Mark Steyn pokes some fun at Tim Naumetz who managed to confuse the Vichy regime with Vimy Ridge, in an attempt to portray Stephen Harper as a history-distorting warmonger:
As Lilley points out, it was the Liberal Defence Minister John McCallum who made Vichy “a household name” in Canadian history when he confused France’s Second World War collaborationists with Canada’s greatest First World War battle: Vimy, Vichy, what’s the diff? (The Defence Minister made his error in seeking to explain an earlier confession that he’d never heard of the Dieppe Raid.) After blog-mockery from Lilley and others, Mr Naumetz and/or his somnolent editors have belatedly corrected his piece, although without acknowledging the error, never mind addressing the broader question of the cultural void in which he’s operating. I mean, it’s not even a particularly Canadian question: If you don’t know what Vichy is, it’s hard to figure out Casablanca.
[. . .]
I have no idea who “Tim Naumetz” is. (Any relation to Admiral Naumetz, whom the Bush-Cheney warmongers singlehandedly made a household name in the Pacific?) But truly he is a child of Trudeaupia. He belongs in the same category as Miles Hopper and Jason Cherniak, apparently grown men who write stuff like:
Canadians have a right to Freedom of Expression. We have that right because the Trudeau Government negotiated and passed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Gotcha. So before 1982 Canadians had no right to Freedom of Expression? Thank you, Boy Genius. As I said of young Mr Cherniak:
One can only marvel at the near Maoist elimination of societal memory required to effect such a belief.
For these guys, Charter Day 1982 is Year Zero in Trudeaupia, and that’s that. You get a lot of that on the review pages, of course. When a critic says “This is the best sitcom since ‘Seinfeld””, all that means is “This is as far back as I remember.” But it’s the collectivization of “this is as far back as I remember” that’s so creepy about this crowd, as if they all went through the same historical vacuuming in school.
Which is presumably why it never even seems to occur to them that “this is as far back as I remember” is an inadequate argument when you’re attempting to argue that the current regime is attempting a wholesale makeover of national identity. I have no particular views on that one way or the other, but I notice that, consciously or otherwise, Mr Harper seems to have a tonal preference for pre-Trudeaupian language. For example, he welcomed Their Royal Highnesses to “our fair Dominion”. How often did that word pass Martin’s or Chrétien’s or Trudeau’s lips? I suppose Mr Naumetz would find that a bit déclassé, too, even though, in its political sense, it’s one of the few genuine Canadian contributions to the English language.
Reading a Steyn missive like this is refreshing; it reminds me of how entertaining he was before he became the crazy street preacher prattling on and on about inevitable demographic doom.
Comment by Chris Taylor — July 6, 2011 @ 09:57
I have to agree: that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been quoting him or linking to his stuff recently. For all that he has useful things to say — and a highly idiosyncratic way of saying them — he moved too far in the demographic monotone over the last few years.
Comment by Nicholas — July 6, 2011 @ 10:26