4 - Wednesday, YEARS AGO, I wrote a column saying that I didn’t see anything wrong with war toys, and took a fair amount of flak as a result. My thought was that violent imaginings are a natural impulse, a learned reflex from the jungle. The trick in adulthood is to learn to control those reflexes, yet they also have to be sharpened and re- tained. You never know when you might have to defend yourself, even nowadays right here in Canada. Gee whiz! I find it ironic, of course, to sce plastic submachine guns being sold as appropriate gifts to cele- brate the birthday of the guy who said turn the other cheek. But otherwise, the hullabaloo about war toys is misplaced lib- eralism. Aldermen square off over P&T __ plan " NORTH VANCOUVER Ci- ty Council squared off over the Park and Tilford development proposal Monday as aldermen repeated their comments on the controversial plan. By STEPHEN BARRINGTON News Reporter Comments from the city adviso- May 27, 1987 - North Shore News Bob Hunter @ strictly personal ® L My son, who’s now eight, had every Stars Wars figure there was. He went through all the He-Man players, and has now graduated, because every other boy in his class did, to G.I. Joe. Rather than being alarmed, | must say I have been waiting for this. Looking forward to it. At the previous stages, the plot lines mainly involved other worlds and while the main char- acters were usually human, their enemies and allies were an in- credible array of uglies. Blowing them away didn’t pose too many problems in terms of neighborhood. Everybody here is at least human. In an event, it is hard to apply the lessons of cartoon — science fiction to day-to-day life. But now a model of a real human soldier and near-battalion of fellow trained killers has ar- rived in the middle of our house, and have been welcomed. G.1]. Joe, I submit, is a marvellous learning tool. I figure a good part of my function as a parent is to be the guy who introduces my kids to the facts of political life on Planet Earth in the dying days of the 20th century. If you’re going to teach your kids, you have to get their atten- tion, as you know. That's not always so easy. My strategy is to go with the electronic flow, take advantage of the stream of gibberish coming off the boob tube and the cor- nucopia overflowing from the toy tracks. The two are so tightly related the line blurs. The kids’ cartoons feature the characters who are the toys, or is it vice versa? In any event, it is a blood-chillingly effective marketing ploy. ry planning commission and the development liaison committee recommending rejection of the 15-acre BCE Development Corp. shopping centre project brought both words of praise and howls of protest from the aldermen. BCED’s latest shopping centre proposal includes a large Save- On-Foods outlet, a multi-screen Cineplex Odeon complex and a host of small shops and services. The city development liaison committee unanimously recom- mended rejection of the plan, citing the ‘‘massive increase in retail commercial space...detrimental to the established commercial properties including those owned by the ci- Ald. Stella Jo Dean labelled the committee’s reasoning as ‘‘very difficult to accept’’ and added that the new development would in- crease city tax revenues. But Ald. John Braithwaite, a longtime opponent of any com- mercial development on the site, supported the two planning boards’ recommendations on the proposal. “This (planning commission) report is very clear as to why ‘the (proposal) was turned down from an advisory planning commission point of view,’’ he added. A public hearing on the development’s community plan amendment is scheduled for the evening of June 22 and a full BC- ED delegation is slated to attend. I keep vaguely thinking it must surely be illegal for the toy mun- ufacturers to get away with such blatant manipulation of a zillion little minds. But if my kid wants to watch G.1. Joe and his team blast the Cobra Commander and his hen- chmen to kingdom come every day after school, rather than resisting, | try to keep up with Joe’s adventures. This way , the kid and I have a common military background experience, as it were, to refer to. And this opens the door onto a subject that almost never gets touched in school, and certainly never in the context of family talk, namely the role of the mili- tary in modern day-to-day ex- istence. : What is it? Two hundred mil- lion dollars a minute being spent on arms. It turns out that G.I. Joe’s tank sports a Canadian flag as a sticker. We can get away, for openers, with pretending Joe's really a Canadian. Thus. my son follows quite keenly when we go to the globe and position Joe and his guys on the part marked Canada . But in- stead of facing the Cobra Com- mander, Joe is now facing the real world. “Here are the Russians. Here are the Americans . Here’s us. All these put together are called NATO. All these are the Warsaw Pact. Over here are the Chinese It will take a while before we get the players aff on the board, to be sure. But it is amazing how quickly he picked up the essential Cana- dian military dilemma, a two- front situation, which of course doomed Germany twice. My son’s education about geopolitics and guns has begun. Explaining who pays G.I. Joe and the boys is going to be fun. Who buys their equipment? Why are the other guys on his case? Why does it say MADE IN HONG KONG on everthing? So, rather than repenting for having written an apologist piece about war toys, I would go fur- ther now and say they make great educational aids. Maybe you should buy some for your child. How’s that for heresy? Cheers Restaurant is the Official Winner in the Third Annual Capilano Coca-Cola Classic Waiters Race held on the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver. They placed first over 35 teams with a new course record of 1:08.41. Gary Bonner and John Shannon now held the title of the highest and fastest waiters in the world. Congratulations!