American-ness [was RE: even my dumb nontechnical anime group gets it -- why don't we?]

[Gary Lawrence Murphy]

>>>>> "I" == Ian Andrew Bell <fork@ianbell.com> writes:

    I> Canadians don't like to be called Americans (for the record)
    I> not because we're boorish, but because we're struggling with
    I> our own sense of identity like a confused teenager.  

Nonesense.  You've been consuming too much CanWest 'who are we?' bs.

We don't like to be called Americans because

- we don't want to be associated with their foreign policy
- we don't want to be associated with their protectionist trade policies
- we don't want to be associated with their form of democracy and law
- we don't want to be associated with their definition of 'revolution'
- we don't want to be associated with their definition of civil rights
- we don't want to be associated with their definition of 'the common good'
- we don't want to be associated with their mass media

How's that for starters; pick up any edition of Macleans and I'm sure
you'll find a few dozen more.  If you're brave enough to step 40 yards
out of Toronto or Vancouver, you'll find, despite the constant barrage
of US mass media, we are still fundamentally very different cultures.

and besides, we've been invaded by them twice, and beat them both times

If you check the histories of the immigrations, non-native
(aboriginal) Canadians are here _precisely_ because they didn't want
to be Americans, and many tried to be Americans first (largely because
of US propaganda abroad, mostly out of Hollywood) but later opted out.

Why else would someone be willing to forego lands in a jet-black-earth
temperate almost semi-tropical agrarian paradise to come up here to
weather black flies and farm rocks and snow?

Just ask anyone in New Brunswick, or any black people you might meet
in Southern Ontario.  Better still, read Pierre Trudeau's memoires,
or read Dief's if you don't like Liberals (but forget Mulroney's, he
made his living - before, during and after - trying to Americanize us)

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@teledyn.com> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)