August 29, 2002, Episode Sixteen: "And Another Thing..."

Astronomically, summer doesn't end until September 22 with the autumn equinox. But culturally, Labour Day and the return to school signify the end of summer for most of us.  We've spent the summer of 2002 producing First Person, Plural.  Today we revisit some of the hotter issues of the summer. 

Enron. WorldCom. Time/Warner/AOL. Arthur Anderson.  On May 23, we talked about the level of trust needed in order to make commerce work.  Trust is fast becoming the single most important business issue of this summer.  We revist the idea of economic trust in light of the summer's events.  Can the American capitalist power elite solve its own problems?

Baseball is on the verge of yet another strike. On June 13, we spoke with University of British Columbia baseball coach, Terry McKaig, about how professional baseball affects Canadian college baseball.  Why does it seem that professionalizing a sport leads to the transformation of that sport into something other than a sport?  How does commercialization and professionalization affect amateur sports?

Since World War II, people have begun to question modern ideas that were previously held as truth.  In the late 1970s, the Quebec government commissioned French philosopher, Jean Francois Lyotard, to examine the current and future state of knowledge with implications for education.  Lyotard made a case that grand narratives have lost their power to legitimize knowledge.   With the loss of a trust in these grand narratives, many disciplines lack solid ground to stand upon.  Lyotard proposed that paralogy has the potential to replace grand narratives as a way to determine what is legitimate knowledge to pass onto university students. On July 4, we discussed one of the bigger grand narratives, the rights of people to rebel against an unjust government. We further explore what paralogy means and how useful the concept is in light of major conflicts in the world.

CARL: The sun is setting earlier and earlier each night. Evenings are cooler. The winds along Dallas Road are picking up. Next Monday is Labour Day. Going-back-to-school ads are flooding the airwaves. These are the sure signs that summer is rapidly coming to an end. Since May 16th, we have produced 15 episodes of First Person, Plural. It has been an interesting and rewarding summer as we have examined topics from aging to anger, from makeovers to the moon, and from poetry to pronouncements. Much to our surprise, however, we have discovered that one hour a week is often not enough to discuss everything we'd like to discuss on a given topic. As things were happening around us and we thought more about certain topics, we had the urge to explore some issues further. During the summer of 2002, scandals have rocked the business world, leaving one to wonder if the cracks in capitalism, especially Wall-Street-Style American capitalism, aren't showing as company after company is implicated in fraudulent accounting practices and securities dumping. Major League Baseball is once again on the verge of a work stoppage with players having set August 30th as the strike deadline. Fans are walking out of stadiums in protest, but in many ways it looks like the same ole, same ole. War rhetoric is heating up between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, and the U.S. and Iraq. No one seems to be sitting down and talking to each other. Can Lyotard's concept of paralogy offer a prescription in a world that seems fragmented and ungrounded? Today, we look back on three issues that we have raised during previous episodes: professional baseball, economic trust and paralogy. This week's episode is entitled "And another thing…" copyright by Pattie Thomas and Carl Wilkerson 2002

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