Treacherous Desire
This is essentially true - I think most countries are small potatoes compared to the USA and our proximity to them often puts us at risk, economically, militarily and often culturally.
I don't make my desire for BC to seceed an open fact off the internet. I have no desire to have the s**t kicked out of me in real life. I mostly keep it to myself which is probably why I'm such a bloody radical on here. I bottle it all up because, ******** man, I'm living in Ontario now and really do have to make some attempts to adapt to my new life. But it BOTHERS me how some people act in regards to Canada - especially the people in my Canadian studies class. They don't have any clue what lays beyond the borders of their own province because they don't think it matters and it irritates me.
It bothers me that the greatest number of people I've met here don't care about the rest of Canada. And it's really made me lose a lot of faith in the whole institution.
We talk about identity a lot in my classes. And the symbols that are chosen. And other people have a great sense of connection to things like the beaver, the maple tree, maple syrup, tim hortons, poutine, the houses of parlimanet and the group of 7. All of these things are places, people and things that people from central Canada can relate to quite easily, it would seem. And it's not stuff that I personally identify with. I feel a greater surge of patriotism with the orca, the fir tree forests, cathedral grove and Emily Car. I don't feel the same nostalgia sense of 'homeness' when we talk about winter and winter activities - man I ******** HATE snow. I think winters should be grey, rainy days. I think Tim Hortons is a sham to get us all obese and maple syrup is really disgusting. I can't speak French and I think poutine looks like the stomach-contents on CSI. I call the great lakes "the ocean" because I'm not accustomed to seeing large bodies of water that AREN'T the ocean.
Ugh, maybe I'm just feeling outsiderness and homesickness. God knows this weather could drive a person insane.
But I can't help feeling like this is something MORE... Like I'm somehow realizing that this ISN'T my place.
What I think you're becoming intimately familiar with is the real amorphous complex of the Canadian identity. To put it quite simply, what is the character of our nationhood? What is our national culture?
Geography certainly doesn't make this conundrum any easier to solve, nor does the fallacious political axiom of the "multicultural" really narrow things down for you. Furthermore, you have globalization continually condensing a world of information and experience into the proximal realm of high-technology. A byproduct of this expansionism is the corporate culture you speak of; our ultimately arbitrary association with the iconography of capitalism. Tim Hortons, whether you're in British Columbia or Newfoundland, whether you're in the far West or in the far East, is a staple of consumerism that has come to emblematize our common experience - our common consumer experience, which has increasingly, I would suggest, become our consumate national experience.
It's commercial imperialism at its finest, and it's even working on a much more global, international scale. Consider Wal-Mart, or McDonald's, or Hot Topic, or Pepsi, or consider the flourishing of corporate sponsorship or the blitzkrieg of internet pop-ups that assault your computer screen with every click of a button. This website, with its "Cash Shop," with its rhetorical change concerning "donation items" to "monthly collectibes," operates as a clandestine testament of our acquisitive nature - and I don't use the term nature very liberally anymore, but in this case, I believe it applies. The world is profit-driven, and we are merely self-reciprocating cogs. Even "national" borders are becoming arbitrary. Some postcolonial theorists like Edward Said will even go so far as to suggest that such borders have always been arbitrary.
And for that reason, I'm inclined to question whether the concept of culture in general is nothing more than a whimsical normative construct.
At least on a national scale. And perhaps increasingly on a local one, as I've noticed rural traditions like the Christmas Mummering begin to all but disappear on this salty, waterly rock I call home. This presents a certain, and arguably quite inevitable, risk of cultural assimilation. But as Veelah pointed out, and I chagrin to agree with her, we're floating quite peripherally to that egocentric cultural void of Central Canada, which has, for all intensive purposes, the real cusp of political, economic, and media power in this country - the urban area is the propogator and perpetuator of consumer culture. There's an inclination to resent or view as threatening those megalomanic cities and provinces as a result.
Likewise, we regard the United States in a similar light. Oppositionally.
Really, I think it boils down to your conception of culture, whether locally, provincially, nationally, or internationally. Unlike Veelah (phew, finally), I don't think you should "try to be less provocative," but rather be more aware that as fundamentally different as we may seem, we're all somehow inexorably linked. Finally, I think if there's any one central maxim to the ethos of Canadian identity, it's that there is no maxim. There is no ethos. Frankly, TD, if you weren't perplexed by what it means to be Canadian, only then would I have to question your association with the "Canadian" guild.
