In the words of former Ontario Premier David Peterson, who hailed from London, Canadian unity work this way:
The thing that keeps this great country together is that everyone hates Ontario; and the thing that keeps Ontario together is that everyone hates Toronto; and the thing that keeps Toronto together is that everyone hates Bay Street.
Toronto hating is an established Canadian tradition. Even back in the day when Montreal was Canada’s commercial capital, it could never prudence Hogtown level bile. Montrealers were just too much fun. That unique Toronto combination of smugness and earnestness — we’re better than you, just watch us be better than you — only exacerbated the envy of Toronto’s astonishing economic pre-eminence. If you can’t see the CN Tower on a good day, well buddy, you’re nowhere that matters.
Publius, “Love Thy Torontonian As Thy Self”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2009-10-07
October 8, 2009
QotD: Toronto as the centre of the universe
September 23, 2009
Condescending Brits on CanLit
The feathers are well-ruffled in yesterday’s post on In Other Words, as a British judge for the Scotiabank-Giller Prize tries to describe CanLit:
It seems in Canada that you only have to write a novel to get grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and from your provincial Arts Council, who are also thanked. Complaints were once voiced that most shortlisted Giller novels emanated from just three big-name publishers, all owned by Bertelsmann, and that virtually every winner lived in the Toronto area. Now, many of the submitted authors, and their rugged subject matter, hail from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That’s maybe because small publishers too are now subsidised, and they proliferate. If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian.
H/T to (yes, this time I’m sure) Chris Taylor, who expects “predictable outrage from hypersensitive arts community in 3..2..1”
September 15, 2009
QotD: Generational obsolescence
What I find amusing is how some believe that the death of civility is a new development. It started with Joe Wilson and was compounded by Serena Williams. Civility has been chained to a rock getting its liver picked out by buzzards since the golden children of the Greatest Generation were encouraged to let their freak flag fly, to use a horrid phrase.
[. . .]
I’ve always thought it’s imperative to stay engaged with your times until your time, singular, is up. Otherwise your sense of the world calcifies, and your worst impressions become your default opinion. The glories of the imagined past become a means of self-admiration, because you were not only lucky enough to be there but smart enough to get it. Kids today, they don’t. Perhaps growing up in the 70s kept me from idealizing my own past; the culture was all gimcrack glitz and second-hand hippie shite before the jams were well and truly kicked out by the anti-sloth movements of the late seventies and early 80s. They were musical and political; the former was all over the road and the latter emotional and naive, but I think they were the first attempts to wrest control of the social narrative from the early boomers, and as such were derided with the smooth weary conceits you’d expect from the generation that remade the world and expected the rest of us to line up and lay laurel wreaths at their sandaled feet.
Then the rise of internet culture saved the late boomers and Gen Xers from cultural obsolescence, because it was no longer necessarily to participate in any of the usual events to be up to the moment. On the internet anyone can be about 26 years old.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2009-09-15
August 11, 2009
Another way of unconsciously offending
I’ve apparently been offending Muslims for years by referring to their places of worship as “mosques”. If Ibraheem Wilson is correct, the word mosque is a French term, invented by Spanish monarchs to associate Muslims with mosquitoes. Who knew?
We are supposed to use the term “masjid” instead of “mosque”. I have no idea of the preferrred pronunciation . . . MAS-dzhid? MAS-yid? mas-DZHEED? But I suspect that whichever one I try to use will be wrong.
Update: Whoops, forgot the H/T to Ghost of a Flea.
August 5, 2009
Maybe there isn’t a lot of ruin in a nation? Or a civilization?
Adam Smith remarked that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, but he perhaps was speaking just of economical ruin? In culture, things seem to have the ability to change remarkably quickly … usually in a ruinous direction. Ghost of a Flea looks at an interesting — but depressing — phenomenon:
In less than a generation, we have come to an extraordinary pass. Once right thinking progressives lined up to purchase copies of The Satanic Verses — my first edition sits untouched and unread — and death chanting rioters in Bradford and elsewhere were called out for the barbarians they so manifestly demonstrated themselves to be. It was the thin edge of the wedge. 9/11 worked as it was intended by its authors, sending every weakling into a panic, lashing out at the men on the walls lest they provoke another raid from the borderlands.
These days, Salman Rushdie would most likely be charged with something by a Commission for the Promotion of Human Rights and Prevention of Hatred. In Ireland they would cut to the chase and press criminal charges. Under the new regime, all demons may be mocked save the one pretending to be God.
These Weimar conditions are a hot house for growing hatred against the people they are ostensibly meant to protect.
