Upbeat-ism required

Our economy needs optimism, not gloom

                        by Robert LaFrance
 

            It seems I forgot to write my usual ‘Bah Humbug!’ column before Christmas—and thereby justifying my not getting presents for anyone. I am thinking it’s time I wrote a nasty one as I look forward to 2012, but I won’t of course.

            Who but my former friend Flug called me yesterday from Ottawa? He was about to get on a plane for Bermuda. “I didn’t dare to mention it when I saw you last,” he said over the noise of a nearby jet as it warmed up, “because you get a little nasty about people deserting a sinking ship as you call it, and going south for the cold part of our winter.”

            “Not at all, Flug,” I said reasonably. “I have only said that snowbirds should be taxed—by New Brunswick—85 cents for every dollar they spend south of the border. Funny thing, the ones heading south in the winter are often the same ones who come home in the spring and whine that our medical system is going to the dogs because they had to wait an hour and a half to see a doctor.”

That was a bit of an understatement in a way; dogs don’t usually have to wait more than twenty minutes to see their physician. At that point Flug said he had to go; his plane for Bermuda was leaving in twenty minutes. “I’ll see you in February,” he said finally.

            “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” I said, “as long as your 747 can land at Upper Kent airstrip.”

            On to other subjects than former friends—rats—jumping ship, I notice now, as January progresses and the days get longer, that all those marvellous things I saw advertised on TV in November and December seem to have disappeared. Whatever happens to all those adjustable wrenches that will also bake a cake for you? And there was that one woodworking device that seemed pure magic to me. You put a short log in one end, and a finished occasional table comes out the other. (Don’t ask me what an occasional table does the rest of the time.)

            Once the new year arrives and we’re all broke, all those luxuries disappear and we’re back to looking at commercials for shampoo and dog food—and don’t get them mixed up. It’s a kind of magic—either magic or I’ve drunk too much lemonade over the holiday—the way that we are told in December that we must have a computerized digital moustache trimmer or we will get the heebie-jeebies, yet on January 2^nd it no longer seems to matter.

            Christmas was supposed to save our economy, but I heard recently on the TV news from Ottawa (and I know that they’re not allowed to lie up there) that in 2012 the Canadian economy is going to be ‘lacklustre’ in spite of all that spending we just did at Christmas (if we’re still allowed to say Christmas). Then another broadcast quoting economists from the big banks told me that growth is going to be slower in 2012, only 2% or so. Then I saw various other gloomy headlines. It made me sad, and I don’t like being sad.

            It’s clear to me as it is to you, I am sure, that the biggest problem with our economies is pessimism. Here is a recent headline in my daily newspaper: “Outlook weakening: Bank of Canada survey”. The sub-headline was “Weak U.S. economic outlook and problems in Europe cloud business expectations in Canada”.

            Hmmmm. Now let me see…if I were selling a used car, would I put this in the ad: “2007 Toyota Corolla. A little iffy on the hills, seat covers damaged from a party, paint scratched where my nephew backed his lawn tractor into it. Doesn’t get as good a gas mileage as the company promised”?

            Hell, no. I would say it “rides smooth as an ocean liner, gets great gas mileage, clean, doesn’t burn oil, CD player works great”. All those economists and their gloom and doom can’t help but discourage us all. As the weather got colder in mid-December and the elections were all over, meaning governments can now get back to stinging us every chance they get, I thought of this song: "Button up your overcoat, when the wind is free...Take good care of yourself, etc.” Guess what? The wind won't be free much longer when the government finds a way to tax it.

            Let’s get optimistic and start thinking: hey, we’re ready to get out of this recession. The first step would be for government to quit spending money trying to tax the wind, and the second would be for us to start thinking positive thoughts.

                              -end-

An enema of the state

We have met the enema and beaten him

                        by Robert LaFrance 

            Anybody who has a low embarrassment threshold shouldn’t choose a registered nurse for a mother, at least they shouldn’t have back in the days when I was growing up, in the 1950s. My mother, who trained in Norwood, Massachusetts, and came back to New Brunswick for love—or so I’m told—was more or less the unpaid doctor on call in Tilley, NB, and it resulted in some interesting scenes around our house. For example, she (I emphasize ‘she’) wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to conduct our Saturday evening bath in the kitchen in front of company.

            More than once she treated broken bones, and everything from measles to Dengue Fever, sciatica, gunshot wounds and bad burns. Of course she sent them to the doctor if the case was serious enough, but most often she was the ER of North Tilley, NB. Any kid with a fever would find himself being bathed by my mother who wielded the cold washcloth like a sword.

            So far I have mentioned mother taking care of the illnesses and injuries of others, but it is now time to mention us kids—and all we endured. I refer to enemas. I swear, she would have given us an enema for a broken leg. It was her cure for everything when it involved her kids, while she used traditional medical practices for everybody else.

            “Feeling a little sniffly, are you Bobby? You look as if you need an enema.”

            “Lawrence, you didn’t seem very hungry at supper, and it was your favourite too—chicken gizzard soufflé—I’ll go find the enema tube.”

            “Joan, you…” Well, you get the point. I am not even going to explain what an enema is, but let’s just say it was an early colonoscopy without the camera. Believe me, after one of those, no vile bodies would dare try and exist in the bowels of the victim. And keep in mind, this was in the outhouse days, if you get my drift. We didn’t have indoor running water and a flush toilet until 1967 when I was 19 and gone.

            When I got into my early teens, I was in open rebellion against enemas. I think it all came to Armageddon the evening my cousin George arrived from Millinocket, Maine to stay with us a week or so while his father and mother were away in Gorham, southern Maine, where my grandfather and grandmother Schriver lived. George no sooner got into the house than mother started asking him how he was feeling. I tried desperately to catch his eye and warn him, but it was to no avail. “Well, I have had a kind of an ache for a few days,” he said, “but that was just because I dropped a stick of 4-foot rough pulp on my shoulder.”

            Not the thing to say. “I think an enema would be just the thing to get you back in order,” mother said, and went into her bedroom to collect the tube, funnel, etc. George just looked bewildered, his mother being a seamstress and not an RN. He didn’t know about enemas. I grabbed him by the arm and said let’s get out of here before she kills you. We headed for the barn where I had been learning to smoke just beside the haymow, probably NOT one of the safer places to have lit matches and cigarettes. Over a couple of Camels (I refer to the cigarettes, not Syrian farm animals) we talked about ways to avoid enemas. Finally I stood up, after carefully throwing my lit cigarette into the haymow.

            Back at the house, I bearded the dragon. “No more enemas! It’s the middle of the twentieth century now, Mum,” I said, “and I’m a teenager. That’s why God made Ex-Lax.”

            “You’re only twelve years old; I’ll decide who gets an enema!” she roared, then sniffed. “I can smell smoke. Were you smoking in the barn again? Come on!” There was just a little smoke coming from the haymow. We always kept pails of rainwater on the barn floor for the cows to drink. Half a dozen pails of water and there was no more smoke. I don’t know what she was worried about.

            The point is, we had made our stand, and won. She gave up. To sum up, the sight of blood doesn’t scare me, since I saw lots of other people’s over the years, and people moaning in pain – why I just laugh, but those gol-danged enemas! I develop a nervous twitch just thinking about them.

                                                           -end-

The feedback was tremendous!

It's official. We are spoiled

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Whew! I never got such a whack of letters in response to a column since I wrote about killing that mouse with a broom. Back about 2006 I think it were. Yeah, I know, your question is: where did the mouse get the broom?

            This most recent deluge of letters I refer to all contained complaints about my column on how spoiled we are today, what with all the modern inconveniences—when they work.

            I got a postcard from a local man. One thing that made his blood boil was the sight of someone using a snowblower and operating it from inside one of those transparent plastic tents “so the wimpy souls don’t actually get cold”. He went on to say that real Canadians face the weather, whatever it is, and only go inside when the wind chill factor is –50C or lower. “It’s time Canadians toughened up,” he said. He signed the postcard: ‘Albert Finogloss, Birch Ridge’ but I noticed that the picture on the postcard showed scenes from Hawaii. The postmark was Maui. He’s an example to us all.

            Amanda Johnstory wrote from Bairdsville, NB, that she was in full agreement with my opinion that we are spoiled today. “When I was growing up,” she wrote in a spidery hand, “a bottle of pop was eight cents and a gallon of gas was twenty cents, and woe betide the person who got them mixed up. I find people today to be whiney, spoiled, and a total pain in the aspect. Paved roads? We went to town on horseback through the woods except in the winter when we just stayed home. We didn’t have any money anyway, so we couldn’t buy anything. I was twelve before I could afford an elastic band to wrap up my…well, that’s personal. We had outhouses, now we have 2-tier flushes.

            Liberal MLA George Clumpe wrote that without the Internet he wouldn’t be able to do his job which includes buying his vacation plane tickets online, Tory MLA Shirley Clumpe wrote that I should ignore anything her husband wrote “because he is an idiot”. Federal Defence Minister Peter McKay wrote to say that he wished the media hadn’t found out about his personal trips paid for by the taxpayers. “In the old pre-Internet days of snail mail, nobody would have found out about it until I was in the Senate,” he moaned—in an email letter.

            “Spoiled is right,” thundered MaryLou Grayee over the phone one morning. “My husband Bill can’t walk across the room with his TV remote, he starts the car with his remote—different one of course—and raises his garage door with yet another remote. He also has a remote to keep track of all his remotes, and a remote for his electric blanket, his electric toothbrush, and a remote for tying his shoes. Spoiled? Well, I should smile.”

            The Reverend Josie LaTour was a little calmer about things, but still was vehement in her agreement with me that we are spoiled. “Bless you, my son,” she said. “You told it like it is, just as I used to tell it when I was a member of Satan’s Neighbours motorcycle club. In those days we had to actually start our own motorcycles, not push a button or use a remote control as they do now. When I hear about someone who has a remote car starter or an iPhone, I curse them up and down the hills from my very pulpit. Woe be unto him or her who abandons the old ways, I tell them, and whosoever does is going straight to hell. Or Toronto, which is pretty much the same thing.”

            “A snowblower is a tool of the devil,” the good reverend continued. “What’s wrong with shovelling or scooping, or hiring the kid down the road to shovel or scoop? I know that it’s good for the economy for us all to go out and buy a new $2000 snowblower, a $700 computer, a new $168,000 Rolls Royce like the one I just purchased. I know we should all spend, spend, spend to get us out of this recession, but we’ve become a high-tech bunch of useless wastrels who acquire a bunch of stuff to make our lives easier and all that happens is that everything breaks down and we have to drive to town to get it fixed. Infrared sensors in restaurant washrooms so we never have to turn a knob? Come on. Let’s do like Thoreau and simplify.”

            I felt like writing back to say that Thoreau lived and wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century when things were fairly simple as it was, but I just settled back on my computer chair and downloaded some more emails. I like people telling me I’m right. Next I might say Christmas is becoming too commercialized. I’ve only had 87 people point this out since Thursday.

                                                  -end-    

No question, we are SPOILED

We are one spoiled bunch of Christmas turkeys

                       by Robert LaFrance 

            After a couple of months of watching TV commercials and listening to people tell the world how they will simply pass away if they don’t get the latest electronic gadget, and how walking to their car exhausts them, I have come to the conclusion that we are all incredibly spoiled. When you start getting the idea that ‘roughing it’ is only being able to afford an iPod Nano instead of a Touch, something is askew.

            Surely we’re out of the recession now; people seem to be buying everything that isn’t duct-taped down. The phenomenon known as Black Friday was a good example of this. Over in the U.S. shoppers pitched tents in store parking lots so they could be on hand when the store opened for business. They could get an eight-person tent for $1.29 or a 5000-watt generator for fifty cents—plus tax of course.

            The iPods, X-boxes, and the StarMax 3010Js (whatever that might be) were selling like Ex-lax at a constipation convention all through November and December, even while our political leaders were telling us that their next budgets were going to hit us hard.

            In the midst of all this, I was talking to a couple who had just come back from Caribou and Presque Isle, Maine, where they had spent many hundreds of dollars. Since both the husband and wife had, in 2011, undergone expensive medical procedures in New Brunswick, I was tempted to ask if part of Maine’s sales tax went to help our medicare system in any way, but I didn’t bother.

            I can sit in my living room, in my favourite chair that is moulded to my every indentation, and listen to radio or watch TV from every part of Canada and the U.S. ‘Podcasts’ allow me to listen to my favourite shows at my own convenience. Remember when we would say: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could record a TV show and play it later?” I believe something called a VCR came along about then but now that is ‘veille jeu’ as they say in Paris, Ontario. An old game, or old hat.

Spoiled. I can send an email letter to Shanghai, China and receive a reply in five minutes. Marco Polo, sailing in the 13th century, took months to go from Italy to China. In our cars today we have tire pressure sensors because we’re too lazy to check the inflation of the tires. We have remote controls for an array of things; otherwise we would have to actually cross the room to change a setting. Remote car starters, the GPS, satellite dishes, heated seats in cars, and digital cameras. How energetic we are!

NASA put people on the moon, but I am not sure their Apollo spacecrafts had bigger instrument panels than my Chrysler Intrepid—and it’s only a 2000. I can use something called Skype and telephone Aunt Rennie in Liverpool, England by using my computer and a ‘digicam’. I said I CAN do that, but since she informed me I am now officially out of her will in favour of a tennis instructor named Glenn, I don’t bother. Besides, the downside of calling on Skype is that I would be able to see HER and she’s had a hard life, if you know what I mean.

I can request library books via the Internet and have them delivered to my home library (as long as Stephen Harper continues to allow the post office to charge only book rate for this); I can ‘Google’ any subject and get information on it in seconds; I can watch a soccer game from Lille, France at the exact instant it’s taking place there; I can take a photo of my great niece and mail it using my cellphone to her great grandmother in Montreal where it’s printed out before the little girl has time to say “did you use the proper DPI settings?”.

Every few months my cousin who lives along the Darling River in Australia sends me the Tompkins Family newsletter and I see what various cousins are up to. Mail is rather fast these days, and I don’t mean the kind that arrives in my mailbox outside, the one that used to be at the end of my driveway and is now 2.5 kilmetres away in a group box.

I recall when I went to university in 1966-67 (my career in higher learning) and I would write to my father and ask for money. It took three weeks for him to reply and he usually said he had already sealed the envelope or he would have been glad to send money. Houses are kept at 25ºC, food is ready-made and all we have to do is chew, we have every modern convenience, and still we complain.
                                                     end