Christmas Every Day

1885 Execution of Louis Riel

Four years ago I penned the following op-ed.

How much of a hero do you have to be to warrant a statue? How much of a villain do you have to be to have your name stripped from streets, bridges, or schools? The brouhaha surrounding the memory of Edward Cornwallis and Egerton Ryerson means that Canadians and their governmental representatives need to seriously consider these questions.

At first glance, it would seem obvious that these two men are worthy of honour and praise. Cornwallis was, after all, the founder of Halifax. He arrived in Nova Scotia in 1749 with 2500 settlers, chose the site for a town, and worked to defend and expand his settlement, now the largest city in the Maritimes.

Ryerson had a splendid career in 19^th-century Ontario as a Methodist minister, newspaper editor, historian, opponent of oligarchy, founder of Victoria College, but above all, as the architect of the provincial educational system – universal, free, and government-supported — that became a model for every province and territory in Canada.

So why are some demanding that statues to these men be taken down and their names erased from community sites?

Both men, it is claimed, wrought harm on the indigenes of their day. In response to native attacks on his settlers, Cornwallis placed a bounty on Mi’kmac scalps – the same sort of inducement that his French and Mi’kmac enemies regularly placed on the hair of the British they killed. His bounty was ineffective (it may have yielded one scalp) and he quickly rescinded the order, but for the sin of using the same methods as his native opponents, today’s Mi’kmac demand the expunging of Corwallis’s public presence. Ryerson’s present shaming results from him being an architect of the Indian Residential School system, the same crime for which Hubert Langevin has recently and controversially paid a high price.

The problem is that we have two men who made important contributions to their country in the 18^th and 19^thcenturies, but who also performed deeds that upset some Canadians in the 21^st century. Which set of actions outweighs the other? Do we put a tarp over Corwallis’s statue on weekdays but remove it on weekends and Natal Day? Is it Ryerson University during term time, and Mid-Ranked Former Toronto Polytechnic the rest of the year? Or do we obliterate the memory of these fellows altogether?

“Use every man after his desert,” said Hamlet, “and who shall ‘scape whipping?”  No one, no historical figure, no matter how revered, ever lived without flaws. Louis Riel, rightly lauded for his role in the founding of Manitoba, ended his life as a false messiah who wanted to rename the North Star after his sister, and move the papacy to Montreal; a failed leader whose decisions brought ruin on the Métis of the Northwest. Yet we have erected two statues of Riel in Winnipeg and name a public holiday after him. By today’s standards, Winston Churchill was a racist, and made some very disobliging remarks about Islam, but who will deny that he is worthy of our gratitude for having helped save civilization from Hitler? Martin Luther King was a plagiarist and adulterer but he remains an idolized figure in the United States. Tommy Douglas, founder of Medicare, was once a proponent of eugenics and sterilizing and segregating the mentally handicapped, yet his fellow countrymen voted him the title of “The Greatest Canadian”.

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” That may have been a cunning piece of rhetoric for Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, but it is bad advice for a country to take. A nation must have heroes and we must honour the men and women who helped build Canada. An approach that recognizes in each historical figure an overall balance of benefits, of good deeds and bad attitudes, will save us from a ceaseless round of revisionism and endless moaning about the sins of our ancestors.

Sadly, the forces of wokedom prevailed. The names of Egerton and Ryerson were stripped from public buildings, statues were torn down, and a damnatio memoriae proclaimed on their reputation. My opinion remains unchanged.

1002 The St. Brice’s Day Massacre

For centuries Scandinavian warriors had been causing misery in England, carrying off slaves, levying vast amounts of tribute money (Danegeld), and occupying significant part of the country. At the turn of the millennium the raids became increasingly intense and damaging. Prayers and public fasting were directed against the pagan interlopers while a payment of 24,000 pounds was gathered to buy them off.

In 1002 Aethelred II (“the Unready”) decided on a policy of extermination, (iustissima exterminacio). Claiming to have heard of a plot to depose him, he ordered the death of all Danes in the country. Historians estimate that thousands were killed in the territories where Aethelred’s writ ran, possibly including Gunhilde, the sister of King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark. Aethelred defended this ethnic cleansing in a porclamation explaining why a church in Oxford had to be burned down in the affair.

For it is fully agreed that to all dwelling in this country it will be well known that, since a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and thus this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the afore-mentioned town, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and its books. Afterwards, with God’s aid, it was renewed by me.

Rather than end the Danish problem, the massacre only prompted more warfare. Sweyn Forkbeard would invade England and depose Aethelred. By 1016 a Danish king, Canute, would rule England.

1970 A whale explodes

In November 1970 a 45-foot sperm whale corpse was found on a beach near Florence, Oregon. Officials were puzzled about how to dispose of 8 tons of decomposing flesh until one genius from the state’s Highway Division hit upon the idea of surrounding the dead cetacean with explosive material and blowing it to smithereens.

Despite the warning from a local demolition expert that a mere 20 sticks or 8.4 pounds of dynamite would suffice, officials settled on 20 cases (a half-ton). The result was spectacular. Pieces of the unfortunate mammal rained down on horrified spectators. Particularly unlucky was the fellow who had recommended the smaller amount — his brand-new car, just purchased from a dealership offering “A Whale of a Deal”, was flattened by a massive chunk of blubber.

This hilarious disaster might have been forgotten but for a piece by humorist Dave Barry 25 years later. A video of the explosion went viral and made the episode famous.

In 2020, residents of Florence voted to name a new recreational area “Exploding Whale Memorial Park” in honor of the incident.

1918 The end of the War to End All War

The Great War, or the First World War, was the most hideous conflict yet to plague mankind (though that distinction only lasted 20 years). The millions of casualties had to be gathered, identified, and buried. (A splendid movie dealing with how the French handled the challenge is 1989’s  Life and Nothing But with the great Philippe Noiret.) The British Empire and Commonwealth’s War Graves Commission decided that the bodies should be interred close to where they fell and should be commemorated with a standard headstone, regardless of rank. Families of the dead were invited to add a personal tribute on the memorial. 

Canada’s Dream Shall Be of Them by Eric McGeer is a collection of epitaphs from Canadian graves on the Western Front. These are words from another age, written for soldiers born in the 1880s and 1890s to parents born between the 1850s and 1870s. They provide a priceless glimpse at a lost world whose ideas of grief and loss may seem strange to children of the 21st century.

1914 The birth of Hedy Lamarr

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna and from a young age attracted attention because of her good looks. In her teens she began getting parts in movies, most notable of which was 1933’s Ecstasy with its notorious sexually-charged scenes. By 1937 she had ditched Europe, her rich husband (she would ditch five others before she gave up matrimony), and her birth name, henceforth adopting “Hedy Lamarr”.

In Hollywood, Lamarr was billed as “the world’s most beautiful woman” and most of her roles were meant to capitalize on that claim. Among a number of duds and flops, she acquitted herself well in Algiers (1938) with Charles Boyer, and Samson and Delilah with Victor Mature (1949). Her stardom faded in the 1950s and by 1958 she had made her last film.

These days Lamarr is mostly remembered for a spiteful little lawsuit against Mel Brooks for naming one of his characters Hedley Lamarr, and for her invention of a frequency-hopping guidance system for a torpedo, a discovery which led to secure WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth. Her last years were spent in sad isolation.

Despite her classic features, Ms Lamarr never set my heart aflutter. There was something a little too artificial and reserved about her screen presence. If I were to list film goddesses in order of swoon-worthiness I would do it thusly:

1. Merle Oberon, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)
2. Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita (1960)
3. Monica Bellucci, Malèna (2000)
4. Sophia Loren, Sunflower (1970)
5. Ewa Aulin, Candy (1968)