The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
There is one simple reason why every newspaper columnist in all the newspapers in the universe hates the editorial page cartoonist. I know many of the best of them ? Roy Peterson of the Vancouver Sun, Terry (Aislin) Mosher of the Montreal Gazette ? and go out and drink with them and dine with them and laugh with them. And I hate their guts. The reason is envy. One of the Bible's seven deadly sins. And jealousy, which I guess that cuts it down to five. The reason for the hatred is that, life being what it is, some ludicrous situation throws it up into society ? and these lucky guys leap upon it with glee and with a few strokes of the pen can picture the idiocy involved in a glance. While we mere scribblers have to sit down for a few hours and scrabble over words and logic and, hopefully, humour, to bore our boundless readers with something they saw anyway in the editorial cartoon. Such a gift to these enemies of mine came, of course, with the news that the poor, put-upon ministers of the United Church of Canada were applying to get into bed with Buzz Hargrove and the Canadian Autoworkers Union. Who, in print, could compete with that delightful farce? Swift? Orwell? Could Lenny Bruce write? Tom Wolfe? Where is Dalton Camp when we really need him? I say this in all seriousness, since I know that Jesus Christ was the first socialist. He said it himself: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." That is the basis of all socialism. Be fair to others, and they will be fair to you. Tommy Douglas (all the great ones come from Saskatchewan) preached that from his Baptist manse and invented universal medicare for this lucky land. This scribbler is a world-authority on the United Church of Canada, having in his possession five medals from Carmen United Church in downtown Sardis, British California, proving five years of Sunday School without missing once (while my dear mummy, now 96, wuz leader of the church choir for 40 years.) Don't argue with me about Jesus and socialism. My only complaint is with my cartoonist buddies. How can a scribbler adequately describe the alliance of the boys in the turned-around collars getting into the sack with the lads on the assembly line, who can't wait for their shift to end so they can get down to the pub to watch the football game, or the strippers? I wish I wuz a cartoonist. X X X AND ANOTHER THING The chattering classes are all agog over the more-than-candid nature of my friend Peter C. Newman's 733-page memoir, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of Power, Passion and Power. (He is my friend because he invented me; putting me on the back page of Maclean's, a run that lasted for 27 years.) See 'Journalism' P.# Con't from P.# There is a little more, ahem, passion in this fascinating tome than we expected from the guy who changed Canadian journalism forever with his Renegade in Power portrait of the eccentric John Diefenbaker (all the great ones come from Saskatchewan) and his tales of the tycoons in his Canadian Establishment books ? tricking every one of them to blab out their secrets, sometimes pretending to fall asleep while his tape recorder was still alive. He records his first marriage in 1951 ? and the divorce in 1958, where "with poor legal advice" bound him to pay half his salary to his ex-wife and so paid alimony for "40 cursing years." His second marriage was in 1959 and lasted to 1976. His third was in 1979 and lasted to 1990. His fourth marriage, to his "last damn wife" was in 1996 when Alvy Bjorlund, an Alberta farm girl (now completing a PhD in London where they live) placed an ad in the singles column of the Vancouver Sun and a lonely Newman responded. What has got the chattering classes boggled over their cocktail parties is my friend's candour. He prints out the names of five of his lovers, including a Miss Canada. And then revealing that he had a love affair "for over 20 years" with one Barbara McDougall, who among other things was Canada's foreign minister under Brian Mulroney's regime. I'm not good at math, but there does seem to be an overlap. This guy has more courage than I have.
