Canadians are becoming what they hate
It’s become a bit of a latter-day tradition for my friends and I to head down to Washington each year to attend the Sasquatch music festival. It’s got a beautiful venue, fantastic music, and is usually a delightful four-day jaunt into Americana and sad-happy hipster music. Last year, however, this wonderful ritual was tainted, as have been so very many things, by douchebag Canadians. This nascent demographic has been embarrassing reasonable Canadians since, well, probably somewhere around the year 1812, but has become significantly more obnoxious in recent years.
If you’re wondering, it was our national anthem that so offended me. Somewhere on the second day (I think it may have crystallized at the Dan Mangan concert) the crowd figured out just how many Canadians were in attendance. The venue is just a few hours south of the border, after all, and we northerners won’t be denied our quirky post-rock. As soon as this was discovered — and I mean right away — the Canadian mob became united behind a single purpose: sing the national anthem. Sing it at every possible opportunity, at all times of the day and night, sing it over and over and over. They went to every open stage, gathered in little pockets to gab about how awesome it is to be able to drink caesars and know what a bear claw is — “God, America’s so crazy, am I right?”
Our country is pretty alright. We allow gay marriage, have universal healthcare, and our pot is good. On that, you’ll get no argument from me, and I’m certainly not about to ship out to the U.S. Still, let’s keep some perspective. How would we react if, at a Canadian concert, a gaggle of half-drunk Texans gathered loudly to gawk at our weird “Future Shops” and sing “America the Brave”? We’d be diving for our idiotic anti-American security blanket faster than you can say “inferiority complex.”
The internal narrative of superiority (and often even victimhood) fostered by self-serving political parties is annoying enough simply for its unbridled success, but to actually export it is totally beyond the pale. We cannot simultaneously proselytize for our admittedly great nation and smugly congratulate ourselves for humility and politeness.
The fact is that Canada is a deeply flawed nation, just like any other. We have huge areas of conservatism so extreme they’d make most American hicks curl their lips in disgust. We have a constitution that only hints at freedom, and a population that assumes we are protected by American amendments. We have an electoral system that is nearly as broken as the American one, an arguably worse record at the UN, and language-politics that rival the Tea Party in their ability to block real progress at the national level.
We are a great country, one of the best, but we have no right to look down our noses at any Western nation. That the anti-American gibberish comes largely from the same demographic set that refuses to criticize Islamic nations for outright oppression of any number of groups is ultimately a non-sequitor, but still a maddening one.
This overt Canadian nationalism ultimately comes off as pathetic and compensatory. Our government doesn’t help — they reinforce false myths about Canadian history. From the creator of Superman (who left Canada when he was 10 years old), to the inventor of basketball (who did so in America), the new nationalism requires us to engage in precisely the sort of empty-headed, revisionist nonsense we so love to criticize in the U.S.
In conversation, I refer to this trend as ‘douchebag nationalism’. It’s the set that can somehow feel progressive for slapping a maple leaf on their beer bong and trashing the Patriot Act. It’s the group that loves to brag about this War of 1812 nonsense, then turn around and criticize the U.S. for excessive military spending. Which is it, douchebags? Are you in favour of basing your national identity on having the biggest swinging dick, or aren’t you?
In a recent piece listing the eight most annoying travellers, Canadians were featured prominently, deliberately distinguished from Australians and Brits and anyone else — when it comes to smug and largely ignorant self-satisfaction, nobody can beat a Canadian. We talk about our ability to sew a Canadian flag on our backpacks and step into a world of unbridled adoration, but that very confidence has gone on to undermine our international reputation. By believing in our own humility, we have become arrogant. By believing in our own sense of charity, we have become apathetic.
Canada didn’t become a popular nation by sending armies of hippy backpackers to go tell the world how much it loves us; it gained its reputation by being a loveable nation. The narrative of the moral superiority of Canadians is born of that, and ultimately undermines it. It’s a heartbreaking thing, to realize that your country is becoming the object of scorn, and even more so to realize that the scorn is totally justified. We are acting like a nation of douchebags.
At Sasquatch, the American reaction to Canadians was a compressed retelling of this story. In just three days their reactions slid from delighted smiles and genuine curiosity, to polite neutrality, to total social shutdown. By the end, I hid my Canadian roots unless asked directly; why would I want to be associated with that gaggle of obnoxious cretins?
In the end, a music festial is the perfect simulacrum of my feelings of the subject: it used to be about the music, man. It used to be about the music.