stranger in a strange land

Christmas Eve...I'm on my own and it suits me fine. No sadness, no self-pity, no tree, no gifts - but also no forced jolly jaunty happiness and dinners with relatives one can't stand. A little boring, though, I'll grant you that.

It's about minus 10 outside, a lot of crusty snow on the lawns, sheathed in a layer of ice. Lots of slush and dirty snow on the roads. Not the ideal weather for walking but I didn't want to skip my daily constitutional altogether, so I set out into the frosty streets. I was glad to be in Toronto, where there are still plenty of places open on Christmas Eve; lots of Jewish families flocking to the conservative Shul on Eglinton - it is after all, Friday night. And other families, Jewish, Chinese, Korean - people for whom it's just another frigid Friday - dining in Chinese restaurants and pizza parlours.

After walking for about an hour, snug in my touque and long johns, I returned to my delightfully overheated apartment and surfed the net for the rest of the night.

Christmas Day: it began innocuously enough - I made myself a large cup of java and a couple of toasts, read emails, practiced my guitar, all good. Then, around 11 AM, I made the fatal mistake of turning on CBC Newsworld (a.k.a. Communist Bullshit Corporation) They were running a two hour show called "Canadian, so? ", a nauseatingly self-congratulatory piece about the superiority of Canadians. The show featured a lot of interviews with immigrants as well as many (mostly young-ish) native-born Canadians, all expounding on our multi-culti virtues, on our ability to accept "other cultures", our fabled peace-keeping, our politness, our Charter of Rights ("the best document of its kind in the world"), our kindness and our superb ability to be friends with everybody. Like I said, it was a good thing I'd only had a couple of toasts for breakfast because had it been anything larger I probably would have brought it up in disgust.

I have issues with all of the above: multi-culturalism which suppresses and chokes the native culture and allows submission to interest groups and "group advocates" on the back of individual rights and liberty is bullshit. I am all for a melting-pot and I am grateful and happy that I can have excellent and cheap sushi and kimchi and pirogi but not at the price of forgetting the core values this country was built on and sacrificed thousands of lives for. I also have issues with the kindness myth (anyone driving in Toronto during rush hour will see very little kindness and politness). As for peace-keeping...well, perhaps back in the 60's, sure, Canadians were known as peace-keepers. But with the state of the military right now, we couldn't keep the peace in a chicken shack. Keeping the peace means you have to have (lots of!) well equipped soldiers with modern weapons and the know-how and ability to use them. If you send them to war zones in decrepit helicopters and leaky submarines, it's doubtful they will be able to do much good.

But fine, be that as it may, I was willing to turn the other cheek, keep my Christmas spirit on auto-pilot at cruising altitude and let it all fly. Until....until the show started featuring a gallery of speaker after speaker after speaker who all spoke about their proudest moment in Canadian recent history. And you know what it was? The time our prime minister at the time Jean "The KING" Chretien stood up in the house of commons and declared Canada would not support its allies and would not go to Iraq!!

The moment I consider the nadir of Canadian politics, the breach of moral fibre, the craven abandoning of traditional allies, the caving in to an odious dictator, the sleaziest moment of appeasement - this is the moment all these speakers (and I later "googled" it and found also about 70% of Canadians) consider THEIR PROUDEST MOMENT....

Words fail me. I leafed through Camus' novel "The Exile and the Kingdom" and reread the lines about exile meaning -

"to live detached from the past with a memory that serves no purpose and devoid of hope for the future.....An exile lives like a prisoner, only his mind is the prison".

I sometimes feel locked up in a prison of memories which serve no purpose and when I hear the blather described above I am devoid of hope for the future. When you see something with a strong moral clarity and yet that clarity is opposed by the absolute majority of your fellow citizens - it's dispair. Becuase they, of course, are also convinced of their own moral high ground. They want no war. They want no part in any war. All wars are bad. There are no enemies with whom we cannot negotiate and the axis of evil and the war on terror is ALWAYS, ALWAYS "the axis of evil" and "the war on terror". The quotation marks - to borrow a thought from Ann Coulter - have become the strongest weapon in the arsenal of multi-culti, peace loving, kind, helpful, polite Canadians. Because there is no evil, there is no war. These are just concepts made up by the terrorist Bush in order to steal Iraqi oil.

The world is upside down, my friends and the moment of triumph for most of my compatriots is the moment of abasement for me. A stranger in a strange land, indeed....