An Author with a Head on His Shoulders

Where is Robert K. Massie’s head at?

Well, fortunately it’s still on his shoulders, unlike some of the folks he describes in his biography of Russia’s famous empress, Catherine the Great.

Off with Their Heads



In a bizarre twist to a great book, Massie interrupts the fascinating story of Catherine to give the reader a chilling mini-history of the guillotine. The guillotine came into use during Catherine’s time (late 1700s) and became famous during the French Revolution.

Massie notes that it was invented by Dr. Joseph Guillotin as an instrument for delivering instant, painless death. However, Massie questions whether the guillotine really did kill instantly. He cites cases in which the eyelids on severed heads blinked.

One respected French medical doctor experimented with a severed head. He called the victim’s name after the head dropped from its body. The eyelids slowly lifted up and stared at him. The eyelids closed but opened again when the doctor again called the name, and focussed on him.

After the diversion of severed heads, we get back on track with Catherine’s story. There is a valid connection between Catherine, the guillotine and the French revolution. Catherine worried about revolutions like the ones in America and France erupting in Russia, which happened a little more than a century after her death.

Massie’s diversion to the guillotine is bizarre but interesting. For instance, I didn’t know it was used in Germany between 1933 and 1945.  Also, anyone who researches and writes as well as Massie has the right to take us off on tangents occasionally.

Catherine the Great, Portrait of a Woman is an excellent read that provides insights into Russian history and culture. Massie is the author the Pulitzer-prize winning Peter the Great and the book about the last of the Romanovs, Nicholas and Alexandra.

Massie is 82 and plans another book. He says he has to continue writing because he keeps having children. The youngest is 11.

No Eating the Pets

"God, I love watching them," my wife sighs with happiness. "I don't know if I could eat one now."

I see my plans for hunting wild turkey evaporating. I had taken the mandatory weekend course, acquired the certificate, bought the licence, camo pants, camo jacket, hat and face net, and special turkey hunter's vest with seat. I had steeled myself for cold. dark mornings, sitting and waiting and calling as they come out of roosts to feed.

A Spring Romance

Now my wife is turning the prey into pets.

Wild turkeys returned to Ontario after the government began a reintroduction program in 1984. Today, 70,000 wild turkeys live in areas across southern Ontario.

They started showing up at our cottage appearing skinny, so my wife decided to feed them. It was love at first sight, and now she sits by the window watching them snort up many dollars in bird feed.

They are big birds, males (gobblers) standing up to four feet high and weighing more than 20 pounds. They are tall, dark, but not handsome. They have fleshy, featherless heads and necks that look like posts where kids have stuck their used bubblegum. The colours even look like bubblegum, varying shades of red, white and blue-gray. The flesh lights up bright red on gobblers when the turkey is angry or sexually aroused.

On their beaks is a flap of flesh called a snood, which biologists say is a hearing organ five times more effective than the human ear. Their feet are odd as well, four yellowish toes making a foot. The gobblers have spurs on the backs of their legs and they use them for fighting.

 Their wing and body feathers are pretty, in a way. Dark buff or chocolate brown tipped with white. The body feathers are rich looking with a copper-bronze iridescence. The feathers on males are spectacular during spring mating displays when the tail feathers are fanned.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell gobblers from hens, but one way is to look for the beards. The beards are tufts of feathers that grow out from the chest an average of nine inches long. However, just to complicate things, a small percentage of hens also have beards.

You have to be able to distinguish between gobblers and hens for hunting purposes. But judging from the romance developing through the cottage window, I won't be out hunting them anyway. Or if I do, I suspect I’ll be doing my own cooking.

Dumping Deadheads

Everyone has an expiry date for their effectiveness and usefulness. Blackberry whiz kids Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis had passed their dates, and finally were removed last week. Whether their replacement by a new operating team comes too late to save the once revolutionary company is an open question.
 

Another leader past the expiry date for his effectiveness is Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario. The latest example of why he needs to go is the scandal at ORNGE, the provincial air ambulance service. The ORNGE board of directors was fired earlier this month after revelations of questionable financial practices. The forensic accountants now are at the books.

This is latest in a series of scandals involving the McGuinty government. Remember E-health where $1 billion of taxapeyers’ money went into the wallets of consultants? And, the Ontario Lottery Corp. scandal that revealed the rip-offs of thieving retailers?

If I stretch and crane my neck I can look down the lake to see the lights blazing at the former Leslie Frost Centre, which McGuinty shut several years back, purely for political reasons. The Ministry of Natural Resources complex sits there empty, lighted, heated, maintained  and protected by security. It was being managed by the mysterious Ontario Realty Corp., which was shut down last year under a cloud of suspicions.



Time to Say Goodbye



None of the many McGuinty scandals smell of old-fashioned corruption. Just sloppy governance. McGuinty himself is a quiet, respectable guy. Family oriented and all that. However, he has done an abysmal job as a political CEO responsible for ensuring that taxpayer money is spent carefully.

The honourable thing is for McGuinty to fall on his sword and let someone else direct his minority government. Ontario doesn’t need another election. It needs a fresh, dynamic and effective leader who will provide tight financial governance. Few leaders fall on swords anymore. So it’s up to the Liberal caucus to get the Dump Dalton movement going.

Good luck with that, but maybe someone can get it started before the flood of misspent tax dollars washes the province away.

Changing Without Moving to India?

You can get depressed watching the downward spiral of the newspaper industry in Canada. Fewer people read newspapers, job cuts in the industry are constant, news coverage of how we live our lives continues to shrink, and is more callow and shallow.



An industry caught in the headlights

The latest sad news is that Thomson Reuters, the global information and news service, is moving its online news service from Toronto to Bangalore, India. Only five of 23 jobs will remain in Toronto.

Thomson is a Canadian company built by legendary newspaper csar Roy Thomson who operated newspapers across the country and abroad. It sold its newspapers, got into international information sales, then acquired Reuters, the British news service.

The move of the online service says much about something we’ve known for a long time: News is simply an another commodity for making money and news executives now spend more time with balance sheets than they do building a good news report.

Thomson’s move out of actual newspapers in the 1990s was brilliant. It moved into the profitable business of providing data and information to professionals. It left behind a newspaper industry struggling to figure out how to become relevant in a rapidly-changing world.

The important thing to remember about Thomson is that it did something to change. The majority of newspaper companies in North America remain like deer frozen in oncoming headlights. They don’t know what to do, where to go, or what to become. Many are becoming roadside kill.

 

However, another Canadian is out there making bold moves to get the news business moving again. John Paton, the copy boy who became a major player in Sun Media Ltd., now controls a couple of major print and digital news chains in the U.S. While most newspaper executives continue talk about how to get into online news and make money, Paton has jumped in with both feet.

Paton is changing an industry that has fought change for decades.

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a piece revealing how he deals with people who won’t accept change in the business. At a meeting, a veteran columnist in one of Paton’s news operations told him that the fast moves to online were ruining journalism.

Paton replied: “I read your column. You are ruining journalism.”

Here’s hoping Paton continues to push ahead, changing journalism and the attitudes of the industry’s Neanderthals. And, maybe he can do it without moving it to India.

Dropping the Ball

We all hope a new year will dawn with much brightness, hope and promise of change. Good luck with that this year.

Bishop Lahey

First, Bishop Raymond Lahey, Roman Catholic leader and purveyor of child porn, was freed from jail this week after serving eight months of a 15-month sentence. He was guilty of bringing into the country tens of thousands of pornographic images. Hundreds showed boys forced into sex acts and torture.

A judge sentenced him, then set him free, giving him “double credit” for the eight months served while awaiting trial. The judge bemoaned how onerous it is for judges to balance the crime against the “personal circumstances” of the offender. I thought he would have bemoaned the horrors of the children whose lives have been ruined by pornographic merchants such as Bishop Lahey.

Lahey’s case has further strengthened the feeling on the streets that the powerful and the privileged are easily forgiven for their offences. The underprivileged and the dispossessed are the people who get the real serious punishments.

Also, it has strengthened the feeling, among supporters and non-supporters alike, that the Catholic Church truly is adrift. It recently spent 10 years and huge resources updating its Roman Missal prayer book to become more archaic, more sexist and more elitist than it has been in recent times. Meanwhile, the Vatican has been silent on the Lahey outrages.

Chatty Kathy



The church, and the Canadian justice system, missed an opportunity here to send messages helpful to our anything-goes society. Sentencing Lahey to a few years labour in an isolated convent operated by nuns devoted to the dispossessed would have telegraphed the message that the Catholic Church is urgently working on things that matter. The message from the Canadian justice system would have been that punishment does not need to be either soft or hard. It should be thoughtful, intelligent, innovative, and of course devoid of self-serving references to how onerous sentencing is for our well-paid, privileged judges.

I had a feeling the New Year was off bad start when the ball began to drop at New York’s Times Square. On CNN, hosts Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin were engaged in one of most awkward and silly TV performances ever (and that’s saying something). Then Kathy decided to be really entertaining; she stripped to her bra and panties.

Watching the undressing of a desperate entertainer, who is as attractive as a can of smashed Spaghetti-Os, didn’t fill me with brightness and hope for the New Year.   

Voice of an Angel

My favourite Christmas story, written many years ago for Readers' Digest, later included in my book Waking Nanabijou: Uncovering A Secret Past, and condensed here:

A Flat

Fresh snow squeaked protests against the weight of winter boots stomping a path through the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk cruelly scrapped against too clean a blackboard, and loud enough to echo off the two rows of houses wearing snowy mufflers on their rooflines and windowsills. The houses, all bungalows bunkered by snow banks, reflected the glow of lights announcing that their occupants were awake late into the night, celebrating, or preparing for the arrival of Santa Claus. I could hear singing.

I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars and the frosty moon the Chippewas called Manidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon that appears small and cold early in winter.

I held my breath to hear even better and determined that the music was O Holy Night and the notes came from the window in my grandmother's room. It was open to the bitter cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then and at gatherings cracked a window to thin the smoke. They sang the first verse and when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

"Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Night Divine! . . . ." That's the part where the notes rise higher until the singer reaches an awesome A flat.

The solo voice belonged to Louise Lafrance, my grandmother, and I knew she was hitting that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that had been her prison for sixteen years. She was crippled with limb twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden. The others had stopped singing to listen to her. Each time she hit the high notes at the words 'O Night Divine', a shiver danced on my spine.

My grandmother was bedridden with the disease in 1943, the year I was born. Our family moved in with her and my grandfather so my parents could care for her. The disease advanced quickly, twisting her fingers like pretzels, then deforming her ankles and knees, making it difficult for her to hobble on crutches. You could see the pain in the creases around her mouth and eyes, and from my bedroom I often heard her moaning in painful sleep, sometimes calling out crazy things like "bottle green, bottle green" when the primitive drugs she took against the pain grabbed control of her mind.

To pass the time and ease her pain, she took up smoking cigarettes. Late into the night I would hear her stir, then listen for the scrape of a wooden match against the sandpaper patch on the box of Redbird matches. When the acrid odour of sulphur drifted into my room, followed by the sweetness of smoke from a Sweet Caporal, I would get up, go to her door and see the red tip of the cigarette glow brightly as she inhaled. She would motion me in and we would talk in the smoky darkness, mostly about growing up and sorting through the conflicts between a teenager and his parents.

Occasionally she would ask me to reach down into her bedside cabinet and pull out the bottle of brandy my father placed there for when she had trouble sleeping.

She never complained or questioned why she had to bear the pain, and the humiliation of a strong, independent woman now dependent on others to fulfill many of her basic needs. She often needed a bedpan to relieve herself and relied upon her son-in-law to strip her and lift her into the bathtub. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year laying back or sitting on the edge of her bed.

None of this was in my thoughts as I leaned on the back fence and listened to the power and purity of her voice on Christmas Eve.

When she finished singing O Holy Night, the other voices started up again, this time with Silent Night and other favourite carols. I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants - my mom, dad and some neighbours - crowded into the ten by ten bedroom that was my grandmother's world. After the singing we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts. I have long forgotten what I got, and it doesn't matter because my real gift came many years later.

The gift of that Christmas was the realization that the A flats were not solely the products of the lungs; they were driven by something stronger than flesh - an unbreakable spirit and the will to overcome.

Thunder, Darkness and Tecumseh

December 16 is the 200th anniversary of the most powerful earthquake in eastern North American history.

About 2 a.m. that day the earth convulsed in the Mississippi River town of New Madrid, in what is now the state of Missouri. There were no measuring systems back then but it is believed the earthquake likely had a magnitude of 7.5 to 8.0. The shaking caused church bells to ring hundreds of miles away, including in York, now Toronto.

The death toll was never tabulated but populations in middle America were small and not heavily concentrated.

There were a number of eye witness reports, including one written in a letter by Eliza Bryan:

“On the 16th of December, 1811, about two o'clock, a.m., we were visited by a violent shock of an earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise resembling loud but distant thunder, but more hoarse and vibrating, which was followed in a few minutes by the complete saturation of the atmosphere, with sulphurious vapor, causing total darkness. The screams of the affrighted inhabitants running to and fro, not knowing where to go, or what to do —the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species —the cracking of trees falling, and the roaring of the Mississippi — the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes, owing as is supposed, to an irruption in its bed — formed a scene truly horrible.”

The New Madrid earthquake had an interesting connection to Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who spent much of his life fighting American advancement into Indian lands.

Tecumseh travelled extensively on horseback trying to recruit tribes into an alliance against American takeover of their lands. In October 1811 while he visited the Creeks in the south, a huge, bright comet appeared and Tecumseh, whose name meant Shooting Star, told the Creeks this boded ill for his enemies.

The New Madrid earthquake of Dec. 16 occurred while Tecumseh was returning home to the Ohio-Indiana region. Some tribes recalled that the great chief told them that he would stamp his feet or clap his hands and make the earth shake, and they took the earthquake as an awesome sign of his power.

Comets, thunder, lightning and earthquakes bode nothing for Tecumseh's enemies. He was killed fighting the Americans in southwestern Ontario during the War of 1812 - 14. He and his people were dispossessed but Tecumseh became a powerful symbol of people fighting to defend human rights.

More about all this can be found in my book Tecumseh: Shooting Star, Crouching Panther (Dundurn 2009).