Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - April 4, 2005, Winnipeg, Manitoba A12 Winnipeg free press monday april 4, 2005 Freedom of Trade comment editor Terence Moore 697-7044 Liberty of religion Equality of civil rights editorials the Mother of Talent m embers of the guess who were with us once again on the weekend reminding Winnipeg about greatness. The thrilling band like Neil Young who cancelled at the last minute grew from promising beginnings Here to become giants of Rock music. The Juno awards show last night was Winnipeg a and Canadas moment to Cele brate those artists others who have followed them and the curious environment of Winnipeg in which greatness can sprout. At the same moment Winnipeg is grieving the loss of Evelyn Hart Lead dancer with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet who danced her last dance Here a week ago after 30 amazing years with the company. She is pulling up stakes and moving to Toronto after finding that the Rob was offering her no Lead roles in their productions next season. It makes a sad parting but it has been a fantastic 30 years just the same. The Winnipeg Ballet Audi ence Learned to treasure her expressive Power and Winni Eggers who were not interested in dance could still glow with Pride Over her achievements on the dance stages of the world. The musicians and the dancer Are masters of their arts but they also have the gift of touching an audience at a human level beyond Rock and beyond dance. Spectators who know nothing of the technique Are bowled Over by something deeper ? an intensity honesty and depth of feeling that must command respect when they Are expressed by people of such consummate skill. For a Small and isolated City Winnipeg has a remarkable record of launching such artists into International orbit. Neil Young and Evelyn Hart had already started into music and dance when they moved Here from Ontario As youngsters. The Singer As a teenager started to attract attention As a student at Kelvin High school in the late 1960s. He left Winnipeg to achieve Fame and Fortune in a wider world but kept his Winnipeg connections. The dancer came Here to study at the Rob school found work with the com Pany and Sank her roots Here. By the mid ?80s she was growing restless and attracting International attention. The Rob accommodated her wishes to dance in London Moscow and Munich. Winnipeg shared a Little of the reflected glory she won. The guess who grew out of Winnipeg a own soil. Organized first in 1962 As Chad Allen & the reflections they found a local audience then a broadcast audience and then reached National stardom with their 1965 recording of Shakin All Over. Then International Fame came with the hit song american woman. Soon they were recording in London per forming at the White House and hardly seen in Winnipeg. Winnipeg is a great place to Start but it is not a place to grow great. You May be the loveliest dancer or the finest guitar player or the most polished band in the world but if you Are Only seen and heard in Winnipeg you Are not great. Greatness is measured by your Impact on a world that is wider than one Small and nurturing City. Evelyn Hart a wonderful dancer at the Rob became a great dancer when she wowed the dance world at Varna in 1980. The guess who in the same Way were not great until Shakin All Over became the top Selling single in Canada. Excellence can be made in Winnipeg but greatness has to be found elsewhere. Excellence is made Here because Winnipeg teach ers and audiences Are in touch with the wider world and know its High standards. But the City is just far enough from the other major markets ? one step off the beaten track ? so that touring artists some times bypass the City and Home grown Talent gets a hearing. This is a huge advantage for Winnipeg in these years of rising hunger for entertainment. As canadians and people of other nations gradually improve their incomes and their standards of Liv ing they make larger and larger places in their lives for the Good things of life including entertainment. Music especially has vastly extended its reach in recent decades. Middle Price cars come with magnificent sound equipment. A Good proportion of the passengers on any City bus Are listening to their headsets. This Market can Only grow As equipment prices drop. The people who know How to write perform and record the music to feed through All this equipment Are assured of interesting careers and Winnipeg knows How to train and nurture those artists. The other Side of that Coin of course is that the Best ones get too big for Winnipeg and then they have to leave. This is True in the arts and it is True in Many other Fields of endeavour. But Winnipeg has plenty More where they came from. This City enjoys first rate artists before they Are discovered while their prices Are still in the Winnipeg Range. A few of them blast off into High orbits where Winnipeg watches them twinkling in the night sky and remembers the Days when they were just starting out. We knew him Way Back when. But today will soon be Way Back when. The Young sters meeting this week in somebody a garage or somebody a basement May just be amusing them selves and annoying their parents or they May be building something that the world will eventually recognize and treasure. Until someone else tells us How Good they Are we May not even know How Lucky we were Way Back when. Manitoba a very own gulag for years i be wondered about the Efficacy of Canadas aboriginal reserves. But i Haven to said much. I Don to live on a Reserve and i a mindful of my sainted Mother a warning to not criticize anyone until you be walked a mile in their i Don to know if that san aboriginal expression but it seems to make some sense. I do however have a flood of questions for people like me who Bob along in Canadas main Stream. One of the most important Are we through our subsidies to reserves complicit in a system that destroys some peo ple and Are we subsidizing reserves simply because As one broker put it wed rather have them on isolated reserves than lying drunk on the sidewalks of our communities to a frightening degree there Are similarities Between some isolated Northern reserves and the gulags of the stalinist Era. Both take people whom some Don to like and keep them on Barren areas in the frigid North. The peo ple there suffer from poor housing and unhealthy diets. True the people in the gulags were forced there at gunpoint. But is there a real differ ence Between using guns and using pervasive prejudice to Force people away from main Stream communities the people in the gulags were forced to work on government projects More than 80 per cent of the aboriginals in some Northern reserves can to find jobs. Again a question for main streamers is there a real difference Between forced idleness and forced labour the idleness in Northern reserves can Lead to depression ? and that leads to some boozing and drug sprees family breakdown child abuse and lethargy. Questions like these popped into my head after i read an insightful series of articles by free press editor at Large Gerald flood on the problems of the people in the vast undeveloped area East of Lake Winnipeg. Shortly after or. Floods articles appeared Jeff Weise 16, killed nine people on a . Reserve 280 Kilometres Southeast of Winnipeg in the bloodiest school killing since the 1999 Columbine tragedy. Its unfair to disparage a Community because of the actions of one distraught youth. But per haps its Worth More than a footnote to say that his Reserve suffers 40 per cent unemployment despite several casinos and its students scored second lowest of the Minnesota schools last year on tests for 11th-Grade math and third lowest for 10th-Grade Reading. The support for isolated reserves is not cheap. Among the costs As noted by or. Flood Are $6 million each year for Winter roads that Supply the East Side of Lake Winnipeg with necessities $6 million in air services to get people in the area medical care and $5 million for a dialysis and education Centre Northern Manitoba a first. Main streamers like to say Northern reserves allow aboriginals to live their traditional but no one today can live the lifestyle of their ancient ancestors. And the aboriginals living in Northern reserves know that ? hence the High Cost of trucking or flying in supplies and flying out sick people. Main streamers who Prate about traditional lifestyles Are confusing them with traditional its possible As Many aboriginals have shown for people to maintain traditional values and work in the contemporary Economy. I suspect a lot of main streamers Don to do any thing about reserves because they Don to want aboriginals in their communities. To this end they Are comfortable dealing with aboriginal Power brokers who have a vested interest in keeping reserves As they Are because they re doing Fine thank you. The main streamers Are not comfortable dealing with individual aboriginals in Urban centres such As a teenage woman who is forced into prostitution because she has no workplace skills. Moving Large numbers of aboriginals to Urban centres is not feasible. Joseph Small Wood a former Premier of Newfoundland tried that in the 1960s when he badgered peo ple to leave the provinces outposts and move to resettlement communities. The program was a disaster for Many of those involved. A better process is to ensure that aboriginals who want to leave isolated reserves for Urban centres have the educational and social training they need to Lead the lives they dream about. For the process to work main streamers would have to open their arms to aboriginals in their communities. Are we ready for that Tom Ford is managing editor of the issues network the old style Art of intelligence by David Brooks the new York times the years Between 1950 and 1965 were the Golden age of american nonfiction. Writers like Jane Jacobs Louis Hartz Daniel Bell and David Riesman produced sweeping books on american society and global affairs. They relied on their knowledge of history literature philosophy and theology to recognize social patterns and grasp emerging trends. But even As their books hit the stores their method was being undermined. A different group rejected this generalist humanist approach and sought to turn social analysis into a science. For example the father of the . Intelligence Community Sherman Kent argued that social science and intelligence analysis needed a systematic method much like the method of the physical social research ? in Urban planning sociology and intelligence analysis ? began to mimic the hard sciences. A new paper by a Yale undergraduate sul Maan Wasif Khan contrasts these two ways of looking at the world. Or. Khan compares the Cias 1960s-Era National intelligence estimates on China which have been recently declassified with the work of generalist scholars like Donald Zagoria. The Cias intelligence estimates Are what you a expect bloodless compilations of data by Anonymous technicians. They do not draw patterns based on an understanding of chinese history or make generalizations about the ethos of the chinese elite. Or. Zagoria a approach was quite different. Relying on a deep understanding of chinese history and society he made novelistic judg ments about the chinese leadership a Hopes and fears. He imagined How we must appear to the chinese and How different american moves would be interpreted. The Cia analysts concluded on nov. 12, 1970, that there was Little Prospect of improvement in sino american relations. Or. Zagoria said China would be open to a rapprochement. Or. Zagoria was right. Henry Kissinger was Winnipeg free press est 1872 / Winnipeg Tribune est 1890 in China within months of the Cia report and panel on intelligence pointed to the same fail a year and a half later president Richard Nixon Ings found by other reports. It said intelligence was in Beijing to open diplomatic relations Between the two countries. But the scientific method used by the Cia and its technical jargon can seem to have More authority used to justify bigger budgets. By now academic analyses of society and world affairs Are often quantitative jargon Laden and hype specialized. Historical works have Gigantic titles and minuscule subjects ? think Power and passion Walloon shovel Mak ing 1723-1724. And we get decades of calamitous Intelli gence failures. Last week the presidential ? 2005 Winnipeg free press a division of up Canadian newspapers limited partnership published seven Days a week at 1355 Mountain Avenue Winnipeg Manitoba r2x 3b6, pm 697-7000 analysts displayed a Lack of they created artificial specialities ? separating regional technical and terrorism Analy ses. They built layers of hard analysis on fuzzy and impressionistic information. This commission does what so Many others have done. It tries to reorganize the Bureau cratic flow charts to produce better results. But the problem is not bureaucratic. Its epistemological. Individuals Are Good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans. We know from recent advances in neuroscience popularized in Malcolm glad Wells blink that the human mind can perform fantastically complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition. There is a powerful Back stage process we use to interpret the world and the people around us. When you try to Analyse human affairs using a process that is systematic codified and bureaucratic As the Cia does you Anes Thetie All of these tools. You Don to produce reason ? you produce what Irving Kristol called the elephantiasis of reason. The capping irony is that Kent and the other pseudo scientists thought they were replacing the fuzzy old generalists with something mod Ern and rigorous. But in reality intuitive generalists like is Jacobs and or. Zagoria were More modern and rigorous than the pseudo scientific technicians who replaced them. Ill believe the intelligence Community has really changed when i see analysts being sent to training academies where they study thucydides Tolstoy and Churchill ? to get a Broad understanding of the full Range of human behaviour. Ill believe the system has been reformed when policy makers Are presented with competing reports signed by individual thinkers and Are no longer presented with Anonymous bureaucratically homogenized bul let Points that pretend to be the product of a scientific consensus. Ill believe its been reformed when there a a big sign in front of Cia Headquarters that reads individuals think better than groups. Rudy Redekop president up Canadian newspapers limited partnership Murdoch Davis / publisher Patrick Flynn / Deputy editor ;