he appeared on camera in the flowing robes and headdress typical of the region. Peter Jennings' rumoured plastic surgeries have been the subject of much whispering and Tom Brokaw's speech patterns are regularly mimicked. Geraldo Rivera's departure for Afghanistan has been greeted with countless quips about his famous womanizing, such as: "Wow, those Afghan women had better put their burqas back on if they know what's good for them." The producer of the Michael Coren Show, in booking me for a panel that included Peter Kent back in April, asked me if I had any qualms about sitting next to a man prettier than me. No, I said (but then I guess the producer did, since I got bumped).

Banfield dyed her hair when she went to Pakistan -- or rather, I believe she let it go back to her natural brown -- and was astonished, she says, that her decision got so much press. Does anyone think that if CNN's blond Nic Robertson dyed his hair brown, people wouldn't joke about it?

And speaking of Robertson, am I the only one who has noticed his huge Prince Charles-like ears? That he has been wearing the same shirt and jacket for two months now? Don't you love his craggy, weather- beaten, Clint Eastwoodesque face? And what about that crease between his eyes? If it gets any deeper, he can keep his pens there. Don't you get tingles when you hear his cute little accent, though?

Of course, no one's accent is better than Alessio Vinci's. Alessio, CNN's guy in Mazar-e-Sharif, has sort of  an Italo/British thing going on. He's dreamy, too, with bedroom eyes and little orphan gloves -- you know, the kind with the fingers cut out. OK, he sometimes looks like he forgot his hairspray in Rome, but can you imagine the great names you could give your babies if you married a man named "Vinci?" Leonardo, for starters, and then ... oops. Sorry. I'm being snooty and sexist, aren't I?

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

How dare you call me a glamorous, sassy, young woman?

Keep feminism out of this, please

If only they had something to say

TORONTO - That one should reply when one is spoken to strikes me as a basic principle of good manners. At least that's what my parents taught me.

But it is apparently not a view shared by members of the small group of protesters that has been  hovering near the U.S. consulate in downtown Toronto. I am not talking about Tuesday's Ontario Coalition Against Poverty gathering -- though there are similarities -- but of the motley assortment of people who, on and off since Sept. 11, have been making standing on University Avenue holding placards their way of avoiding constructive activity. Most of them look like undergrads, decked out in plaid shirts and bandannas, and they all look like people who have benefited greatly from the freedom and prosperity the United States is currently fighting to save.

Beyond being lazy, they have bad manners. Recently, I asked one of them, holding a placard that read "Homes, not bombs," if he thought the two were necessarily mutually exclusive. Surely, I suggested, we can have both homes and bombs. No answer. I asked another, holding a sign that read "War is not the answer" what she thought the answer was. Nothing there either, unless you count an impressive sigh a response. And so forth.

We say that times like these bring out the best and the worst in people. They also bring out platitudes galore, such as those found on the banners of these inchoate protesters. Let's debunk, shall we?

"Homes, not bombs." Need we make a choice? I think not. But even if we did, I'm not sure what good a home would do if a terrorist decided to fly an airplane into it, or send its owner an envelope full of anthrax. None of us wants war, but Osama bin Laden et al. have not given us a choice. Personally, I would rather see the money spent on bombs used to feed pigeons, but that would be in the best of times. These are not the best of times, and we need to make bombs. We also need to drop them.

Which brings us to "War is not the answer." Well, depending on the question, yes it is. For example, if the question is "How should we respond when maniacs fly airplanes into buildings?" then "By waging war" is definitely the answer.

Violence has solved many things, including things like Hitler, and it was the constant threat of violence  that helped contain the Soviet Union. In fact, one could argue that not enough violence during the Persian Gulf War at least added to our current situation. As Gen. George Patton said in the fall of 1945, "The politicians never let us finish. They always stop short and leave us with another war to fight."

Bombing people back to the Stone Age (or up to it, in the case of Afghanistan) does, in fact, work much of the time. During the final months of the Second World War, the Allies razed certain German towns and cities and, of course, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Afterwards, the U.S. was able to civilize and democratize both Germany and Japan, to the great benefit of all. Ever since, both those countries have mostly behaved.

By far the most embarrassingly absurd sign (unwittingly, I imagine, given the people involved) was one that read "What about freedom of speech?" What about it, kiddo? You're standing in front of the consulate of a country that has just lost more than 6,000 civilians to religious zealots and you're questioning that country's response to the madness? Some of you are even blaming the victim. And no one is stopping you. Speech doesn't get much freer than that.

True, two journalists in the U.S. were fired for criticizing President Bush in the days following Sept. 11, but to suggest they were censored is ridiculous. Those were not cases of free speech being threatened, but rather, of columnists being fired. No one has prevented them from submitting work elsewhere and, indeed, both gentlemen have appeared on television since, offering their side of the story.

And firings have not just involved those attacking Bush. Ann Coulter was fired from the National Review for writing that we should invade the countries that harbour terrorists, kill their leaders and Christianize their people. Those first two suggestions were fairly reasonable, I think, but two out of three wasn't enough, and Coulter lost her column. Again, it was a firing, not a muzzling.

Free speech is alive and well on this continent. Just ask the participants in the speechless, impolite vigil on University Avenue. I only wish we could fire them.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto freelance writer.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

It's OK to watch television

TORONTO - There was a surreal moment on TV Thursday night when Dan Rather, looking sombre after President George W. Bush's primetime news conference, announced: "The premiere of Survivor III: Africa will begin right after these messages." How did the famously emotional Mr. Rather feel, one wonders, having to say that? Angry? Embarrassed? Dirty?

That last one would well describe not only how I felt watching Mr. Rather doing a Survivor III promo, but how I felt watching Survivors I, and II, period. And I'm a big Survivor fan. Later Thursday, the hosts of The View and on The Tonight Show made comments to the effect that "in these times" Survivor was not only not of interest to people, but downright "inappropriate."

I find that amusing since Survivor, let's face it, is never "appropriate." It is something you watch for the  sheer joy of seeing shameless low-lives sink lower, of seeing attractive people in tiny pieces of clothing, of seeing the kind of treachery we all experience at the office or in romance played out from a safe distance. At the best of times, you want to have a shower right afterwards.

Since Sept. 11, the appropriateness of much is up for debate. The Emmy Awards? They were cancelled twice, and now there exists the very real threat the event will be held at a military base. I say threat because having the Emmy Awards at a military base would be, I think, infinitely more inappropriate than just simply having them at their regular location. Bill Maher's comments on Sept. 17 (the appalling "we have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from thousands of miles away" spiel) were beyond inappropriate -- try treasonous --but he is still on the air.

It is beyond banal to say that we need distractions, that we need Reality TV, because actual reality is so horrific these days. It is beyond cliche to say that watching CNN's green-screen coverage of the military action in Afghanistan is the "new Reality TV." And I won't go anywhere near the "if we change our lives, they win" sophism, because as a result of Sept. 11, we will surely have to change our lives. We will have to increase security, pay closer attention to our surroundings, our neighbours, our mail and our words.

The mistake people are making is confusing "our lives" with "TV."

TV is just TV. And you can look at Survivor two ways. You can say network executives are pond-scum or you can say that life goes on. And if Survivor manages to destroy Friends for once and for all, time spent watching will not have been wasted.

Rondi Adamson is a freelance writer in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Laura Bush rises to the occasion

TORONTO - It has become fashionable to say that the private lives of politicians do not matter. When Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky became public knowledge, for example, the overwhelming reaction seemed to be a collective rolling of the eyes and a very loud "whatever." A leader's private life, it was argued, does not impact on how he serves his country.

To a large degree, I believe that to be true. There have been great leaders with a less than perfect family life (FDR), and less than perfect leaders with a great family life (Jimmy Carter). I would vote, in a flash, for someone whose vision inspired me, even if his or her choice of spouse did not.

But that is not to say someone's choice of spouse is not a reflection on that person. And Laura Bush reflects clearly and definitively that George W. Bush is a man of impeccable taste, at least where wives are concerned.

Like many, I have been impressed with Bush himself these past four weeks, and grateful that, however questionable the method, he won the U.S. election last year. Were it President Gore, he would be lecturing everyone, proving he could pronounce the hijackers names properly, rather than displaying the so-needed human touch -- and listening skills -- we see from Bush. Laura Bush has been right beside her husband, displaying that humanity.

Appearing on Oprah last week, Mrs. Bush said that when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, and once she had spoken to her daughters, she phoned her mother. Not, she said, to reassure her mother, but because she needed reassurance herself. (I did the same thing, for the same reason). She said that since her husband became president, their routines have more or less stayed the same: He gets up first, makes the coffee and feeds the pets (my kind of man!). The woman who told her husband, when they became engaged, that she would marry him provided he promised she would never need to make a speech, has come forward with sincerity and confidence at a difficult time.

Mrs. Bush would have some good reasons to fear the public, given the current general attitude towards women who do things like take their husband's name, choose not to hand their children over to strangers and make their family their priority.

It was only 11 years ago that her mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, was roundly dissed by undergrads at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Mrs. Bush Sr. had been asked to deliver the commencement address there, and a group of snotty, spoiled, Gloria Steinem wannabes signed a petition protesting her speech. Why? Because her "only" accomplishment in life was her family. Mrs. Bush Sr. handled the "we're career gals and you're not" brouhaha as all the Bush women seem to handle difficult times -- with humour and class.

Contrast that with the near semi-worship of Hillary Clinton that went on while her husband was in office, and that still goes on today. Mrs. Clinton's accomplishments are undeniable, but her choices in regard to her private life are something else altogether.

I find it odd that feminists adopted Mrs. Clinton so passionately as their poster girl, since her personal choices seem a throwback to another century. Staying with a man who persistently humiliates you and repeatedly cheats on you is probably the worst message a woman can send to young girls. Mrs. Clinton's angry, tight-lipped denials of her husband's philandering only made her look foolish. Funny, I thought feminism was about no longer tolerating such terrible treatment from a man, about women deserving better (like, say, what Laura Bush has).

But Hillary is anything but foolish. She played the victim when it  suited her, the loyal wife when it helped and distanced herself from Bill when necessary. Smart? Yes. Admirable? I don't think so. Ambition is a good quality, but not when it costs you your dignity.

Laura Bush has handled much with grace, including her twin daughters' teen misadventures earlier this year. At one point in George Bush's brilliant speech of Sept. 20, he looked up at his wife and winked at her. It was a moment of clear connection, when you could see he got so much strength from her. And vice-versa.

In fact, the only thing I would begrudge Laura Bush is that, for such a beautiful woman, she dresses so dowdily. But again, I think she's just being a good wife, not wanting to offend any of her husband's possible supporters.

Of course, an admirable First Lady doesn't always indicate an admirable First Husband. I mean, I think the world of Aline Chretien.

Rondi Adamson is a freelance writer in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

In this war, we are American

TORONTO - I knew it would happen, but I didn't think it would be so soon. Only two days after the terrorist attacks on the United States, the anti-American drivel was already rearing its ugly head.

At a work function that night, I ran into a newspaper editor, a British man with bad teeth -- believe me, the writer in me wishes he had had wonderful teeth -- who opined that he had been disappointed in coverage by the American media because they weren't "presenting the other side." What "other side" would that be, I wondered? Was he suggesting there was some rationale for Sept. 11?

Frighteningly, many Canadians have begun spewing forth the same kind of flummery. I had hoped, when these events unfolded, that we would finally get off of our impossibly smug, high horse where our neighbours were concerned. But, apparently, even the murder of more than 6,000 civilians can't help us put our insecurity in proper perspective.

On CBC Radio the other day, I heard someone say "the United States should try to figure out why people hate them so much." And on these pages on Sept. 12, Susan Riley wrote --the victims' bodies still warm -- that "it is worth asking if this latest attack had anything to do with the recent United Nations' conference on racism and the United States' refusal to join the chorus against Israel." She also cited other possible reasons for the attack "worth asking about."

Of course, it is not worth asking about "reasons," and Americans should not waste their time trying to figure out why people hate them, because the alleged reasons are not relevant. If there were peace in the Middle East tomorrow, if Israel were annihilated (a fond wish of extremist Islamists), if we could turn back time and prevent American soldiers from "desecrating" holy ground during the Gulf War, the people behind Sept. 11 would still find other "reasons" to attack.

Read one of Osama bin Laden's manifestos. His intentions are as clear as Hitler's were when he wrote Mein Kampf. These terrorists, spread out over many countries, angry because their own governments have failed them, are destroyers, pure and simple, and they are evil. It is not hyperbolic, or "rhetoric," as yet another CBC report claimed, to describe them as such. Others have criticized American  intelligence, saying it failed to protect the U.S. properly. But American intelligence can only be blamed  for having failed to imagine the level of barbarity out there, for having failed to understand that people could do such things.

The response of our leaders has not been impressive. On Monday, Svend Robinson boldly stated that we should only get involved in a war if we can be sure no civilians will get hurt. First, I would like to thank Svend for confirming my belief that most New Democrats live in a dream world. Then, I would like to tell him that the question of whether civilians are going to get hurt in this war was rendered moot on Sept. 11. And our prime minister's responses have been mealy-mouthed, at best. He is willing to say that we will stand by the U.S., but exactly what that means is something he won't clarify. He has yet to promise that Canadian forces will join any mission, saying that at this point such talk is hypothetical.

It is not. This generation, until now so fortunate, will surely be forced to dig in for the long haul. We  cannot be neutral here, and Canada for once ought to lead the pack, instead of always being the last to join. Riley, in her aforementioned column, asserted that Canadians are safe "because of our relative harmlessness" and that  "our best protection may be distancing ourselves from U.S. foreign policy."

But the kind of violence we saw on Sept. 11 could happen in Canada, and those who refuse to grasp this are dangerously delusional. Our "best protection" will be in aligning ourselves with the United States --yes Svend, even if we have to be mean -- and getting over our feelings of superiority.

I have received countless e-mails this week from my Muslim friends and former students in the Middle East and Arab world. Their pain is twofold: That their religion has been hijacked by a group of fanatics and calumnied in the name of something insane, and that so many good people have died for no reason. "I hope you Americans don't hate us all," wrote one of them. "We Americans" don't. And in this war, we should recognize ourselves as just that.

Rondi Adamson is a freelance writer in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Killing children concerns us all

TORONTO - The case of Andrea Yates has afforded us -- apart from the curious spectacle of celebrities professing empathy for a confessed multiple-murderess and people blaming everyone but the perpetrator for the crimes -- a clear view of the never-ending stupidity and hypocrisy of certain feminist groups.

NOW, the National Organization for Women, is a prime example of the latter. Last week, the Houston area branch of the group, HANOW, announced a "support coalition" to raise funds for Yates's legal defence, and also to "raise sympathy" for the Texas woman. HANOW encouraged people to send "cards or notes of caring" to Yates.

NOW has even taken things one ridiculous step further. At its national conference in July, NOW's then head, Patricia Ireland, said the Yates case revealed the United States to be a "patriarchal society where women are imprisoned at home with their children." All women at home, Ireland seemed to imply, feel a murderous impulse toward their children as a result of living in a male-dominated society. Such language. Not since the days of Germaine Greer ... If it weren't so laughable, it would make me nostalgic.

In reality, postpartum depression (PPD) occurs in about 10 per cent of new mothers, and a desire to commit infanticide is not among its symptoms.

Postpartum psychosis, what we are told Yates suffers from, occurs in about one per cent of new mothers, and with that condition, the threat to children is more pronounced.

But NOW has managed to make it sound as though all women suffering from PPD could possibly commit infanticide, and as though children are only in danger of being killed if their mothers stay at home. Such assertions are a perfect way to discourage women with PPD from seeking medical help. Many of them, after the public demonization of their condition, and even their choice to stay home with their kids, may be afraid of being viewed as potential baby killers should they talk about their problems.

The generally negative attitude NOW has traditionally taken toward stay-at-home moms has been replaced with a patronizing "you poor, pitiful victims" type of compassion. Making women who stay home with their kids into martyrs, or portraying them as potential nutbars, is no way to help anyone.

Karen Johnson, NOW's executive vice-president, said in a CNN interview last week that it was her organization's place to support Yates -- as opposed to supporting, say, Nikolay Soltys, the California man charged in the killing of six family members -- because postpartum depression is "a woman's concern, a gender issue." I would venture to say that Yates's husband and, if they could speak, their four slain sons, would also count it among males' concerns.

And speaking of Russell Yates, Johnson said NOW would continue to support him provided he is "supporting his wife." In other words, should the poor man ever come out of his shock and be angry with the woman who killed his children, he will no longer be worthy of compassion. Ah, you gotta love feminists.

Many in NOW's camp have been critical of Yates's husband, saying he forced her to have so many kids, forced her to stay home with them, forced her to home-school them. This infantilization of women, this notion that men can "force" us to do things, that a grown woman like Yates was incapable of asking her doctor for birth control pills or of simply telling her husband she didn't want to stay home, is frightening.

It represents the most archaic view, one that would seem at odds with feminist ideology, but one that  groups such as NOW espouse at their convenience. We deserve equal pay, of course, but we are by definition malleable, ever at the mercy of men.

NOW would do better to raise funds for research into postpartum illnesses, rather than continuing to spread misinformation about a serious disorder. Getting the real facts out there, perhaps setting up local support groups, this kind of thing would be a better use of NOW's time than its current obsession: turning a murderer into St. Joan.

And as for some of NOW's ideas of ways to support Yates -- a march, a "media watch" of the case to make sure no one is "exploiting" it (can you say the pot calling the kettle black?) and a candlelight vigil -- I hope it cancels all of them and puts that energy elsewhere.

Except I like the idea of a candlelight vigil -- for Yates's dead six-month-old daughter, Mary, and for the girl's four brothers, all of whom were covered in bruises, according to the coroner, an indication they had fought with all their might to stay alive as their mother held them under the water.

Rondi Adamson is a freelance writer in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Lament for our anthem

Senator Vivienne Poy feels our national anthem should be changed. The lyrics "in all thy sons command" could be offensive to women who might interpret them literally. I agree the lyrics need to be changed because they are not inclusive. They don't include atheists.

The line "God keep our land, glorious and free" is offensive to me and my non-believing brethren. Or rather, my utterly-convinced-the-universe-is-unfolding-randomly brethren. Because we do believe. Just not in God. In chaos, maybe. Or, in my case, in the cuteness of bunnies.

What is interesting is that our anthem's original lyrics, the ones I sang as a kid, didn't include a reference to a deity. The aforementioned line was a replacement for "O Canada, glorious and free." I seem to recall, when my teacher told us we would have to learn the new words, that the change had to do with there being too many we-stand-on-guard lines, since those, of course, are militaristic and therefore offensive. They might frighten off tourists.

But why did removing an "O Canada" and replacing it with "God keep our land" improve things? Is it not bad enough that when I was very young I had to say The Lord's Prayer in school and sing God Save the Queen every morning? It's a miracle I didn't grow up to be a Bible-thumping monarchist.

Instead, I'm an atheist, and so I'm excluded from everything. You're Christian, you're Jewish, you're Muslim, Buddhist or "other," but there's never a box to tick if you're atheist.

I know many atheists who, when in the company of believers -- Christians in particular -- will say they are agnostic. "Agnostic" represents less of a challenge to those who love to proselytize, and therefore keeps wannabe Billy Sundays at bay. The minute you confess to being an atheist, a thousand heads of garlic couldn't keep the sharp-toothed hordes from trying to "save" your soul from marching forward.

In the movie The Contender, Joan Allen played a politician trapped in a sex scandal. Allen's character also admitted to being an atheist, and got little grief for it. Imagine a real American politician saying she didn't believe in God. She wouldn't stand a chance. Americans have God on their money and in their pledge of allegiance (though refreshingly, not in their anthem).

We are slightly less God-obsessed in Canada, thank, um, goodness. Just ask Stockwell Day. During last year's election, Day was dragged through the media slime for appearing on 100 Huntley Street while his religious beliefs were treated with contempt and fear. Does he actually think Earth is 6,000 years old? Do we want him making decisions of national importance? For many, the answer was a resounding no.

Which is why our national anthem's lyrics are puzzling. Why bring God into it? Personally, I have no quarrel with believers, but I love what Oscar Wilde said: "When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it."

I despair, too. And I joke around a lot, like when I suggested our anthem should be changed for atheists -  or anyone else. I said prayers in school and I don't believe in God. I can sing about "sons" and not think Canada is only for boys.

Rondi Adamson writes regularly for the Citizen.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

What partner?: It's the missus

TORONTO - At a funeral recently, a woman introduced a man at her side to me as her "partner." "Oh," I replied. "Do you own a business together?" The woman looked surprised and told me that no, they were married. "Then he's not your partner," I said. "He's your husband."

Keeping in mind that it was a funeral, and protocol would ask me to keep my crankiness to a minimum, I left it at that. But I could have added a few other things. When I asked if they owned a business together, I could also have asked: Do you ballroom dance together? Do you rob banks together? Do you play tennis together? Do you do science experiments in Grade 9 biology class together? Do you run relay races together?

Because those are all circumstances in which the word "partner" is called for. But saying "partner" to describe someone you are married to/dating/sleeping with, is but one example of our unfortunate misuse of certain words these days.

A clever and talented friend of mine recently e-mailed me a list of words she would like banned from current usage. They include: honour, embrace, celebrate, herstory, wimmin, womyn, gathering, inclusiveness, communicate, diversity, sharing, family, closure, wellness, wholeness, wholistic, healing, community, openness and creativity. "We are," she wrote, "newspeaking ourselves out of a vocabulary."

Many of those words are fine if used to mean what they actually mean. "Honour" is fine, if we say, "On Nov. 11, we honour our veterans." But when someone says, "You should honour your pain," it's another case entirely. Same for, say, "celebrate." It is fine to say, "Today my daughter is celebrating her sixth birthday." But it is not acceptable to say -- to use two irritating words in one sentence -- "Let's celebrate our diversity." And not just because one is tempted to reply, "Oh please, let's not." But because diversity is not something you celebrate. Not that it's not wonderful, but you celebrate winning the lottery, tournaments, wars, getting married/older/pregnant/a raise and so forth. Not diversity.

"Family" is fine if it means family. But when people say "family of friends," or refer to their parents and siblings as their "family of origin," I want -- pardon me for saying this --to puke. As I do when I hear someone talk about "a gathering of friends" or "my community."

That last one is confusing. I mean, is my community the Norwegian community? The Irish community? My neighbourhood? The people at my gym?

"Herstory," "wimmin," "womyn" and "wholistic" are all annoying, deliberately misspelled words that would be perfectly all right if they were spelled properly. A friend of mine used to work as a receptionist at a place that was called -- and this is not a joke -- The Womyn's Wellness Centre. Her biggest stress of the day came from trying not to snicker when she answered the phone and had to say "Womyn's Wellness Centre, good morning!"

The worst of all, though, has to be "partner." It is so achingly, maddeningly politically correct that it just makes me want to send stormtroopers into the homes of everyone who uses it, well, incorrectly.

It all started innocently enough, when gay people wanted to find a word to describe their significant others (also an annoying term, but less so than "partner"). And then it spiralled out of control when the sincere among us wanted to prove they were enlightened and began incorporating it into their previously untainted vocabulary.

And now it's part of common parlance, which is nothing short of tragic. For describing someone you are romantically involved with as a "partner" is deluded. Anyone who has ever married or dated or lived with someone knows full well that such situations are as far from being partnerships as Ottawa is from being warm in winter. And that's the whole point of any kind of romance. Its very attraction lies in the subjugation, the emotion, the passion and, eventually, all too frequently, the disillusionment, the disgust and the boredom.

So while I would love to deprogram us all from the PC lexicon, first let's get rid of "partner" when discussing the people we are having sex with (or used to have sex with, in the case of married people). It's "boyfriend" and "girlfriend," or "husband" and "wife" (or even "the missus"). And that goes for all of us -  gay, straight, sensitive and not so. And if you all don't listen up about this, I may have to honour my rage and believe me, that won't be very healing or inclusive.

Rondi Adamson, formerly of Ottawa, lives in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Stop apologizing for Hiroshima

TORONTO - When I lived in Japan -- I was teaching English there a few years ago -- I became addicted to Japanese pumpkin and for a while ate it every day. I always bought it from the same shop, run by the same little old man, situated halfway between my train stop and my apartment. Sometimes, as I shook and smelled the pumpkins, trying to find a ripe one, the old fellow would nudge me, wink and say, smiling, "Pearl Harbor.''

One day, after I had consumed a couple of canned scotch and sodas purchased at the vending machine outside the factory where I worked, I stopped, as usual, to buy my treasured vegetable. "Pearl Harbor,'' smirked the old guy. Tipsy, I leaned over and said what I'd been dying to say since I first met him: "Hiroshima!'' I then gave him a death ray look that said, "Bug me again, buddy-san, and I'll say `Nagasaki' too!''

After that, though I kept buying pumpkin -- put off of it only months later by the fact that my fingertips and nose began turning orange -- my produce-selling friend never said "Pearl Harbor'' to me again. A colleague berated me for my handling of the situation, calling it "insensitive.'' I told her what I saw to be the only pertinent point in the whole matter: "He started it.''

I've been thinking about that vegetable vendor a lot this past week. Monday marked the 56th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Col. Paul Tibbets, flying the Enola Gay, carried out a mission that killed thousands of people, changed the face of warfare forever and marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War.

U.S. president Harry Truman did the only thing the leader of the Allies could have done at that point. His choice, and Tibbets's actions, prevented the further loss of Allied lives -- more than enough had already been lost -- that would most certainly have resulted from a land invasion of Japan. The latter would have been inevitable without the atomic bomb. Three days after Hiroshima, with the Japanese still unbowed, still behind their "divine'' emperor, a second bomb was dropped. That one targeted Nagasaki. Five days later -- at last -- the Japanese surrendered.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been at the centre of a good deal of revisionist, bleeding- heart claptrap over the years. (They also resulted in a very bad 1980s pop song). I had a lot of western visitors when I lived in Japan, many of the plaid-shirted, Birkenstocked undergrad variety. So many, in their unbearably earnest way, would tell me they wanted to visit Hiroshima. Then they would bow their heads solemnly and utter something meaningful. It turned my stomach.

All the more so because of my daily conversations with my adult students, all university-educated, sweet, fun, well-travelled and extremely touchy about the Second World War and their country's humiliating defeat. Many had been taught in school not only that Japan was a victim of the war, but that Japan was its only victim. Most of my students did not know that the constitution they were so proud of had more or less been written by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Japanese school texts, I learned, glossed over Japanese war crimes.

Earlier this summer, South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung refused to meet high-level Japanese diplomats, in protest over some newly published Japanese history texts -- aimed at teenagers -- that deny several historically documented atrocities committed by Japan in Korea. One of the nationalist scholars who contributed to the texts has said that teaching teens about Japanese war crimes would be
"masochistic.''

In short, Japan has had a policy of burying its military past. And that is all the more reason we should not bury ours in shame, or rewrite it to suit how we now feel.

The issues of a strong defence remain the same as they did back then, but people, unfortunately, do not. My own generation -- the dreaded Gen-X -- is spoiled, ignorant and incapable of sacrifice. I hate to think what would happen were we threatened again. There would be no brave Paul Tibbetses out there, and I  doubt the Gen-Y crowd is at all an improvement.

No one wants another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But people should fight the tendency to look at history backwards and say "Oh gosh, if only we could have won that war without hurting anyone.'' We couldn't have.

Instead of focusing on the mushroom cloud, focus on these pertinent points: They started it, and they weren't about to stop.

Rondi Adamson, formerly of Ottawa, lives in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Time to draw lines in Mideast conflict

TORONTO - The conflict in the Middle East is, to a large degree, a war of perceptions. People of my parents' generation viewed Israel as "brave little Israel,'' born of the ashes of the Holocaust (though the Zionist movement began decades before), surrounded by enemies, making the desert bloom nonetheless.

My mother can still get teary-eyed describing the sight after the Second World War of what was left of European Jewry making its way to what it hoped would be its safe haven.

Now, the media regularly portray Israel as an unprovoked bully and the Palestinians as the downtrodden, who never commit acts of violence without justification. The Israelis have soldiers who "attack'' Palestinian "activists,'' just for example. Implicit in the word "activist'' is the notion of a noble cause, versus an armed soldier who attacks him. Implicit in the word "attack'' is the notion that there is no issue of national defence behind it.

Thomas Friedman -- not by any stretch a blind apologist for Israel -- in his book of some 10 years ago, From Beirut to Jerusalem, made the point that, with the onset of the intifada, the tide of public sentiment began turning. Those who knew little about the history of  the region responded viscerally to the David-and-Goliath sight of young boys throwing stones at armed men.

When Ariel Sharon was elected Israel's prime minister earlier this year, the hyperbole hit the fan. Sharon was referred to in headlines everywhere as "the Bulldozer'' or Israel's Milosevic, the latter moniker most certainly libelous. But what were Israelis to do?

Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak, made astonishing concessions to the Palestinians (95 per cent of the West Bank and the dividing of Jerusalem) that were greeted with aggression and disdain. Arafat's true face was exposed, and yet he is still treated with respect by many. He is still the man the Israelis have to deal with, although history shows us he is not to be trusted.

In the face of this past week's violence, several news stories have commented on Sharon's "surprising'' restraint. In fact, there is nothing surprising about it, unless you are judging Sharon from the current media bias. The CBC, in particular, portrays events in the Middle East with such a slant I sometimes feel it should come with a disclaimer.

When I took a broadcasting course at Ryerson -- a bastion of CBC-ites -- my teacher, going over copy I had written about the Middle East, took exception to a pro-Israeli quote I included from an attache at the Israeli Embassy. "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he,'' scoffed my teacher, "he's a Jew!'' Because of course, no Jewish people ever criticize Israel. And anyway, what was I doing including a pro-Israeli quote in that story -- which also included, for the record, someone speaking in defence of the Palestinians?

And the Globe and Mail, earlier this week, contained an editorial urging the use of international monitors in democratic Israel.

And that is what we so often forget. Israel is the only democracy in a part of the world apparently uninterested in democratizing, and had the Arabs accepted the original partition, voted on by the United Nations in 1947, the Palestinians would have a state now.

We also overlook the fact that, but for a limited number of exceptions, Israel is surrounded by nations that want it annihilated. This is not to say that successive Israeli governments have not made mistakes, particularly in regard to Arab Israelis. But our current perception of the troubled region fails to put things in perspective.

When Jerusalem is discussed, many say that it must be an "international city'' because it is "equally'' important to both sides. In fact, Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam, after Mecca and Medina, and the holiest city to the Jews. Again, there is massive media amnesia: We rarely hear that Jerusalem under Israeli rule has been open to people of all faiths, provided they are not there to stir up trouble. Or that under the Arab rule of 1948-1967, Jews were not permitted to visit their holy sites.

For any negotiations to be successful, people have to decide what they absolutely will not negotiate, and I believe this is where Barak erred. He never drew firm lines. Sharon, we can hope, will stand firm on Jerusalem remaining undivided and on Israel hanging on to whatever territory it deems necessary for its own security.

And the rest of us can help by forgoing the usual bromides about brokering peace plans with Arafat, a man who never follows them, and by changing the way we perceive things.

Rondi Adamson is a former Ottawa resident now living in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Planet of the heartless, arrogant humans:
The latest version of a classic film once again indicts those people who happily slaughter animals

The great writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once told talk-show host Dick Cavett that he would not kill even a mosquito. "Are you saying,'' asked the incredulous Cavett, "that you think the life of a mosquito has the same worth as the life of a man?'' Singer replied, "I have seen no evidence to the contrary.''

Nor have I.

Earlier this month, a boy was attacked by a shark off the coast of Florida -- while he was swimming in the shark's habitat -- and had his arm bitten off. I hope the boy continues his recovery, but I was dismayed when the shark was taken out of the water and shot, in order to get the boy's arm back, and bystanders applauded.

How would humans feel if every animal we killed/maimed/ mutilated came chasing after us to get back their missing body parts -- often their skin and coats? And what if they brought along a gaggle of their own kind to cheer them on? We would be outraged, because, you know, they're just animals and who, exactly, do they think they are? We can do as we please to them. We can walk into their ever-dwindling territories and if one of them -- bear, cougar, shark -- should dare object, he had better watch out.

On Monday, I saw an advance screening of Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes. The 1968 original, directed by Franklin J. Shaffner, was a powerful indictment against the way people treat animals. From the harrowing sequence in which Charlton Heston and his fellow astronauts are first hunted down by the apes, to the way the humans are treated like criminals -- or used for scientific research -- the message is clear. We are barbaric in our disregard for the feelings of other living creatures, creatures that experience fear and pain and love just as we do. If the tables were turned, we would be plenty unhappy.

Ultimately, Heston discovers they are not on an alien planet, but back on Earth. Man destroyed the world he knew, and brought about the simian world in which he now finds himself trapped. The new Planet of the Apes offers criticism of man's fundamental inhumanity, but provides humans a far more comforting explanation for the existence of an ape-world.

However, one scene stands out. An assortment of chimps, orangs and gorillas is seated around a table, enjoying dinner as human servants mill about. An enlightened chimp (played by Helena Bonham Carter) says she believes humans have souls, to the shocked gasps of those around her.

Sound familiar? Those of us with Christian friends know full well the arrogant attitudes of some members of that society. Only humans have souls, and an embryo in a petri dish is more important than a living, breathing animal already roaming the planet. I wonder what Jesus would say about that? I wonder what he would think about six billion of us taking more and more habitat away from animals, and then being astonished when the animals occasionally make a foray onto our turf. Ottawa police recently shot and killed a moose in the city. Though the moose apparently took a nap, authorities said they couldn't get close enough to it to use a tranquilizer gun, so the cops ended up shooting it dead. Hey, why make any special effort? It's an animal.

We humans are insensitive to animals' welfare or comfort, unless somehow it affects us. We eat them, wear them, use them for research and entertainment, hunt them for sport and hang parts of them on our walls -- without any of it being necessary.

We are free to inflict torture on many of them without fear of legal reprisal. Things are changing in that area, but far too slowly. A man in California was recently sentenced to three years in prison for killing a dog, a ridiculously short sentence, and yet this was nothing short of a breakthrough. In Canada, Bill C-17, which would have been a step forward towards criminalizing animal abuse, died on the table last year. Efforts are being made to ensure that its successor, Bill C-15, is more successful in passing through Parliament. I'm not holding my breath. There is, I fear, no end to our lack of compassion.

And why not? Animals don't vote, they have no money, and -- don't forget -- they have no souls. I am not suggesting that we should give animals free reign. I am simply suggesting that we shouldn't have it either, and that we ought to seriously rethink how we treat living beings who don't happen to be human. Gandhi made the high and mighty wait to speak with him while he fed goats and tended to other animals. Like Singer, he saw no difference in their relative worth.

I'm afraid I sometimes do, and it's usually people who come up short. Last week, out for dinner with a friend, I looked around the restaurant and saw a lot of slobbering, overweight jaws wolfing down big slabs of dead animals and all I could think was, "Damn you all to hell!''

Rondi Adamson, an Ottawa native, is a freelance writer based in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Sex is something you can't conceal

Memo to men, especially you married, middle-aged ones: Girls talk! Girls talk about sex, all the time, to everyone.

When I get together with my girlfriends, we spend one nanosecond discussing career, two nanoseconds discussing movies and books and the whole rest of the evening talking about men and sex. This probably comes as a surprise to no one, except, judging from Bill Clinton and Gary Condit, men.

Most everyone has heard about the newest intern drama in Washington D.C., and while Monica Lewinsky has gone, um, down as the most infamous intern in history, Chandra Levy may go down as its most tragic.

Levy, a 24-year-old Washington intern from California, missing since April 30, had a romantic relationship with married California representative Condit, a self-described "conservative Democrat,'' a relationship he warned her not to disclose. She disclosed. Bill Clinton issued the same caveat to Lewinsky, with the same result.

When will these fellows learn? If you want to chase young women, go right ahead, but don't delude yourself into thinking that it won't come back at you.

The last time anyone saw Levy, she was planning a return home after six months interning at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. (She was not, for the record, Condit's intern). A few days later, police entered her apartment and found her bags packed and no signs of a fight.

Her parents, heartbroken and frantic, have hired Billy Martin, the attorney who for a time represented Monica Lewinsky's mother, to help them navigate the press and police-ridden weeks ahead. Levy's disappearance is believed to be the result of a homicide. Police do not feel it is, as some have suggested, a suicide.

The 50-something Condit, nicknamed "Mr. Blow Dry,'' is also a father, and, by all accounts, something of a sex symbol in the American capital, having appeared in a "Hunks of the Hill'' calendar.

I was an intern three summers ago, at a now defunct hyper-capitalist magazine where I wrote stories about how parents being made to get certain vaccinations for their children was a form of communism and so forth. I was shown, I am glad to say, no particular attentions from my boss, who was truly repellent. He insisted, to the dismay of all, on talking baby talk to his children over the phone just about every morning, and on pretending to have a personality. I wasn't fooled.

On the plus side, there were a couple of dreamboats who wrote for the actual magazine, but I didn't get  to meet either of them at the time. I have since met one.

All I learned at that job was how to change applications on my computer incredibly quickly (so my boss wouldn't see that I was logged on to Bridget Jones's Diary), how to stifle laughter successfully (when my boss tried to strong-arm me into writing a 5,000-word feature for the magazine on my $1,000-per-month intern salary) and how to duck the well-intentioned colleagues who felt I would benefit from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

None of those are skills of negligible importance, of course.

And all of that is now filed in my mind under "E'' for "Experience.'' I am thankful none of that experience was fatal, as Levy's may have been, or massively humiliating, as Lewinsky's was.

Few believe Condit actually had anything to do with Levy's disappearance, but many believe he knows more than he is revealing. Up until this past week, he would not even admit to a romantic relationship with Levy, calling her instead his "good friend.'' Depending on his definition of that term, of course, it could well have been the truth.

FBI statistics reveal that 453 people have gone missing in Washington since January. None of the other cases has received an iota of the publicity that Levy's has. For better or for worse, the idea of a young thing with a sexy, married boyfriend has mass appeal.

The problem is, the married boyfriend in question may be a large reason the case has gone cold for D.C. police. Had he revealed from the outset everything he knew, some minor detail, seemingly insignificant to him, could well have provided investigators with a lead. Surely tolerating public embarrassment is worth the life of a young woman.

Condit has not held a press conference or issued a statement about Levy. It is arguable whether he "owes'' his constituents that much, but for a man who voted to impeach Bill Clinton, it seems strange that he is now being as slippery as the former president ever was.

All I can say is, mothers, don't let your daughters grow up to be interns.

Rondi Adamson is a freelance writer in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

A girl's biggest enemy

I have lived in three of those cities and have visited all five. How many Olympic Committee officials can make that claim? None, I'm sure, so I think I should make the choice.

Beijing should get the Games. Here's why: The Olympics are hell, and no city in its right mind would want them. And, since Communists are bad, we want them to suffer. What greater punishment could there be than sending the Olympics and all its trappings over there? None that I can think of.

Why, we'll have President What's-His-Face begging for mercy before the first medals are even handed out. He'll be saying stuff like "If you only promise to never send this kind of event over here again, I promise not only to allow protest rallies in Tiananmen Square, I'll organize the first one myself.''

On top of which, maybe some of the athletes and press people will mingle with the common folk and tell them tales of freedom of expression and expose them to clothing other than green outfits with matching caps.

Who knows? It just may help.

Istanbul, where I lived for a year, is a stunning city, as beautiful as Paris (where I lived for four years) and the people are far nicer. The Turks are sweet, the architecture and history are amazing, the food is fantastic, but Istanbul is just not ready for the Olympics.

Public transit is weak, the air quality and traffic make Los Angeles at rush hour look like the opening scene from The Sound of Music and the drug laws there would leave, let's face it, pretty much the whole Canadian team stuck behind bars as all of the other world athletes were flying home.

Osaka would be fine in terms of hosting, as would all Japanese cities, but Nagano had the Winter Games not long ago, so that hardly seems fair.

Paris is beautiful, but the people are snotty and they take personal hygiene to new lows. Now before you all go sending me letters about that, it has been shown, in countless studies (one just two years ago), that the French use less soap than any other group of people on God's earth. Yes, that includes people in Third World countries who consider soap a luxury.

So, Paris is smelly enough, and adding a bunch of sweaty athletes to the picture would not be a grand idea.

Which brings us to Toronto. Now, when I was growing up in Ottawa, I always thought everyone in Canada hated Ottawa, because the government was there. Five years ago, I moved to Toronto and discovered that it is this city that Canadians hate. But what the  rest of you don't realize is that Torontonians hate Toronto, too. Probably more than you do since we have to live here.

And as much as I hate Toronto and would like to see it punished, I am also selfish and don't want to put up with the inconvenience and overcrowding the Olympics would bring. Not to mention that our mayor is dead keen on us hosting 2008 -- he feels we can afford it.

I feel we can't, since our mayor has cut funding to, just for example, the Toronto Humane Society. If we can't afford to help kitties, puppies and raccoons, then surely we can't afford to pander to a pack of arrogant athletes, spoiled Olympic officials and debauched journalists from far and away.

However, I am basically a Pollyanna, and prepared, if necessary, to look on the bright side. Should Toronto get the Olympics, there is one group of people that would benefit greatly: hookers. And I would be thrilled for them. Toronto's hard-working men and women in Lycra and vinyl deserve a break.

Well, it wouldn't be a break exactly, but I seriously doubt they get paid as much as they deserve. Most of them do their duty through wind and rain and sleet and hail and they have to tolerate crack dealers, pimps and five-inch stiletto heels on a regular basis. It is a job rendered more difficult by the fact that it's illegal (something that ought to change, in my opinion).

So, think about it. Between the athletes, officials and media, there will be more fornicating going on  around here than there was at the Clinton White House. Hogtown's hookers will be turning tricks every half hour on the half hour. Some of them may finally earn enough to take a holiday. Amen.

Rondi Adamson, formerly of Ottawa, lives in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Such an occurrence took place a few weeks back, as I was invited to be a guest on one of this country's many imitation American panel shows with three other journalists to discuss Survivor. (I was the token "pro'' voice).

One of my co-panelists was a writer from one of Toronto's seven or eight thousand dailies, a woman who greeted me by pulling back her extended hand -- when she heard my name -- and exclaiming, "Oh, something you wrote last week made me so mad!''

I needed only take a quick look at Ms. X to know what it was that I had written that had enraged her so. At the risk of sounding catty ... well, let me put it this way: She was wearing leather pants the fabrication of which most certainly required the death of at least one entire herd of Holsteins, if not more. (Which, of course, does not mean she is not a lovely person.)

A week prior to our meeting, I had written a story -- for one of this city's seven or eight thousand dailies -- about the Golden Globe Awards and how the post-mortem on them dwelled only on how skinny Lara Flynn Boyle and other actresses were. Why don't we, I wrote, ever say things like "God, she's so fat'' when Camryn Manheim appears on stage?

Why don't we, when we see Manheim or Star Jones and their ilk, ever say things like "God, that's so unhealthy'' or "what kind of a message is this for young girls?''

Surely being overweight is unhealthy and surely we don't want our kids thinking they ought to try and beef themselves up to 200 pounds or something? Do we? And, as there are far more fat people in North America than anorexics, surely solving the fat problem is where we ought to focus our attention.

Anyway, as I am polite, I pretended not to know which story Ms. X was teed off about. She told me which it was and why.

Overweight people, she said, are just as healthy as anyone else. "I won a squat contest at my gym,'' she boasted. I didn't point out that winning a squat contest means, well, squat. It doesn't mean you're healthy or fit. It just means you have massive quadriceps. So do Sumo wrestlers.

It was a hellish night, but they gave me liquor and a cheque after the show.

All of this has come back to me recently what with the possibility of fatness being declared a "disability'' (gee, silly me, I always thought a disability was something you couldn't control, like being a paraplegic or a thalidomide baby) and with the success of the movie Bridget Jones' Diary.

The fatness as a disability thing has been well commented upon in this paper, I believe, so I won't say anything further. But Bridget ... ah, Bridget! The greatest book ever.

As a single woman in her 30s, I can attest to its frightening accuracy. And I loved the screen version too, something I was not expecting.

The Globe and Mail's Leah McLaren, along with other greats of Canadian journalism, have commented on Renee Zellweger's weight gain for the role. McLaren wrote that Zellweger, post-Bridget, had slimmed down to "nearly nothing.'' Huh? Zellweger post-Bridget looks fine, not deathly skinny.

True, she could probably pack back 10 of the 30 pounds she lost after the role was over and still look slim. But have we become so hysterical about weight that a slim woman is called "anorexic''? Zellweger, apparently, is 5'5'' and weighs 115 pounds. That is not "nearly nothing.'' I am 5'10'' and, after living in a third-world country on a third-world salary several years back, I returned to Canada weighing 110 pounds. That was next to nothing. (I no longer weigh 110, trust me.)

Other writers have pointed out that, once upon a time, a fat woman was considered healthy and enviable. Well yes, that was when most of us were peasants subsisting on bread and homemade hooch and anyone who obviously had the money for food represented an ideal.

Jane Wilson of the National Post wrote, on the Bridget/Renee topic, that we are being asked to accept "that a character who weighs less than the average North American woman is a fat figure of fun.'' This argument has been echoed in many other Bridget stories.

But should the average weight of a North American be our guide? This continent is suffering from a fatness epidemic. Most North Americans eat garbage and don't exercise.

I think we could come up with a better standard.

Rondi Adamson, formerly of Ottawa, lives in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

There has been much hand-wringing about whether Swift will be able to fulfil her responsibilities with two bundles of joy to look after, not to mention the toddler she and her husband already have at home.

Cute headlines like "Governor Mom'' are proliferating like amoeba and -- a sure sign it's big news -- even the ladies of The View have discussed it. They, in all their wisdom, felt that Swift, with the help of babysitters, day care and hubby, would prevail.

I see a better solution. Swift should stay home with her kids. Someone else should take over as governor.

Not just for six months or a year, either. For six years. Or 12. Or 18.

And she should not have run for lieutenant-governor when she was expecting her other child. She should have planned to stay home. But like many women, she does not want to make a choice.

The problem is, choices are necessary. You can't have a great career and a great family. You can do a half-hearted job of both, but surely having a child and raising it properly is the most important job in the world. It is far more important than being governor of Massachusetts or anything else, for that matter. It is not something that should be pawned off onto ECE workers or family members, or a nanny.

The phrase "working mother'' should surely be obliterated from the planet -- as though women who do the right thing by looking after their own child are not working.

Children need a parent at home. It seems odd that we have got to the point where this opinion needs to be defended. I say "a parent'' because sure, in exceptional cases, dads need to stay home. But still, I would say that women ought to be the ones who do so.

It is natural. We carry the children for nine months. And unless this is some great, colo-ssal joke played by Mother Nature, we may want to take a cue from it. If we carry, then are we perhaps not best suited to looking after them?

As well, our breasts fill up with milk when we are pregnant. A colossal joke from Mother Nature, or another cue?

Even mainstream medical organizations recommend breastfeeding for a year, minimum. Does it not seem that after a year spent nurturing your child in this manner you may be more bonded with it? Would it not flow more naturally for you to continue to stay home?

Many women complain that they would get "bored'' staying home with their kids. I suspect they would get bored sitting in a cubicle somewhere as well. Life can be pretty doggone boring at times.

Many couples complain that they will not have enough money if the wife stays home. Again, you may want to consider what is truly important. Shouldn't the goal of someone who wants kids be to have them with the person they love and to raise them properly? As opposed to, say, living in a certain neighbourhood?

I recognize that some women find themselves, through no fault of their own, in the position of being alone with a child. They have no option but to mete out their childrearing responsibilities to someone else. Jane Swift is not such a woman.

Maternity leave -- oops, I mean "parental leave'' -- seems not to be something created to benefit children at all, but rather to benefit parents who want two incomes, rather than a well-brought up kid. It seems to me nothing more than the government encouraging people to spend a token year with their child, before ultimately trusting a day-care worker to teach it right from wrong.

Rather than parental leave -- or that most dreadful of ideas, universal day care -- could our government not come up with ways to provide financial incentives for women to stay home with their kids? True, a woman returning to the workforce after a decade at home will return at somewhat of a disadvantage. But she will have bigger rewards. The kind that come from making the best choice, the one that does not involve doing the unnatural -- abandoning her child to strangers -- while she slugs it out at some company whose CEO wouldn't notice if she dropped off the face of the earth.

Because her baby would notice.

Rondi Adamson, formerly of Ottawa, lives in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Did she learn them when her elderly mother sat in economy class on an airplane while she flew first class? Did she learn them while taking my tax dollars to pay for Heritage Moments?

Not that I think Heritage Moments are a waste of money. I'm sure the money that goes to showing us how our native people taught us the word ("kanata'') that would later become the name of an upscale Ottawa suburb could never go to anything better, such as back into our own pockets where we might be able to use it to pay for rent or for food. Or to setting up a royal commission investigating why my hair is so unruly that only aerosol Agent Orange -- choppered into my apartment directly from the Pentagon -- can keep it in place.

Another Heritage Moment shows us how girls can be every bit as useful in wartime as boys. It's the one where the aviator steps out of an airplane, all covered up in goggles and cap and bulky clothes, and all the men standing around the landing strip assume that such a good pilot must be a man, and then the aviator takes off the goggles and cap and we see that he is a she.

The men are all stunned. Oh how sexist they were! Girls can fly planes and fight Nazis, too!!

Well sure we can. But should we?

Gen. George S. Patton, at the beginning of the American involvement in the Second World War, said the following: "An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who write that stuff about individuality don't know anything more about real battle than they do about fornicating.''

George Patton knew something about real battle. I fear that most of the decision-makers in our own Armed Forces do not.

For real battle is the issue. I recently saw Enemy at the Gates, a fine film. No Saving Private Ryan, but fine. In it, a female Soviet soldier, Rachel Weisz, has to choose between having sex with Jude Law or Joseph Fiennes (Hey! there really is no life like it!). Now if that were what real battle was like, I'd say don't even think about trying to beat me to the recruiting office.

But it's not. Real battle is bloody and merciless and nothing short of a completely unified team should be out there.

It is not male arrogance that has kept women out of warfare for millennia. It is the knowledge that young males, testosterone raging, will work together far more efficiently -- and brutally -- if there are no girls around.

Girls are for after the fighting is over (get those Hershey bars out, boys!).

True, few things are as aggressive and horrifying as a premenstrual woman and a platoon of them could no doubt have defeated the enemy at El Guettar without even the use of guns.

But the logistics of getting a group of women ready for battle for only six or seven days a month, and assuming the enemy would attack then, are daunting.

Women can, and have, contributed invaluably to armed forces throughout history -- but not in combat.

Women have also contributed by working in munitions factories and raising generations of children singlehandedly during both world wars.

None of this should be underestimated.

Recently, Gen. Maurice Baril, chief of Canada's defence staff, said anyone who can't treat female soldiers as equals should leave our military.

But do we want men to think of us as nothing more than fellow soldiers? Do we want them to lose their desire to look out for the people who give and nurture life? I hope not.

Gen. Baril also stated that because Canada was "diverse,'' our army should be as well.

Wrong. The ethnic origins of our soldiers make no difference, but once in combat they must all have the same uniforms (no turbans, please!), use of the same language, and the same goal.

We approach this the wrong way.

We say "let's force men to be sensitive so girls can live in submarines.'' No swearing, sexist jibes, porn movies or staring at cleavage lest the girls be offended.

But if girls can't take an insensitive comment or an unwanted stare here and there, how are they going to fare on a battlefield, up against something truly dangerous?

War is far more offensive than a dirty joke.

Rondi Adamson, an Ottawa native, lives in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Ooh, I'm all goosebumps.

Our public broadcaster has been having trouble holding its own in the fluid, multi-channel television world, and even The National is no longer much of a match for myriad competitors out there. On the horizon, therefore, are changes to the CBC lineup.

Less hockey, more mini-series (please Lord, not another People's History, OK? I'd even rather watch Ralph Benmergui. Nah, scratch that, I'd rather watch endless Degrassi episodes than Ralph) and more documentaries are among the promises being made.

We are also being threatened with evenings of "themed'' programs hosted by "personalities.'' Now what this could mean in CBC-speak is almost too horrific to contemplate. Does it mean a tribute to Margaret Atwood hosted by the Dale sisters -- in which the Great One Herself recites several Odes to Herself and her invaluable contributions to the universe?

Does it mean a show called Why We are Better than Americans, hosted by Rick Mercer? (Oops, sorry, that one's already been done.)

Does it mean a tribute to our fabulous cultural mosaic that is so much better than the one in the United States because, you know, they're just not as tolerant and open-minded as we are, hosted by all kinds of Canadian celebrities of colour, such as Oscar Peterson and that chick from The Young and the Restless and, um, Oscar Peterson.

Not that the changes won't be an improvement. It would be hard for them not to be. Whenever I watch our public broadcaster -- when the cable is out -- here's what runs through my mind: "I see dead people. Walking around like real people. Only they don't know they're dead.'' Not very original, I'll admit -- in fact, it's such blatant thievery that I really ought to apply for a job at the CBC.

One problem with the CBC is that it is stuck in a timewarp. When it tries to be "hip,'' it proves embarrassing, sort of like when your parents try to be groovy. Which shouldn't surprise us, since so many of its supporters -- supporters of the notion that Canada "needs'' a public broadcaster -- are people from a timewarp.

More specifically, they are aging boomers, products of the 1960s and '70s, people who are vaguely leftish, anti-American, people who work in creative fields, preferably the taxpayer-funded kind (many of whom, if left to fend for themselves without a CBC to lean on, would not be able to make a living unless they became Wal-Mart greeters), people who believe in subsidies for magazines and books, and probably for the air that we breathe if we could prove it was Canadian air and was threatened by the superiority of American air.

Even the Gen X and Y talent at the CBC appears earnest and nationalistic, younger people on the outside, boomers on the inside. The anti-U.S. factor looms large at the CBC. During the NATO bombing of Kosovo, I watched a CBC news report that focused not on the former Yugoslavia, but on U.S. network coverage of Slobodan Milosevic.

The point made was that the American news shows presented a subjective view of Slobo, calling him "evil,'' "a dictator,'' and so forth. Implicit was the notion that he was not those things, and weren't we lucky to have fair newscasts in our country pointing this out? Of course, there is nothing "subjective'' about calling Milosevic evil or a dictator. Those are fitting descriptions. The only bias I recall from that report was of the anti-American variety.

When I attended journalism school, my broadcast teacher was Stuart McLean, Canada's own Garrison Keillor-wannabe and diehard CBC-ite. His message to us, often repeated, was clear: "CBC good, others bad.'' Sort of like Animal Farm's "four legs good, two legs bad'' and presented to us with similarly limited room for dissent.

What matters, however, is not whether the CBC produces great or lousy programming, either on TV or radio. The real issue is whether we ought to keep paying for it. The notion that quality programming can only come from a public broadcaster is a bogus one.

Harold Redekopp, CBC's vice-president of English television, said last week that "we want to increase the real and perceived value of CBC television to Canadians.'' I am pleased, at least, that someone at the  CBC can admit that a difference exists between the real value of the CBC to Canadians, and its perceived value.

And while I'm not a fan of euthanasia, I'd like the public plug pulled on the CBC. Its devotees, that small percentage of the population, can support it through donations like the true believers they are.

Rondi Adamson, formerly of Ottawa, lives in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Throngs in thongs

Bye, bye, mon Lucien

Canada is the eternal geek from high school, the head of the debating club, desperately trying to get the attention of the United States, the Big Man on Campus. Our dependence on someone else's approval is so paramount that we need a session of national self-esteem therapy.

I can't imagine any other nation making such a fuss at the tiniest bit of attention thrown its way by the only world power. True, people the globe over fixate on the United States. The reasons are obvious -- the United States is the most powerful nation on Earth, the one we envy, the one we depend on -- and therefore, like teenagers with their parents, the one we resent.

Compare our obsessive desire for U.S. attention to our supreme smugness and self-satisfaction vis-a-vis all things American. Think of that embarrassing "I am Canadian'' ad of a few months back, which essentially defined Canadians as not being Americans. Think of the popular "Talking to Americans'' segment on the CBC news satire show This Hour has 22 Minutes. The latter is hilarious, but also in a way objectionable. Imagine if an American comedy TV show ran a segment called, say, "Talking to Sri Lankans'' in which they made fun of people from Sri Lanka because they didn't know every detail of American political life. "Oh, ha ha ha, that mango picker from that little village south of Colombo doesn't know who Daniel Patrick Moynihan is!'' If Americans broadcast such a thing, we'd call them racist, arrogant and ugly.

At a party in Toronto last New Year's Eve, I heard another guest comment on CNN's coverage of millennium celebrations. "Americans are so ignorant,'' she sniffed. Why? Because they hadn't, as far as she could see, included any coverage of the big celebrations in Toronto. Those silly producers at the major American networks felt, for some reason, that Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House might be of more interest to viewers. Go figure.

We also like to argue that we know so much about Americans and they know so little about us. But I'm not convinced we know that much about them at all. We know their primetime TV lineup, the Gap and Starbucks, but ask your average Canadian, to name five U.S. senators (not including Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman), or five U.S. governors (not including the Bush brothers). Ask your neighbor who is on Mount Rushmore.

It makes sense that that we should know more about them than they  about us. That's what happens when someone is more powerful than you are. If we are ever threatened again, such as we were during the Cold War, we will again count on the U.S. to save our behinds. What happens to them happens to us, so it's in our interests to know what they're all about.

Besides, America probably knows more about us than we know about, say Tajikistan -- which, on the global scale, is about to us what we are to the U.S. In fact, Tajikistan may be more noteworthy because, as a former Soviet Republic, it may have secret stashes of nuclear weapons or badly tended nuclear power plants ready for meltdown. So what do you know about Tajikistan? What is the name of its president? Or is it a prime minister? Or an ayatollah? Is Tajikistan even independent? I don't know, and neither do you.

All I know is that we got mentioned by Letterman and Leno. Tajikistan didn't. We must be better.

Rondi Adamson is a freelance writer in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2000 All Rights Reserved.

Make mental checklist of goals for evening. 1) observe behaviour of Marlen and Mike, and 350 close friends, produce social commentary allowing readers to shake heads at absurdity of the rich. 2) meet and marry high-tech millionaire.

7:30 p.m.: Arrive at Casino. Brightly coloured fountains, men in bellboy suits opening limo doors, blinking lights and questionable architecture. Expect rides and Goofy as well. Am in happiest place on earth. No, wait, that's Disneyland. Am in tackiest place on earth.

Marlen to make entrance at 7:45. Red carpet out, crowd standing anxiously by. Marlen late. 8:15, still not there. Sick of waiting, find woman whose job it is to "control the media.'' Am escorted to gala room.

8:20: In gala room (thick cloud of mist all over) see free bar. Revise goals for evening to one: not make drunken fool of self. If Marlen's people have concern about "controlling media,'' should not offer liquor. Begin quest for celebrities. Specifically Mulroney, supposedly on guest list. Wish to flash bellybutton ring at him. Dressed in two-piece ensemble to facilitate this. Marlen may have outrageous outfits, but no bellybutton ring. (If she did, we would all have seen it by now).

Do not see Mulroney. Do see shining examples of Ottawa high society. Women in long dresses with denim jackets, women wearing lycra who really should not; men who do not grasp that "formal'' means tuxedo. In frigid national capital populated by public servants and computer geeks, should not be surprised.

Chat with cute, drinkless reporter from LeDroit. Tell him about free bar. Woman nearby looks like Margaret Trudeau. We agree it cannot be. Chat with 50-something woman in bunny suit, who claims to be "tennis partner'' of Mike Cowpland. Chat with funny Woodroffe High teacher (how invited?). Has he seen any celebrities? He points at woman in orange dress, says is famous but can't remember name. "She's married to Wayne Rostad,'' he adds. Who?

Spread of food sight to behold. Placed strategically on table are teeny doggies made from what smells like Cheez Whiz. Also -- high point of evening -- a chocolate fountain. Beyond fountain see actual celebrity, Max Keeping! Ooh, ooh! He is nice but has rat's tail thing in hair. Is always so disappointing to meet stars.

9 p.m.: Emcee from casino announces that Marlen is here, wearing most unique gown ever. Crowd goes wild. Gown is fuschia, transparent but for stars placed on boobs and, to steal a Monty Python line, "naughty bits.'' Strands of Marlen's hair dyed fuschia. Dress is something, yes, but not unique. Geena Davis wore similar deal to Emmys this year. Marlen makes speech filled with "dog'' puns. She is dog- tired, has been working like dog. Crowd laughs uproariously. All same jokes she made in National Post article a few weeks ago. Marlen has funny accent. Sort of Quebec accent trying hard to be Parisian.

James Jefferson, Marlen's designer, holding Bunny Cowpland, Marlen's Maltese. Bunny dyed fuschia. Have epiphany. Realize do not object to Marlen's clothes. If you've got the body, I say, go girl. (If not, please don't.) But object to calling self animal lover and dying dog. Is cruel. Is like circus trick. Might as well bring along dancing bear too. Heard Betty White was scheduled to be on show but took one look at brightly coloured Bunny and refused. If true, will worship at altar of Betty White forever.

Ask woman next to me what she thinks of Bunny's colour. "He likes it,'' she insists. "How do you know?'' I ask. Woman glares, informs me Marlen will give a full 10 per cent of profit from show to Humane Society. Why not 100 per cent, I ask? Woman glares again.

Watch clips of Celebrity Pets on big screen, featuring -- astonishing! -- Marlen in wacky clothes with veritable B-list cornucopia: Kreskin, Carla Collins, Mike Bullard, Canadian stars I never heard of and actual talented person, Jann Arden (who is at gala). Kreskin, also present, speaks next and is roundly dissed by guests, who leave en masse for the bar. Feel sorry for the amazing one and hear him, quite understandably, kvetching about it later on.

10:30 p.m.: Hatch plan to rescue Bunny Cowpland. Walk over to Jefferson and shake Bunny's paw (dog has good social skills), but designer is too swift for me. Faster than a speeding seamstress, he disappears. Give up, sadly, on plan. Run into Le Droit reporter, holding drink. "Thanks for the tip,'' he says, but not before informing me that Margaret Trudeau lookalike was, in fact, Margaret Trudeau.

Approach hosts. Mike has firm handshake and makes eye contact. Marlen's handshake not even as firm as Bunny's. As I say, it's always such a letdown to meet stars.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto writer whose two cats are not dyed fuschia or any other colour.

Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2000 All Rights Reserved.

Tuesday: I had plans with a friend, who called to bail because "I weaseled an invitation to the ACTRA party out of a friend of an editor I worked with three years ago at (now defunct Canadian magazine), whose sister slept with (relatively famous Canadian movie director) a couple of times last summer!'' The excitement in his voice was palpable. Goodness knows why, since the party in question was for Canadian actors (the bottom of the food chain), and unless Christopher Plummer was there, who cares?

This friend is sophisticated, bright and funny. But the festival reduced him, and most everyone else in this city, to a celebrity slobbering, panting, drooling movie slut, impressed so easily that even Dale sisters are worth whoring himself for. Heretofore normal people walk around dropping words like "industry party'' or "the director's cut'' into their conversation. "Who have you seen?'' is the question du jour, as in, "I saw Goldie Hawn getting into her limo outside Holt's!''

Thursday: A friend and I had theatre tickets. "Hi Rondi,'' her e-mail began ... I knew what was coming. (Someone should create an e-mail form letter for dropping old friends like a hot crack pipe in favor of craning your neck to see Al Pacino's left thigh during the festival.) My friend went on: "Sorry, but my boss gave me a pass to the Richard Gere party, on the condition I work overtime every night for the next 27 years and take over his mortgage. Hope you understand.''

I noticed it more this year, probably because I've changed gyms. My new gym is in the same building that houses Varsity Cinemas, the epicentre of the festival. An innocent jaunt to a kickboxing class was turned into a physical battle between me and great hordes of self-important cinephiles with their little books of tickets sticking out of their pockets. "Back, you animals,'' I wanted to scream, as people glared at me with eyes that said, "you have no right to walk through our lineup just because your gym is on the other side, woman.''

Also insufferable was the 24- hour festival coverage on one of our local networks. I happened upon the press conference for Robert Altman's Dr. T and the Women. The movie does not star Mr. T, unfortunately, but Shelley Long, who complained to reporters about the life of a celebrity and how  walking around Toronto afforded her no privacy. I didn't, she proclaimed, go into acting to be a star, I did it to be a serious actor.

That's Shelley Long, of Cheers fame, of The Brady Bunch Movie, of that movie with what's his name, about ... something ... umm ... I can't remember. That's Shelley Long, the serious actress, who we know would shrivel up and die without photographers.

I've been in Toronto five years, and I confess to having enjoyed the festival previously. With great shame, I will even confess to having been romantically involved with someone in "the industry'' a  couple of years back, and having attended festival parties, where he would stick things up his nose and I  would eat and drink my body weight in appetizers and free liquor. And while the thrill of seeing the short (gack!) Mr. Tom Cruise at a party was not negligible, it was also fleeting.

And in Toronto, a city boobytrapped with movie sets -- "Hi, I'm not New York, but I play it on TV'' -- you become irritated by the vagaries of life in Hollywood North. My favorite laneways are forever blocked by film crews, looking for that perfect mix of dirt, backdoors and rats that makes for a good urban grime backdrop.

On the other hand, you do see celebrities, even without the festival, just not as many. Once I was prevented from crossing a street because Andy Griffith was on the other side. Now, I loved Mayberry, and I'll take Matlock over The Practice any old day. And on that day, he waved and smiled. But I wasn't allowed to cross the street. And with the festival, that kind of thing is more commonplace.

So last week I would have given anything to have been stuck at some dinner party in the Glebe between some boring policy wonk from the Ministry of Whatsit and some cutthroat high techie, listening to some tedious conversation about Joe Clark or Quebec before paying an outrageously expensive Ottawa cabbie to take me to ... Oh my Lord! What am I saying? Sorry, got to run. I think that's Farrah Fawcett I see over there.

Rondi Adamson lives among the second-rate stars in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2000 All Rights Reserved.

Next we see a dowdy, middle-aged woman with, curiously enough, braces on her teeth (must have a horrible gum disease as the result of Harris health-care cuts) saying more or less the same thing. "Mike Harris was a teacher?'' Then she blows air out of her mouth and shakes her head as her subtle way of letting us know she is outraged. Thanks to this, we, the viewers, don't have to exert ourselves by  watching the ad and thinking at the same time.

Just in case we still don't get it, another person says pretty much the same thing and, in an attempt to appeal to young viewers, says this information "blows my mind.'' She has a low shock threshold. Another woman, who looks to be about 12, and therefore someone whose political opinion we would  want, also says she can't believe it. The acting is so bad it makes the acting on that Heritage Moment  about Dr. Penfield and the Hungarian woman who kept smelling burnt toast look like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Finally we go back to the dowdy woman with gum disease who repeats -- because by now we may have lost our way and gotten distracted and gone to get a beer from the fridge -- "Mike Harris was a teacher? Sheesh, something must have happened along the way.'' (Well I'll say! He got a job that didn't afford him three months vacation and to be home from work every day at 4:00. That's when he may have decided teachers didn't have it so bad. But I digress). The whole thing is about as understated as that "I am Canadian'' ad that made us want to take a big national Gravol.

This ad is one of a series put out by Ontario teachers in order to plead their case to the powerful TV viewers of Ontario. Whether you side with teachers or the government is not the issue. The issue is: Who on earth thought these ads -- clearly designed to appeal to the horrifically dimwitted -- would have any effect other than to make people a) laugh b) drink c) take an Ativan d)click on the remote while screaming "Honey, it's one of those stupid teacher ads again! Have Survivor reruns started yet?''

It could be argued, I suppose, that many TV viewers are horrifically dimwitted and need to be hit over the head with a grand piano in order to get whatever message happens to be on their TV screens. So in the spirit of altruism, may I suggest -- sponsored by the Committee of Canadians Concerned that the  Horrifically Dimwitted aren't Getting The Message, Whatever the Heck that Message Is -- the following TV commercials to help us all wake up and smell the burnt toast.

1) Concerned Canadian (you know he is concerned because of his furrowed brow): "Pamela Wallin was a serious TV journalist? My Lord, isn't she hosting the Canadian version of that freakish, voyeuristic display of degradation for money, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Wow!'' Another concerned Canadian (shaking her head): "Whew ... Pamela Wallin used to be a newswoman? Gosh, something must have happened to her along the way.''

2) Angry Canadian (frothing at the mouth): "You mean some of my tax dollars pay for the CBC? But what if I don't watch or listen to it? Geez Louise, that hardly seems fair.'' Another angry Canadian (biting off the cameraman's nose): "So, if I don't want to buy, say, a Nike product, I don't have to. But if I don't want to help pay for Peter Mansbridge, I can go to jail for tax evasion?''

3) Exasperated Canadian (sticking head in a vise): "Alexa McDonough is leader of the NDP? Isn't she wealthy? Didn't she grow up in a snooty, private school environment? Shouldn't she be giving all her money to, I don't know, those poor, victimized teachers?'' There's a grand idea. Then maybe they could afford to hire a better advertising firm.

Rondi Adamson lives, bitterly, in Toronto.
Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2000 All Rights Reserved.

Bashing Britney: Stop knocking the teen idol. You're just jealous that she has it all

Let's give Kathie Lee, everyone's favourite punching bag, a break

The old man and his cats: Fluffy felines rule the roost in Hemingway Home

KEY WEST, Florida - Ernest Hemingway was a man's man, a macho man. He loved huntin' and fishin' and bullfights and drinkin' and brawlin' and pickin' up babes.

And he loved cats. He had a cat or two in his apartment in Paris, and 60 or so at his home in Cuba -- where he took great care to give them proper burials upon their death. His carefully made crosses, each with the cat's name, can still be seen there.

He also had 50 to 60 cats at his home in Key West, Florida, which is now the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum.

The curious thing is, these cats -- or at least their descendants -- are still there. They have the run of the place, much as their ancestors did when the celebrated author was alive.

(Mr. Hemingway committed suicide in 1961. His family looked after the house -- and the cats -- until it became a museum in 1964).

At last count, 62 feline fluffballs of all sizes, shapes and colours ruled the home at 907 Whitehead St. where Mr. Hemingway wrote To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

Nearly half of them are six-toed -- or polydactyl -- kitties.

Polydactylism is the result of a genetic mutation in cats -- much like the short tail on Manx cats.

A Key West friend of Mr. Hemingway's gave him a six-toed kitty in the early 1930s and the rest is history.

The current generation of cats are, according to best guestimation, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandkittens of Mr. Hemingway's cats. Or thereabouts. Most cats in each generation are spayed and neutered but a select few, including at least one polydactyl, are bred to keep the line going.

The cats are well-cared for. A vet visits regularly to give them their shots, flea baths, ear-cleanings, etc. and huge bowls of kibble and fresh water are kept out round the clock. The odd outside cat will occasionally meander onto the grounds, but thanks to the territorial nature of cats, he or she usually won't stay long.

The cats are all named after movie stars --including a polydactyl Miss Mariel Hemingway -- or writers. And in true Southern fashion, they are addressed and referred to with great gentility as "Miss'' or "Mister.''

Lest you think the names are not taken seriously, just try and trip up museum staff. You won't succeed. Every employee can tell you the name of every cat and you can cross-check all you like. Each tour guide can tell Miss Lillian Hellman from Mr. Truman Capote, and Miss Zsa Zsa Gabor from Miss Susan Hayward (whose new book, the guides will tell you, is called I'll Meow Tomorrow.)

And they know exactly which kitties have those six toes. (The six toes are on the cats' front paws and the result is rather large looking feet with an extra, though non-opposable, thumb.)

Mr. Hemingway's wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was not as huge a fan of the cats as her husband, but accepted their presence as part of keeping hubby happy. She wouldn't be surprised then, at their status today: Where "Keep Off the Grass'' signs abound on the manicured lawns, they don't seem to apply to the cats, who sleep, groom themselves, and play on the greenery. Where the furniture is cordoned off to keep lazy and/or tired tourists from sitting down, cats sleep where they wish, even on antique chairs. They rub up perilously close to paintings, sculptures, knick-knacks and have even been seen napping on Mr. Hemingway's typewriter, still in his study, and also cordoned off from human hands.

Would Mr. Hemingway approve? "He wouldn't have it any other way,'' say Hemingway Home staff.

Key Westers are proud of the Hemingway heritage. Every July, around the date of Hemingway's birthday, July 21, the city celebrates "Hemingway Days'' a literary festival of sorts, with essay contests and special tours.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of his birth, and will no doubt be quite the shindig. Hemingway Home is bracing itself for more visitors than ever.

And the cats? Well, they are accustomed to the prying paparazzi and their run of the house and grounds is not expected to change just to accommodate a few extra camera flashes.

Copyright Ottawa Citizen 1999 All Rights Reserved.

Yuppie puppies go to day care

TORONTO - Two-income families are taking up a lot of headline space these days, what with tax breaks for day-care causing such a fracas in Parliament. Stay-at-home mothers feel slighted, and mothers who work outside the home feel judged.

That's all very well and good, but what about a tax break for all of those hard-working people who need someone to care for their pet while they're stuck in their office cubicles day after day?

In Toronto, dogs and -- and occasionally cats -- are being dropped off at day-care at 9 a.m. and picked up at 6 p.m., just like so many of their toddler counterparts.

These are not pet spas or grooming salons, where animals get a choice of gourmet treats and silk ribbons for their fur, but rather genuine no nonsense day-care centres.

In a growing trend, many Torontonians are leaving Fluffy and Rover with the animal equivalents of early childhood education workers. Several pet day-care centres are in full operation in the megacity, places where pets can play with friends, have a snack, take a nap, listen to a story, go outside to burn off energy (dogs are walked usually in pairs or small groups), sing, bark, meow, dance and then wait for mommy and daddy to come and take them home.

A spokeswoman for the Humane Society says five years ago, she would have laughed if someone had called asking about dog day-care. But now, she says, demand is there and it's likely more canine care centres will open soon.

Pet day-care is not a phenomenon relegated to the wealthy or even to yuppies and other poseurs. At anywhere from $12 to $25 a day, rates are affordable for a good many people. Some centres charge more if an animal needs special care, such as having to take medicine, or if an animal needs special food or attention of any kind.

Few pet parents, however, use the centres daily, and the ones who do usually get a cheaper monthly rate.

"We have some customers who maybe have one long day a week, maybe a day where they're out from 8 a.m. till after 6 p.m., and that's the day they bring their dog in,'' says Emily Cartwright of the only day-care centre for dogs in trendy Yorkville, Tire Biter.

Tire Biter has no cages, but it does have couches, chairs and TVs and at the end of each day, the little charges are sent home with report cards, commenting on their activities and behaviour.

Tire Biter has three staff members and up to 15 dogs. People who put their dogs in day-care can expect about one human staff member for each four or five dogs.

Shannon and Kyle Couch send their dog, Charlie, to Tire Biter one or two days a week, depending on their relative level of busy-ness.

"When our days are full, then he doesn't have to sit around home alone,'' says Shannon Couch. "It's better for us to not have to worry about what he is doing to our apartment, not to mention that he has the time of his life!''

Ms. Couch and her husband are personal trainers at Toronto's Sports Clubs of Canada chain, and say that they can make up the cost of Charlie's day-care if they can book in even one extra client on the days when they leave him at Tire Biter.

Especially for a city dog like Charlie, day-care provides something that's hard to come by on urban streets -- time to be off leash and socialize with other dogs.

"When he comes home he is so tired he just curls up and sleeps,'' adds Ms. Couch.

Where socialization is concerned, pet day-cares take things seriously. Dogs are usually "pre-interviewed'' to make certain they can get along with the pack.

As many as 15 dogs can be found at your average doggie day-care, all breeds, sizes and ages.

As for cats, while they have a reputation for not playing well with others, some pet day-cares do take them, and generally charge less than they do for dogs.

"They don't require the attention, walking and care that dogs do,'' says Johanna Thomas, owner of Pets Wonderful, on Toronto's Church Street. Pets Wonderful takes both cats and dogs and that is not, says Ms., Thomas, so much of a problem as one might imagine. The cats sleep most of the day, she points out, and really just need their own space with scratching posts, pillows, and whenever possible, rays of sunshine.

"Obviously, we separate them,'' she says, adding that the dogs frequently want to play with their kitty friends.

Is the feeling mutual? "You'd be surprised,'' she says. Sometimes, depending on the dog's size and the cat's personality, playtime together goes quite smoothly.

Are the cats, like the dogs, pre-interviewed to ensure harmony?

"Oh heavens no,'' laughs Ms. Thomas. "They're cats. They'll do that on their own schedule, and in their own way.''

The irony of places such as Tire Biter and Pets Wonderful going great guns against the backdrop of recent political debate is not lost on Ms. Couch. Musing on the $25 a day she and her husband shell out for Charlie's time at Tire Biter, Ms. Couch concedes that "for $10 more a day, I could put a kid in day-care.''

Copyright Ottawa Citizen 1999 All Rights Reserved.

Web design and development by A Touch of Splash   www.splashme.ca