So, farewell then, Chief Wahoo

An assiduous reader reminds us that the Toronto District School Board has been justly ridiculed on WWW prior to the Islamophiliac nonsense described in "Canada's loony left, pro-Muslim 'public' school board", WWW 16/1/18. Last fall, in "PC gone mad! Toronto public school board drops 'Chief' from job titles", WWW 11/10/17, Walt quoted at length from Post Media's Christie Blatchford, who took the TDSB to task for its decision to excise the word "Chief" from all its job titles, in the interests of not giving offence to Canada's First Nations (read: indigenous peoples... or... wait for it... Indians).

The TDSB's ultra-liberal, ultra-PC diktat was provoked by the fake-news controversy in the Excited States of America about whether the Cleveland baseball team, known for decades as the "Indians", should change their name to something less "racist". Since that idea was a non-starter, the SJWs were demanding that the team get rid of its mascot, whose smiling face has adorned its caps, uniforms and other paraphernalia since 1947. His name is... or was... Chief Wahoo.

I say "was" because today the Cleveland Indians caved. Team owner Paul Dolan announced that the Chief would be around for the 2018 season, but would then go to the Happy Hunting Ground to join Mr Rebel (Boone County KY High School), Colonel Reb (Ole Miss), and the old Darkie toothpaste guy.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told the meeja, "The club ultimately agreed with my position that the logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use." Playing Mortimer Snerd to Mr Manfred's Edgar Bergen, Mr Dolan said, "We have consistently maintained that we are cognizant and sensitive to both sides of the discussion. While we recognize many of our fans have a longstanding attachment to Chief Wahoo, I'm ultimately in agreement with Commissioner Manfred's desire to remove the logo from our uniforms in 2019."

So Walt's use of the past tense was premature. Chief Wahoo gets one more year, during which the Indians will continue to wear his image on their sleeves and caps. Merchandise featuring the beloved mascot will continue to be sold in northeast Ohio "to retain the trademark."

What happens in 2019? Will the designers just kind of lighten Chief Wahoo up, changing him to pink and then to white, like they did with the Darkie dark guy who became the Darlie white guy? Or will they paint out the feather, make him darker and change his name to something more in line with the city he represents, like, say, "Prince Leroy"? I can hardly wait to find out.

Oh (as Columbo used to say), there's one more thing. The forces of political correctness hit a double on this one, but the inning isn't over yet. They'll keep batting until they force the Cleveland team to drop the moniker "Indians" as well. And then? There will be other racist team names to expunge from the vocabulary of American sports: the Kansas City Chiefs, the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Blackhawks, whose mascot is the coolest Indian in all of sports. His name is Tommy Hawk.

Another martyr to political correctness

Meet Tecumseh. He was an Indian leader of the Shawnee and a large tribal confederacy (known as Tecumseh's Confederacy) which fought alongside British soldiers and Canadian militias against the United States during Tecumseh's War and the War of 1812.

The bicentennial of the War of 1812 is being celebrated in Canada right now -- the Battle of Queenston Heights will be re-enacted on the site next month -- but for some reason is being largely ignored in the US. Click here for more information on the War of 1812. You'll see a picture of Tecumseh -- well, an actor portraying the great Indian leader -- second from the left on the landing page. If you'd like to watch a good video about Tecumseh and his role in the war, click here.

Now then, about the political correctness... Ed. thinks I should say "Native American" instead of "Indian" in the opening sentence. I will not, for the same reason I won't write "Native Canadian". The Indians regarded themselves then, and still regard themselves as neither American nor Canadian. They are just "the people", and that is how they refer to themselves in Cree and other native languages. Actually there's nothing wrong with the word "native", except that it's no longer politically correct to refer to people of colour by six-letter words beginning with "N".

Nor is it PC to use representations of n*****s as mascots for companies or sports teams or... well... anything. One company that has stopped "appropriating cultural images" is (or was) the Tecumseh Power Company, founded in 1934 as Tecumseh Products.

There is still a company of that name trading on NASDAQ, but it's not really the same as the Tecumseh Power Company that was known in 120 companies around the world for its small gasoline engines, like the one shown here.

This is an old(ish) picture. If you have a Tecumseh engine manufactured in the last half-dozen years or so, you'll notice that the Indian has disappeared, replaced by a nondescript and meaningless geometric design. The chief, it seems, is not wanted in the New Age of Political Correctness.

Warning to fans of the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Black Hawks: You're next! (Signed) The PC Police.

Book review: One great lake, two very different countries

Having lived and worked in both the US of A and Canada, I am sometimes asked to explain the differences between the countries, if any there be. Canada and the Excited States are quite different, but identifying and explaining the dissimilarities requires more time and space than I have ever cared to devote to so doing.

I was therefore gratified to stumble upon a highly recommendable book by two Americans -- Ken Sobol and Julie Macfie Sobol -- who migrated to Canada, and in the early 1990s undertook a series of trips through neighbouring parts of the two countries, perhaps to be sure they'd made the right decision. Their entertaining account of their wanderings, Looking for Lake Erie (Penguin 1996) is highly recommendable.

Ken Sobol and Julie Macfie were raised in the Cleveland and Detroit areas, respectively. They met at Oberlin College, married, moved to New York and in 1974 to Toronto. It would be nice to say that Ken and Julie had a lifelong love affair with Lake Erie, but it's not so. They began their travels around the lake in the course of researching magazine pieces. In the prologue we are told:

We...began to be intrigued by the lives of the people who lived along the lake. We wanted to know more about the millions of people who live along Erie's shores, some of whom worry about daily survival in dilapidated, drug-devastated slums while others drift through the American Dream in tidy suburbs, studiously oblivious to anyone else's problems, and still others rise at dawn to work their farms and pursue a daily routine not all that different from that of the first pioneers to settle in Ontario.

Where had they come from (and why and when), what place in the ongoing social history of the lakeshore did they occupy, what kind of communities had they developed? Had common patterns evolved from ne side of the lake to the other? How alike and how different are the two cultures that share the shoreline?

The Sobols' book is thus more sociology than geography. More social history than travelogue, Looking for Lake Erie paints a picture not just of an empty landscape, but of the nature and attitudes of the different peoples who inhabit the Canadian and American shores.

For Americans, Looking for Lake Erie will make depressing reading. The grim descriptions of Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo beg the question of why American cities are the way they are. (That's the authors' question, not mine.) Why the dilapidation? Why the racial division? Why the depression? The writers do not attempt to give definitive answers, only suggestions presented in a down-to-earth and entertaining style which owes much to Bill Bryson and Dervla Murphy. (The debt is acknowledged in the authors' note.)

Canadians cannot look across the lake smugly. The Sobols point out the similarities (beyond the names) in Fort Erie ON and Erie PA, the former being described as "hanging on by a thread". That was nearly two decades ago. It would be interesting to revisit places like Leamington ON and Ashtabula OH today, to see if things have changed... for better or worse.

Looking for Lake Erie is chock-full of amusing, acute and sometimes profound observations of Americans, Canadians, and their settlements along the shores of the great lake. Even if you have no intention of going anywhere near that part of the continent the two countries share, the Sobols' book is not to be missed.