Posted on 07/16/2002 9:30:53 PM PDT by gcruse
[Edited for length]
Eagle-eyed readers reeling from the vast army of National Post personnel doing cameos on Global TV will be aware that I am now the last unconverged CanWest columnist.
The question of television came up during my last contractual negotiations, and I said sure, I'd love to do a variety show, open up with the theme from Titanic arranged as a bossa nova and sung with special guest Allan Fotheringham, backed by dancing girls in spangled tights. But they replied that actually what they'd had in mind was if I could just come on and say what I said in my column only not as coherently. Same with radio: Occasionally, someone asks if I'd like to come on his station, and I say sure, I'd love to chainsmoke and play Peggy Lee at two in the morning, but he replies that he too would rather I just turn up and say what I said in my column in a slightly different order. For those of us who believe in divergence rather than convergence these are difficult times.
Of all three media, radio is the most intimate. The artifice of TV -- the desk, the sofa, the hairspray -- puts it at one remove. So too with newspapers: That byline picture above was drawn in 1974, the year before my sex change, and yet most readers are none the wiser. But radio people are in your head. And, even if most of the time they're interviewing Paul Martin or Anne Murray or telling you about an overturned tractor-trailer on the T-Can, in the course of three hours a day five days a week year after year the details of their lives imprint themselves on you subliminally but remorselessly. By the time Gord Sinclair died on Friday after 51 years on the radio in Montreal, most of his fellow anglophones knew more about the rhythms of his day than those of friends they've known for decades.
[...]I suppose to most readers west of Cornwall his name means his dad: Gordon Sinclair of CFRB, author of that famous 1973 salute to Americans. "I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around," he said, thus deluding so many of our southern neighbours into believing that deep down we're not just a bunch of socialist pussies. President Reagan on his first visit to Ottawa asked Trudeau if he could meet Sinclair, which given the rest of the guest list Trudeau had lined up is understandable. Gord was never close to his dad, who advised him to give up radio as he'd never amount to anything. When West Island matrons called up and began with, "I like your show very much and your father was a very nice man, too," he'd be polite but cool.
His dad's shadow never went away: Last fall, I was bombarded with e-mails from Americans and even Canadians forwarding Sinclair Sr's editorial to me under the misapprehension that it had been written in response to September 11th. It says something about us that paeans to America are so rare the last extant model is 30-years old. Gord agreed with his dad on America, but he wasn't a professional curmudgeon to the same degree. He knew he'd never be as famous, but, as he liked to say, "I've ended up as rich as he was." That's unusual in radio. I stopped at a Radisson hotel last year and the elderly receptionist's voice sounded familiar. He turned out to be a one-time big-time New England morning man. "Oh, I like this new work," he assured me, "because in a way I'm still in the communications business." Then he handed me the key and told me breakfast was from 7 to 10. If living well is the best revenge, Gord did better than most radio folks.
As for his views on God, even if he didn't personally believe in eternal life, the technology guaranteed it. Radio waves go on forever, bouncing around in space and ensuring that somewhere, right now, in some distant galaxy, Gord Sinclair is talking about the great deals at Furniture Wholesalers and the Subaru dealer across from the Alexis Nihon Plaza. For Montrealers waking up to the first week of the post-Gord era, that's a sobering thought.
Ping for the MSPL
[...]I suppose to most readers west of Cornwall his name means his dad: Gordon Sinclair of CFRB, author of that famous 1973 salute to Americans. "I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around," he said, thus deluding so many of our southern neighbours into believing that deep down we're not just a bunch of socialist pussies. President Reagan on his first visit to Ottawa asked Trudeau if he could meet Sinclair, which given the rest of the guest list Trudeau had lined up is understandable. Gord was never close to his dad, who advised him to give up radio as he'd never amount to anything. When West Island matrons called up and began with, "I like your show very much and your father was a very nice man, too," he'd be polite but cool.Now, here is that WONDERFUL 30-year-old paean to America, from http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Our_Culture/americans.htm:His dad's shadow never went away: Last fall, I was bombarded with e-mails from Americans and even Canadians forwarding Sinclair Sr's editorial to me under the misapprehension that it had been written in response to September 11th. It says something about us that paeans to America are so rare the last extant model is 30-years old...
The Americans
Gordon Sinclair
Radio Station CFBR 1010
2 St. Clair Avenue West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada"LET'S BE PERSONAL"
Broadcast June 5, 1973
CFRB, Toronto, Ontario
Topic: "The Americans"
The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971 and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the earth.
As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtse. Who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did.
They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Misssissippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.
When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.
When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries into help... Managua Nicaragua is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped.
The Marshall Plan .. the Truman Policy .. all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent war-mongering Americans.
I'd like to see one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes.
Come on... let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar or the Douglas 107? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or women on the moon?
You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times ... and safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, most of them ... unless they are breaking Canadian laws .. are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend here.
When the Americans get out of this bind ... as they will... who could blame them if they said 'the hell with the rest of the world'. Let someone else buy the Israel bonds, Let someone else build or repair foreign dams or design foreign buildings that won't shake apart in earthquakes.
When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble.
Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.
Our neighbours have faced it alone and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.
I hope Canada is not one of these. But there are many smug, self-righteous Canadians. And finally, the American Red Cross was told at its 48th Annual meeting in New Orleans this morning that it was broke.
This year's disasters .. with the year less than half-over… has taken it all and nobody...but nobody... has helped.
ORIGINAL SCRIPT
COURTESY STANDARD BROADCASTING CORPORATION LTD.
(c) 1973 BY GORDON SINCLAIRPUBLISHED BY STAR QUALITY MUSIC (SOCAN)
A DIVISION OF UNIDISC MUSIC INC.
578 HYMUS BOULEVARD
POINTE-CLAIRE, QUEBEC,
CANADA, H9R 4T2Now – please read, The True Story of how
"The Americans" came to be and the
magnificent events that followed its
original broadcast
Speaking of Gordon Pinset....just kidding. I
like Mr Pinset.
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