Lizzy, "Happy Independence Day"? It's Canada Day. We celebrate the entry into force of the British North America Act of 1867, which made Canada many things, but not independent. Canada didn't even have citizens until 1947. We only became fully independent of Westminster in 1982, when the provinces lost the right to take constitutional disputes to London and the process of amending Canada's basic law was vested fully in Canada.
We have no "Independence Day." "Independence" in Canada implies Quebec nationalism.
The Fête Nationale du Québec starts tomorrow though. The culturally correct way of celebrating it is to go downtown to the see the parade in the morning, and then get thoroughly drunk and spend the rest of the day singing drinking songs in French.
Yes, it is rather unseemly to call a combination of ignorance and desperation "medieval suggestibility", or to suggest its present absence.
Mental epidemics are making a come-back under another name: memes. As for propaganda, there's a line somewhere towards the end of John Varley's book Millennium, where God has his monologue and says something like: "But when if you give them free will, you have to lie to them."
You don't play paperwork games with essential national assets.
Yes, you do, as long as you don't actually want them protected. I realize that it's become cliché to complain about how the Bush administration makes people sound like conspiracy theorists, but there is no war on terrorism. The Bush administration has profited enormously from terrorist attacks. Second only to Islamic fundamentalism (actually, maybe not even second to them - they've been losing ground in plenty of quarters), the Bush administration has been the major beneficiary of terrorism.
New York City didn't vote for Bush and is more or less lost ground for the Republicans anyway. Y'all voted in Hillary. Voting for Osama bin Laden himself wouldn't have made you more enemies in the GOP. So, it makes perfect sense to screw New York on anti-terrorism funding when you have everything to gain from seeing them hit by terrorists and you don't really care if New Yorkers live or die anyway.
The question was, what would be a modern "European" myth look like, analagous to the American oversimplifications about freedom-loving individualists carving liberty's redoubt from an empty continent?
People seem to object only to the second sentence of MacLeod's line: We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. Cutting that, reordering, adjusting some words, restoring the rest of the quote and expanding on the third sentence a touch, I might propose the following:
This is Europe. This land covers the bones of our ancestors and the stones of their works are everywhere. We have built our nations on the ruins of empires. We beat back the Moors, we assimilated the Huns, we held back the likes of Genghis Khan and the Janissaries. We are the children of the survivors of genocides and of their perpetrators. We have conquered continents and shattered empires. We build up tyrants and we tear them down. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes.
There is no European century because we have dominated the world for half a millennium.
If we enjoy our present security and comforts, do not mistake that for decadence. We won those luxuries through threats of violence against those who would deny them to us. If we retain our privileges when others so easily give them up, if our governments back down when they want to take them away, it is a sign of the terror we instill in those who would govern us.
We are a continent of energetic mongrels and we are very hard to kill. And we have nuclear - fucking - weapons.
It's aggressive and pseudo-nationalist and not all that historically accurate (much like the remarks MacLeod was originally responding to), but at least it focuses on the notion of an empowered people rather than a race or an "ancient" tradition that is usually no more than 150 years old. But it's hard to sell to Europeans.
Richard Sloan has an interesting publication record. He's got issues with religion in general from the sound of it. Try The horror! Atheists try to better the world and Scientists seek God, too, through inquiry. I'd see him not so much as anti-Catholic but as anti-church. Not very novel in that line of thought, but still.
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| 2006 | 7 |
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