(Fwd) Blasphemous Black Blasts Bishop

[phillp2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

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From:           	"Paul Phillips" <phillps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To:             	phillp2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date sent:      	Fri, 7 Apr 2000 01:47:19 -0500
Subject:        	(Fwd)
Priority:       	normal

I thought all Pen-l-ers with an interest in Canada and in one of the
top representatives of Canada's business and media elite might
enjoy this tidbit.

Paul
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba

Subject:        	Blasphemous Black Blasts Bishop (fwd)


PAPER BARON BLACK CALLS BISHOP A "LITTLE TWERP"
FOR DEFENDING WORKERS

By James Winter

Thin-skinned paper baron Conrad Black is in yet another dustup,
this
time with a bishop.

Black is still embroiled in perhaps his most infamous dispute, with
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, whom he sued last year for
alleged abuse of power. He lost that suit, but is carrying on against
the Canadian government itself, over his thwarted attempt to garner
a
British peerage last spring.

Black used his Calgary Herald newspaper on April 4 to lash out at
the
Roman Catholic Bishop of Calgary, who came to the defence of
striking
workers there last week.

Black wrote of Bishop Frederick Henry, "If your jumped-up little
twerp
of a bishop thinks I'm not a very good Catholic, I think he's a prime
candidate for an excorcism (sic)."

"I am happy to enlighten the bishop on a few points," Black
pontificated, before unleashing his personal attack.

"In the Leninist terminology which would be familiar to the strike
leaders, [Bishop Henry] has made himself a perfect =91useful idiot' to
them," Black wrote.

"This is a bishop who, as he arrived to take up his position in Calgary
and literally was removing his luggage from the baggage carousel at the
airport, began a rant against the health policies of the Klein
government. He has not ceased since to run off at his episcopal mouth
and pen in the same tendentious manner," Black wrote.

Black accuses the bishop of being "unbalanced" and "unkind" with his
remarks, and then proceeds to ignore the substantive points made in
Bishop Henry's article, resorting instead to the usual vitriolic attack.

Be of good cheer, Bishop, for you are in good company. Black's
hypersensitivity to even the mildest criticism has long been apparent,
as he has waged wars of words with John Ralston Saul, Alan Fotheringham,
Peter C. Newman, Ramsay Cook, Robert Maxwell, Laurier LaPierre, Bob Rae,
and numerous others. Recently, Black has taken to penning personal
responses to letters written by union leaders and social activists who,
like Bishop Henry, disapprove of Black's union-busting tactics at the
Calgary Herald.

Ralston Saul, now the spouse of Canada's Governor General Adrienne
Clarkson, wrote a critical article about Black in the British magazine,
the Spectator, when Black was taking over London's Daily Telegraph, in
1989. Black struck back, writing that Saul "should confine himself to
subjects better suited than this one to his peevish, puerile,
sniggering. . . talents."

Black was kicked out of Upper Canada College, a boys' private school in
Toronto, for stealing exams and selling them to his classmates. In his
autobiography he justifies his actions as retaliation against canings
administered to the boys by "the several sadists and few aggressively
fondling homosexuals on the faculty, and the more numerous swaggering
boobies who had obviously failed in the real world. . ."

"One of the more enthusiastic flagellators of the time was Laurier
LaPierre," Black wrote. "Many years later when we became friendly radio
debaters in Montreal and he sponsored my thesis at McGill, and still
later when he publicly declared his homosexual proclivities, it became
possible to imagine some of the socio-economic and psychological
displacements that
must have motivated this penniless young French-Canadian socialist to
assault so violently the comfortable derrieres of Upper Canada's
scions."

When historian Ramsay Cook wrote an unfavourable review in the Globe and
Mail in 1976 of Black's book Duplessis, arising out of his M.A. thesis,
Black wrote back criticizing The Globe for "entrusting the review of a
serious work on an important subject to a slanted, supercilious, little
twit."

Black waged a war of words with British publisher Robert Maxwell on the
front page of Black's Le Soleil, after Maxwell criticized Black for
opposing the prohibition of bilingual commercial signs, in 1989. Black
wrote that Maxwell's views were "hypocrisy and buffoonery."

"He faxed me back a rather wan reply, and I published this and another
withering response on page one of the following day's Le Soleil. Bob
abated for several days and then meekly suggested that we go back to
corresponding without recourse to publication," Black writes.

When NDP leader Bob Rae was elected premier of Ontario in 1990, Black
wrote in The Financial Post, of which he was part-owner, that the
election results represented "the triumph of the forces of envy," and
went on to refer to the "fraudulence of socialism," and to "our
welfare-raddled lumpenproletariat," and "Bob Rae and his silly claque of
misguided teachers, social workers and labor agitators," ultimately
calling Rae a "swinish, socialist demagogue."

Jim Sinclair, President of the B.C. Federation of Labour, wrote to
complain to Black about the treatment of strikers at the Calgary Herald.
Black wrote back, in a letter dated January 17, 2000, "If you wish to
cancel a subscription to the National Post (presumably as a result of
lip-strain after too ambitious a foray into bisyllabic reading), contact
its circulation department."

"The present strike is an attempted left-wing coup d'=E9tat in the
newsroom of the Calgary Herald, which serves a community that includes
very few mindless socialists of the type you would find convivial,"
Black wrote.

Subsequently, Black told union's president Andy Marshall, in Calgary
that the strike is going to be resolved either by decertification of the
union in two years time or by employees coming back to work without a
contract.

Black told Marshall that he is "amputating gangrenous limbs" with
reference to the Calgary strikers.

Many people in public life come under sharp criticism. When I gave a
talk at Brock University in St. Catharines recently to an audience of
200 people and took questions for an hour afterwards in a freewheeling
debate, Doug Firby, editor of Conrad Black's St. Catharines Standard was
quoted in the paper the next day as saying, "James Winter is an
ideologue who has abused the academic process." Still not satisfied,
Firby wrote in a column the next day that I have "never worked in daily
newspapers," and that the talk consisted of "an endless string of
unsubstantiated opinion, half-truths and carefully selected =91facts',"
used to support my thesis, in a "one-sided " presentation which ran
"contrary to the fundamental nature of academic
debate."

I suspect that everyone who was in the audience who doesn't work for
Doug Firby and/or Conrad Black, would disagree with Firby's assessment.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to write a letter to Firby telling him
his mother wears army boots, or calling him an acolyte and lackey and
all that.

One of Conrad Black's problems is his thin skin, which, despite all of
his bluster and bravado, probably originates with a tiny, and possibly
well deserved, little ego. Every time Black, the military enthusiast who
once wrote a newspaper column praising Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam
War, is criticized, he sees red and comes out with guns blazing.

Tempting as that may be, as they say, "It's better to sit there and look
stupid than to open your mouth and prove it."

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