On Canadian History
If my understanding of Canadian history seems a bit crazy at times, it’s probably owing to a series of chats I had with my grandfather when I was young. His is an influence that has proven difficult to rinse clean. Maybe it was my age when he got to me. I was just a seven year old kid with a mind like a sponge ready to soak up any corruption on offer. My absorption was indiscriminate and permanent, and it littered my mental landscape with pits, none of which are clearly signed. Discovering the whereabouts of these pits, or rather the process of learning that Joe Clark was not actually born to an Ewok mother… Well, let’s just say it’s been a process of repeated public shaming. So much so that I am now someone who will very rarely volunteer an opinion, whether at work or a bar, out of the fear that doing so will give my grandfather yet another chance to deep-six with my social standing from beyond the grave.
There are however a few instances when my grandfather’s ramblings seem to have had a little method deep within the madness. I was reminded of one of these exceptions very recently when I saw Prime Minister Harper assert that the whole world wanted to be Canada on the evening news. ‘Fair play,’ I thought to myself, it seems a little juvenile but I guess Canada is wonderful enough to inspire envy in the imaginary musings of the global community. But the Prime Minister didn’t stop there. He went on to say exactly how we’ve earned this envy. Apparently the whole world wants to be Canada because we don’t have any of that awkward historical baggage most other Western countries have- that colonization thing. Just hearing these words split my mind down the middle. Left side chirped, ‘what about the people who used to live here?’ Right side thundered, ‘tell no one!’ Nothing to see here, just our Prime Minister stripping history down, scrubbing it to the bone with carbolic soap, and re-gifting it to the wider world in a ‘feel good’ package. It’s not the first time a leader has dolled up history and shoved it to the curb to turn political tricks, nor would it be the last. After all, it generally takes a mere mention of Canadian greatness to make our collective matter vibrate at a more feverish intensity.
Not this guy though. It just pulls me back into one of my grandfather’s more delirious sermons.
This one took place on a Saturday afternoon. I’m positive of this because I remember sitting on the living room rug watching Thundercats when I heard the opening volleys of my grandfather’s drunken assault on the front door. Once he managed to get the door open, he entered the room with carefully planned steps and turned off the television without a word. “Come keep your grandpappy company” he slurred, before giving himself to the gravity exerted by the liquor cabinet in the kitchen. Even at the tender age of seven, intoxication’s mysteries had already been revealed to me via the duplicitous nature of my grandfather’s alcoholism. Coming home from school was just as likely to encounter a doting old man who had magically been transported out of a Disneyland commercial as one who shouted cryptic obscenities at me before retching all over himself, all from the fortress of his favourite chair. Judging by his eyes, I could see that he was already pretty drunk. After he gave his ice the customary post-pour swirl, he beckoned me to come and take a seat with him at the kitchen table.
He cleared his throat before starting, “to teach you what a whore this country of ours is, I need to tell you a thing or two about history. Ahhh, that’s it!” He grinned, as if something just dawned on him. “I’ll teach you two things: history has a start and it has an end. And what’s more, Canada was sitting around in a fuckin meadow picking the petals off of flowers for both of them.”
Though it started out confusing and never ventured anywhere close to lucid, it’s a story that has survived in my mind. I have reproduced it best I can in the space below. I believe grandpa called it:
‘A Modern History of Canada: The Curse of Fistory’s Ghost’
First there was nothing, and by nothing I mean there were no white people. History had not yet been born. This was a dark age when Canada’s forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains- and all edible and non-edible creatures therein- existed in permanent stasis; stopped in time. The paused waters of the Fraser River teemed with sockeye salmon, some frozen mid-jump in a feat of permanent levitation. All across Canada, Native Canadians stood around in some kind of macabre exhibit displaying a way of life that would eventually be destroyed, smiling at loved ones, sewing blankets, staring into fires, looking up at the sky. Some edible creatures got shafted, like the beaver with its head permanently lodged between a wolf’s jaws. Others had better luck, like anything that stared back at eternity with an oh-face.
During this long period of stasis, Canada found herself totally super-bored. Nothing worthy of note was going on between her shores, and she was painfully aware of how the other countries were ignoring her in spite of her natural endowments. She was convinced that she could one day become the country that every other country wanted to be like, but whenever she got down to thinking about what to do she got totally bummed out. No matter how much she thought about it, she just couldn’t conquer her nightmarish algebra problem. Vast space, life, incomprehensible sounds, death, beavers- it was all just unconnected bullshit floating around in her head. How could she be expected to string it all together by herself?
Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long for something to happen. The Europeans arrived with a newborn history in tow (so newborn in fact that he was still shrivelled and disgusting). They swarmed into Canada’s interior, encountering natural curiosities on the way. They dutifully recorded them in their journals and letters. Some used charcoal to sketch trees gently swaying in the wind, others came across bear cubs while out for a piss and ended up dead. What’s important is that water flowed, clouds moved, and all of the edible creatures were finally released from eternity, to which an unlucky few were immediately re-acquainted.
This was all plum for the Europeans, but Canada’s spiritual malaise remained. She felt like she was just an indistinct crayon outline of a country, far from what was required to garner the envy of the rest of the world. For this, she decided, she would need a strong and virile ideology to build her kingdom upon- one that was man enough to let all of the Canadians know that being Canadian is a privilege and as such you should shut the fuck up during the national anthem when you’re at the Leafs game, even if you’re fuckin gilded enough to be able to afford platinum seats! At this point, my grandfather seemed to have struck a chord in himself with his story. He proceeds to digress into the typically stereotypical territory of how people didn’t used to be scared to love their country. He even touches down on a few of his uncomfortably sexist views on the nature of man and woman. When he finishes, he apologizes and says he needs to skip to ‘the good part,’ because he fears that he’ll be too ‘tired’ to finish it he doesn’t.
It was the 1960s and Canada had fallen hard for a strapping young ideology named the welfare state. The two of them got exactly what they needed from each other. The welfare state got a platform, and Canada got a point. They were outwardly passionate enough about each other to invoke jealousy from other countries, who in turn comforted themselves with the notion that fires this bright don’t burn forever. When they weren’t attending book fairs, student rallies, or open mic nights, they were lying in bed, playfully arguing the nature of art and existence. Canada had never been with someone so cerebral before, and she got swept up in all of his tastes and eccentricities, taking them on as her own. One of her favourite things about being with the welfare state was the poems that he would occasionally leave on her pillow. No matter how many times she read through his frantic scrawl, his sloppiness never ceased to amuse her. Her feelings for him were even strong enough to overlook his awful pacing and crappy metaphors.
Hand-in-hand they frolicked towards a better tomorrow, each getting from the other exactly what they needed. It seemed that Canada had found herself.
As their romance bloomed, it spritzed a minty-fresh mist of change over the masses. No longer did (most) people look down single mothers or guys with long hair. Indeed, the needle on the compassion barometer began its shift away from the left-most extremity of ‘smite from the earth’ towards the middle’s ‘tolerate with contempt.’ The welfare state proved a hit with Canadians because it allowed them to identify as such without the hassle of constantly fighting wars. All of a sudden, everyone had something binding them together, a theoretical bridge that led to total strangers. Now, if John T. Canada’s Oxycontin addiction were ever to fly off the rails and unexpectedly cast him in the role of blowjob junkie #2, he could feel confident that the welfare state would be there to pull him out of the muck. The drunken, student, and drunken-student masses were particularly enamoured with the welfare state’s sunny idealism and wanton disregard for practicality, traits which they found to be admirable in a concept. Mostly everyone looked up at Canada and the welfare state’s relationship with proud approval, and even though corporate efficiency collapsed and daytime intoxication boomed, for the first time ever Canadians knew exactly where they stood.
But of course, as is so often the case with romances between state and ideology, the grace period is terribly short. Cracks began to appear in the relationship’s foundation, all of which snaked their way back to the welfare state. His grand project of human elevation- from poverty, ignorance, and hatred- was failing before his eyes. The people of Canada had enough on their plate already without the pressure of having to build utopia. They were far more interested in getting a government job (so they could retire from working) or working an angle to claim baby bonuses for children that didn’t quite exist yet. Thus the welfare state’s dream was slowly hollowed out by cruel reality, sending him into the welcome arms of the spray paint can. It wasn’t long before he started taking out his inadequacies on Canada. At his cruellest he would say that she was half the woman America was, and in one of the daily poems that he still insisted on leaving her, he allegorically inferred that she’d never be a real country anyways.
You don’t get to the top without fucking a lot of people over along the way, and in this the welfare state was no different from any other concept. The corporate elite had watched in horror as Canada got involved with a loafer who was never going to amount to anything. All of their efforts to check the relationship’s advance failed. The pie charts- lovingly drafted, the slide shows- assembled and organized for maximum effect, the lobby groups- wined and dined. All of this was to no avail. Eventually they concluded that they would have to fight fire with fire. If Canada was ever to be swept back into their corner, they would need a handsome young ideology to get under her skin like the welfare state had. However, there was one huge problem with this plan: corporate culture lacked the sex appeal, the ‘sauce’ factor, needed to get Canada’s attention. Aesthetically it was all jowls and rosacea. Eventually the appearance problem was conquered, and the ‘Beast of Bay St.’ was loosed into the world on a singular mission to win Canada’s heart.
‘He’s got like, tons of dough. Enough to buy Canada anything she wants.’ rasped a chunky businessman, smoking a cigarette at the base of a Toronto skyscraper. ‘Yeah but what’s he look like?’ asked his friend. ‘Who knows,’ the fat one replied, ‘he’s an invisible hand or some shit.’
And like that the invisible hand was borne into our world. He was in many ways the complete opposite of the welfare state, substituting ruthless efficiency for romantic idealism. No amount of human tragedy could succeed in wiping the mask of indifference from his face, for he was black-red colorblind. His genius was pervasive and chilling, the type that can spin equations out of piles of corpses just as easily as calculating the opportunity cost of quitting your job at the sandwich shop. Of course, no one would ever deny that he was an absolute whiz with numbers.
The invisible hand went straight for the jugular with Canada and targeted her anxieties vis-à-vis the rest of the world. And though Canada was nothing if not loyal, the welfare state had been leaving some particularly debased poems as of late and she found herself receptive to the hand’s line of reasoning.
“Why help people if it keeps them from ever helping themselves? Are you not just kind of fucking them over in the long run?” “Makes sense, I guess” thought Canada. “If we get bogged down by corporate taxes and social welfare policies, how will we compete with other countries that forego these quixotic ideals?” “Sounds fair,” thought Canada, straining to remember what quixotic meant. “After all, if you can’t be better than all of the other countries, why not be richer?”
With that, the final wall crumbled to the ground and Canada let the invisible hand in.
The welfare state’s deadbeat ass was promptly kicked out and the people of Canada found themselves sprayed with the acrid mist of a new ordering principle. It didn’t take long for them to get into the new spirit of things. Janet Smith from Medicine Hat wrote her MP suggesting that a lot of money could be saved if the mentally ill were set free from their expensive permanent institutions and be allowed to establish their own societies in the forests of northern Ontario. In a bar in Saskatoon, Chad Jones proudly declared that the government should stop giving welfare cheques to immigrants, because they just come here to steal jobs and they weren’t real Canadians anyways- a remark that forced then-drinking buddy Eric Brown to rethink his relationship with Chad. ‘Well I think drug addicts should just be put in camps,’ typed Maude Sinclair into a CBC News online comment form, then-unaware that her opinion would not survive their moderation process. Indeed, Canadians everywhere were trying on their new conceptual master and one by one they discovered that the fit was nice and snug.
The welfare state watched these changes from the sidelines, a prisoner of the perpetual melancholy expected of such a hopeless romantic. He was reasonably sure that he was the only one for Canada, but far less sure on how to go about convincing her. After giving it a lot thought he eventually landed on the same epiphany that all ideologies do when they consider how to beat their competition: use violence. The conclusion didn’t really jive well with his romantic sensibilities, but he wrapped himself in the rationality that desperate times call for desperate measures. Ultimately, he came to the compromise of foregoing the more practical plan of shanking in favour of a good old fashioned duel.
The invisible hand promptly accepted the challenge and a few Saturdays later they found themselves standing in a field flanked by strip malls on every side. Bucking the supposed mood of such events, the weather was actually pretty stellar that day. The sun shined like a kid’s painting with exaggerated curving rays and a manic grin. In fact, that very same day in Detroit, a man had the distinct impression that the sun was smiling down on him. He looked up into its blaze and seared sunspots into his sight; sunspots that would eventually cost him a job later on when an interviewer thought he was winking suggestively at him. The sun hadn’t been smiling because, of course, the sun has no face. Coming home later, exhausted, the man from Detroit cursed everything that had led him to believe that extraordinary things were possible.
The weather was so beautiful that Canada missed much of the preliminary chest thumping and cock measuring as her attention was constantly harassed by an urge to pick flowers. Her suitor’ declarations floated by in truncated wisps, “rather die for Canada… than live for a 3-car garage,” and “didn’t fight in Korea to build a Socialist paradise in Canada.” And so on and so forth.
As the invisible hand and the welfare state ranted on, a man walked up and politely asked where he could pick up his tax rebate cheque. No sooner had he finished than three other people walked up and made similar queries. The trickle of polite individuals fast became a deluge of rubes, all of them totally pissed and wanting their tax rebate cheques ten minutes ago. Some clutched Wendy’s bags and sipped from comically large plastic cups, others sat in lawn furniture that they had the strange foresight to bring, a few of them were even nursing king cans in pursuit of some cheap suburban thrills. The mob wasn’t just people seeking tax rebate cheques. Random stragglers had also navigated into the throng, driven by a curiosity to see what the fuss was about.
After waiting for the opportune combination of size, confusion, and restlessness in the mob, the invisible hand finally turned to address the crowd. “Fellow Canadians, I know that you have come to pick up your tax rebate cheques, but today we are faced with something far more important.” A collective murmur rose from the mob as people looked at each other wondering what could possibly be more important than a tax rebate cheque. “The welfare state has hypnotized Canada with impossible ideas, intangibles that can never be achieved. His talk of utopia doesn’t come from the heart. No, he plays it like a card so he can take advantage of sweet young Canada, take advantage of each and every one of you.” Heads nodded in agreement, the invisible hand hit his stride, drinking up the mob’s attention and spitting it back out as venom. “The welfare state’s forked tongue and Canada’s regrettable female proclivity for romance have cost you all dearly. You have paid with your time, your sweat, and your hard-earned money. Do you even realize that all of the other countries are laughing at you people when your backs are turned? They think you’re a joke! So yes, this is far more important than one tax rebate cheque. It’s your son’s cheque, your daughter’s cheque! It’s your grandkid’s cheque as well!”
The welfare state listened to all this with detached indifference until a troubling thought occurred to him. Where had this mob come from? Did the invisible hand send out a mailer? What if the hand wasn’t interested in duelling at all and instead he was just going to rile up the mob and have them do the duelling for him? His musings were shattered by a ‘YEEEAAAAAHHH!!!!’ from somewhere in the crowd. He looked on in horror as one of the people in the front row began to foam at the mouth. He knew he was running out of time and that it was now or never if he was going to avoid letting the mob have their way with him. “Hey!” He yelled, “I’m sorry, but I thought this was Canada… Do we let both sides have a say?” Hundreds of eyes fell on him. “If your golden boy has no problem with spilling your blood to elevate his own star, then I guess I have no choice but to do the same.” The welfare state dropped the microphone, turned away from the crowd, and let out a thunderous, bird-like ‘KAWWWW’ that rang out across the land.
Silence descended. Everyone looked around in puzzled anticipation; who the hell could possibly answer the welfare state’s call? “Does he even have any friends?” a little boy asked his mother, but she was far too engrossed in assuming the worse of her husband who was currently on a business trip. She didn’t even register the question. The boy decided that the welfare state probably didn’t have any friends. Then he felt sorry for him, because he didn’t have any friends either. He knew what it was like.
It only took a few minutes for the mob to get their answer, when an elderly disabled gentleman wheeled himself out of the woods and took his place beside the welfare state. One by one, the welfare state’s counter-horde arrived, long on socioeconomic diversity, short on battle strength. The ranks were full of infirmity, crossed eyes, twitching, methadone shakes, and monologues both insane and thought-provoking. The welfare state assessed his troops and shook his head; they weren’t the army he chose but they would have to do. “My people,” he called out over the crowd of ragtags, “we are the Canada that does not appear in the brochure- the people who work hard and get no reward, the downtrodden, and the dispossessed. Follow me and we will win back her heart, for how could it be possible that the real Canada doesn’t carry the day?” He turned back to address the invisible hand, but as he did so he suddenly felt a sharp pain course up his side. He looked down and saw a fist, covered in blood, attached by hairy arm to a man who looked like Tarzan might after 30 years of living on the street. “Bahala Nabja,” said the jimjim in his cross-dimensional dialect. The welfare state fell to his knees and he knew that it was over.
The crowd had seen enough. Their primary goal, the rebate cheque, had turned out to be a ruse and their bonus goal, the lynching of the welfare state, had accomplished itself. Bile drained from the part of their bodies that demands blood and back into the part that produces permanent dissatisfaction. Wendy’s bags were discarded and watches were checked to see if there was still time to get home in time to catch Intervention. The welfare state watched as his ragtags sauntered back into the forest and upstanding Canadians filtering back into their SUVS. The weight of his own meaningless end felt like it was about to squish him like a grape.
“CANADAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” He shouted as dramatically as possible. All remaining eyes fell on him. “I’ve one more thing to say before I go,” he said, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth. What followed was the Curse of Fistory’s Ghost:
If we’re to worship the basest of human instincts, how can we ever be proud of ourselves, of Canada? Well here’s the catch: we can’t. So enjoy your money but make sure you lock your doors. As for where we came from and what we stand for? Better to get used to bullshit, to story-time feel good history. You’ll need to make do with fantasy, because the reality of it………it fuckin sucks.
Though the welfare state put on a brave face after finishing, he knew that he had terminally botched the delivery of what should have been his swan song. He had lost and now faced oblivion as the new Canada tried to make a splash in the global schoolyard of nations. As the edges of his vision began to creep inward, he allowed himself one final comfort: everything comes back in style eventually. If the poncho can do it, why can’t I?
My grandpa was almost sleep-talking by the time he finished, head lolling back and forth while he spit out the words maliciously, like his story telling was some type of cruel torture. After he fell asleep at the kitchen table, I returned to the living room to reconnect with my one true role model- the television set. Life went on and I paid his story very little heed.
Posted: August 4th, 2011 under satire writing - humor.