Shooting through our national stereotypes

I had the recent opportunity to trek south of the border. Although it was far from my first trip, it was the most enlightening one, as it was the first time I went solo as well as the first time I had no clear attraction to visit. So I was therefore free to take a look at the real America without a schedule in mind.

Looking to inject me with a refreshing slice of Americana, a Washingtonian friend introduced me to an outfitting shop by the name of Cabela's. There you could browse a huge library of guns including a .50 calibre, and then grab a venison bratwurst 10 feet away. And not content with merely selling things, the place was littered with dead, stuffed animals and informative plaques. In short, it was gratuitous, materialistic, and littered with instruments of death — the America that Europeans and Canucks are supposed to fear and that, as a Canadian college student, I'm supposed to jeer at.

But instead of treading over these hackneyed stereotypes, I found myself admiring them. By stripping away my preconceived notions and expectations as to what "American" and "Canadian" should represent to me, I saw nothing more than people in touch with their primal urges while still maintaining a middle-class lifestyle.

Indeed, the self-parody of it left me thoroughly amused. The stereotypes were realized, yes, but the negative spin so frequently emphasized by us outsiders simply wasn't there. Surrounded by a bunch of law-abiding, laid-back, down-to-earth people handling AR-15s, I'd never felt safer.

America is a beautiful paradox — a nation of immigrants and cultural diversity, but with well-defined and rich macro- and micro-culture. It's divided into ethnic and regional groups, while maintaining concrete, broader images. It's far from unified, but it's readily definable on a variety of levels. In spite of the excess and elements of vulgarity, it's vibrant.

The novelty of this was completely lost on those who live there every day, and this brought to my attention something about Canadian culture. While Americans are completely comfortable with their surroundings to the point where they don't notice their quirks, we Canucks seek an identity with pathetic desperation.

Canada, as a country and a society, is utterly devoid of any defining features. Canadians are so lacking in any notable qualities that our flag depicts flora found pretty much everywhere in the developed world, that the animals adorning our coins are equally nonexclusive, and that our English-speaking provinces import the bulk of our books, television, and films from the States.

I should make it clear that I'm not a nationalist. But our problem isn't that we lack of national identity or pride. It's that we lie about the fact that we lack it, and we cling to anything that can be branded half-decently. It's impossible to be proud to be Canadian when nobody has sufficiently defined what being “Canadian” is.

In my experience, Canadians even enjoy discussing American politics more than our own — and for good reason. In spite of the many benefits of a multi-party system, there are hardly any practical consequences to whoever ends up gaining the next minority government. American elections results arguably even have a more pronounced effect on our country than our own joke of a democratic system.

Indeed, we so desperately seek validation and attention that whenever our country is referenced in The Simpsons, South Park, or The Daily Show, our national media feels the need to promote this little bit of acknowledgement with a pathetic sense of pride that someone outside of our borders knows that we exist.

We need to either put in the legwork to define ourselves or stop pretending that we have a distinct culture. Until then, we fully deserve to be a continued punchline in a series of little brother jokes.