nationalism

Notes from North of 49ºN

Charles McGrath in the NY Times wrote a curious and annoying piece on Canada’s quest for gold in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver {HT: LinnyQat}. I thought his characterization of Canada to be a collection of what I call “university-educated” stereotypes complete with quotes of Canadians, such as Margaret Atwood, that make the country sound like a nation of self-loating and self-deprecating sots. It’s articles like this that remind me that the New York Times often is a purveyor of moderately well-written naval gazing with all the right references to make it seem legit.

I’ve written blogs on Canada’s postcolonial experience, as well as how a trajectory of regionalism may be at play. Reading McGrath made me think about my own blogs. He thinks he’s stumbled on a new Canadian consciousness that cares about Olympic medals that’s out of place in the zeitgeist of the nation::

“They want to rewire the national mind-set and come away with not just a couple of golds but the most medals over all. They have dedicated roughly $118 million to enhancing the performance of Canadian athletes, and have financed something called the Top Secret project, in which teams of scientists have been studying the various winter sports in hope of gaining a technological edge.

The organization in charge of improving Canada’s medal performance has the un-Canadian-sounding name Own the Podium, and its chief executive, Roger Jackson, said: “We’ve never been pressured before to perform to a stated goal. Thirty medals or more is what we’re hoping for this time. I think we can get those.”

Talk like this, so nakedly ambitious, makes some Canadians uneasy. Theirs is a vast country that in many ways is run like a small town, with small-town values, and it has a highly developed culture of modesty, if not a collective inferiority complex. The athletic record in general is a little underwhelming, and some Canadians think that is because their countrymen prefer that, considering a good effort just as valuable as a trunkload of trophies, maybe better.”

McGrath is sounding like an American version of Andrew Cohen in The Unfinished Canadian. While I’ve argued that Canadian identity may be “fuzzy,” that has more to do with its sheer size, distinct regions, and relatively small population. Never underestimate the power of sports to galvanize a sense of identity, as evident in the recent film Invictus::

What McGrath fails to parse is the effects of capitalism and of culture. Hockey galvanizes Canada, solidifying an identity that may be fuzzy. It’s not that Canadians are OK with losing, as McGrath implies, it’s question of economics.  It looks like Canada is willing to invest in its teams and I’ll bet a box of Timbits that if Canada wins medals, there won’t be a collective national sheepishness over the feat. Canadians don’t fear winning, it’s just that Canadian capitalism, to date, hasn’t fostered it. It looks like that’s changing.

The Canadian embracing of funding the medal count may not be without controversy. The Olympics have their detractors because of the astronomical costs involved. So, Canadians may like winning, there may not be a collective willingness to finance it at stratospheric levels.

Some may argue that if Canadians are so into hockey, why did they let the sport become Americanized and lose the Winnipeg Jets and Québec Nordiques in the process? It’s all about capitalism. I’ve blogged about the NHL on Rhizomicon and while the NHL has tried to expand heavily in the US to vie for the sports entertainment dollar, it’s the Canadian fans that are making the Canadian teams the top revenue generators.

Unfortunately, given scarcity of resources, the Canadian biatheletes are out in the cold, i.e., no corporate sponsorships. So, I’ll give them a shout out::

While Zina Kocher is a World Cup bronze medalist from the 2006-7 season, the funding just isn’t there for the biathlon.

Here’s a response to the NY Times pirce from the Toronto Star, which is pretty funny::

“We started talking about what we’re hoping for at the Olympics.

Ned said he hoped Canada would win so many fourths that they’d have to make a special new medal. Maybe a nickel medal. With a beaver on it. But not a cocky-looking beaver. Just a plain work-a-day beaver. We could hand them out after all the foreigners leave – so that no one feels left out.

I said I hoped we might sweep the fourths and fifths. And the odd sixth. But Ned shook his head at me, and I felt awful for a few minutes. And then ashamed of feeling awful.

But it was exciting to talk this way. Maybe the most exciting thing we’ve talked about since they (whimper) let Wayne drift away into that heaven-on-Earth they call California.”

Twitterversion::  NYTimes #fail confuses Canadian culture with capitalism re: Olympic medal push. Hilarious response in #Toronto Star. @Prof_K

Song:: The Besnard Lakes {Montréal, QC} -“Albatross”

I’m currently reading through George Packer’s wonderful two volume edited collection of George Orwell essays (“Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays” and “All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays”). With all due respect to the erudite defaming of George Orwell in the pages of NYRB, I love the guy. I love his lucid writing. I love his courage in criticizing what he sees as wrong. I love his methodology of putting himself in the middle of things. I love his sentimentality about hearths and his homeland. Earlier this week, I read his well-known, WWII-era essay, “England Your England,” and regard it as among his very best. I believe so much of it speaks to our current state of affairs that I’d like bring some of its key points up to date. Rather than writing a full essay (which would inevitably pale in comparison), I’d like to do a little series pulling out some points of interest. This will be the first.

Orwell begins with the claim that culture differences between nations are big and meaningful: “Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country … Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England.”

This sort of claim remains controversial today. Browning’s Ordinary Men argued that the Holocaust wasn’t based on intrinsic characteristics of the German people, while Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners countered with just the opposite claim. Today, we often hear much about the immutable cultural differences between Americans and Europeans (“Americans live to work, European work to live”). Advocates of a single payer system of health care have repeatedly been told that such a system would never be accepted in the United States. Tom Friedman wrote just this Sunday about how a $1 gas tax should be, but is not up for debate in the U.S. (despite sky-high gas taxes in European countries). The mandatory religious rhetoric in any American political speech (e.g., “God Bless America”) would be the cause of scandal in Europe.

While such limitations on political speech and manner of living are profound burdens, Orwell also claims that being a member of a national culture is, ultimately, meaningful to each of us. “And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time … Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.”

Though we might threaten to leave (if Bush is elected in 2004) and though the vile racism and hatred and ugly nationalism at town halls and “tea party” events might disgust us, America will always feel like a home to those of us who were raised here. We breathe easier in the air we’re accustomed to. Talking loudly while eating a slice of pizza and walking down a city block, the choice of sixteen varieties of mustard in the grocery store, and the simple pleasure of a gas-guzzling muscle car and an open road are, for better or for worse, things that feel like home.

“Yes,” says Orwell, “there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own.”

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the continuing legacy of the rice paddy for Asian cultures, the “culture of honor” in the American South, and the significance of hierarchy in Korean society. To be sure, our nations and our cultures constrain our behavior and even our ways of thinking. But perhaps perversely, the very culture that limits us also comforts us.

The conservative French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has expressed concern that the burqa is subjugating women in France.  Addressing both parliamentary houses in the Palace of Versailles::

“The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience…It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”

The BBC clarified the different types of Islamic headscarves {below}.  Sarkozy emphasized that this isn’t about disrespecting Islam and a group of cross-party French legislators are interested in examining whether women wearing the burqa is undermining French secularism and also whether womem wearing the veil are doing so voluntarily.

The French government banned the Islamic headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols in 2004 although within the government, there is no consensus on the issue.  In the US, somehow I think that no matter how hard the polygamy and abuse angles are pushed, there won’t be any bans on FLDS garb.

Last year, the Urban Affairs minister, Fadela Amara, born in France to Algerian parents, has been a harsh critic of the burqa.  A feminist who has fought racism for decades, Amara grew up in one of the rough banlieues of Paris, knowing the often ugly intersections of race, culture, and gender.  After a 2008 court case case denying a Moroccan woman citizenship was upheld, Amara said she supported the ruling, in the hopes that it would  dissuade fanatical Islamic followers from imposing the burka on their wives.  In an interview with Le Parisien, she said::

“The burka is a prison, it’s a straitjacket”

“It is not a religious insignia but the insignia of a totalitarian political project that advocates inequality between the sexes and which is totally devoid of democracy.”

This brings up an interesting issue, since banning clothing has been associated with anti-immigration politics throughout Europe.  The fact of the matter is that if France decides to move towards a banning of the burqa, some argue this is likely to limit radical Islamic women’s freedom even more, as men may not allow them out at all.

Barring the possibility of some celebrity starting a burqa trend, i.e., secularizing it, such a ruling would be in conflict with the French concept of laïcité , a variant of the concept of the separation of church and state.  More subtle is an idea that banning the burqa does symbolic violence to the “other.”  Pierre Bourdieu notes in Distinction how subjugation and control are manifested in the everyday::

“…the social relations objectified in familiar objects, in their luxury or poverty, their ‘distinction’ or ‘vulgarity’, their ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness’, impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconscious as the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered, garish linoleum.”

The Islamic veil has been isolated and socially categorized.  The attention given it has stigmatized it.  Ironically, within extreme Islam, it has its own symbolic baggage, particularly as it crosses national borders.  While scrutiny of the Islamic veil can foster a political agenda by conservatives and a feminist agenda, is doing so through such symbolic violence the best way to institute social change?

Twitterversion:: #Burka under fire in #France. #Sarkozy and #feminists meeting in anti-extreme Islam common ground? #feminism #Bourdieu http://url.ie/1wt4 #feminism @Prof_K

Song:: La Danse Des Negresse Vertes – Les Negresses Vertes