4 - Friday, November 8, 1991

- North Shore News

Intellectual pitches at a designated redneck

EVERYONE HAS needs.
Right?

And one of the most pressing
human needs is to feel superior to
someone else.

And so we come, fairly swiftly,
to the monster need of the opi-
nion-shaping elites:

The need for a Designated
Redneck.

Yes, I’ve borrowed the term
from baseball, which, at least in
its American League and minor-
league form, has created a player
callcd the designated hitter who
has only one mission in life. He
may not know how to catch,
throw, or think out a double play
in a millisecond.

(it would take a whole multi-

disciplinarian army of math, phys-

ics and other professors two years
and a $3 million grant to figure
out where a second baseman
should throw the ball when he
fields a slow roller to his right
with men on first and third with
one out, his tean: leading 3-2 in
the home half of the eighth, and
the next batter a left-hander hit-
ting -302 facing a right-handed
pitcher. This same problem can be
— and must be — solved ina
trice by the second baseman, who
may be a Grade 4 dropout from a
bad school in rural Alabama.
That's why professors don't play
baseball. Or even computers. Nei-
ther can think fast enough.)

No, all the designated hitter has
to do is step up to the plate about
four times per game and sack the
hide off the ball.

The Designated Redneck is
somewhat the same — except that
his role is to step into the media
spotlight now and then where the
elites wack the hide of f Aim.

(No female redneck has ever
been discovered. Ever: geneticists
tike David Suzuki can’t explain
this.)

Now, you may be impatient to
get this column started. Wait. I'm
just throwing some warm-up pilt-
ches, That’s part of it too, you
know. Can't expect to go the full
nine innings starting with a cold
typewriter.

There, I’m ready. The theme of
this piece is that what defines a
Designated Redneck is not what’s
inside him. It's his so-called image
~ which is created by the media,
the tool of those opinion-shaping
elites.

Trevor
Lautens

GARDEN OF BIASES

(Few members of which, by the
way, are genuine intellectuals. But
that’s another game for another
day.)

And the image fills the elites’
pressing need for a jerk, a boor,
an uneducated slob, and especially
a cultural philistine.

Does the following sound to
you like the profile of a redneck?

He’s a graduate of the Universi-
ty of Saskatchewan law school —
2 respected one.

He's also 2 graduate of the
University of Western Ontario
business schoo! — the most
prestigious in the country.

His UWO thesis — papers on
the giant Steel Company of
Canada — were good enough to
have entered the bibliography of
Harvard University.

He spent 10 years in the com-
munity college fietd, as teacher
and administrator, including two
years as chairman of the business
school and career planning at
Calgary’s Mount Royal College,
and at Douglas College in B.C.

After that, admittedly, his re-
cord falters: be became a radio
hotiiner, which within the media
hierarchy is looked upon with a
certain contempt and an even
more certain envy.

And, more to the point of the
story that brought him national
attention last week, he spent six
years, two as Chairman, on the
North Vancouver District Library
board.

Not, you might agree, the
background of a stereotyped
redneck.

Yet that image was once again
whisked out of Central Casting
last week for Charles Henry
Cook.

Who?

You know. Chuck Cook.
(Maybe that nickname doesn’t
help.)

North Vancouver’s Member of
Parliament received the full exam-
ination of the nape of his neck
when he speculated, as a member
of the Commons communications
and culture committee, that
maybe Canadians shouldn’t pay
an $18 million a year subsidy to
the nation’s book publishers.
(They want three times as much.)

Cook suggested that maybe
many Canadian books just aren’t
good enough. Otherwise, he im-
plied, they wouldn’t need the sub-
sidy by half the Canadians who
don’t read them of the half who
do.

ALL
PATTERNS

Vogue, Simplicity,
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New Look and Burda
Sale Buy 1 Get

Well, something hit the fan —
and it wasn’t a foul ball off the
bat of a designated hitter.

Avie Bennett, president of Mc-
Clelland & Stewart, gave Cook 36
M&S books — its full fall list.

Author Howard White attacked
him on the Elite People’s Radio,
CBC (although W.P. Kinsella,
who needs no subsidies, gave
Cook some support).

Alan Twigg, publisher of BC
Bookworld, and all but a couple
of callers on Bob Sharple’s noon-
time phone-in show, flailed Cook
mercilessly. Gary Bannerman
scorned him on CKNW.

Cook chuckled.

“If you annoy the culture peo-
ple, they unite against you,’’ he
told me. ‘‘l mean, this’? — his
comments — ‘‘is heresy!’’

Best of all, CBC's As It Hap-
pens called him. But, after the in-
terview, Cook got the distinct im-

= 30".

pression that the interviewer was
disappointed.

“I'm supposed to come through
as a bozo who only reads the
comics,’’ Cook mused.

Somehow he felt he hadn't fit
in with the preconceived notion.
The item never aired.

Cook, having provided many
people with a chance to vent their
indignation, display their cultural
superiority, and wave the flag,
chortled that it was ‘‘a profile-
enhancing experience signifying
nothing.’

And those words suggest that
maybe Charles Henry Cook,
LL.B, M.B.A., is the shrewdest
promoter of all of his Designated
Redneck role. It gets votes.

Which, speaking of needs, isa
politician’s Mo. 1.

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