I really wanted to put an end to the idiocy in the comments sections and to remind fools like Benoit Dutrizac that he isn't the only one clever enough to make injurious remarks about somebody else's culture.
When we were kids, the classic insult of this sort was "YA MUDDER WEARS ARMY BOOTS!" which if I recall, was first enunciated by none other than 'Bugs Bunny.'
It sort of means 'Shaddup already.'
When readers in the Comments section complain that Canadian culture is a pale imitation of American culture, it's nothing more than a lame attempt to annoy, as is likewise when English readers do the same .....Your mother wears army boots!
At any rate, I'm surprised that nobody cottoned to my tongue in check reference to the 'PRICE IS RIGHT.'
For Pete's sake!!!!
If you are a regular fan of the 'The Price is Right" in French or in English you are not exactly a paragon of cultural superiority.
It's a piece of crap in any language and 'showcases' the very worst of us. All it proves is that people on each side of the language divide are equally greedy and stupid.
So I guess we are not so different from each other, language aside..
Did not one of you readers appreciate a belated April's Fool's Joke!!!!!
Monday's post was meant to prove that we can all make arguments that hurt when we are angry or in the mood to punish.
Lawyers do it every day, make a great argument to support a bad premise.
Calling someone's culture second rate or lame is like calling someone else's kids ugly.
WHY?
What good can come out of it?
Everybody loves their kids and it's the same for culture, everybody loves their own and if one culture is more sophisticated or complicated is it automatically better?
Who really is to say what is good or bad?
Here in North America, including the ROC, Quebec and America, we live in a fast food culture of crap. Greasy, fried, fatty, bad for your health CRAP!
I'm sure that no one among us will argue that our food culture is superior to anything offered elsewhere the world, even in poorer countries.
Yet we like our food and are used to it and wouldn't want to change it for a 'superior' food culture.
What would you say to someone from another country telling you that your food culture is crap?
You'd probably tell the insulter to take a hike.
Telling English Canada that it's culture is a pale American imitation or telling French Quebec that their culture compares to a second tier hockey league, makes as much sense.
You're not going to convince anyone and you'll just annoy people with such comments.
It is an argument not worth having. Really, think about it.
We seem to be living in a charged atmosphere where a few hotheads aided by the media are whipping up people into a linguistic frenzy, brainwashing the public into believing that the sky is falling in on the French language in Quebec when nothing can be farther from the truth.
And so as the inflammatory rhetoric against English rises, it is to be expected that the English defenders riposte.
But is all this emotional debate necessary. Is language such a big issue in Quebec?
I'm not talking about the media, which has a vested interest in pushing disharmony.
How many people are really involved in this movement to protect the French language in Quebec?
Are people really so worked up about language in their own personal lives?
Every time the language militants call for a massive demonstration to denounce this or that, concerning the French language, they barely get a turnout.
When they called for a massive display of indignation over the hiring of a unilingual English coach of the Canadiens, about 150 turned out to protest. This in a city of two million and this after tens of thousands of dollars of free publicity in television news coverage before the protest.
Consider the 25,000 to 50,000 students who protested last week over a tuition hike and one can easily come to the conclusion where the language issue actually stands in this province.
On a scale of one to ten, language as an issue must rate between zero and one.
Sure if you take a poll and ask Francophones if they are worried about language, they will invariably answer YES, but ask them to make some sort of a sacrifice to defend their language and culture and the answer is NO.
They won't even attend a demonstration.
It's clear that the entire French language movement is composed of a tiny group of serial complainers.
It's the same faces on TV, over and over again.
Gilles Proulx, Mario Beaulieu, Mathieu Bock-Côté and the Parti Quebecois.
As they say in French... Dats it, Dats all!
Let us consider the 'shocking rise' in complaints over at the OQLF where we are told that complaints are way up this year to over 3,500 from 2,400.
Most of this increase, by the way, stems from the fact that the OQLF issued false and erroneous public information that businesses in Quebec who have trademarked names, must use French descriptors.
There is no such stipulation in the law or in the rules.
At any rate, even with this increased number of complaints it boils down to not very many in a province of
The OQLF will not reveal the actual number of complainers or the percentage of complaints that are unfounded, but we can draw some inferences.
I reviewed a number of these complaints on a site run by Mouvement Québec français, which ran a contest whereby readers send in copies of their complaints. About one third of the complaints were completely unfounded and as for the famous Madame Rioux, she should actually check out the rules before complaining.
Here she complains about a Café Chill-Out, because there's too much English in the name, despite it including that famous descriptor!
We are letting ourselves get carried away.
All of this language hate is only about getting people to vote for sovereignty. A classic case of sleight of hand.
In the meantime it masks the real issues of a province on the road to financial ruin and remains a wonderful mask that keeps us from debating the pressing societal issues.
Readers, please don't get caught up.
Francophones and Anglophones get along just fine in Quebec, if only the radicals would leave us alone.
That they don't is sad, but we need to react as adults.
