Saturday, February 28, 2004
A FEW LOOSE ENDS TO TIE: If you were wondering, I've satisfied my curiousity that enough regular Canadians were ticked off to make the Triumph situation an incident, rather than just a chance for politicians to make themselves look good by being morally indignant, while other Candians didn't feel it was worth the fuss. After taking everything into account, I wasn't too surprised.
What genuinely floored me was all of the hyperbolic accusations of "racism", since I've always thought of the French as a nationality instead of a race. Only after checking Webster's did I figure out that misstep. After blaming my own loutish self, I put the finger on the "melting pot" factor, since quite a few families with deep roots in this country have a family tree that touches somewhere in Europe or the UK at some point. In addition, when multiculturalism was starting to catch fire, it was framed as a reaction to the academic "cult of the Dead White Guys" (read: Western Europe as a whole). So going to my default interpretation, which is all I can usually conjure up at 1am in the morning, it looked like a white guy with a puppet giving other white people (without puppets) a hard time. Maybe the guy with the puppet saw it that way, too, but I can speak about nobody's mind but my own.
That leaves us the culture gap between the French side and the American side, which isn't a trivial one by any means. Otherwise the French government wouldn't have invested a lot of time and money fortifying the native culture and language, to keep national identity from being eroded from the outside.
From that angle, I don't see the Triumph issue as racism, but old-fashioned cultural insensitivity. Cultural bigotry, if you want to put it into terms that'll clear the fog out.
I could be dead wrong on every bit of this, but sometimes a guy has to try and figure out his own mind, and my main dread, besides doing it in public, is that I'm using a television show as a prop for it. Anyway, there's only one schism between people that keeps me up at night these days: those that want to hurt me because I'm an American versus those that want to hurt me because they've actually gotten to know me.
I'm washing my hands of this month of apologies, so you won't be getting anything out of me on Howard Stern or Bubba the Love Sponge. Instead, I'll point you to a pageload of Late Night with Conan press coverage from 1996 up to the translator saying Conan never knew the touch of a woman. and hopefully we can move on to the pressing matters of beating each other up again. It's an election year, after all.
What genuinely floored me was all of the hyperbolic accusations of "racism", since I've always thought of the French as a nationality instead of a race. Only after checking Webster's did I figure out that misstep. After blaming my own loutish self, I put the finger on the "melting pot" factor, since quite a few families with deep roots in this country have a family tree that touches somewhere in Europe or the UK at some point. In addition, when multiculturalism was starting to catch fire, it was framed as a reaction to the academic "cult of the Dead White Guys" (read: Western Europe as a whole). So going to my default interpretation, which is all I can usually conjure up at 1am in the morning, it looked like a white guy with a puppet giving other white people (without puppets) a hard time. Maybe the guy with the puppet saw it that way, too, but I can speak about nobody's mind but my own.
That leaves us the culture gap between the French side and the American side, which isn't a trivial one by any means. Otherwise the French government wouldn't have invested a lot of time and money fortifying the native culture and language, to keep national identity from being eroded from the outside.
From that angle, I don't see the Triumph issue as racism, but old-fashioned cultural insensitivity. Cultural bigotry, if you want to put it into terms that'll clear the fog out.
I could be dead wrong on every bit of this, but sometimes a guy has to try and figure out his own mind, and my main dread, besides doing it in public, is that I'm using a television show as a prop for it. Anyway, there's only one schism between people that keeps me up at night these days: those that want to hurt me because I'm an American versus those that want to hurt me because they've actually gotten to know me.
I'm washing my hands of this month of apologies, so you won't be getting anything out of me on Howard Stern or Bubba the Love Sponge. Instead, I'll point you to a pageload of Late Night with Conan press coverage from 1996 up to the translator saying Conan never knew the touch of a woman. and hopefully we can move on to the pressing matters of beating each other up again. It's an election year, after all.
|| Eric 2:38 AM#
