Toronto Star Belittles and Slanders All Newfoundlanders

I thought I'd read it all when Margaret Wente put her cockroach level intellect to work slamming Newfoundland a few months back. I hadn't. Now I see that the Shit for brains Ontario mentality has reached a whole new level of crapocrity.

I've been around the block a few times and it takes a lot to piss me off like I'm pissed right now, but I'll tell you one thing, the waste of sperm that calls himself "slammer" wrote an article today that really hit home. I'm sure his intention was to do exactly that, but I hope and pray it backfires and this asshole gets exactly what he wants when he says Canada should cut Newfoundland loose into the Atlantic.

I have reproduced the article below for anyone from the province who is in the mood for an eye opener and I've included the email address of the Toronto Star editorial office if you want to let that rag know what you think:

city@thestar.ca

As for Mr. Slammer, my only question is: With 50 million sperm in the race, how in the hell could you have been the fastest?

Read on and fume:

Newfoundland hits Rock bottom
Jul. 20, 2006. 01:00 AM
Slinger

The only thing that keeps Newfoundland going these days is duelling literary festivals, one on the island's west coast, one on the east coast, but otherwise identical. This distresses the one or two forward-looking citizens in the province who still hold out some hope for The Rock's future.

``How would you folks in Ontario like it,'' they gripe, ``if a couple of broken-down old newspaper hacks from St. John's decided to help you poor, unlettered souls feel like you have some reason to exist by organizing head-to-head festivals celebrating Ontario literature, one in Kenora and one in Carp, and brought along a couple of DJs from our leading oldies 'n' goldies station to emcee the proceedings?''

The implication being that something very similar has been foisted on them thanks to a couple of broken-down old newspaper columnists from Toronto who have chosen to help Newfoundland's poor, unlettered souls feel like they have some reason to exist by organizing head-to-head festivals celebrating Newfoundland literature, one in Woody Point and one in Eastport, and bring along a couple of CBC radio personalities from the mainland to emcee the proceedings.
I wouldn't go that far.

For one thing, the Woody Point festival is dedicated to the proposition that ``I's the by that writes the book, and youse the bys that reads 'er,'' while the Eastport festival theme is ``I's the by that writes the book, and youse the bys that reads 'er.''

The problem facing these literary events is the same as the province faces with all its other resources: Newfoundland is running thin on writers. Festival participants must dash back and forth, and with the famous Bullet no longer operating they are left with no alternative but to hitchhike. Because the festivals are on the same evening, and the traffic is sparse, audiences find themselves waiting as long as three days until the next scheduled author shows up.

Nevertheless, there is no shortage of colourful outport characters happy to fill in by yattering interminably about how things were before the cod disappeared, something tourists find especially charming because every word is unintelligible.

The festivals have compensated for the lack of Newfoundland writers who write in Newfoundland by expanding the criteria for participants to writers who moved to Toronto because they couldn't make a living in Newfoundland, writers who once had relatives in Newfoundland, writers who once holidayed in Newfoundland, and writers who can find Newfoundland on a map, a category that embraces writers from everywhere but Alberta.
The challenge is persuading them to travel down there, either because every word they have written will be unintelligible to local ticket-holders, or, in the case of writers who left Newfoundland for Toronto, because every member of the ``Welcome Home'' committee waiting to greet them at the ferry terminal will be a bailiff.

On the other hand, there is an abundance of appropriate material. Anybody with a word processor can turn out a Newfoundland novel. All you need to do is type, ``Bitter years — the tide kept coming in, and time kept running out,'' and you're off to the races. Since they all start the same, the ``nuance'' they're so admired for depends on how they end, which they eventually do when the writers can't find anybody else to lend them money for rum.

Whether all this means that Newfoundland has finally had it and the Confederation experiment has failed is another matter. From the very start, a lot of Newfoundlanders claimed Joey Smallwood sold them a bill of goods; what's changed is that nowadays pretty well all of us in the rest of Canada are saying, "You ain't the only ones.''

It can't have escaped anyone's notice that Newfoundland has recently gone so far as to add "and Labrador'' to its name, but if it thinks a blatant attempt like that to give itself airs is going to impress any of us sophisticated Torontonians, it is mistaken. We're all familiar with Irving Finkelman who changed his name to Irving St. Clair, C.B.

``Very classy,'' said a friend. ``But what does the C.B. stand for?''

"Corner Bathurst,'' said Irving.

Sadly, it is beginning to look as if the only practical thing for Canada to do is read the writing on the outport wall. Cut our losses. Push Newfoundland back out to sea. Let it drift away. (Obviously we'll keep Labrador; you can never have too many caribou, which Labrador does, but at least it's something.)

NEXT: Farewell to Nova Scotia.