The Great Myths of Canada |
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Everyone Loves Canada
On the surface we New Englanders are almost indistinguishable from our cousins
next door. I have been asked -- Are you Canadian? -- by Canadians themselves on
both coasts. While studying in Great Britain during the Viet Nam era, I quickly
discovered it was easier to introduce myself as Canadian, than to endure the angry
comments of citizens from the UK. Three decades later, a friend touring Europe
during the Iraq War sewed a maple leaf flag on his backpack for the same reason.
Nobody hates Canadians.
"Nobody in the world hates them," says a friend of mine who attended graduate
school at McGill in Montreal, "because nobody fears them. But nobody listens to
them either, because they can't make up their minds."
It's an odd thing to describe an entire nation, as many have described Canada,
as orderly and tolerant to the point of dullness. Canada is the only country in
the world that has a police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for a national
symbol. It was the Mounties, legend says, who protected the northern Indian tribes
from rowdy, unscrupulous Americans during the Gold Rush. Mounties were so incorruptible
and so full of British justice that the bad guys ran away rather than confront
them. These cool, determined, square-jawed super heroes in red jackets remain
so squeaky clean after more than a century, that the Disney Corporation owns the
license to market their image.
But according to Canadian historian Daniel Francis, the myth of the RCMP owes
as much to Hollywood as to fact. Many of the best Mountie adventure tales came
from ex-Mounties and were fictionalized by moviemakers early in the Twentieth
Century. In fact, Francis says, Mounties sometimes arrived too late and too short-handed
to save the day. In the 1930s, during a national Canadian "red scare" similar
to the American McCarthy Era, Mounties operated much like a secret police force
-- routing out Bolshevik sympathizers and acting as judge and jury too.
Daniel Francis details six more fundamental legends in his book National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History. Many consider the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, for example, the
first truly Canadian achievement that unified a huge nation. Yet the work was
done, Francis points out, largely by Chinese workers backed by British investors
on Indian lands. The myth that Canadians are all rugged folk of the far North
who share a deep bond with their vast wilderness is apparently no more true than
the modern myth that all Native Americans are supernaturally spiritual beings
with a inborn wisdom about the workings of Nature.
Myths are not necessarily bad things, Francis theorizes, and not the same as
lies. Good myths can bind together diverse types of people spread out over great
expanses of land. Myths can build nations. But myths are different from history,
and it can be dangerous to confuse the two, especially since human memory for
detail fades so easily.
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