Michael Coren, Danish Cartoons, Sean Penn

I've been punk'd

By Gary Reid

Friday, September 15, 2006

I submitted to CFP two back-to-back articles about columns written by Toronto Sun columnist, Michael Coren, on the not unreasonable assumption that CFP might find them interesting enough to publish. My assumption was correct.

However, notwithstanding CFP's choice to publish, I find that I have become the subject of a column by no less than the owner/managing editor, Judi McLeod, who characterizes me as having "my knickers in a knot" and hopes that I will purge myself of Corenphobia before December 25. Further, Judi tells us that she has had to defend the honour of her publication because of questions raised about my dubious political leanings.

I keep looking around expecting to see a grinning Ashton Kutcher and a cameraman emerge from the bushes to announce that I have been "punk'd".

Starting with the question, am I left or right, I consider myself to be neither. I call the shots exactly as I see them. Other people may filter my pieces through "right" and "left" political prisms, if they wish, and conclude that I am one thing or another, but I am not a shill for a specific ideology.

I have had 3 columns to CFP "spiked", as the newspaper argot would have it. Two of those were published elsewhere. I think I am entitled to assume, when I see my work appear in CFP, that it has passed the political smell test of the editors.

Judi appears to suggest that I lay off bashing Michael Coren. According to her, journalists are not very important people, not well-respected, and not influential -- so why lather so much ink on this guy? Or, as she said in other words -- why am I so lathered about him?

Actually, I am not.

I wrote two columns around him, but only the second was really about him-- pointing out his hypocrisy on the subject of free speech, and the irony of finding himself in exactly the same position that the Danish cartoonists did when he was busy praising the people who were threatening those folks. I also find Christianity a confusing religion when it comes to identifying its moral centre, especially when I listen to people like Coren, and I wanted to make that point.

The first column, however, was aimed at the issue of the use of nuclear weapons and it was his arguments that I picked apart. I did this partly because I saw no public outcry appear in the letters pages of the Sun. Perhaps this is because, as Judi says, the public doesn't think the opinion of journalists is all that important. I suspect that it has more to do with the strange quiescence of our society about nuclear war.

In the ensuing days, there was a letter from one lady who was outraged to see actor, Sean Penn, smoking during an interview in connection with the Toronto International Film Festival. Her anger was directed towards the free pass given celebrities from the laws that apply to us.

But, if you examine the issue more closely, these laws were passed so that non-smoking people would not perish from inhaling the smoke from smokers. I thought, "How strange that the potential smoke from a 2-mile wide atom bomb crater would provoke not the slightest interest from the Sun readers, but Sean Penn's burning cigarettes would stir them to take the time to write a protest."

If I have a hot button, it is nuclear weapons.

With respect to these abominations, the world is becoming progressively less safe.

Lost in the buzz of the last U.S. Presidential election was the answer Bush and Kerry gave to a question during one of the televised debates. Asked to name the single biggest problem the world faced today, both candidates, without qualification, identified the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

During the height of the Cold War, the President of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union had direct telephone connections in their respective offices, solely for the purpose of preventing an accidental nuclear war.

Contrast that with the current situation where the nut bar leader of a hostile nuclear power, North Korea, and the wing nut leader of a putative one, Iran, not only have no special telephone connections to the White House, but the administration has a policy of refusing to even talk to them. Diplomacy is waged by press conferences and media releases in the capitals of the nuclear states.

Does this make us safer than we were in the Cold War, when at least the cold, calculating communists realized that their survival might depend on having direct discourse at the top level?

And, the madness of proliferation will not be solved by resorting to nuclear weapons to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The minute someone starts using atomic bombs to obtain a political change, the argument is made for everyone to get them, and maybe use them.

Finally, a word on journalists and on the power of the written word.

A political cartoon is journalism. If journalists have no power, then why did thousands of people, in several countries, rampage through the streets of their cities burning and killing because of cartoons drawn by people who are less than household names? You would think those artists had invaded and bombed Muslim countries!

The written word is a very dangerous weapon. Every autocratic country in the world locks up people who publish words that are deemed dangerous to the authorities.

The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, which led to the rise of Germany as the strongest country in Western Europe, and which is considered by some historians to be the dress rehearsal for WWI, was triggered by some strategic alterations in the wording of a diplomatic telegram by the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.

And, not to forget that we have the problem of the atom bomb to deal with today principally because of a letter sent to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt by Albert Einstein, telling him the Germans would get the bomb if the United States did not beat them to it. Of course, like Iraq and WMD, the claim later proved to be less than accurate, and Einstein regretted writing the letter.

Having said all this, I was never worried that the words of Michael Coren would start a nuclear war (see comments about Sean Penn's smoking, above).

And, Judi, I hereby promise to leave the schmuck alone. Well. At least until the next time he says something that strikes me as being extra dumb.

Gary Reid is a freelance writer and a public affairs consultant. Gary Reid, Opinion 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002