Hero Worship: Facts and Foibles

I just returned from Washington, D.C. where I got a quick education in the art of venerating leaders. The U.S. capital, a city of inspiring architecture, venerates four presidents in particular – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Each has a memorial and each memorial is unique.

The Washington Monument rises 555 feet over the city, a massive obelisk honouring the father of a nation with 300 million offspring. As official sire of the republic, Washington rightly deserves to be recognized by the world’s largest phallic symbol. He is remembered not only as the first president, but as a general who won the nation’s independence from Great Britain, as a farmer who lived and died on the land, and as a cartographer, surveyor, connoisseur of wines, voracious reader of books, entrepreneur, and all things deemed good by Americans. He is on the dollar bill, the capital bears his name, and lampposts throughout the entire Capital Region have his silhouette. The man is ubiquitous.

Even his estate in Mount Vernon, Virginia has been restored to its former glory. The entire experience of his life as depicted on these grounds portrays him as a leader of men.

The FDR memorial captures this president in a different way, telling a story that recognizes his accomplishments through the Great Depression and World War II. But he, too, comes across as a leader.

The same is true of Jefferson and Lincoln. Now Lincoln is widely regarded as the greatest of all presidents. The manner in which he sits – 19 feet from top to bottom, 175 tons, surrounded by 36 Doric columns in neoclassical magnificence with a look of wisdom that speaks courage and determination – is all you have to know about the man. But for good measure, the north and south chambers of the memorial are inscribed with the words of his Second Inaugural Address and Gettysburg Address, and people actually read them. Which brings me to my country. How does Canada venerate its leaders? And what leaders do we venerate? Aye, there’s the rub.

The house in Kingston, Ontario where Sir John A. Macdonald lived sits as a museum, but I don’t know a single person who ever visited it. He is on our 10-dollar bill and there are a few statues sprinkled about, but he is best remembered as a man with a large nose who drank.

Mackenzie King was prime minister for over 21 years – 21 years! – which is eight years or two full presidential terms longer than FDR served as US president, and for all that he gets his face on the 50-dollar bill, the odd statue, and not much else. He is remembered as a bachelor who was guided by the spirit of his dead mother.

When we consider more recent occupants of 24 Sussex Drive, I think it’s safe to say that leadership is not the first trait that comes to mind. John Diefenbaker was an able orator, in English anyway, but no leader. Lester Pearson earned his stripes on the international stage as a diplomat, but as prime minister he seemed more nice guy in the mode of Jimmy Carter than a man to follow into battle. Joe Clark had a soft chin and was led around by his wife. John Turner was in office just long enough to show he didn’t belong. Paul Martin wasn’t known as a waffler by accident.

What about long-time PM’s Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien? Mulroney spoke eloquently about the injustice of apartheid in South Africa and managed the economy, but will be remembered for the Schreiber affair, which puts him into Nixon territory. His debatable accomplishments aside, Mulroney will never be revered by his people. Besides, Americans don’t lionize their presidents, especially the dead ones, because of how they managed the economy. They lionize them because they were leaders.

As for Chretien, a rather arrogant and ignorant man, he did win three elections despite the fact he wasn’t conversant in either of the nation’s official languages, which I suppose is something of a feat. But let’s be honest, anyone proposing a monument when either of these two guys is gone would be laughed out.

Of all the prime ministers in my lifetime, Pierre Trudeau is the only one I would call a leader. The man had guts and he could make decisions. However, a monument or memorial to PET? Venerating a man who is the Father of Canadian socialism, who shied away from the fight against Nazi Germany and dismissed the battle as “England’s war,” and who for all his travels and alleged wisdom had precious little understanding of the country outside the province of Quebec, would be a bit much to swallow. Do you recall that after his death, it was announced that Canada’s highest mountain Mount Logan would be renamed after Trudeau? It would be our own version of Mount Rushmore. But it resulted in such ferocious debate that the idea was quickly nipped in the bud.

What about present PM Stephen Harper? He’s still new to the job, but I don’t get much of a sense of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln from him either.

Frankly, I envy how Americans wave their flag and venerate their leaders. It smacks of nation-building and the Americans have definitely built a nation. We seem to have inherited ours and that’s a big difference. Americans make their leaders larger than life – while they are in office and especially when they are out of office – and build spectacular monuments to honour them. Despite their foibles.

The bitter irony of George Washington and that 555-foot phallic symbol is that in 41 years of marriage the general didn’t impregnate Martha even once. And never mind that on his Mount Vernon estate he presided over slaves, or that one military campaign not recorded by American history was his decimation of 40 Seneca Indian villages on the finger lakes of New York State. Such things are conveniently overlooked, and let’s not forget that Washington’s career in politics was assured at the age of 27 when he married the young widow of one of the wealthiest men in Virginia.

It seems that having access to money through inheritance, marriage, or dare I say the word theft goes a long way to building a political career, no matter where you reside.

The point I’m trying to make is that if people were completely honest about their heroes, none of these men would be depicted as they are, and no nation would have any heroes. Not without some mythology. Jefferson wasn’t only a father of early America, he was also the father of many blacks who lived their entire lives as slaves. JFK was a womanizer. Nixon a liar. George W. Bush? Well, if the current Oval Office incumbent gets to Mount Rushmore – and I have my doubts – that huge bust of his head might well have nothing in it. It would be hollow. And if Bill Clinton ever gets there, what is on display likely won’t be a bust at all, but an altogether different body part.

Anyway, these guys won’t make it. Still, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt (Teddy, not FDR) look pretty damn good up on that mountain, don’t they? They look strong. And they are. Stone has that effect, as do all those monuments and memorials in D.C.  It’s all part of nation building and Americans are good at that, better than any people on this earth. Such things make them proud, while we Canadians are just … Canadians.

Whatever that is.

Toronto the Good

Frank Sullivan, who lives in West Vancouver, had a letter printed in the Globe and Mail last week. “Given the number of bullets flying around the streets of Toronto,” he said, “I’d think the city’s bureaucrats would be more concerned with preventing lead poisoning than skin cancer.” He was responding to the city erecting shade audits that would measure the angle of the sun at different times of day so as to protect children from the sun’s rays. I won’t get into that now, but I will get into the bit about lead poisoning. Or guns.

 

Frank’s letter made me think back a few years when I was working with a young woman from Sudbury, Ontario at an Ontario government office. At the time, Toronto’s so-called ‘year of the gun’ was making news all over the place, and this woman told me how her mother kept phoning from Sudbury because she was worried about her daughter being shot.

 

Well, let me tell you my story. I was born and raised in Toronto – and encountering such people is becoming more unusual all the time, but that will be another article – and have lived in this city for over half a century. Not once have I ever witnessed any situation or altercation where a gun was involved. Not once! I have never seen somebody get shot. I have never even seen a firearm of any type discharged. No AK-47. No Uzi. No sawed-off shotgun. No pistol.

 

Not a single time in over 50 years.

 

I’m sure that all you people in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal, and everywhere else figure that I must be the only person in Toronto who has been shielded from all this violence, and for such a long time, too. Why, I must be living in a closet with my eyes closed. How could this be?

 

I’ll tell you.

 

The reason I haven’t witnessed any of this violence is because at 3 a.m., on any given morning, you will find me at home in bed. If I’m not in my bed, you will find me in the living room reading a book or watching TV as a means of fighting insomnia. But you won’t find me in those areas of the city infected with gangs and crack houses, which are generally found in low-income, government-subsidized, high-rise towers where thousands and even tens of thousands of people congregate in ugly, seedy ghettoes that breed crime. Which isn’t to say that everyone who lives in such places is a criminal. But the ratio of criminals to the population is a lot higher there than it is on my street.

 

I could draw you a map of Toronto – the entire city – and show you where these places are. This doesn’t mean that innocent people don’t get killed or shot through no fault of their own. They do, just as they do everywhere else in the world, but in Toronto it’s not common. As I say this, my heart goes out to any innocent victims of violence who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. But to imply that Toronto is a city where you one is in constant danger of being shot is ridiculous.

 

This tells me that something is very much amiss in how my town is perceived by those who don’t live here.

 

I have little doubt that if a poll was taken asking Canadians what they thought was the most crime-ridden city in the country, Toronto would be no. 1. How could it not? A day doesn’t go by when the print and air waves – right across the country it seems – aren’t blazing about gun violence or three men found slain in west end or mayor seeks to ban all guns. At the same time, recently released crime stats reveal that Canada’s largest city is also – are you ready? – the safest big city in the country!

 

The highest crime rate was in Regina, Saskatchewan. Population 200,000. In fact, cities with the highest crime rates were all out West.

 

Now I know as well as anyone that figures can lie, just as liars can figure, and politicians are especially good at this. But I just wanted to assure people like Frank Sullivan in West Vancouver that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and it’s not his fault. It’s largely the fault of the media, which has an increasing tendency to create stories, and more than stories, issues that may or may not even exist, and if they do exist what gets reported is way out of whack from the reality. It is also the fault of some of those aforementioned politicians to whom the mere scent of a possible voter can trigger an outbreak of unadulterated BS.

 

Toronto is a city which, in many ways, is under fire. Gridlock is horrendous. The streets are falling apart. Many areas are not as clean as they used to be. Some parts of the downtown are in a sorry state because of a proliferation of beggars, panhandlers and drug addicts who are allowed to breed like mosquitoes. But Toronto is the fifth biggest city in North America, and for all big cities in North America, it has the lowest crime rate. Don’t get me wrong. When it comes to dealing with the bad guys, I’m all for getting tough, and in some cases, throwing away the key.

 

But implying that Toronto is under fire from the gun is a bit like calling Afghanistan a democracy.