cktimes.ca Archives for Notes from a Garage


Notes from a Garage

With John Gardiner

Good news, Charles Dickens and where are those weapons of mass destruction....

Wednesday, June 4, 2003

It's been another really good week at cktimes.ca. The number of visitors to the site remains strong and that encourages me to keep on keeping on. I truly enjoy meeting all of you during my travels and have found that you folks really seem to like the cktimes site and the good, positive news I tend to run on it. This is the philosophy! The news media constantly tells us that they give us what we want – and what they give us in a steady diet of negative, sensational stuff. It is my belief that there's plenty of good news going on in the world each day, so why is most of the news we get from the media negative? Because the people who manage the news media effectively censor what we get as news each day. All media outlets receive far more news than they can use each day – somebody decides what makes the evening newscast. I think these media managers have been programmed to search out the bad stuff – they really think that's what people want to read and hear. Well, you know what? More and more people I talk to are sick to death of all that negative stuff. More and more people I talk to are not reading the mainstream newspapers or watching the news on TV. Why? Because it depresses the heck out of them. Sure, there is bad stuff out there we need to be aware of, but I'm not sure I ever need to know that 38 people were killed in a bus crash in India. We need to start a trend to get thinking more positively about this old planet – that's the only way we can turn this around. Think about it.

I'm extremely excited after talking to Chatham resident Jane Katzman last week. Jane and some other Chathamites have formed the Chatham Dickens Fellowship right here in Chatham-Kent and the idea is to create a Dickens Festival Theatre in our community, similar to the Stratford Festival which revolves around Shakespeare. You see, Charles Dickens was from Chatham-Kent in England and there are a host of similarities between that community and our Chatham-Kent. Jane and her group feel that if Stratford can claim the Bard, then there's no reason why we can't claim Charles Dickens. I agree. In fact, I think it's a terrific idea and I hope a whole bunch of you Chatham-Kentites will get on board and help make this work. I'm a frequent visitor to the Stratford Festival during the summer months and there is no more culturally alive place in the whole of Canada as far as I'm concerned. And the economic benefits that Stratford and area enjoy are considerable. Why, there are over 400 bed and breakfasts in the Stratford area and they're not all in Stratford by any means. My wife and I have stayed in a fine B&B in St. Mary's which is about the same distance from Stratford as Wallaceburg is from Chatham. Next meeting for this enterprising group is June 12 at St. Clair College. Get involved and make Chatham-Kent a better place to live.

So, the boys in Bagdad are having a little trouble finding a single weapon of mass destruction. Surprise! Surprise! And according to a report on NPR from Detroit, the intelligence community in the U.S. may well have known there were no weapons of mass destruction long before the war started. Now, this leads us to a couple of interesting questions. First, did the intelligence community deliberately mislead President George Bush so he honestly thought the weapons existed? Or, did George W. also know and did he deliberately mislead the American public about the possible existence of weapons of mass destruction? These are fairly serious questions and if George W. wasn't entirely truthful with the American people, perhaps Bill Clinton's bad behaviour wasn't so bad after all. Richard Nixon got in deep trouble for not being entirely truthful. What about George W.?

Heard a very disturbing story last week as well. It was about the number of criminal convictions currently being overturned in the United States because of DNA testing. In fact, Illinois has done away with the death penalty after it became aware of how many innocent people were dying in the state each year. The story also called into question police interrogation techniques. I remember watching part of an episode of NYPD Blue a couple of years ago. I watched as the detectives deliberately lied to a suspect to extract a confession. I remember saying to my wife that that was absolutely morally wrong – the police should absolutely never lie. She said that the police are dealing with some very bad people and sometimes lying is necessary to get them off the street. That's totally wrong-headed thinking. And from what I heard on radio last week, these tactics are leading to a huge number of innocent people ending up in jail and in some cases on death row. Extremely scarey stuff. The modern police officer needs to realize that the vast majority of us are on their side – we want the bad guys off the street too – but we're not all bad guys. It's the truth.

Anyway, about to sign off for another week. Thanks so much for tuning in week after week. Some great reading in cktimes.ca. Keep thinking positively about the weather and maybe it'll improve. And remember..."Hew to the line; let the chips fall where they may."



John Gardiner is a 25-year-veteran of the community newspaper business, but he is also a prolific writer of moralistic short fiction he refers to as "emotional thoughtscapes" or "adult fables". Samples of his fiction can be found at:

He has also produced a noteworthy piece of humanist philosophy which can be found at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~aboiten/ad502.htm He welcomes comments on his work.