Regards, Ivan
The flag of Canada...before the trouble started.
Posted on 03/07/2003 6:26:10 AM PST by MadIvan
As a great believer in recycling, I was enormously envious of Mark Kingwell's column yesterday. Mr. Kingwell, you'll recall, had been commissioned by The New York Times to write a piece on U.S./Canadian relations. The buggers sat on it for a week and then spiked it without sending Kingers a cheque -- or, more to the point, a check. (American dollars!) So our man shamelessly sloughed it off on the National Post instead! Attaboy!
Oddly enough, this incident rang a faint bell with me, for recently I too was asked by The New York Times to write an analysis of U.S./Canadian relations. I told them to go **** themselves. Or, to be more precise, my assistant sent them a polite note saying that the last piece I'd written for the Times had been a very unpleasant experience, and the result had been so personally embarrassing to me I'd concluded life was too short to subject oneself to The New York Times editing process ever again.
Reluctant to take "get lost" for an answer, the Times editor e-mailed back: "Is there anything I can do to make it possible for Mr. Steyn to write for us?"
Ha! Coke and hookers may work at the National Post, but it'll take more than that to get me back in the Times. This was a few weeks back, when the NYT had concluded the most pressing issue of the day was not Iraq but Augusta National Golf Club and its refusal to admit women members. Unlike their agonizing over Saddam, they'd actually taken a clear position on Augusta: They were against it, and they were demanding that Tiger Woods and CBS Sports boycott the club, and furthermore, until he saw the error of his ways, the Times heavies were going to splash all over the front page, as if it were some kind of "news story," Tiger's reluctance to sign on to every cockamamie cause the paper picked out for him. A couple of NYT sports columnists dissented from the paper's line, and promptly found their columns had been mysteriously dropped. When Izzy's enforcers carry on like that, the papers are full of a lot of huffing about the threat to "freedom of the press." But, when the bastion of liberal progressive values does it, a strange sheepish silence descends.
"This Times guy is still pestering us. Says he's sure everything can be smoothed out for you," said Chantal. "What shall I tell him?" So she wrote back: "A week in which The New York Times is spiking its own columnists is probably not a good time to try and reassure somebody else's."
The editor replied: "Ouch."
Chantal closed the correspondence with: "There are plenty of people who would be happy to write for the Times but Mark is not one of them." And lo, in the fullness of time, they came to Mark Kingwell. Maybe it was a day or two later, or maybe it was a month later, after they'd worked their way through refusals from Fulford, Jonas, etc. My modest pleasure at discovering that I come ahead of Kingy in the NYT Rolodex is somewhat tempered by the fact that the editor had begun his first missive with: "David Frum, with whom I was speaking about another story, suggested I contact you."
"Another story"? Yeah, right. Frum's always shrugging his cast-offs my way. It's a rare day when I don't get a call from KZZZ-AM, Dead Buzzard Gulch's newstalk leader, asking if I could come on because David's got through to the next round of American Idol and won't be able to make the drivetime show.
By now, you're probably going: Oh, come on, Steyn. At least Kingwell was recycling an unpublished column, not his secretary's e-mails. What's your point?
Well, first, there was clearly a booking error. If your initial choices are Frum and Steyn, it's obvious even the Times is looking for something other than the usual Canadian self-congratulation. That in itself is a measure of our deluded Dominion's shrinking reputation down south. But, second, let us take Professor Kingwell's boisterous assertion:
"The strident pro-Bush voices in this country [Canada] display a new form of inferiority complex, forever enacting a sick codependency which involves berating the Canadian government and people for lack of guts while reading every criticism of American foreign policy as lack of loyalty. They are reminiscent of colonial elites of old: More American than the Americans ..."
Hmm. Wonder who he has in mind.
Alas, reality is more complicated. It is I, the colonial lickspittle with the "inferiority complex" and the "sick codependency," who thinks nothing of flipping the finger at The New York Times, who says take your job and shove it, I ain't workin' here no more, who cries, "Yanqui, go home! No, wait, this is your home. OK, I'll leave." It is Prof. Kingwell who chases that Yankee dollar from the American elite, both at the Times and at the academy, from which Manhattan perch he filed his column last year.
Does this make Kingwell the lickspittle? Not at all. There is nothing unusual in left-wing Canadians gravitating to left-wing Americans any more than there is in right-wing Canadians gravitating to right-wing Americans. The only difference is that I do not take the Prof's need to appear in the Times as evidence of mental illness.
But to be honest I do get mildly irked when Mr. Kingwell accuses those of us who dissent from Trudeaupian orthodoxy of being consumed by "paroxysms of self-hatred." Couldn't one make the argument far more plausibly that it's the Trudeau-Chrétien Liberal Party -- the ones with the strange determination to obliterate every pre-existing national symbol, from Dominion Day to the RCAF -- who are consumed by a weird self-loathing? If you look at the half-millennium of Canadian history since Cabot loaded up the ship, I have no problem with the first 4.7 centuries or so. I don't see why that makes me less Canadian than fellows who like only the last 35 years. Or as the Prof puts it:
"For generations, we have been busy creating, in your shadow, a model of citizenship that is inclusive, diverse, open-ended and transnational. It is dedicated to far-reaching social justice and the rule of international law. And we're successfully exporting it around the world not by bucking the UN, but by seeing it for the flawed but necessary agency it is."
Is that really what Canadian citizenship is? If so, I don't qualify. No matter how "inclusive" it is, it's un-inclusive of me, and a good percentage of other Canadians, maybe even a majority in certain redneck provinces. A century ago, a Kingwell of the day could have written:
"We like and respect you Americans, but we see ourselves as Britannia's loyal lion cub on this continent. For generations we have been busy creating, in your shadow, a model of transnational citizenship founded on our common allegiance to a distant Crown. We celebrate our inclusiveness and diversity not by bucking the British Empire, but by seeing it for the flawed but necessary agency it is."
That would have been hooey, too. Each to his own. But, either way, it's insufficient. The Irish and the Dutch believe all that Kingwellian boilerplate, too, but it's not how they define Irishness or Dutchness. And I'll bet that's where things went awry for him at the Times. I'll bet they looked at that paragraph and said: "Hey, that's not a definition of Canadianness, that's a definition of us! And Bill and Hill, and Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore, Barbra Streisand, Martin Sheen ... 'inclusive, diverse ... social justice ... international law ... flawed but necessary ...' Either that sonofabitch Canadian is a plagiarist or he's yanking our chain."
Professor Kingwell has come up with a pleasant restatement of standard left-of-centre Euro-Canadian-New York Times political philosophy, but there's no definition of "identity" in there. Even the Times isn't so foolish as to believe that. In fact, I'll wager it read a little goofy down on West 43rd Street.
Let me offer instead an alternative vision of non-Americanness from USA Today's recent item on Vince Vaughan's experience of filming in Britain:
"Man, it was bad," says the Rat Pack-y star of Swingers. "These girls saw us and were kind of flirting, and they kept asking us if we were American. Finally we said, 'Yes,' and they just took off.
"One girl turns and says, 'We were hoping you were Canadian.' Canadian? Since when was it cooler to be Canadian?"
So by trying to be "more American than the Americans," we National Post colonials are getting a lot less action. No wonder we're slumped in self-loathing.
Regards, Ivan
The flag of Canada...before the trouble started.
The editor replied: "Ouch."
Ouch indeed. Steyn rules.
Mwahahahahahahaha!
Rediscovery of the 1965 original flagReported on the national TV news (15 February 2000) was the "discovery" of the first Canadian maple leaf flag. The flag was first flown on 15 February, 1965, but no-one seemed to know what happened to the actual flag that was raised on that day. It turns out that the the then-prime minister, Lester B. Pearson, took the flag and put it up in the Liberal Party caucas board room, where it has been ever since. A newspaper reporter started digging, and found it. The modern Liberals (again the governing party) claim that they knew that was the original flag all along, and have now donated it to a heritage museum. Of course the opposition parties all cried foul, claiming the Liberals had deliberately hidden it.
Rob Raeside, 16 February 2000
Regards, Ivan
Talk to the people in the west and they will tell you there is not much of a difference.
Had you properly subjugated the Francophones after the battle on the Plain of Abraham, none of this would be a problem.
What can I say, we can sometimes be a little too gracious in victory. ;)
Regards, Ivan
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