Columnist connects the dots
Jim Taylor is a regular columnist with Okanagan Weekend. His column first appeared in 1995.
Born in India of missionary parents, he spent his early career writing and editing for radio with stops at CJOR (Vancouver) and CBC. He also dabbled in sales. He later served as managing editor for the United Church Observer which, at the time, had 330,000 subscribers. He co-founded Woodlake Books in 1996.
A resident of Lake Country, he’s active in Rotary and his church.
He spoke with Courier managing editor James Miller, Monday, on a wide variety of topics.
COURIER: Much is said about the demise of print journalism but traditional radio is also facing its challenges. What do you see as the most significant change from when you were first involved in the 1960s?
TAYLOR: I think that in those days, broadcasters still felt they had a responsibility to their listeners. We needed to be a trusted source of information, as well as of entertainment. Even in music, we assumed that we knew something about the quality of music – whether pop, country, or ethnic – and so we tried to avoid junk.
COURIER: Was radio as glamorous and exciting as most people think it is?
TAYLOR: Not a chance! It paid peanuts, and I worked overtime every week.
COURIER: Do you believe traditional radio will survive?
TAYLOR: Stations will rise, stations will fold. I can’t wait for Fox News to implode, by the way. The difference now is that there are so many ways of getting news and entertainment, that the failure of any one channel – except the CBC – would be barely missed.
COURIER: Where do you see print media heading?
TAYLOR: Print media can never be as immediate as broadcast media, which in turn can never be as immediate as the phones and the internet. Because of that inevitable delay, I see print as offering a more nuanced analysis, providing more background and perspective.
COURIER: Where do you draw the inspiration to come up with a weekly column? That’s tougher than most people think.
TAYLOR: My deadlines are every Thursday. Typically, on Tuesday, I ask my wife, “What am I upset about these days?” I try to focus my columns around current events in the news. But it’s never just about that event – that event is part of a larger picture. I try to connect the dots between, say, the sexual harassment accusations levelled against some celebrity and the attitudes toward women that men have held for generations. For centuries.
COURIER: What was your favourite column and why?
TAYLOR: I don’t have one favourite. More accurately, every column is my favourite. I write it, I hope people will pay attention. After that, it’s up to them – I have to move on to the next column.
COURIER: What other columnists/writers do you admire?
TAYLOR: When I first started, I modelled my writing on Gwynne Dyer. But I think he ran afoul of Rupert Murdoch.
COURIER: You tend to get political, so let’s go. Do you think Justin Trudeau is doing a good job?
TAYLOR: Trudeau has all the right instincts. I feel that I can trust his personal sense of ethics. But he’s out of his depth in the Machiavellian world of modern politics. Donald Trump is the classic bull in a china shop; Trudeau is the cuddly teddy-bear in the wreckage.
COURIER: How about John Horgan, or is it still too early to tell?
TAYLOR: At this point, the best I can say about John Horgan is that he’s not Christy Clark.
COURIER: What was your take on the school shooting in Florida?
TAYLOR: Oh, don’t get me started. I think the National Rifle Association should be outlawed, and its leaders indicted for conspiracy for murder. I think the motto on U.S. money should be changed to “In Guns We Trust.” I think the U.S. media is guilty of race prejudice for naming any act committed by a person with a foreign name “terrorism,” while calling anything done by a white person “mental illness.” Even the witchhunting FBI now admit that the greatest danger to Americans comes from home-grown rightwingers.
COURIER: What one word or hyphenated word best describes Donald Trump?
TAYLOR: You’re not going to print (expletive deleted) are you.
COURIER: Who was the best prime minister Canada never had?
TAYLOR: I used to say that about Robert Stanfield, if anyone still remembers him. He was a decent guy; we’ve had too few of them.
COURIER: Closer to home, as a Lake Country resident, do you support the sale of publicly-owned waterfront land?
TAYLOR: No. I also don’t support the development of our few remaining ridges of wild land. Accounting practices don’t assign any value to undeveloped land, so of course it’s better to sell it, build on it, privatize it.
Would Vancouver be as desireable if it didn’t have Stanley Park, English Bay and Spanish Banks.
COURIER: What’s your sense of the most pervasive problem in our civilization today?
TAYLOR: Compartmentalization. People break their lives — and their beliefs, even if they don’t realize that they have beliefs that shape their actions — into air-tight compartments. They don’t see a connection between their work and global poverty, between science and religion, between celebrity misconduct and their own personal attitudes. Life, all life, everyone’s life, is one seamless fabric.