You'd think I'd have something to say about the Juno's that have been going on in my city for the last week since the effervescent Pamela Anderson has been using the occasion has taken on Paul McCartney's cause to try and end the seal hunt "once and for all" through her participation as the MC of these aforementioned Canadian music awards that were hosted here this past weekend.
I have been staying as far away as I could from the whole thing - I didn't watch the awards at all, and didn't venture to the downtown core at all in case I came into contact with any of the Juno "doin's". Hassle scares me as I'm aging. But Peter Duffy's column today amused me enough that I thought I'd let his comments speak out - and then as a final say-so for the post - I'm going to debut an email I received more than a month ago from a guy who's from Newfoundland but now lives down in Louisiana that he sent to Larry King Live when Paul McCartney was on the show that is the most articulate piece of writing that you're going to read in a good long while. I wrote to him when I received it and he emailed me back to say that he received more than 500 emails thanking him for writing it. It gives an entirely different and thought provoking take on the fishing industry in Newfoundland and the Maritimes - and actually anyone who lives near the ocean - that I'll bet 99% of us have never thought of but that in our bones we have always felt.
One last thought about Ms. Anderson though - do you know that the government of Nova Scotia paid good money so that I could have the majority of those most precious of Ms Anderson's assets cut off my body? And I have never regretted it for one day! haha! I wish they wouldn've cut off more! It's one thing to have those things at 20 - it's quite another to have them at 60 - but I don't imagine that Pamela will still have them at 60 - she'll look like the idiot that Dolly Parton has become. Blech.
So here's some of Mr Duffy's column from today:
Not a dumb blond in sight as Anderson takes on the media
By Peter Duffy
THE LARGE ROOM is filling fast.
Here they come, dozens of self-important young men and women, some nicely turned out in expensive suits and dresses, most in fashionably grubby jeans, jackets and T-shirts.
It’s Saturday afternoon on Juno weekend in a downtown Halifax hotel. In they straggle, the movers and shakers, the trendsetters and the posers, laughing and hugging.
And this is just the media!
Armed with our tape recorders and cameras, we’re all set to pounce on the real star of the show, now a fashionable 45 minutes late.
We’re waiting for Pamela Anderson; the much-snickered-about, big-breasted actress who’s in town to host the awards show. She isn’t doing interviews during her visit but she has agreed to this one news conference.
So here we are, loaded for bear, or should that be seal? It’s no secret Canadian-born Pamela is dead set against the annual seal cull in this part of the world, so no doubt it’ll come up this afternoon.
I hope she knows what she’s doing. If she really is just a well-endowed airhead, these media sharks will eat her alive, especially the contingent from the Toronto newspapers. Judging by some of the catty dumb-blond comments making the rounds of the room, frankly, I’m starting to feel sorry for her already.
Fifteen minutes later, magically, the din in the room subsides. As if by instinct, smelling blood, we know she’s close. Sure enough, an official reaches for the microphone and makes the introduction.
The double doors swing inward, and here comes Pamela Anderson on the arms of two strapping Mounties, each in his dress uniform. The two officers, Cpl. Steve Gloade from Millbrook and Staff.-Sgt. Jim White of Halifax, tower over the diminutive blond star who’s nodding and smiling at the crowd.
She’s wearing a Grecian-style baby-blue dress cut high enough to deny a look at her famous breasts but short enough to expose her shapely legs. Her feet are in silvery-pink high heels, and her blond mane is carefully tousled. Her eye makeup gives her a bit of a hard look, contrasting sharply with her open smile and tendency towards the occasional, endearing giggle.
The photographers climb over each other for a shot, their flashes exploding like sheet lightning. Pamela makes it safely to the small stage and obediently poses for photos. Click! Click! Click!
"Pam, over here!" we yell. "Pam, right here, please!" we implore. When we’ve all settled down, Pamela sits at a table and prepares for the onslaught.
She’s articulate and well-spoken, handling every question and comment calmly and politely, even the dumb stuff. She doesn’t duck anything and comes clean when she gets an answer to a Juno question wrong, like thinking Britain’s Coldplay and America’s Black Eyed Peas are Canadian groups. She even flashes some self-deprecating wit when talking about her own career or her recent attempt to sing. ("Some of the notes . . . I embarrassed myself.") But it’s the questions about her stand against the violent seal hunt where she really catches fire.
She reminds us that she’s been a member of an activist group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for the last 15 years. This isn’t a fad on her part, she assures us. She wishes our prime minister would meet with her to discuss the issue. She feels it would be a great way for him to earn popularity with young people "because there’s not one young person, I think, in Canada that agrees with the seal hunt."
It’s a bold statement and it doesn’t go unchallenged. A Toronto journalist rises to tell her of a popular young singer from northern Canada who wears sealskin fashions. (He mentions a name, but it means nothing to me.) Politely, Pamela lets him finish and then launches another attack on the hunt. "We can force them to stop!" she declares of the seal hunters. "It’s not a huge (industry). Natives get hardly anything! It’s really being twisted and it’s not necessary." Someone asks her if she plans to escalate her anti-sealing efforts. "You’ll see," she promises. "It’s my mission right now. It’s important to be heard!"
After 45 minutes of this, the blond from Malibu begins to wilt visibly. Defending the cause of baby seals has drained her completely. Organizers cut off the questions, and Pamela rises to leave.
She hesitates at the edge of the stage and looks out at us a final time.
"Say what you want," she says dismissively in a barely audible voice.
And then she’s gone, sandwiched between the two Mounties. And for a long, awkward second, not a soul in the room moves.
Now here's the email from the fellow who's now living in Louisiana - read this and wonder...
Re: Interview With Paul McCartney, Heather Mills McCartney Aired March 3,
2006 - 21:00 ET
Dear Sirs and Lady McCartney;
While CNN and you, Larry, tried to display a balanced perspective on the Newfoundland Seal Hunt, there were significant elements of "not letting the truth get in the way of a good story". It is obvious that even the website mentioned by the McCartney's www.protectseals.org is a false revenue generation front for the US Humane Society automatically forwarding to the URL http://www.hsus.org/
This latest onslaught against the seal hunt is little more than a socio-economic terrorism campaign against the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. Who are the Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans you may ask? We are the Inuit and Innu who migrated east out of Africa eventually setting on the northeast extremities of North America; with the final leg of the journey avoiding the warring of the central pre Columbian tribes to a place where they could be free. We are the Scots, Irish, Welsh, French, Basque, English, etc... Migrating west out of Africa were; the highland Scots escaping the great clearances. The Irish escaping poverty, rebellion, the English crown and famine. The French and Basque escaping wars and rebellions, and Acadians hiding from the English clearances of Acadia. The West Country fisher folk who were left behind on our rock shores to fend for ourselves through cruel winters after the fishing admirals' holds were too full of fish to ship those poor people back whence they came. Much of the inhumanity foisted on Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans was either directly or indirectly at the hands of pompous English Lords.
But on our rocky shores they were unfettered and free; the deer in the woods were not the king's deer, the trees not the king's trees, the fish and seals in the ocean not the king's fish. What we had was ours to subsist upon and grow. In the post ice age trans-Siberian migrations, the millennia since Norse settlement and half millennia since English and Portuguese rediscovery we have become a unique society with our own culture, music, customs and folk lore. Two of the most recognized and best loved dog breeds in the world, the Newfoundland Dog and the Labrador retriever hail from our shores. We have thrived here by subsisting off nature's bounty as men and women of steel in frail wooden boats.
Every season had its purpose in our symbiotic relationship with this New Founde Lande. One of those seasonal bounties were the seal herds following the ice flows in the harsh winters when the root cellars were nearly empty of the previous years crop and the fish and caribou were out of reach in the thick sea ice and deep woods snows. Seal meat rich in omega 3 fatty acids sustained families through the lean winters, Seal oil lit lamps against winters darkness, seal skins became parkas and boots against winters cold fingers. It was then and still is subsistence hunting. Seal meat today in addition to being a pure, growth hormone and antibiotic free beneficial food source, is as much a delicacy in Newfoundland and Labrador as Veal and Fois Gras is in Europe. Yet the seals live wild and free and that some of their number fall to the hunter's bullet on a hazardous winter ice floe has none of the inherent inhumanity associated with the production of Foie Gras, veal or any other intensive factory farming technique. By comparison Sealing is a small scale near cottage level enterprise in which the sealers get a significantly larger percentage of the profit and healthy meat from the endeavour than workers with the Agri-food Multinationals responsible for the mass production of hormone and antibiotic laden Chicken, Beef , Pork etc...
Sir Paul tries to differentiate between Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans pursuing their traditional Seal Hunt and aboriginals who do it for subsistence. The Inuit seal hunter who leaves Makkovik or Cartwright in his boat to hunt seals is pursuing the same basic human right as the sealer who leaves Twillingate, Bonavista or St. Anthony; Feeding, housing and clothing ones family. To say there is any difference smacks of racial discrimination and elitism, claiming that one class of human being has different inalienable rights than another. If you were to completely map the genome melting pot of Newfoundland and Labrador society after the past millennia, the boundary between those whose ancestors exclusively migrated from the East out of Africa are as rare as those who exclusively migrated west from Africa.
These are the same small boat, inshore and near shore fish harvesters whose 500 year history of sustainable fish harvesting has been destroyed by the foreign offshore draggers and factory freezer trawlers. Primarily from the European Union, these wealthy and powerful multinational corporations have vacuumed the fish stocks before they came ashore to feed these rural families. Despite decades of outcry by our rural communities, no high profile bleeding hearts like the McCartney's ever lead the banner march to stop the corporate pillage and return that world heritage resource of the Grand Banks to its former abundance.
I am an engineer in the Petrochemical Industry and my westward migrating ancestors have been on Newfoundland's shores since the mid 1500s. Despite my ancestors of the recent two centuries being Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors, Nurses, School teachers, Merchants and Artists, we all farmed, fished, hunted and ate what we hunted and fished. I have had a personal use sealing licence, for mature adult seals only, whenever I lived in Newfoundland and ate what I hunted. I am very conscious of what I eat and stick to organic, naturally raised or sustainable/wild caught animal and fish products.
Likewise I am conscious of the clothing and products I buy, gravitating towards cotton, hemp, silk, flannel, leather, fur, etc. all biodegradable. In fact when my seal skin boots of 18 years service were finally beyond repair, the boots and felt liners were put into my compost heap to eventually be recycled into fresh vegetables. I wonder what could be said of Lady McCartney's much touted synthetic boots, manufactured from non-renewable petrochemical resources in plants that use many carcinogenic compounds and are often cited for fugitive emissions polluting the air, soil and water. Such synthetic clothing items are exceedingly difficult to and rarely recycled usually ending up in the morass of land fills or burned to release their constituent toxins into the air, soil and water.
Rather than focus on the plethora of inaccuracies in most of Sir Paul's and Lady Heather's arguments, I would prefer to direct you to the governmental web site for Fisheries and Oceans responsible for the Seal hunt.
http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/seal-phoque/myth_e.htm
I think Lady Heather and Sir Paul would find it difficult to accuse the same Government of Canada of lying about a small rural cottage industry as the seal hunt, while being such a stalwart supporter of Lady Heather's ban on land mines and its 40 year history of international peace keeping activities.
Sir Paul your desire to completely stop the Seal hunt is not a one issue campaign, but a case of tunnel vision brought on by the propaganda of those who reap enormous financial benefit from using you and Lady Heather as the poster children for their cause alongside a newborn Whitecoat Pup. Speaking of which, I think is it time that Premier Williams launches a lawsuit against using the Whitecoat pup image associated with campaigns to ban the seal hunt as fraudulent misrepresentation, since the federally regulated hunt does not permit hunting and killing of these seals in the Whitecoat stage.
Furthermore, Premier Williams should request Congress and the FBI to do a forensic audit of the Humane Society of the US and any other agency that uses the seal hunt as a revenue generation mechanism to show what proportion of the seal hunt revenues go towards the seal hunt campaign, and what portion are diverted into general revenue, as none of these monies are ever directed towards the rural communities whose fabric has been ripped apart by the fishery collapse. If found guilty of such misappropriation of cause specific funds, then these agencies should be stripped of their taxable donation status.
Sir Paul, if you are looking for a just cause in your golden years, then put your weight and wealth behind stopping the EU based over fishing on the Grand Banks. Help restore a sustainable Cod Fishery of 500 years to its former abundance and the outport Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans reliance on the Seal hunt will taper off accordingly. Plus the seals won't have to scour for food on the Trans Canada Highway far from the sea.
Desmond McGrath
A Newfoundland Patriot
Living in Political and Socio-Economic Exile in the Bayous of Louisiana
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