Wednesday, April 30, 2014

What's in a name

Last Friday, April 25, a local paper, the Courier-Islander, gave us a glimpse of what we can expect from the new owners when it published an editorial I'm pretty sure wasn't written in-house.
As is my wont when I find I'm somewhat offended by something political, I wrote a letter to the editor:

Dear Sir,
As a subscriber to your newspaper since the 1970's, it is extremely disappointing to see a piece of rather obvious Conservative propaganda masquerading as Friday's editorial (The Fair Elections Act. Is it fair or unfair?)
Especially as the government that introduced the Act has now climbed down from most of the contentious provisions so energetically defended in that editorial.


Today that letter was published, along with two others in the same vein.

This afternoon J showed up. He wanted to talk about "your letter", and why, as a Campbell River lawyer who signs himself W.J. Havelaar he couldn't be associated with it.
Fair enough, although as I pointed out, the contents of the letter pretty clearly demonstrate that he couldn't have written it.
Anyway, I agreed to write another letter:

Dear Sir,
My son, W.J. (Jay) Havelaar, wants me to point out that there are four W.J. Havelaars presently extant, and that he's not the one who has subscribed to your paper since the 1970's, so he's not the one who wrote the letter complaining about the "editorial" that appeared in the April 25th edition of the Courier-Islander.
Yours very sincerely,
W.J. (Justus) Havelaar 


That should clear things up!
(Though I doubt they'll publish it.)

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