Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!
Richler, Mordecai
that section of the media where our political discourse takes place, the pundits have the power and obligation to point to a naked emperor and observe that he has no clothes on." Note well the key...
...Rather than admit such a thing was possible the nationalists disputed the language of the survey questionnaire and noted correctly that there were even more anti-Semitic "incidents" among the "English...
...Alterman writes about his opponents as though they have taken control of the political discussion in the United States...
...Nor should A Nation of Victims take any awards for exact editing and scholarly depth...
...It is only in the last generation and a half—which is to say with astonishing rapidity—that that entire apparatus has been secularized...
...One nationalist Member of Parliament urged that the book be banned under Section 319 of the Criminal Code as hate propaganda...
...Stone, friend to Communist dictatorships and possibly handmaiden to them as well...
...Unwilling to engage these ideas seriously, he instead resorts to petty assaults on the characters of the men who hold them, substituting rumor for fact with the small-mindedness and ugly dexterity of a campaign spokesman...
...His introduction, after all, praises the late I.F...
...Worst of all, no one even knows how to talk about the relationship of bigoted priests in the 1930s to bigoted intellectuals today...
...El that myth in an article in the New Yorker in September 1991, it was greeted in Canada—and especially in Quebec—with a tumult of incoherent anger...
...Two peoples, working in two languages, together, building on the northern half of the continent a more tolerant, more caring, more just nation than the U.S...
...When the novelist Mordecai Richler attacked many of the underpinnings of Barry Cooper teaches political science at the University of Calgary and recently co-authored Deconfederation: Canada Without Quebec...
...But what if the emperor is clothed and his critics are as denuded of wisdom and sense as Eric Alterman himself...
...Note well the key word here: "obligation...
...Richler cited public opinion surveys that indicated contemporary French Quebec was more anti-Jewish in its attitudes than English-speaking Canada...
...the editorializing in our major newspapers that appears under the qualifying phrase "News Analysis...
...Nothing...
...REQUIEM FOR A DIVIDED COUNTRY Mordecai Richler Alfred A. Knopf /277 pages/$23 reviewed by BARRY COOPER The American Spectator December 1992 71 because they knew who controlled the wealth of the city—but poor Irish Catholics and even poorer Jews were not so strong...
...foster good conduct, with the left and the right both discomfited by the prospect of public efforts to improve personal morals...
...Inside stores, English is allowed to appear but only if it is clearly subordinated to French...
...Contemporary ethnic nationalism is best understood by looking at the religious history of the province...
...The powerful English-speaking Presbyterian businessmen of Montreal were indifferent to these curses, not least OH CANADA...
...The language inspector will decide what color is stronger...
...The term maudits anglais, damned English, was understood literally...
...There are shortcomings in Sykes's exposition, not least being his occasional lapses into the jargon characteristic of the therapeutic culture he castigates...
...Granted that rotten personal behavior does indeed create intolerable social trouble, debate centers on how to John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...Be that as it may (and the claim seems to me overstated), Sykes offers compelling reasons to suppose that American culture is in a bad way...
...Alterman believes the only honest political writing is for the purpose of exposing naked emperors...
...OH QUEBEC...
...Richler starts by describing Bill 178, a law that excludes any language but French from exterior commercial signs...
...Martin's Press /289 pages/$22.95 reviewed by JOHN R. DUNLAP / n its twentieth-anniversary issue (Fall 1985), the Public Interest printed an essay by James Q. Wilson on "The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy...
...Richler is famous enough abroad that his words will carry weight at home, and, although his book doesn't aim to ridicule the government and politics of Quebec, it does the next best thing: it surveys with wit not unmixed with contempt, a long train of stupidities that have contributed to a world-class economic, political and constitutional crisis that may well require the partition of the country to resolve—civil war having been ruled out as "unthinkable...
...They are the expressions of American conventional wisdom, and for the most part they do little but point to the emperor and declare him naked...
...Oh Quebec!—with footnotes, a bibliography, and a host of new details that have only increased the rage and the incoherence of the response...
...liberals get antsy about religious intrusion, conservatives about state paternalism...
...The health, education and welfare bureaucracies, for example, were staffed and administered by priests, nuns, and lay brothers and sisters...
...A half-century ago French Quebec was Roman Catholic not only in its religious practices, but also in its social organization...
...They have thus described Richler as filled with delirium and hysteria, resentment, racism, bad faith, contempt, morbid introspection, unresolved personal problems, and both hatred and self-hatred...
...While it is certainly true that these men were the rising stars of Reagan-era journalism, they have been largely balanced (or canceled) out by Canadians are prey to many myths, but the most important of them is that what makes us truly, uniquely, profoundly etc...
...Richler was tasteless enough to remind the nationalists of their anti-Semitic heritage, a heritage of which they are properly ashamed...
...Canadian is Quebec...
...Quebecois intellectuals and governments have over the years debated whether Quebec would be better off without Canada...
...Americans seeking a quick study of the painful recent history of their northern neighbor cannot do better than this splendid piece by Canada's best writer...
...the index is incomplete, some names are misspelled, and the notes are cluttered with secondary 72 The American Spectator December 1992...
...What does Richler say about that...
...Such bile might well alert ordinary readers to the existence of a real issue...
...Likewise, one can argue that arson is really a form of urban renewal...
...The most unsavory aspect of Church-dominated society in Quebec was the contempt it taught for non-French, non-Catholic citizens...
...In A Nation of Victims, Charles J. Sykes cuts across the ideological divide with his claim that we have become a society "unwilling to judge itself in terms of moral order...
...No one among the Quebec nationalists wanted to consider Richler's argument: that there is an intelligible connection between the bigotry of a priest or the editorial position of a major Montreal newspaper during the 1930s, and the contemporary nationalism of the French population of the province...
...Without Quebec, sing the full-throated chorus of Canadian intellectuals, we would simply be poor, cold, rust-belt Americans with a deep appreciation of hockey...
...The essay pointed to a hesitant change in the assumptions of policy analysts...
...Last spring he published it all over again as Oh Canada...
...Having bottomed out with calculable economic appraisals of public problems, some analysts were beginning to toy with the idea that such problems (welfare dependency, crime, family disruption, poor schooling, deficit spending) owe less to defective incentives than to frayed morals...
...But anyone who points out that virtually all of Canada's constitutional difficulties center on Quebec is indirectly raising another question: Wouldn't Canada be better off without Quebec...
...A NATION OF VICTIMS: THE DECAY OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER Charles J. Sykes St...
...Detailed directives have been promulgated regulating, for example, the size of letters on signs...
...One rule states: "The color of the French and English lettering should be the same...
...These bylined articles, which physically resemble news stories but are actually nakedly subjective, are given prominent placement on the front page, not somewhere near the back of the front section...
...The assumption sustaining the Quebec sign law seems to be that French will be preserved and enhanced by suppressing English and those citizens who speak it...
...Wilson alluded to "the growing awareness" that many social troubles can be understood only "if they are seen as arising out of a defect in character formation...
...Seven years later, that growing awareness has matured into what Lawrence Mead calls a new "politics of conduct...
...No one dares admit that the French are fighting against injustices that no longer exist, nor that they are committing real injustices against their English-speaking fellow-citizens, whose bilingual sons and daughters are leaving for more hospitable places in record numbers...
...If not, the color of the French should be stronger...
...If Richler has ridiculed ridiculous laws, surely that is the only appropriate response of a concerned citizen in a democracy...
...Richler drew attention to two dirty little secrets: the repressive language laws of Quebec and its history of anti-Semitism...
...October's "no" vote in a Canada-wide referendum on national unity only deepens the problem...
...What really comes across in this book is its author's rage that some opinions with which he disagrees have managed to receive widespread attention...
...To make matters worse, a week after it appeared in Canadian bookstores, it was the number-one bestseller in the country...
...But since their nationalist pride is uncertain, their shameful past can be accommodated only by denying it ever existed...
...The keynote is "victimism," which Sykes defines as "a generalized impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self...
...Look, they said, Toronto has more anti-Jewish vandalism than Montreal and in 1934, in Regina, Saskatchewan, two Jewish radiologists were excluded from a hospital...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
