A Canadian moment

I'm in a pretty substantial queue the other day at Popeye's at Bloor and Yonge. And it's ridiculous, because everyone else is Chinese. Like, hardcore fresh-off-the-boat-that-just-sailed-down-from-Richmond-Hill Chinese. And you know how they love their PFK.

And so there's this one older lady who really can't understand why it's cheaper to buy a three-piece meal when she only wants two pieces. And she's trying to make herself understood by the service staff. And all nasty latent xenophobia aside, she's really not doing this particularly well. And this is not being helped by the fact that the staff is all brown. Like, the really brown type of brown, that get looked at funny when they commit the crime of taking a plane trip. And they don't speak the English any better than our Chinese lady friend. And so dear Yasmina, or Yeasmina, or whatever, is trying to explain that, no, she really she should buy the three pieces. And the Chinese lady is attempting to convey that no, her love of the fried chicken doesn't extend to three pieces. And we're really getting nowhere, and the line full of Chinese people and Tom is completely stalled.

And so my eyes are wandering, and I can't help but notice that prominently displayed, in the name of Allah the Most Merciful, is a certificate stating that all the chicken served in this Popeye's is Halal. And that this has been established because Islamic scholars inspected the chicken farm in nulle-part-de-fuck-butt, Quebec. Where, it would seem, the slaughter of chickens in conducted fully in accordance with Islamic law. And, one hopes, French language law, too.

And so with this issue eventually resolved, I'm upstairs eating my Halal fried chicken. And three Asian teenage girls make a point of taking turns posing, Japanese-tourist-style, for pictures. These would be pictures of them standing in the middle of the eating area. In Popeye's. At Yonge and Bloor.

And it's at this moment I realize that all this has been going on in a Cajun-themed restaurant, that's supposedly recreating the cuisine of the black folks in a colonial French-influenced area.

And that somewhere up there in the sky, Pierre Trudeau is pissing himself with joy.

Home and native land

The main finding of this study made me angry, and if I was in a mood to be more intellectually rigorous, I think I'd turn this blog post into an rational yet seethingly-passionate diatribe about how zero-sum conceptions of state loyalty can exist only in puny minds. I might throw in a sidebar about how the whole to-do over the Lebanese evacuations was barely-veiled racism, and perhaps make note of how that whole weird France-hating complex of the American conservative movement probably translated over to some pimply kids in the Conservative Party war room, which resulted in those Dion-bashing dual-citizenship ads.

But not today. Instead I'll seize on the below quote:

What Griffiths did find disturbing was that around 30 per cent of Canadians say part of what makes Canada successful is the lack of a strong national identity.

Dear Mr. Griffiths,

I understand the view you and your like-minded commenters get of the world is necessarily a little obstructed. After all, its hard to take in the broader sweep of human narrative when you're busy licking maple syrup off of Jack Granatstein and Desmond Morton's erect nipples. Perhaps you'll note that nations are delightful little post-feudal constructions that usually involve some sort of embarassing national dance, an indigenous flatbread of some nature, and some endearing ritual involving children and holidays best captured in oil paintings.

Nations can be fun things. All told, I'm rather happy with the one I was born with: highlights for my tribe are conspicuous consumption of alcohol and proud literary tradition, which I suppose makes up for also getting black pudding and a rather naff mythology involving people turning into swans and pots of gold. But if, as is the fate of all humans someday, I'd been born as an ethnic mutt and grown up in a cosmopolitan environment in which I had no predominant tribal group to assimilate into, I'd be fine, too. Inheriting a particular national identity is a bit like being able to roll your tongue: every so often, it's fun to hold it over your friends who can't do it, but really it means fuck all.

Nations can also make people do stupid, stupid things. I'll avoid any Hitler examples, but how about we look at, oh, pretty much every action that occurred in the Balkans from 1991 to, well, now. Remember, in order for there to be a concept of genocide, there must be a concept of genos.

Nation-forming is a lengthy, messy, and often a sort of pointless process. Colonial peoples can and do coalesce into nations: Americans and Afrikaaners come immediately to mind, and yeah, I'd include the francophone canadiens and Acadians in the two centuries in which they were cut off from their original French nation, first by limited transportation links and second by political occupation. Were any of these peoples better off because over a great deal of time, they bred exclusively with one another, developed unique cuisines and art forms, and started to think of themselves as nations? Hell if I know.

But I do know that no number of last spikes, no number of Vimy Ridges, no number of Labatt Beer commercials will change the fact that Canada doesn't count. Canada isn't, like most other states, home to a reasonably-homogenous tribe that sees assimilation into the tribe as a proper precondition to Canadian-ness. And creepy books from Mark Steyn notwithstanding, we're doing quite okay for ourselves.

Canada's continued existence as a (reasonably) prosperous, happy, bilingual, socially-integrated state, home to as robust a society as found anywhere else, puts to a lie the stance that you and your crazy gang of timbit-counters that Canada isn't a "real" country unless it has a "real" national identity. Sorry, guys. Just because the Serbs do it, doesn't mean we should. And, again with the history, this sort of post-nationalism isn't actually anything all that radical: we're just proving the point made by Athens and Sparta and the Holy Roman Empire: the nation-state is just one particular way of doing things. Frankly, I think it's a way of doing things whose time has come and gone.

So this Canada Day, you'll forgive me for not raising my glass to the mighty nation, or marching in some parade commemorating some medieval battle or apocryphal saint while beating on a uniquely-national drum. I'm going to celebrate the fact that through assorted accidents of birth and circumstance myself and my fellow Canadians have been brought together on a patch of dirt and we've done a pretty good job at getting along with one another.

As for the 30% that agree with me? Soon there'll be more of us. Deal with it.

From crust to crust to crust

Thought-du-jour: Who the hell decided what was on a "Canadian" pizza? Did I miss a parliamentary motion, or a CBC phone-in vote special? And what the hell is so inherently Canadian about them? Did Sir John A. always order them in when he and George-Étienne got really baked on the evenings after Confederation negotiations? Do they present an inherently mosaic-like flavour cross-section in contrast to the muddled flavours of an American pizza pie?

As best I can tell, there are three sub-schools of Canadian pizza: one which is just pepperoni and mushrooms, the second which throws bacon into the mix, and the third which adds the bacon but withholds the pepperoni. I could be wrong. I mean, the genesis of this blog post came from staring at a freezer case full of Pizza Pops in the supermarket, and lord knows comparatively few great thoughts have been birthed there across the sweep of human history.

Pepperoni? Particularly Canadian? Uh, sure, whatever you say.

Mushrooms? Vile, inedible little lumps of oversized mould? Certainly. Contaminants of any fine self-respecting pizza? Absolutely. But Canadian? Again, not really. Maybe there could be special Canadian consideration for the funny-looking ones that grow in rainy forests in coastal BC that seem to make people act all weird. But I get the sense Pizza Pizza would at the very least consider those a deluxe topping.

And Bacon? Getting into more interesting ground here. Certainly, Americans tend to enjoy docking the word "Canadian" to "Bacon." Canadians who might feel inclined to place chest-thumping patriotism ahead of common sense would probably agree with them, and claim bacon (be it peameal-dusted back bacon slices, or, any kind of back bacon slice, or the concept of bacon in general, or hell, the pig) to be part of this bizarre pantheon of "damn-right-its-Canadian" iconography that honestly isn't.

So many things cited by Americans as quirky Canadian exceptionalisms, ironically, enough, just reflect quirky American exceptionalisms. Non-exaustive list follows:

• Vinegar on fries? Totally not a Canadian thing, but instead just a non-American thing. Go to a chipshop in Britain, and shockgasp, vinegar is considered a typical french fry topping. Go to a chipshop in Singapore, and here's betting that the same will hold true. (Now, as Douglas Coupland points out in Souvenir of Canada, the classic four-sided clear-glass vinegar cruet on restaurant tables is distinctly Canadian, but let's not get carried away with blown-glass tableware defining our national character, shall we?)
• Smarties? Yeah, they don't have them in the States. Doesn't change the fact they're originally from Rowntree's in Britain and can be quite readily found at any supermarket checkout in Europe
• Esso? Again, we're kinda on the side of the world on that one. They're the weird-ass freaks with Exxon. Has to do with Standard Oil and their antitrust settlement back in the day, I think.
  
• Zed? Likewise. No more Canadian than the spelling "colour."

So taking us back to bacon for a second, we have another case where they're the somewhat wacky ones, what with the endless "Canadian bacon is ham" references. To the rest of the English-speaking world, bacon is a wide family of pork cuts, of which one are fat-streaked strips or rashers cut from the belly of a pig, and others are slabs, cubes and so on from sides and backs and all sorts of exciting parts of a pig you mightn't want to be reminded are edible. Americans are weird in that they limit the definition to the aforementioned belly bits, what the Brits call "streaky bacon." Because we Commonwealth-inclined Canucks have the gall to refer to other types of bacon as bacon, too, someone decided somewhere along the line that bacon cut from one of those odd places them Canadian fellers think bacon comes from should be identified specifically as "Canadian bacon." And the rest is history.

There's a sort of perverse cultural ignorance and insular look-ma-they-said-Canada-on-the-tee-vee vibe to going along with the idea that something with back bacon on it is inherently Canadian. Pigs in Canada don't have particularly remarkable backs, as far as I can tell. We don't even eat all that much of the stuff: its far more common as part of a fried breakfast on the other side of the pond, while over here we're more likely to go for the greasy stuff off the belly

And yet, that's my working hypothesis as to how the heck a Canadian pizza became a Canadian pizza. Never minding the fact that some Canadian pizzas don't even have the damn stuff on it. That's just fucked.

So there you have it. Canadian pizzas suck, because they potentially advance innaccurate Americentric notions of cultural normalcy, and because they have mushrooms on them. I wish we had something better. Maybe involving strips of harp seal and cheese made from muskox milk.