Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

Book Plugs:

Buy 'em and I get
money. I think.
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Monday, January 2, 2006
17:21 - ...As possible under the circumstances	(top)
From time to time, people bring up the weird idea of what would happen if the US and Canada were to merge. It's always seemed like a rather silly idea to me, though I have to admit it's always had a certain appeal�not because I think it would be cool for the US to be bigger or to avoid having to whip out the passport eighteen times on the way to Alaska and back, but because it would imply that someone wanted to be part of the US. I'm not above a little plaintive wishing-people-would-like-us-that-much. I don't begrudge the Canadian people wanting to preserve a culture distinct from America's, even though it grates after a while to never hear the words "American culture" except from a northerly direction and accompanied by an eye roll or sneer. But I do find myself thinking, in this modern age where fragile cultural blocs are�like it or not�growing more important than national identities, that it's not entirely encouraging for whole TV shows to be generated whose purpose is to reinforce national differences, like Atomic Betty, whose original premise (which seems to have been dropped for the series' larger production) was to be uniquely Canadian in character... and thus, as far a the rest of the world is concerned who is accustomed to seeing movies and TV shows with North American accents and assume they're from Hollywood or New York, to establish itself as "not from down South". Nice idea, guys, and I don't want to sound parochial here, but I can't help thinking that such a thing would look to inimical forces overseas rather like a case of infighting between what are supposed to be friends than an expression of justified national pride. We've all established that racism is bad, m'kay, but cultures are still fair game for studying under microscopes and characterizing with sweeping generalizations, if we're not interested merely in putting them all in bell jars in museums for the amusement of the schooled; but something I don't see very much of is any interest in Western culture. My high school taught "World Cultures & History" instead of the more traditional "Geography"; it was a great class with an amazing teacher, but needless to say there wasn't any component in it that explained what our culture was all about. Yet we did study "the Middle East" and "Southeast Asia" as broad cultural paradigms, along with units on Russia and China, where we learned all about exploding televisions and how to read Cyrillic. We didn't study Yemen and Iran and Egypt and Morocco all separately; we considered them in the contexts of the cultural values that bound them together. I daresay that if this class were taught in foreign lands, it would have a unit not on "American culture", but on what looks to outsiders like a shared history, language, accent, and set of traditions spanning all of this continent north of the Rio Grande. As much effort as the National Film Board and CBC put into ensuring that Canadian pop culture has a character disctinct from ours, I daresay the differences from thirty thousand feet, to someone not in the industry, are largely academic. It would be interesting, then, from a cultural standpoint, to consider the US and Canada at the very least as a "North American culture" bloc, and in so doing to at least establish that it would be nice for us not to have to be so wary and suspicious of each other as to inject national differentiation within that bloc into children's cartoons. So at least from the cultural point of view, having a single unified country in non-Latin North America seems to make some sense. I know Canadians aren't pleased by the idea of American culture overshadowing their own uniqueness, and political unification would surely be the very antithesis of what any Canadian with a shred of national pride would want to see. But as a thought experiment it's still interesting. And as to how it would potentially affect the political equation in the proposed greater nation, Paul Denton runs the numbers. The upshot: it wouldn't have that big an effect on anything, really. So even for those people who seem to passive-agressively want to see some kind of unification just because it would ensure a more liberal America, Paul's numbers suggest that it'd be far too small a payoff for far too high a price. I'm inclined to agree. Mind you, I wouldn't go storming around waving placards in protest if Canada decided of its own accord that it wanted to join the US, whether precipitated by some massive Quebec-shaped upheaval or what-have-you; it would certainly be nice to get that vote of confidence after all the backbiting that has taken place over the past few years, and it would be uniquely nice if everyone on this continent had a single national interest to bind us in the face of the global power struggles that don't appear to be getting less likely to erupt in coming years. But it'd be nicer still for there to be the two countries that there are now, just seeing a little more eye to eye.