Posted on 07/01/2008 9:20:19 AM PDT by forkinsocket
Recently, on a return flight from Washington D.C., I found myself sharing the plane with Jim Flaherty. It gives me no pleasure to approve of anything Jim Flaherty does – he has always seemed to me like a classic big little man who shouldn't be trusted to run a used car lot never mind the finances of a country. Still, I want to give him his due: the man who determines how much tax you and I pay, and how precisely the government goes about spending it, was flying economy. And when our flight landed, he waited in line to pass through customs.
It was a long line. About twenty minutes. Was it just that I was returning from Washington, where the display of power is so naked and imperial, that I found the whole performance reassuring, even moving? I'm definitely home and I like home, I thought, seeing the second most powerful person in the country check his BlackBerry and sigh and look into blank space. I was seized by an emotional contradiction which always returns to me around Canada Day: I was proud of our humility.
But I know that while humility is an attractive characteristic in a finance minister, and the right sentiment to evoke in certain specific circumstances, it might not be the best foundation for a nation. Hard to get stuff done when you're busy always being humble. Two of our biggest Canadians icons – Don Cherry and Margaret Atwood – have made not being humble the key elements of their personas, to huge success.
Cherry is easily the best sports commentator of his generation – his consistent capacity for detailed insight is amazing – but he is known for the flamboyance of his patriotism. That's the root of his celebrity, and why, even though he's so, so good, he'll never make it on TV in the States. "This is Hockey Night in Canada not Hockey Night in Russia" : That's Cherry.
My first memory of him is the post-game analysis after the brawl at the world junior championships in 1987, the one that cost Canada the gold medal. He told Barbara Frum then, "My country right or wrong." Could there be a less Canadian sentiment?
We don't indulge in that kind of silliness, Don.
Our Scottish roots have always favoured canniness over sentimentality and successive waves of immigrants haven't altered the preference. Surely, it's good to know, and to be able to say it without shame, when we're wrong.
Cherry embraces xenophobia and the worship of violence and Canadianness as if they go together, but it's hard to think of a combination that's less in tune with the general public. Basically, he wants us to act like Americans.
Which is to say that Cherry wants us to act a bit more like Margaret Atwood: tough, aggressive, uncompromising, not humble. She is Canada's most American writer – that's the irony of her status as icon.
Canlit = Margaret Atwood. Canlit has frizzy hair under its slightly eccentric gardening hat.
But the kind of books she writes and the style in which she writes them share almost nothing with her Canadian predecessors and little with her Canadian contemporaries.
The influences are American: As a poet, she belongs with Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, not F.R. Scott or Louis Dudek; as a novelist she belongs with John Updike and Saul Bellow, not Hugh MacLennan or Margaret Laurence.
She does not at all write like the literature she promotes in Survival. With the place names blocked out, a reader unfamiliar with her work would guess it was written from somewhere in the Northeastern United States.
Her persona doesn't conform to the clichés of Canadian identity either. Her personal arrogance, so evident in every interview, cloaks an intellectual restlessness superabundantly rich and fabulous. Like all great writers, her main flaw is also her greatest strength: In her case, it's that she's a street fighter willing to take on all comers. Novels, poetry, short stories, criticism, postcard fiction, children's books, collections of loose notes – she even continues to write book reviews.
What on earth does she have to prove?
And yet she goes on proving. Atwood has always flaunted her ambitions magnificently. What could be less Canadian than such enormous raw aggression?
Canadian icons are rare for a reason. Our national self-deprecating self-love makes their emergence difficult, their existence fragile. Both Cherry and Atwood are struggling to help us over the habits of our colonial past – believing that life happens elsewhere, waiting to hear the judgments of others in other places, using the excuse of parochialism to avoid attempting great things (because how could they happen here?).
But our self-deprecation also has its prizes. As a country we have almost never sacrificed sound policy for ethereal symbolic achievements. Our passivity has saved us entry into many stupid wars.
These are not small accomplishments. We should be proud of them.
Only well after my flight from Washington beside Flaherty did I realize how strange it was that the minister of finance would wait in a passport line: Doesn't he have better things to do? He should be jumping the queue.
He is more important than the rest of us. And yet I love living in a country where the big shot has to suck it up, or at least feels he has to pretend to suck it up.
Surely I'm not alone in feeling patriotic about our lack of patriotism. It is one of the most beautiful features of this country that nobody has to indulge in pointless vulgar flag-waving; let's leave that to the Parti Québécois.
It makes my heart swell how little our hearts swell at all that parochial guff.
Cherry and Atwood complain that we are not patriotic enough. But that's who we are. And we like ourselves that way. We should celebrate.
Canada, the little country that could, but chose not to because that would mean being like those beastly uncouth Americans.
Ping.
That, plus knowing that we would ride in to save their a@@es if they were really threatened.
> Cherry and Atwood complain that we are not patriotic enough. But that’s who we are. And we like ourselves that way. We should celebrate.
At least one Canadian disagrees with this writer. Anyone else?
Ahh...America Jr. you’re so cute when you try to act all grown up. It’s adorable.
I’ve never met a Canadian that I hated which is surprising. From what I’ve seen written, they would seem to be easily hate-able.
Canada is America Jr. They try so hard to have their own identity and that is so unattractive.
I am both Canadian and American - but consider myself true red-white-AND-blue. I would rather live in the US ANY DAY than in Canada (where i lived for many years, but no longer do). Canadians constantly bash Americans for their patriotism and the fact that Americans don’t know much about Canada. America-bashing is their patriotism. Canada wants to be greater than the US, but can’t seem to manage it - so they throw insults and look down their noses at us. As if acting as though you’re better makes you better. Silly Canada!!
1. You haven't met enough Canadians.
2. Most Canadians are classy enough to separate the collective America that they despise from the individual Americans that they meet. The same is true, believe it or not, among Mexicans (in general).
“The same is true, believe it or not, among Mexicans (in general).”
Well, I’ve definitely met plenty of hate-able Mexicans. Their society is certainly to be despised too.
I’m glad the Canadians are at least classy enough to separate the collective America from individuals. Which collective America do they despise, I wonder? I’m afraid it’s the America that I most identify with.
I've spent considerable time talking with both Canadians and Mexicans over the years, although I have admittedly spent more time in Mexico. The problem with Canadian national identity is that Canada never developed a strong central national identity due to disparities in regional culture among the provinces to say nothing of its continued political relationship with the UK. This has caused Canada to essentially identify itself as being "not the United States", ie a negative pseudo-national identity.
In the case of Mexico, the revolutionary government went to several lengths to inculcate a national identity based on Mestiaje (mixing of races) and national sovereignty (nationalization of the oil fields). The PRI governments (which ruled Mexico from the 1920s until very recently) could not sustain these ideals, as the need for foreign investment caused them to make concessions to foreign influence, while at the same time throwing nationalistic bones to the public. As a result, most Mexicans have grown rather cynical about national identity, especially those 40 and under.
Hm, that’s interesting.
I was talking about the Mexican culture I’ve personally witnessed in Denver and Tulsa (two cities I’m familiar with and are ruined or being ruined by the influx of Mexicans). Most of them, or at least the most visible side affect of their presence, is lack of respect for others’ private property, audible comfort, visual comfort, and lack of care for public property. They have religiosity without the positive side affects of religion. I could go on. I don’t think it’s racist either. If you look at a poor, mostly American white, neighborhood, then a poor, mostly Mexican neighborhood, the difference is obvious.
That’s what I was talking about: The society that produces those kinds of attitudes (distinctly unAmerican attitudes). Maybe I should say culture instead of society. I’m determinately not talking about individuals though.
Is it my imagination, or does this guy sound like he got his keister kicked on a regular basis as a schoolkid? What a wuss.
Change "Mexican" to "black" and you have many other urban areas in the US (East St. Louis, Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, etc.). I wasn't talking about the Chicano underclass, I was talking about the Mexicans I have met in Mexico.
“...and you have many other urban areas in the US” Yep, including Tulsa and Denver. I never met in Mexicans in Mexico.
It stands to reason that Mexico’s best and brightest are not the ones who cross the desert to get here.
Canada, the taint of the Anglosphere. ‘Tain’t the States. ‘Tain’t the U.K.
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