A truce between friends
Andres Barker
Most of us think we know ourselves pretty well. We have our opinions, our distinct personalities and our own hobbies. Most people can tell you their favourite colour and whether they prefer Smitty’s to the Salisbury House. But sometimes it takes the keen eye of an outsider to put things into perspective. The sober view of a casual observer can point out the flaws in our ways, which we have either chosen to overlook, or to which we have just been generally oblivious.
Enter Paul Weyrich, a conservative “thinker” for the American Free Congress Association (AFCA), one of those typical right-wing groups that believes the stability of society hangs by a thread on its general acceptance of Judeo-Christian values. Continue down the path of political correctness, the AFCA website warns, and America will become “no less than a third world country.” I guess that would look a little like New Orleans.
This particular group is said to have a hand in a movement to encourage or discourage the amount of right-wing commentary or suggestions directed at the Great White North during the last election so as not to persuade the electorate that a vote for Harper really was a vote for a Bush-loving sycophant. Perhaps it worked, because the Conservatives did win.
But that wasn’t enough help. After the election, Weyrich did us a personal favour. He launched an intervention of sorts. He looked up north, and had the courage to call a spade a spade. We Canadians are too hedonistic: inherent pleasure-seekers, doing only what leads to personal satisfaction and gratitude. Think gluttony and lots and lots of sex.
On the surface this seems like a ridiculous accusation. It’s a brave person who can pin the label hedonist on a people who voluntarily live in what is one of the coldest countries on earth. A people whose official sports of lacrosse and hockey seem to be in direct violation of our charter right to life, liberty and the security of person. A people who made Celine Dion famous. It’s nice to know better now, though. I have been awakened to my ways. No more pizza and chicken combos, and certainly no more trips to the Palamino.
So what else can Canadians do to aid ourselves on the road to recovery? More sit-ups? Unpaid overtime? No, it’s far easier than that. All we have to do is ban abortion and keep gay people from getting married! That’s right, the very essence of our pleasure-seeking, “culturally Marxist” ways is our obsession with the freedom to choose and condone same-sex marriage.
What else, you ask? Apparently pleasure-seeking involves a tendency to appoint liberal judges, who should be replaced immediately. These are the keys to the reversal of our ways that some label progressive and others call evil.
Of course, this kind of criticism irritates most of us, just as when the NRA came to Alberta to hold pro-gun rallies and protestors came to B.C. to protest same-sex marriage by holding our flag upside down and writing “Fag Flag” on it. It seems absolutely insulting and condescending that a people for whom we have so much general scorn could possibly be telling us what to do. After all, we’re the ones who are used to giving advice and taking an arrogant, holier-than-thou position against most of our neighbour’s policies, regardless of what they happen to be at any given time.
It is just as frustrating that there doesn’t seem to be any suitable remedy or retaliation. What do we do, demand they vote out Bush? This is a man who, during his last visit to Canada, publicly acknowledged in an address the fact that people showed up to see him with the strict intention of giving him the finger.
Maybe this presents the opportunity for a truce. Perhaps we are best served by each country minding its own business. Anti-American sentiments can cease to make the pages of the Globe and Mail and, in rarer cases, the National Post. When our American relatives visit over Christmas we won’t remind them that their $1,000 operation for their ingrown toenail would have, eventually, been free here. After all, they already know, and they would like us to stop telling them about it.
In return, we would ask that fundamentalists, gun-nuts and neoconservative “thinkers” leave us alone and go back to complaining about purple Teletubbies. After all, with our obsession with American politics and policy, maybe it would do us some good to spend a little more time paying attention to what’s going on in our own country.
Andres Barker is a first-year law student.
