Friday, November 11, 2005
What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?
I long ago swore off serious posts, but today will have to be more or less an exception because today is Remembrance Day, the most somber date on the Canadian calendar, and there's nothing funny about that.
At least there's nothing comedically funny. Remembrance Day is funny-odd, funny-exceptional in a couple of ways.
MOMENT OF SILENCE
Something that really bugs me about Canadians is that, by and large, they figure they are too cool to be patriotic. This is one of the best and most wildly successful countries in the world, yet it's like pulling teeth to get anyone to admit it. Canada Day, for most Canadians, is just an excuse to sleep in. They will go to Canada Day celebrations only if there is a good band playing and there is a beer garden.
But Remembrance Day, for some reason, is different. Everyone honours it. You can actually make a Canadian feel guilty about not wearing a poppy. Look around the crowd at a Remembrance Day ceremony and there's scarcely a dry eye in the house.
Which is all very strange, considering. This country only has a token military and hasn't been involved in a major war for 60 years. Very few people in Canada even have grandparents old enough to have fought in a war. Yet, as a nation, our dedication to bearing witness to the horrors of WWI and WWII is as strong as it has ever been.
So on this one day (and, it seems, this one day only), the bickering stops and we actually act like a nation. There are no self-satisfied Albertans sneering about their oil wealth nor any self-satisfied Ontarians sneering at the bumpkins in the rest of the country. There are no perennial-victim Quebeckers telling us how our latest ass-kissing effort was really an insult to them. There are no socialists or social conservatives, no east vs. west. There are no odes to T.C. Douglas, or Preston Manning, or Pierre Trudeau.
There is only a quiet and firm acknowledgement of the sacrifices made to build this country.
Moment of silence indeed. If only there were more.
FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO BE STUPID
On occasions like Remembrance Day, we often hear that those who died in foreign wars died for our freedoms.
So what does freedom mean? Well, to me, from my Monkey Principle perspective, freedom means the right to be as stupid and as much of a jerk as you like without seriously hurting anyone.
Take freedom of speech. You don't need freedom of speech to tell the government what a good job they're doing or to compliment a politician on his new tie. Even the North Koreans are happy to give their citizens all the freedom they want to say those sorts of thing. No, freedom of speech means the freedom to Photoshop a picture of Paul Martin so that it looks like he's kissing a baboon's butt, which would normally be considered bad manners if you did it with anyone else.
The same thing applies to other civil rights in general. You don't need freedom to have a government tell you how to run your life properly. Any type of government, especially the dictatorial ones, are always more than happy to do that. The great advantage of living in a democracy (in theory at least) is that you are allowed to royally screw up your life as much as you want and no one can (or should) be able to order you not to do it.
Which brings us to the Royal Canadian Legion. As we've all heard by now, the Legion is not allowing websites to use their copyrighted image of the Remembrance Day poppy. If they did, the Legion says, then their poppy image "would be everywhere." That's pretty stupid, considering that they normally want Remembrance images to be all over the place. But, goddamit, those brave boys who gave their lives on Juneau Beach died so that those who came after them would have the freedom to be as utterly, gloriously stupid as they like.
So don't look on the Legion's policy as an insult to Remembrance Day. Look on it as an affirmation of it. I'm actually kinda serious about this.
Regards,
Mentok
posted by Mentok @ 1:00 p.m.,
4 Comments:
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At 2:24 a.m.,
Chimera said...
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Dr. Dawg did a post on the refusal of the Legion to allow their Poppy to be posted without permission:
http://drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2005/11/poppycock-royal-canadian-legion-has.html
I seem to be one of the few people around who actually understands why the Legion is taking this attitude, and I explain it in the comments on that post. I do have several years' worth of experience with the Poppy Fund.
Hope this helps.
I do enjoy your blog, even though I don't comment often. You do some very fine, funny stuff! -
At 9:39 p.m.,
Mentok said...
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Thanks for the comment chimera. I drop by your site frequently and know you have a link here, so nice to hear from you again.
We'll have to agree to disagree on the Legion issue. I posted several replies to your observations on the drdawgsblawg link.
For the record, my late father was a WWII vet and I was an associate Legion member for several years. The tragedy of this situation is that it has pitted the Legion against those who care the most about their legacy.
But that's life in the monkey cage. -
At 10:13 a.m.,
A. B. Chairiet said...
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(Insert appropriate amount of respectable, yet giggly, silence here)
~ Ash -
At 12:29 p.m.,
Chimera said...
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Actually, being a regular forces (as opposed to cadets or reserves) veteran myself, I'd have to say that sometimes the tragedy of the Legion is that they can't always get out of their own way.
Same with the ANAFVIC, of which I am a member -- they won't even allow children of vets to become Active, voting members (and I campaigned for years for that to happen -- hit my head on a brick wall every time I opened my mouth). For all the stuff I tried to do on their behalf, I was actually voted an honorary Associate membership! The other Active members were scandalized when I accepted. I was honored!
And I guess I could have made myself a little clearer on Dawg's blog. I said I understood why the Legion took the attitude it does with The Poppy. I don't necessarily agree with them. If the Active and voting members don't move ahead, both the Legion and ANAFVIC are going to die out from attrition.
