Being An Ornery Old Man

seanessay.com I’m only a senior citizen who doesn’t expect Canadians at the next breakfast table to remember… Sean Crawford, in last week’s post, A Spy Being Too Tired

I started being an ornery old man back in childhood. I would take a Pacific Stage Lines bus along the mighty Fraser to the port city of New Westminster, previously the capital of British Columbia. One day I saw two grey ships aligned perfectly, side by side. A fellow in an army green uniform—not navy blue—was on deck. My child treble carried to him, “Are you government?”

He replied with a voice trained for being heard through a gale, “We’re navy!” Wow. Many boys grew up with the romance of the sea and the Royal Navy. Me too, although I was raised inland. But not any journalists working at the New Westminster daily newspaper, The Columbian. I read a grownup’s letter to the editor saying a British admiral was a liar, because his age, minus his reported years of service, would have meant joining the navy as a child. Was I the only romantic who knew that officers—not crew—started with the rank of midshipman at eight years old? Not one journalist caught the writer’s error. I was shocked. “Not fair!” Call it the child equivalent of being a senior citizen, heart armoured, shaking the newspaper and muttering, “Dat burned fools.” 

I would remind reporters that those British students in their last year of high school in the 1967 movie, To Sir With Love were only turning fifteen. No surprise midshipmen were even younger. The book was in 1959; the US spin off (1969) TV series, Room 222, had them turning 18.

As an adult, before attending university myself, I once stood outside a university classroom door listening to a teacher explaining Sparta, and asking for something her students couldn’t deduce, even with broad hints: “Why do you think Spartan girls ran to school?” She finally had to spoon feed them: “So they could be strong mothers to strong warriors.” (Today a mother with kids in sports would feel no need to jog) That was Professor Sylvia Shaw; I still have her obituary on my refrigerator door. Had I been an old man I would have stood outside her door and muttered “Dat burned kids” instead of feeling sadder and wiser. Sorry Virginia, every student doesn’t know about Athens and democracy; about Romans being unpaid citizen-soldiers; about Rome declining from a virtuous first world republic to a decadent third world empire within a single generation.

I’ve read that Chinese can think, and then communicate, with a richness of metaphors and proverbs. Not us. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau implied Canada shouldn’t have a culture when he told a New York reporter “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” (Link)

Maybe would-be reporters could get a regular degree first, achieving a minimum standard of knowing our culture and human nature, before they specialize in journalism. Until my own time, people down the generations kept referencing the same enduring classics, as when Khan chose exile, with his followers, over rejoining society. He easily explained himself by asking Kirk, “Have you ever read Milton, Captain?” 

Kirk answers, “Yes, I understand.” Later, when Engineer Scott is embarrassed at not knowing, Kirk explains that Satan said, “Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.”

As a boy I had no way of knowing that I would come to live in a world of people, however smart, as innocent as Scott. I can’t protest, not if I want to be a grown up who “takes the world as he finds it”: Makes me ornery.

After losing my innocence about journalists, I no longer expected them to know our culture’s basic history, but what about them knowing popular culture? What hope for the rest of us, if even journalists don’t remember best sellers? 

David Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize winner, went to Japan for months to conduct research and interviews. Horribly high cost of living, but his investment of time paid off. Or so he thought. In his best seller (1986) The Reckoning he compares the motor companies of Japan and America, exposing how US arrogance led to auto manufacturers in the US and Canada losing so much market share to “foreign imports.” Arrogance: front wheel drive, which should have been a “no-brainer,” was standard in Europe a full ten years before any automaker here introduced it. And so-called “Japanese management,”was in fact invented by an American, Edward Deeming, but he was ignored for years by arrogant US car companies, right up until regular Americans started choosing imports because they were better built. Then, at last, the executives showed respect, inviting Deeming to speak at Ford.

Too bad Halberstam’s years of researching and writing were wasted years. During the Wall Street melt down General Motors wanted a federal bail out… yet persisted with such arrogance as bonuses for executives and taking a private jet—front page news—to meet with the White House. Yet no reporters referenced The Reckoning.

It’s as if journalists with their fancy degrees, and the rest of us, have a memory that extends at most four years… As politicians know. 

If someone looks pained when the Russians annex Crimea, and grunts, “Munich” then he is complimenting you, acting as if you share basic 20th century history. So ask what he means, and build up your own shared culture. Then I won’t stand to one side feeling ornery.

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Sean Crawford

Alberta,

October

2023

Footnote: A Star Trek fan site, Memory Alpha, has all of Star Trek’s John Milton references (link)