She's no Simon Reisman

What in Gawd's name is Chrystia Freeland doing with NAFTA?!  She's been at it for what, years?  And can't get anywhere.  She is obviously not up to the task.  So get her out of there and bring in someone else to negotiate with the Americans.  They obviously neither respect, nor take her seriously. 

I was part of the original Free Trade Agreement negotiations, when I worked for Customs and Excise, in 1988 between Simon Reisman and Peter Murphy, US negotiator.  Murphy had had cancer, but Reisman still wielded a big stick and we got a great deal.  Is the problem that she's a woman?  That she's four foot something?  That she insists on wearing those ridiculous pearls?  Maybe all of the above.  She is not taken seriously.  She is dealing with high-powered, chauvinistic American men and apparently can't hold her own.  But will Trudeau replace her?  Never.  We're effed. 

I had to work all through Christmas and New Year's in 1988-89 to ensure the agreement was implemented on January 1st.  But hey, I was a dedicated public servant and was happy to do my part.  Here is my official "thank you" from the deputy minister of Customs and Excise for my work on the FTA and my official certificate:

 





As to the Kinder-Morgan fiasco, Trudeau should have put his foot down two years ago.  Yes, he would have pissed off the tree-huggers, but he would have had two years to dig himself out of that green hole.  But he waited until the whole thing was a mess.  Guess what?  That $4.5 billion is just to compensate Kinder Morgan for what it has spent in vain trying to get the approved pipeline built.  We are now looking at another $8 billion to actually get the thing in the ground.

As I have said, ad nauseam, he will have to call out the army to get shovels in the ground.

And he won't. 

48 years

That's how many have passed since B married the mother of his children and 38 since he and I got together.  Last week, we discussed it and decided he had to call her about a family matter involving one of his kids.  Now, remember, he decided 30 years ago to never speak to her again.

Because you can't.

What a mistake the call was.

Not only did she not give a sh-t about the issue with her kid, she immediately went right back to their marriage and divorce.  It was almost as if she had been brooding for years and used the conversation to spurt out everything she had stored up.  Irrelevant topics and "who cares" abounded.  Her narcissism continues to block any objectivity and critical thinking she might have been able to have possessed.  That was how it was 38 years ago and evidently that is how it remains.  "I have confidence that the father will grant access, but I do not have the same confidence in the mother," wrote the psychologist we all had to see before custodial arrangements were finalized in 1983; that was why B was awarded majority custody. 

Miss Havisham anyone?  Even though she wanted the divorce, I picture her sitting in her wedding dress in a dusty house blaming me for everything -- which, by the way, she still does.

"Is she in the room?" she demanded.  "I don't give a shit about what Nancy thinks."  "She's been in the room for 38 years," he replied and raised our kids.  Frankly, I thought some progress might have been made, but I was wrong.  This person is still stuck in 1980.  "This is a dog barking," said a therapist I went to for help in trying to deal with her irrationality in the early eighties when I had to.  That was very helpful when I had to deal with childcare issues.  Logic?  Reason?  Sanity?  Practicality?  Forget about it. 



 

Insanity rules

What in Gawd's name is wrong with the Art Gallery of Ontario's "indigenous" curator, Wanda Nanibush?!  She and the gallery's curator of Canadian art, Georgiana Uhlyarik, have decided to re-name an Emily Carr painting to, "...eliminate culturally insensitive language from titles in its collection."

OMG!  Why is it always women who are so dumb?!

Poor, old Emily, turning in her grave, as her work is high-jacked by insanity at the AGO.  A panel near the painting notes the name change, explaining that the artist's title was in keeping with the language of her era, but that the gallery is in the process of amending titles containing, "terms that are considered discriminatory by modern standards."

OMG again!

Except that Carr painted it when she painted it, back when natives were called "Indians".  (By the way, does anyone actually know why they are called "Indians"?  Because the explorers who discovered them thought they had reached India.  But I digress.)  No one was more in-tune with natives and their culture than Carr, so to have the name of this painting changed for no good reason is a bit of an outrage.  Were I a native, I would be insulted that a couple of art gallery dummies assumed I would be insulted by the title of a 1924 painting honouring them.  Who do these women think they are and with whom do they think they are dealing?  Patronizing in the extreme.    

"If we change this title, does that mean we're changing the past?" says Uhlyarik.  "Not at all," was her stupid reply.  So why change the title?  You can't change the past, dummie.  The article in 'The National Post' went on to say that, "the effort to contextualize (a pompous word) Carr's painting is of a piece (mumbo-jumbo) with the gallery's decision last October to appoint her and Nanibush to jointly head the newly-rebranded Canadian and Indigenous Art department."  What a dumb move. 

How can a beautiful painting depicting an Indian church be "hurtful and painful"???  "I think this is how we open up a conversation about colonial history," this dimwit said.  Except, you run an art gallery, lady-- not a course on colonial history.  Wake the eff up.  Natives are doing themselves irreparable harm acting like this.  It's laughable. 

"Renaming a work in contradiction with the artist's intentions is tantamount to censorship," said Jan Ross, curator at Emily Carr House.  "We must examine things within the context of their day." 

Precisely.  How did these idiots get their jobs?  Here's the "offensive" painting:

            

Different rules

While the rest of us were scrambling around a hodgepodge of patchwork daycare solutions -- our mothers, relatives, neighbours and finally (in my case) a "wife" in the form of a live-in nanny -- to find daycare for our newborns so we could get back to work and keep our jobs, I found it a bit much that Sheila Copps and Mila Mulroney were lauded as "feminists" for bringing their babies to the office.  Remember that?  No one else was permitted to cart the kid to the office and stash him/her under the desk, or in a drawer.

Now we have the latest example in a Liberal MP and Minister parading her baby around the halls of Parliament.  Presumably, she'll be taking the kid to work regularly -- something we in the vanguard of feminism were forbidden to do.  In fact, even talking about domestic issues and child care was verboten.  You were pregnant, then you went away for a couple of months, and then you came back not pregnant.  And no one wanted to know how you were managing.  Just pick up where you had left off. 

Back then, we didn't get paid maternity leave for a year and then back to the jobs we had left.  No.  We got unemployment insurance -- much less than our salaries -- and we returned to the office and got "a" job back.  Yep, you had to move out of your office and do something else, while you watched someone else take over your job -- the one you had helped build.  There were big penalties for having the biological function of bearing children. 

That's the way it was, folks.  So here she is, in all her "feminist" glory, back at work and mobbed by the press as if she'd just invented the wheel.  She can actually thank women like me and my cohort for her good fortune because we went to the barricades and paved the way.



Aghast

That's what I was when I watched the re-run of the wedding of Meghan and Harry.  Did anyone know what that preacher was going to say??!!  Obviously not.  Apparently he "deviated" from his text and was ridiculous.  Right on queue, Martin Luther King was mentioned in the first sentence!  And why did he go on about "love being redemption"?  Redemption for what?  Who needed redeeming?  He actually claimed love could eradicate poverty.  Really?!  What he ignored completely was where he was.  This was Windsor Castle, for Gawd's sake, and he raved on as if he had been at a Baptist revival meeting in a tent!  But hey, this guy was never going to have a moment and audience like this.  Ever again.  So he went for it.  I found it appallingly embarrassing. 

No one knew where to look.  People looked down and sniggered.  Did you see the expression on Elton John's face?!  Dumbfounded.  I think his mouth was actually open in bewilderment.  Looking at Harry, I wondered if he were having second thoughts about the culture into which he was marrying because it was not the other way 'round; her culture dominated.  What was the poor Queen thinking??!!  Gawd. 

But her dress, although not one I thought appropriate, was magnificent -- especially with flowers representing the 53 countries of The Commonwealth -- sewn into the train.  That was very smart because The Queen is its devoted head.  To me it was an odd choice because she has been married before and divorced, so in my ancient mind, she should not have been in a traditional, white-virgin wedding gown.  I think something off-white or pastel and short would have been a better choice.  Frankly, Wallis Simpson got it right when she married her David.  She was clad in a lovely day dress looking smashing, as she always did for the rest of her life.   

All I can say to those who think the Monarchy useless, all I can say after this majestic display is "pshaw".  However, Harry and Meghan looked very happy and in love and for that I cheer.  Harry has been a stalwart and deserves happiness.  Now, if you want kids, get going!  She's 36!    

Copycat

That's what I was when I first read Tom Wolfe, the incomparable American journalist/chronicler who has died.  In the late sixties, I subscribed to 'Esquire' and Wolfe was in it regularly.  He was brilliant.  A journeyman writer and editor with Maclean Hunter at the time, I wrote articles like, well....a journalist.  But when I came across Wolfe, I said, "Whoa, this is how I want to write!" 

Easier said than done.  But from then on, in every piece I wrote I tried to copy Wolfe's personal approach to his subjects.  Instead of just writing about what businessmen I interviewed were doing at the time, I actually sought out their childhood friends and included anecdotes that helped explain their approach and success.  Sometimes my subjects were offended when I wrote about a childhood escapade, but my columns and articles impressed my editor and put me on the front page of the business publications for which I toiled -- with a byline!

Very big deal.

He was unique.  He did what I tried to do:  Wrote about facts, but with a personal perspective on my subjects.  My editor, Jean Portugal, then red-pencilled the sh-t out of what I wrote, which was so helpful because, although what I wrote was correct, I used waaaaay too many words to get there.  She made me a decent writer.  RIP dear Mrs. Portugal.   
_______________________________

On another note, Harper is now going public with his positions and opinions.  He even went so far as to say he could be leader of the Conservatives anytime he wanted.  I agree.  I think he has laid low to see what Scheer would accomplish. 

How about nothing.

Harper may be positioning himself to come back as leader.  Yay! 

I was a "victim" of the Forties Scoop

What a pile of weeping, wailing and teeth gnashing the 'Sixties Scoop' beneficiaries are sending up.  As a beneficiary of the 'Forties Scoop', when so many of us post-WW II illegitimate babies were adopted, I am so grateful I was raised by loving, middle-class parents who gave me advantages my working-class birth family could not have.  Had it not been for them, I would have been working on the line in the Du Pont factory in Maitland.  My birth mother escaped that sentence, moved to Hamilton and secured a very good job at Stelco, where she met her well-to-do husband.  Sadly, she could not have children, so the mold was broken with me. 

Why are the natives, who have benefitted from having been adopted and schooled, so ungrateful?  They can always go back and reunite, or live amongst, their birth families, but in the meantime, they just got handed $800 million.

Trudeau is apologizing, renaming and handing out money like a lunatic to every group he can think of.  It's insane!  History is history and you can neither change it, nor apologize, for what others did.  When the British and French landed here they encountered what they deemed "savages" and tried to educate them in the hopes they would assimilate.  When that didn't work, they allotted parcels of Crown land and billions every year for them to live on.  Frankly, that didn't work out too well either because on most reserves, with little to do, the main activities are drinking and drugging.  But native leaders will not change the Indian Act because that's how the money is handed them.  So the despair will continue. 

But natives are not compelled to stay on the reserve if they wish to move off and I know a couple who did so and have been very successful.  All I can say is, do something with the windfall you have just been given.   

     

"He was always a prude"

That's what someone said about my grade 13 boyfriend at the Lisgar Collegiate Institute's 175th reunion, when I mentioned the guy in question had morphed into a prude.  I laughed because I realized it was true and also the reason my mother and grandmother were so keen on him.

Go figure.  Why I dated him for a year waaaaaaay back then is beyond me! 

I was -- and am -- not a prude, as you can well imagine.

The reunion was so fabulous!  Wouldn't have missed it for anything.  "You're married to Nancy Griffith?!" said many to my husband.  "Wow."  (Don't know if that "wow" was in a good or bad way; I hope the former.)  The variety show was hosted by alumnus Rich Little, who was top drawer and very funny.  The dinner on Saturday was amazing and we were seated more or less by year.  There I was, next to Joan Fisher, who had been a year behind me.  "Nancy Griffith!" she exclaimed.  "You were head cheerleader!"  Joan was a year behind me, but went on to represent Canada in the Mexican Olympics.  And she was in awe of me!?!?  Seriously.

Saw lots of old boyfriends and realized our high school years are the best we will ever know.  "Remember when we couldn't wait to finish grade 13 and move on?! said an old friend.  "How great it was," I replied.  'Glory Days', as The Boss sings. 

Here are a few snaps of the event:

 

Bob Green, football hero, head boy and eventually a high school principal at Glebe -- Lisgar's arch-rival.

An ancient beau and a fabulous dancer.

Here's a Canadian Olympian, Joan Fisher.  An honour to have been seated with her.

Classmates.  Note, I am the one blabbing!

Football hero on the right, old pal on the left.