BAN BOTTLED WATER

BAN WOULD SAVE EVERYONE

Canadians are blessed with so much fresh water flowing around us and from the tap that it is baffling and embarrassing that we spend billions on bottled water that then clogs garbage with empties.
I have to admit that my wife and related offshoots buy and guzzle bottled water despite my unveiled antagonism.
I also admit the purchase cost is a pittance. It's the principle that counts with me, and the garbage left behind. It's such a stupid idea to throw away even small change on bottled water which is often only our tap water run through filters by giant corporations and then marketed using computer-generated nonsense names.
Now there are municipalities around the world which have toyed with bans and have stopped providing bottled water at civic functions. They should go all the way and not just dip a toe into the issue.
My boyhood was spent in a town in the Bruce Peninsula which we boasted was famous for its deep artesian wells flowing with the sweet necessity of life. There was even a small brewery that boasted of its water before it was swallowed by a giant that concentrated more on distribution than taste.
When I returned to T.O, the populace would have giggled at the idea of buying bottled water. Then came preening bottled water from exotic locations and grumbling from activists about fluoridation (an important health improvement despite the silly poison claims.)
I remember only two major stories about southern Ontario drinking water (although the north had major problems on reserves) which meant that what came out of our taps here has never really been an issue.
We had the awful scandal about lengthy water pollution that ruined people in Walkerton (ironically the capital of the Bruce) and official mutterings from a radicalized city health department where a lefty listing himself as a doctor (his doctorate was in African studies) warned pregnant women and others that it would be best not to use Toronto tap water.
His warning didn't fill Toronto's councillors with alarm but it sort of roosted there ticking. Then I pointed out as a columnist in a private conversation with the head politician over the water supply that he as a chemical engineer and the engineers involved with the pumping stations from the lake were leaving themselves vulnerable to professional challenges of their credentials if the issue turned from a tickle to a flood.
Which led Metro Chairman Paul Godfrey, who apparently went on to work in baseball and publishing, to lead the charge to spend $135,000 on a major scientific study of the quality and safety of Toronto tap water compared to various bottled waters which were then mostly imported.
The results put to rest for all time any health claims that Toronto tap water was bad for you. In fact, in taste and quality it was rated superior to every bottled water sold in the city including the effete Perrier.
(Which reminds me of the chap who looked after all the drinking water for Expo '67 VIPs. This included the water that all the kings and PMs brought from their homelands so they wouldn't get tourist tummy. He showed me some of the giant bottles which actually had little "things" floating in them.)
But back to my recommendation that the new city council ban all bottled water from our store shelves on the grounds that city tap water costs less, may occasionally be safer,  and is environmentally friendly because it doesn't jam our landfills and suck zillions of litres out of our ground water supply.
It would be so simple to do. It would save us money and hassle. Among the minor benefits would be that I would no longer have to lug the unused bottles of water home when I close the cottage for the winter. It hurts my back even as I fume about the fact it's just a dumb fad.

RESCUING OUR PHONES FROM JERKS

ROBO CALLS SHOULD BE  BANNED

Why have we allowed politicians, pollsters and foreign salesmen to transform our telephones from a vital part of our lives to a nuisance?
My childhood was spent in a home without a phone. I spent a couple of decades in journalism searching daily for pay phones before cell phones became common.
So there are few people who appreciate a phone more than I do. I spent too many nights in exotic locations trying to get a line back to the office from the latest crisis not to love the fact that I can walk into a hotel room on the other side of the world and actually dial Toronto and get through in seconds.
But the wondrous convenience of it all has been ruined by the barrage of crank calls, particularly that one that comes early every morning and there's never anyone there.
I realize there are do-not-call lists and various ways to block unwanted calls but the practitioners seem to slither around the latest shield as if they have taken lessons from the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Why should we have to buy options to block calls or have call display, or buy answering machines and let devices protect us? It's like hiring someone to stand at the door to deal with visitors.
I have neighbours and friends who are ditching their land lines because it's cheaper and they can guard their cell phones better from intrusion. But I am sure that any temporary protection is going to vanish like deodorant on a hot day.
As proof that the Robo Call menace is only going to get worse, I suggest you check the various outfits on the Internet promising to unleash a tsunami of canned calls for customers for only 0.7 cents a minute.
Of course I hang up immediately, as I'm sure most people do.
Yet I think I'm also going to organize a group with important initials to pledge they will never vote for any party or politician that use Robo Calls.  In our spare time, we will lobby for Robo Calls to be made illegal. It's bad enough when there's a real politician calling and not just a computer.
I have known John Tory since he was a kid radio reporter who came before meetings to ask my advice on what were the important issues on which he should concentrate.
If I had received one more Robo Call from Tory, I would not have voted for him, even though his major opponent had silly policies that were not improved from having been raised first decades ago.
To be brutally frank, I would make illegal ALL telephone calls for votes from politicians or parties. Just end political telephone solicitations. Let  them spread their message in pamphlets delivered by campaign workers or by Canada Post at a special rate. Ensure these pamphlets have real meat, real policies in them. not just the usual bunkum and puff pastries. Have real confrontations in election debates, like the dozens I moderated in the 1970s and 1980s in Nathan Phillips Square and on the community Rogers channel which has disappeared.
The easiest way for politicians, pollsters and companies to contact people with the least hassle is by email. We can just skim over the nonsense without wasting much time. Except I find the Internet in general to be so unreliable, so filled with routine glitches, that when the cut-rate brokerage outfits run by two giant Canadian banks kept crashing for days, it was not considered that unusual. In fact, TD officials seemed miffed when I complained.
I have a son working for a giant computer company who just spent eight hours trying to get his special computer to work again and grumbled that it happens weekly if not daily.
So I think any system that depends totally on computers is not going to work, just as this dream of driverless cars is going to go through a long nightmare stage. We have to have the post office as a backup (and believe it or not, I think our postal service works just fine.)
We have climbed to a peak of annoyance and we don't want to go higher. Limiting commercial and political use of our private telephone lines just has to happen or there is going to be a stampede back to smoke signals.
I realize there are arrogant outfits that think they have a right to bother me. They claim they are "allowed" to because they have done business with me in the past. I would squash their calls first. As I said on Facebook recently (FB certainly ditched the post in a hurry, not wanting to offend Rogers I guess) what is the point  in Rogers calling me every few days when I already buy most of their services? Then there are the calls from Bell. You would think its officials would not do anything to poke customers when their rates are so high.
If Rogers and Bell really want to sell more, they should improve their services and lower their costs. As it is, they are sinking into oblivion because technology and competition is drowning them in quick sand. I doubt that in a few years they will be getting the same monthly dollars from me. Only laziness has stopped me from cutting already.
Technology has overwhelmed our politicians and agencies like the CRTC. We have become a city  where most people no longer answer their door in the evening (some times never) but we have also become one where electronic intrusion by con artists is routine on our telephones and Internet.
Official spam is allowed to flourish by the politicians who think they will piggyback their way to the next election victory by bugging the hell out of anyone who is too stupid not to immediately hang up.
But what about pollsters, you ask? As someone who has spent many hours pouring over polls, that does concern me because I find polls interesting and useful.
I have trouble separating the real polls from the scam ones over the phone but if the real pollsters were given a special low postal rate, not only would the mailed polls be able to contain more questions, there could be more supporting material too. You don't get that on a call.
It is ludicrous that we have huge rooms in foreign lands filled with unintelligible people trying to sell us duct cleaning on the telephone, and exotic towers filled with hackers infiltrating our emails with dangerous solicitations, and our authorities say there is nothing they can do, that is when they aren't phoning and emailing with their latest scam.
I drove by the house recently where I lived as a boy in the small town of Chesley. It was a sleepy peaceful scene.  And I luxuriated in it for half an hour. Then I headed back to Toronto and my cell phone rang. The electronic madness had returned.

COUNT ME CANADIAN!!!

LET'S NOT PRETEND CANADIANS AREN'T UNIQUE

Once upon a time, believe it or not, the federal government made it illegal to call yourself Canadian on the forms of StatsCan, particularly at census time.
I challenged this at provincial and federal human rights tribunals which ignored me on their grounds that I was just the Editor of the Toronto Sun and tabloids really didn't count with the Establishment.
Except the not-so-secret weapon of the Toronto Sun was columnist Doug Fisher, who before computers was the trusted memory of official Ottawa.
 Fisher had been a MP thanks to being the giant killer who defeated C.D. Howe, one of the most powerful pols ever to walk the Commons. Then he became a columnist feared and respected by every political leader in the land, particularly on immigration and native issues, and as a librarian by training, had the best files on any issue you could think of to buttress his opinions.
I was at many a party in Ottawa where leaders like Jean Chretien talked about Fisher's files as one of the best resources in the country.
The politically correct armies were just getting rolling but when it came to issues as sensitive as Indian/native/indigenous affairs, no one dared tackle Fisher even when he pointed out that the PC police were often full of crap and as a result too much money was spent and wasted on and by native leaders.
I began a Count Me Canadian campaign, in editorials, columns, speeches and electronic appearances, saying that Canadian should be allowed to call themselves exactly that when official federal questions involved ethnic origin.
With broadsides from Fisher and some immigrant leaders, we won, the census bureaucrats actually crediting the Sun for the change. So Canada as the next century approached actually went from fines for Canadians who dared call themselves Canadian on forms (we had to write it in) to formal recognition that as a country that was actually older than half the countries in the world, it was O.K. to say it was our origin. We no longer had to say our family originated in failed foreign regimes that specialized in driving their people to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
I hadn't thought of the issue for years. But I just read a letter-to-the editor complaining that the writer had to complete a form in which listing Canadian as an ethnic origin was not allowed.
Do we really have to go through this war again? Do we really have to go back to one of the sturdy roots for the good change, the great campaign by John Diefenbaker around 1960 to end hyphenated Canadianism?
Look at my family history. My father was born just two years after Confederation and came here from Cornwall a decade later. My mother came here from Holland in 1909. More than a century later, I visit the smuggler's coves of Cornwall and the canals of Rotterdam that my father and mother left behind and enjoy myself but don't really feel kinship.
Since Mary's parents came nearly a century ago, my three sons have our century-old roots in England/Holland/Slovenia, but their base, their source, is Canadian, not some hybrid gruel loved only by academics and those who boost the mosaic rather than the melting pot because they have more power (and grants) when they divide with hyphens fashioned as swords more than links.
Whenever I write about this, I still smell the stench from the past when ethnic origin and religion mattered more than the capability of the person in question. It's really not that long ago that politicians and businessmen found it necessary to fib about their history, and I'm not just talking about serial liars like Donald Trump who pretends he doesn't have German ancestors.
Religion doesn't count any more. Orange Toronto died a long time ago. Roman Catholicism may have been an issue in the mayoral election of 1972,  and it did take the city 146 years to elect its first Roman Catholic mayor in Art Eggleton in 1980, but we have just gone through a number of elections when religion wasn't important.
Or so they say.
I would just as soon not return to the days when our officials forced us to remember foreign roots that should instead be lost in the mists of history.
Count Me Canadian on every question about my ancestry or I will shove a bushel of forms down the throat of every official/professor/politician who wants to drag the baggage of other lands into this, the best country in the world. (Sorry, but the daily gush of patriotism south of the border is a tad infectious even though it must be obvious that we Canadians are much better and have a much nicer country.)

CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING POLITICAL OBSERVER

THE WONDER IS PEOPLE STILL VOTE

After a lifetime of political immersion, I ignored most of this provincial election.
I'll vote Tory because the incompetent Liberals bordered on fraud and the New Democrats want to give away even more of my money to the lazy, the unions, and every special interest group that has even a vague leftwing cachet.
 Naturally the teachers and civil servants want the Tories to lose.
I have covered politics since I was thrown out of my first council meeting in Whitehorse as editor of the onlyYukon newspaper. Then I had my vote thrown out in my first election when the territory court decided there had been too much fraud and voided the federal election.
My introduction to politics and journalism.
 My first taste of international media came via the same election when my story in Time magazine about the strange election in the land of the midnight sun appeared with seven errors not of my making.
 You would have thought I was a political reporter for the Star.
Since then it has been too many decades of covering elections, turning down invitations from three parties to be a candidate myself, and thousands of columns and editorials on politics.
Once upon a time, I thought the greatest thing in the world would be to represent voters, whether as a trustee, councillor, mayor, MPP or MP. My proudest family boast was that my father had been chairman of the Toronto school board. Now who knows who that is, and who cares?
Over the years, most politicians seemed to fail us. So when the parties came calling, I said no, even when victory was practically guaranteed.
That got easier every year as elected representatives, which I thought was honourable work, slid down the slope of public opinion past even journalists.
I was at three recent gatherings which once would have been a hotbed of political debate - several hours of meetings of the CNE board, a Ryerson University reunion with three fellow grads of the class of '58, and a family party celebrating the 80th birthday of my cousin Paul Plewes.
I was surrounded on these occasions with avid critics and current and former political partisans who have been mayors, deputy mayors, councillors, senior party officials, MPPs, reporters and failed candidates.
In the day, there would have been fire in the air, along with cutting insults, volleys of facts and ambushes of insider data.
Not now. I am sad to report that for too many, and it was illustrated at these occasions, the battlefield is silent, littered with broken promises and pools of indifference and contempt. The voter hates the choices.
One reason is the fatigue over being bribed with our own money, and excesses being justified with lies and cheating.
Another cause is the 24-hour news cycle and the desperate search for news by skeleton staffs so what passes for political coverage is used to fill the yawning expanses and is often boring and shallow.
Then there is the poor quality of the candidates. It matches the reporting.
A third cause is social media and a general contemp by too many for facts and their acceptance instead of lies and hokum dreamed up propagandists and egotists who couldn't report what was happening in a flea circus.
It's difficult to be a good reporter. It's even more difficult to be a good columnist. Yet we are surrounded by fools who think they can play journalist without ever leaving their couch.
So the U.S. now is ruled by a corrupt president who has lied and cheated his entire life. And in Canada we have a minor drama teacher who inherited money and a family reputation.
In Ontario, the only choice is so flawed, it's enough to bring one to tears. The Ford family is a caricature sketched by a drunk -  a boring father and awful mother produced one bumbling clown who became mayor and another smarter son, both of whom won simply because they preached a populist message that conventional politicians waste money and are lazy jerks.
They promised change, the most seductive of all political messages, because so many hate how we have been  governed. So they go for a Trump and a Trudeau despite their huge flaws of personality and inexperience,  and Ford is a real possibility despite being a lurching rookie.
Thank heavens there are good Conservatives who can prop Ford up, including Christine Flaherty who should have won as leader. Give me this lawyer who raised triplets and was a good cabinet minister instead of this strange premier and a union flunky who may have been a good steward.
Since we have to have an election because that is the way democracy works despite this contempt for what it is producing, let's go with some women and men who promise us real change instead of old ways to give money to all the civil servants and teachers and bureaucrats and consultants and ad flunkies and....

REVISITING WHITE HOUSE PRESS DINNERS

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF "FAKE MEDIA" BOYCOTTED LIES?

I have sifted the fallout from the White House Correspondents' Dinner and concluded that despite some chicken-shit commentary from media who have been covering too many politically-correct protests and got infected, I'm firmly on the side of ridiculing politicians.
In my blog about my memories of the dinner, I grumbled about Michelle Wolf at this one separating her good lines with foul expanses. This doesn't mean I thought she should be cast into outer darkness for her criticism of the president and his White House denizens, including the official liar who doesn't even seem embarrassed when the boss is caught out on another whopper.
Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher and all the professionals who earned their spurs doing stand-up who have refused to cry Wolf because of her gutter bits are correct in saying that Trump and his staff deserve to be roasted here on earth before they go on to burn in Hell for their utter contempt for truth, facts and the ordinary Joes and Janes who haven't bought their way into Republican hearts. (Assuming this lot have them.)
The president, who has been counterfeit since 1980, likes to talk about "fake news." Now he certainly is an expert at fabrication. But he needs the media to distribute this insult for him. Why then do we go along?
It has been left to the comics to be the most effective weapon against his bluster, although they should use more rifles than blunderbusses.
I have written thousands of columns, editorials and blogs. I even have been called upon anonymously to help write putdowns and gags for speeches about major figures, including premiers and prime ministers.
Now it's easy to write diatribes, as jerks demonstrate hourly in social media, but it's much more difficult to be subtler and clever in your lines.
So I have often sought advice from those who also have had to write for living...but have to be funny too.
 I remember grilling the greats, like Jack Benny on an exercise walk down Yonge Street to the Royal York Hotel. (And if you don't know who he was, that master of timing and the stare with one hand to the mouth, then you haven't done rudimentary homework in judging comedy.)
I'm told that when you write a humorous column or a roast routine, you start by putting down every  pun, crude gag, insult and double entendre that you can think of. Let it all hang out, from toilet humour to slander to rusted kitchen sink. Then you go through with a thick black pen and take out almost all of it. What's left can be funny.
The problem with Wolf is that she needed a good editor, one that would let her say almost everything  she wanted, but would get rid of the worst smut. If you get rid of the groaners, then the rest is funnier.
Of course even when Donald Trump sticks to the Teleprompter script written by his confused and terrorized staff, he Trumps the worst line delivered by Wolf who just did what she was supposed to do and then is criticized by media apologists who don't have her guts.
You know if the Washington media were really serious about criticizing Huckleberry and the mistruths of her regular briefings, they just wouldn't show up. Boycott the liars and let Trump and Fox marinate in  their swamp.
Then the rest of us could watch old TBS movie classics and take a break from the weird reality of this weird reality president whose behaviour for more than three decades has been worse than anything that Wolf could say.

WHITE HOUSE PRESS CLUB DINNERS

WHEN FAMOUS PEOPLE RIP FAMOUS PEOPLE

"Those were the days" I thought as I was watched the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Nope, I wasn't recalling when Archie Bunker shocked the world in All In The Family (he really didn't but the political correct had to pretend) but my trips inside the American bubble to mingle with the famous and those who wished they were.
I also wasn't remembering when the dinner's guest comics were clever and funny like Stephen Colbert and not killing their good lines with foul expanses of dubious humour like Michelle Wolf.
Early Sun expeditions were legendary but our trips to Washington were great even by those standards. Led by Doug Creighton, the Sun founder and a delightful Pied Piper, the Sun mafioso used to invade the White House dinner because we owned the Houston Post, one of the larger U.S. newspapers that died a couple of decades ago. (One of Doug's few mistakes came when he bought the Post rather than the Chicago Sun-Times. Most directors wanted Chicago.)
The dinner's a magic time in Washington. The city's pretty with blossoms, the summer humidity not yet soaking, but mainly because major politicians spend a lot of nice time cozying up to major journalists even if they would never dare confess that in public.
 On this journey, there was a special tour into White House corners the public never sees. Some  Americans got annoyed when I pointed out an error in the plaque on a Truman portrait and was indiscreet enough to remind them it was nicknamed the White House after it was painted to cover scorch marks left when we burned it after winning the War of 1812.
Toronto used to have a great weekend when the Toronto Press Club flourished. The Byline Ball, revue and dinner that invited media greats like Walter Cronkite. Corporations and pols rushed to have receptions for three days.
Both Doug and I had been press club presidents and missed the decline and eventual death of that fine time of media smoozing. So we threw ourselves into this similar Washington weekend with abandon.
We had so many notables at our reception before dinner that no one really caught the name of a tiny U.S. cabinet minister who was pulled in by Don Hunt, one of the three Sun founders. Don who was quite large had reverted to his days as a rowdy sports reporter and had found the minister in a hotel hall.
Doug viewed his colleague's kidnapping with more humour than the minister's security detail. "Is Don carrying that guy or just dragging him?" he asked me. Fortunately the perplexed minister found out the friendly giant ran the Post before his guards were ordered to rescue him.
The dinner was a cross between a World Series game and the Academy Awards.
The Sun/Post had two tables.  I was sitting beside Miss Universe, whose date was a famous Texas congressman named Charlie Wilson. (Tom Hanks played him in the movie Charlie Wilson's War from a book that detailed how Charlie wangled huge sums for the CIA in Afghanistan.)
Across the table were Ken Taylor and his wife Pat. I tried to wiggle insights out of our former ambassador about his sheltering of the Americans trapped in Iran in 1979 but the dinner roar took the moxie out of major questions.  ( Ben Affleck's mischievous movie Argosy which downgraded Taylor and the Canadian role was far in the future.)
The star of the dinner was, of course, an actor who never rose above supporting roles. Yet Ronald Reagan was a better president even at the end with his Alzheimer's than Donald Trump is on his best day.
The mood was mellow and the applause was warm. Then Reagan, a great talker, rattled his sabre and got standing applause when he reminded us about his bombing of Muammar Gaddafi (there are many spellings.)
I did not stand. After all, he was boasting about bombing the home of the Libyan leader in a raid where two sons were wounded and Gaddafi claimed his four-year-old adopted daughter was killed. (The West still doesn't know if that's true.)
I looked over at Charlie Wilson, who was such a blithe spirit operating from his hot tub that he was nicknamed by colleagues as "good time Charlie." But Charlie wasn't standing either. And he had been a naval officer. "I don't think you clap or stand when you injure the innocent family of a leader," I said, and Charlie nodded his support.
It's hard from TV to grasp how the dinner has evolved from what used to be a grand party. Now it appears everyone is posing for the nearest camera. It doesn't help when CNN gives us those endless panels as we wait for hours to judge the latest verbal assassination.
I don't know why the correspondents' association bother with one comedy hitman when no one can top Donald Trump as a clown. The dinner audience is sophisticated enough to figure out his lies, and all the Trump supporters watching on TV will swallow any fib from his supposed fortune to his supposed accomplishments.
Poking this president with a stick of humour is like expecting a porcupine to feel the prick of a pin.
The dinner in this form has been ruined by the man who didn't come to dinner. CNN is going to have fill a Saturday night some other way, perhaps with Senate mud wrestling.
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DEATH OF MANDELA'S WIFELY BURDEN

A VIOLENT SHOWBOAT

Nelson Mandela and I stood under a tree awkwardly eating a buffet lunch while bodyguards watched suspiciously within grabbing distance and the elite of the world press circled waiting for their chance.

Mandela had lined up for the food at the Nijo Castle with hundreds of publishers and editors gathered for the prestigious annual conference of the International Press Institute in Kyoto.
But they weren't as quick as me to slide in behind him in the queue for food and chat about what he liked to eat. Turned out his favourite food came wrapped in nostalgia about his childhood - maize  porridge.
I followed him to the shade of the tree, having established a weird rapport when earlier we had crashed head-on into each other on an elevated walkway as we surveyed the famous 15 rocks in what is said to be the most famous Zen garden in Japan, Ryoan-ji, a raked gravel "garden" where the Japanese come to meditate. (It's also called Temple of the Dragon at Peace.)
 Neither of us had paid enough attention to those walking towards us. I'm big, but he was an inch taller and hard from a youth as a boxer and those awful years in the quarry of his prison on Robben Island. Still I almost launched him into air since he was 73. And that would have been a dangerous fall that would have snapped bones. But I managed to grab him and haul him back up to safety while his bodyguards behind him glared in horror. "Gawd, I almost wiped out the guest speaker," I said as we both grimaced in bruised embarrassment.
So I had really made an impression.  Thank heavens, I thought.  My wonderful and difficult boss, Doug Creighton, reluctantly paid for the trip during Sun budget cuts after telling me I had better get an "exclusive" interview with Mandela. (I hate media labelling interviews as exclusive if they are with famous leaders or personalities who live in the media spotlight. and are interviewed constantly.)
After a few mild questions not to alarm him since this was a touring day, I asked just what he was doing in Japan at exactly the same time as his wife's notorious trial for kidnapping and murder was starting in South Africa. (In this story, the dragon was not at peace but back home in court.)
He studied me in silence, then slowly said: "We have good lawyers. They were good for the family. They were in the struggle."
There were other questions that day and the next, after he asked "the Canadian who hits so hard" what I thought of his speech defending his African National Congress in a forum that included such luminaries as Robert McNamara, the former U.S. defence minister.
I told him it would have been better if he had written the speech himself. Mandela challenged me on that, but laughed when I pointed out that he hadn't known when he got to the end and had turned the last page expecting to find more.
Yet it was his almost painful response to my questions about Winnie, the beauty for whom he left his first wife, by all reports a gentle nurse, that I remember most about this encounter with a remarkable man who bloomed in world stature and acceptance for his compassionate leadership despite his beginnings in the bloody terrorism of the ANC.
A year after this, he decided to stop being polite in public about the woman who was lionized for her struggle against the brutal apartheid regime even as she was attacked as the cruel den mother of a deadly vigilante group which beat and murdered any opposition. He separated from Winnie as she  flaunted her nickname of Mother of the Nation, then several years later sued for divorce for being so blatant in her infidelity that "I was the loneliest man when I was with her."
Mandela married again, this time happily. When he died, he left Winnie nothing, and his family squabbled over his will. She died April 2, but that will not end the controversies over her corruption and cruelty and her many roles with the ANC government that so often is an affront to the decency and honesty of the leader who  brought it to power.
Unfortunately, there are those who choose to ignore the calamitous history as apartheid was strangled  and now portray Winnie as the valiant woman who wouldn't be hobbled by men or apartheid thugs. Her obituary in Time by a former UN official skips over the trial of her gang for the murder of the youth where witnesses just happened to disappear. (Of course the UN staff are always painfully politically correct when it comes to gender and whatever myth the power blocs dictate. Just look at their  dishonesty over Israel.)
Winnie was the firebrand who believed in tires of fire hung around necks as well as in oratory. Only a great man could have survived her to continue to be respected by all who met him, even if it was just for two days long ago on a foreign island.