Whitewashing Genocide: Truth, Lies, and Joseph Boyden
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 12: The First Nations Fraud
By Josh Lieblein
As we saw last week, a small minority of authors dominate the Canadian literature scene, and a tightly connected network of elitist culture-crats keep them in power. But what happens when these operators can’t get out of their own way? What happens when they fail to do their due diligence? They end up getting hosed – and since they hold almost all the power, Canadians as a whole end up getting hosed when they do.
One of the things that upper-crust Canadians don’t like to talk about at dinner parties when they’re showing off for their American friends is the country’s sorry history when it comes to its First Nations. You can craft a narrative that obscures the flaws of the Canadian health care system, but you can’t whitewash what was effectively a genocide. That didn’t stop them from trying, however, and they tried by promoting Joseph Boyden as THE voice of Canada’s First Nations.
Margaret Atwood’s Reign Of Terror
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 11: Literary Tyranny and The Handmaid’s Tale
By Josh Lieblein
SIGH… Margaret Atwood, everybody.
If you’ve heard of her, you probably know her as the creator of The Handmaid’s Tale… aaaaand you might be feeling the urge to click on something else after reading that. Well, lucky for you, because Atwood is inescapable in Canada. She is THE living Canadian author. Pick up a Canadian high school English class reading list and she’ll be on it. Read a Canadian newspaper and she’ll be featured at least once a month- look, she patented a machine that allows her to sign books remotely! Who cares if the thing didn’t actually work- the point is that more people can have an audience with Margaret Atwood!
The Marriage of The Mundane and the Fantastic
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 10: Southern Ontario Gothic
By Josh Lieblein
We have gone from city to country, and from silly to serious, but there is one place we haven’t looked, and it is within, and below, into the unconscious. Today we venture into “Southern Ontario Gothic,” that sub-genre of Canadian culture that hints at the mystical and the magical.
Let us begin by introducing two of the form’s most accomplished practitioners: Robertson Davies, the Canadian Faulkner, and Timothy Findley, who is perhaps the Canadian Edgar Allan Poe. Though Findley invented the term “Southern Ontario Gothic,” it was Davies who turned the region into a self-contained world like that of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, while Findley would write from the perspectives of Noah and his sons before the Flood, or Carl Gustav Jung on the eve of World War I.
Mordecai Richler, Montreal, And Gritty Realism
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 9: Avoiding the Serious
By Josh Lieblein
I have hinted at it before, but I have not said it in so many words until now: Canadian culture is characterized by a deliberate attempt to avoid dark and serious topics.
You might think it is mere coincidence that Stephen Leacock’s lighter fare made him the Canadian culture maker, or that Montgomery excised the harrowing circumstances of her life from her work. But when we come to Mordecai Richler (1931-2001) – a man who pulled no punches when depicting the rougher side of Canadian life – and we see that he is less remembered for his darkly funny and poignant novels, or his incendiary journalism, but a series of children’s books that he wrote to entertain his family, it becomes harder to chalk that up to mere happenstance.
If Leacock is Canada’s Twain, Richler is Canada’s Phillip Roth. Aggressive and mercurial Jewish protagonists with mommy issues and attendant intimacy issues populate the interconnected worlds of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then And Now, and Solomon Gursky Was Here.
Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Treacherous Alpine Path
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 8: The Traumatized Artist
By Josh Lieblein
After the sometimes unbearable lightness of Stephen Leacock and his Sunshine Sketches, it is time once again to return to the darkness. We’ll ease into it this time, however, with a quick study of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the creator of , a trailblazing Canadian writer, and a far more interesting personality.
Montgomery’s young heroines are precocious, sharp-tongued, deeply sensitive, not conventionally attractive, prone to tragically losing relatives and friends, and carry within them dreams of literary superstardom and an unbreakable core of innocence. The red-headed, pigtailed Anne is the best-known, and someone needs to do a compare and contrast between her and Little Orphan Annie of comic strip fame. But Emily of New Moon and her quest to develop her literary skills – her climb up the “Alpine Path“- will touch a chord with anyone who’s gone through the cycle of having to put their written work back together after having it pulled apart by an editor.
The Long Shadow Of Stephen Leacock
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 8: Mark Twain of the North?
By Josh Lieblein
Stephen Butler Leacock usually gets the credit for being the Canadian culture-maker. Whether he deserves all the credit is a matter for the next two entries in our series, but he is definitely an excellent place to start.
First, however, a few key details about the man and his life are in order. Because Leacock is often compared to Mark Twain, some assume he was a self-made man from humble origins like Twain. He was decidedly not. For one thing, he was born into old English money and he wasn’t even born in Canada. He attended Upper Canada College, which was and still is the premier prep school for Canada’s first families. He spent time teaching and learning at the University of Toronto and McGill University, the two most prestigious universities in English Canada, and studied under socialist academic Thorstein Veblen at the University of Chicago. He was a lifelong Canadian Tory, advocating for the monarchy, for tradition, and for the presence of whatever passed for religion in public life.
How To Build A Successful Canadian Musical Act
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 7: Who I believe to be the quintessential Canadian band
By Josh Lieblein
Have you ever watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video and wondered just what the earthly hell is going on?
How did this morose, strangely-dressed, monotone-voiced, wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-
The Garrison Mentality: More Than Meets The Eye
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 6: Animation
By Josh Lieblein
The consequence free hipster odyssey of Scott Pilgrim and the gritty, blood-soaked path trod by Wolverine do not contradict one another – they are one and the same. This contradiction plays itself out in a concept called “the garrison mentality“- broadly, the idea that Canadians invent or seek out their own personal wars despite living in relative peace. But rather than explicate this confusing concept through politics or history, I will do it using two children’s cartoons with Canadian roots.
One, “Transformers: Beast Wars,” is likely well known to you. Everybody knows the robots in disguise thanks to Michael Bay’s explosion-soaked series of films. (Hilariously, and proving my point in a way, “Beast Wars” was deemed to be too violent a title for Canadians, so the show was known in Canada as ‘Beasties.'”) The other, “ReBoot,” is acclaimed in animation circles but enjoys much less popular fandom. Both were created by Vancouver-based Mainframe Entertainment.
Visually, these two series have not aged well. Being early-to-mid 1990s CGI, the uncanny valley runs deep through them. But the writing, voice acting and character development remain top-notch and surprisingly deep. And, for the purposes of our discussion, the ancient animation actually helps convey the sense of unease and low-level threat central to the garrison mentality.
Inside Quebec’s – and Canada’s – Replicant Culture
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 5: Dystopian Science Fiction
By Josh Lieblein
The doomed antiheroes Spawn (created by a Canadian) and Wolverine (who is Canadian) show that to separate from Canada carries with it a grave penalty, even the loss of one’s soul to Hell itself. And yet there is a region of Canada that has nevertheless flirted, dangerously closely, with separatism. I speak of course of La Belle Province – Quebec.
As this is a series on Canadian culture, I will not delve too deeply into Quebec’s history or politics. Any discussion of Quebec culture, however, must reference the year 1759 and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, just outside modern-day Quebec City, where British forces established themselves as the sole power in what was then Canada.
An obscure and quite short battle in the much larger Seven Years War, this event created the pretext for French-speaking Canadians to view themselves as a conquered and colonized people. To this day, Quebecois display “Je Me Souviens” (I remember) on the license plates of their cars, and antipathy towards the English royal family is common throughout the province while the Queen remains (mostly) beloved everywhere else. This is the result of the Quiet Revolution, a cultural and religious shift two hundred years after the French defeat at the hands of the British. The Catholic Church may have lost most of its power, but a giant cross still stands atop Mount Royal and adorns the Quebec National Assembly, the provincial seat of power, and Quebecers curse each other with religious epithets (Tabarnak! Va a diable! Crisse!).
Banished From The Promised Land: A Tale of Two Canadian Anti-Heroes
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 4: Wolverine Vs Spawn
By Josh Lieblein
The road from Scott Pilgrim’s Toronto, to Wayne and Tanis’ Letterkenny, and out to the farthest reaches of Essex County has turned into a Heart of Darkness journey… of sorts. This is still Canada, remember? There was, at long last, some heroism, but nothing yet that could credibly be called evil. For that, we’ll have to go abroad, and back in time a few decades, to the grim-darkest depths of the 1990s.
You know this place: everything is XTREEEEEEEME!!!! and everyone thinks in Frank Miller internal monologue balloons, wears eye-bleeding colours and more ammo pouches than ever could be considered practical, talks like a surfer, and enjoys stable employment as a vigilante contract killer. How would morally squishy Canadians hold up in this kind of environment? Pretty well, it turns out, because you probably know Wolverine, one of this era’s grittiest exemplars, and you’re probably familiar with the work of Todd McFarlane, who drew some of those badass anti-heroes.
McFarlane is Canadian, but his character Al Simmons/Spawn is an American: Wolverine is a Canadian character created by Americans Roy Thomas and Len Wein. I chose these two as a study in contrasts, but also to highlight what happens when the Canadian creator, or creation, gets sick of the aggressively dull homeland and thrusts himself into a hostile world.
