Something the traitorous American Catholic bishops and the legions of bleeding-heart nuns should read, even if they miss ExCathedra's POV.
I lived for many years --and became a citizen of-- a bilingual country, Canada. What an incredible waste of time, energy, effort and money on the whole French/English game. Were it not for the fact that doing so would split the Maritime Provinces from the rest of the country, it would have been better for everyone to let Quebec go.
I have noticed a trend --anecdotal impressions only-- that when liberal Americans despair of the homeland, as during the Bush years, their impulse is to leave. I supposed part of that is the large number of Western places that are more decayed, uh, I mean liberalized, than we are: nearby Canada or EuroDisneyland. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend either to look for places within America where they can be more left alone --Wyoming or Idaho-- or they imagine the break up of the country so that people who are essentially in a cold civil war can part ways and leave each other in peace.
4 comments:
Reinhold Niebuhr legitimated immoral social constructions as illegal immigration in order to write off the American white and black underclass by negative wage pressure: moral man produces immoral society.
What does Ex Cathedra expect?
Well, I gotta go back to complaining about Christmas materialism in the vulgus.
Yours in dematerialization plus desublimation,
er
Re the addendum on Québec separatism: there would also be the tremendous problem of First Nations rejection of the separatism -- both the Indians living on lands within former New France and the Indians living on lands formerly the Hudson Bay Company, which was added on to the province of Québec by the Canadian federal state with royal approval.
Any reference to this problem by froancophone separatists that I ever saw insisted in thumotic indignation that all lands technically call'd "Québec" after the HBC add-on belong'd inseparably to any sovereign Québec. Sure the sovereign francophones would be willing to consult and dialoghue endlessly with any indigenous population groups within Québec, but there would be no plebiscite permitted on whether the groups plus their lands could opt to remain within the residual Canada.
That would have been a fine spectacle. ... The hydro Québec towers bringing electricity to new york and new england from dams (built oftentimes without First Nations approval -- compensation afterward) were and are vulnerable to destruction by sticks of dynamite. And native groups often use sticks of dynamite to fish with. So dynamite is plentiful. So huge areas of Québec might have had to be militarized by sovereign Québec.
Amour-propre, demographic panic, rage, etc don't bring out the finest qualities of any population group.
Francophones could have gotten tremendous revenge upon us (revenge that would have been good for us, I add) if they had gone in for Nietzsche (as France could have ruled Europe by taking up Niezsche when Germany elected to use Nietzsche for race hatred etc etc). (Similarly: de Gaulle rejected American hegemony, in order to build an American France -- American minus the strong elements of America such as saying No to bureaucratic determinations of existential meaning.)
But instead they used for an incoherent secession movement their residual aspiration for sovereignty or reversing the indignity of France preferring to give New France to England at the bargaining table in exchange for a spice island or two in the Caribbean.
Why incoherent? The basic thumotic meaning was a slave revolt against capitalist imperialist forces. A basic rallying text was entitled "White Niggers of North America," as if not only working-class francophones but all francophones were disenfranchised downtrodden destitute strugglers, destitute etc.
To the extent that the separation leaders were Castroists, they would have screw'd over the middle-class francophones and the rich francophones. (Perhaps it is sociologically to describe the apparently dominant anglophone Gentiles and Jews in Québec as functionaries for the real, francophone authorities in Québec, and not vice versa.)
Sure, they would have been willing to throw out the anglophones at any economic cost. But were all the rich and middle-class francophones willing to endure Castroization for the sake of the amour-propre of francophone intellectuals?
Or the Castroization migth have been shelved (as perhaps one could see when Rene Levesque went to Wall Street or someplace to assure international capitalism that a sovereign Quebec wasn't going to be a Cuba of the north). But this scenario meant a sort-of mild Animal Farm political project: the downtrodden francophones are going to throw all their political aspiration into putting fellow francophones in position as lords. Certainly such pseudo-revolutions are possible (e.g, Algeria), but perhaps working-class francophones would resent giving honour to bourgeois francophones who pretended to be revolutionaries.
The Castroist path or the mild Animal Farm path would both ensure that Québec would lose its spirit. Ferdinand Céline was right to expect zilch from Gaullist-American France. And zilch has come from Castro's Cuba. ... Before the quasi-political rallying got going in Québec, the francophones discarded their Jansenist Christianity (the quiet revolution). Getting rid of an inherited theism is culturally spiritually risky. One must be ready to do something different, for instance, I guess, a Freudian cultural project that has a medical therapeutic vision of the unconscious. One of the Québec separatism leaders was a psychoanalyst, I recall. But the result of this can be mere agitprop anti-semitism.
... I marvel that even today young Québecois of the educated class will take seriously the routine politicians of separatism or sovereigntism. I am ready to grant that Québec's politicians are of a somewhat higher calibre mentally or something than English-speaking Canada's. (I don't know ultimately if that's true, but I'm willing to grant this. I don't wish to put any Historical validation in our politicians.) But young or formerly young separatists in Québec will take their politicians or — their politicians' concerns or something — seriously in a way that would make sense only if they were much greater than deGaulle.
Canada had great politicians — francophone and anglophone — in the confederation era. But in the usual Victorian way. Which requires complementation by theistic and post-theistic figures of a great culture, which New France had in its continuous Jansenist Christianity.
The proper response to an era of destitution is a culture or poetics or whatnot that says destitution is destitution — you know, Hoelderlin and all that. It would have been a very good thing for us anglohpones if young postWW2 francophones said this and look'd to poets who said this, and obviously assumed as a matter of course that anglophones in Canada were absurd, mindless nihilists (post-Christian and post-Judaistic but pump'd for the cultural greatness of multicultural diversity as promulgated in skoos and by the CBC and so on). But they seem'd to 'buy' somewhat of the quasi-marxist critique of capitalism or-and imperialism or-and whatever, project this entirely onto anglophones (shadow doppelgänger), and then compose a programme for their own version of American pop culture.
Decades ago -- before I knew anything of gelassenheit -- I used to think it would have been a fine thing had even anglophone Canada made absolutely no resistance to American pop culture. We would have miss'd out on this or that good CBC TV show (not that I care, but I'm willing to grant that "Seeing Things" is better than "Three's Company"), but the greater reward would have been that the direly important, tremendously reverence-worthy bogus CanLit multi-cultural etc flimflam would not oppress us. I would not have had to endure conversations with friends and family members who assume that I too revere CBC programming and agree that it is the only thing that stands between us and spiritual destitution.
'Wherefore CBC in a time of dearth? In order to give us meaningfulness in our lives, in contrast to the meaninglessness of the USA.' ... I gather that what english-speaking Canadians of my class say of the CBC vs Americanisation-destitution the Québecois of my class say vs anglosaxon-destitution. And Americans of my class say the same thing of PBS and NEH etc vs destitution by generic American culture.
But the basic objection isn't to entertainment for the vulgus -- at which America's pop culture institutions generally excel ours. The real objection is to the supposed higher culture and-or real pop culture (folk music etc). Canadians would say to Hoelderlin, "What destitution? what time of dearth? I just heard a great interview on CBC radio!" And Americans suppose that the NYT book reviews or whatnot leave Americans sitting pretty in culture. ... With more funding for the arts, Hoelderlin would have gladly changed his tune, eh?
But it would be better for the spirit if youngsters experienced only manifest nuffin. Elders would say, "Canadians [or Québecois] used to believe in God, but we decided to agree with researchers in science who said that randomness causes everything in the universe, and we got rid of Christian culture, and figured that American culture from Hollywood would be more fun than any we could fabricate in Canada. If you feel that this isn't enough, maybe you should read a book."
Instead, the youngster is immersed in heavy moralistic flimflam. You know. You "lived" in Toronto. You endured the sermons and the alleged meaningfulness of our Christianity-replacing cultural institutions.
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