Pogey, Poutine and Warm, Furry Beavers

So I was sprawled slug-like on the sofa the other evening, as is my custom, absently brushing the Tortilla chip crumbs out of my mustache and half-listening to The National, when the CBC finally got me to snap. The approach was surprisingly simple, and effective—as it turned out, all Pastor Mansbridge had to do was cut to one of those “person-on-the-street” interviews, in which several “ordinary Canadians” were invited to yammer on a bit about the latest Weighty-News-Issue-Du-Jour. Now, I’m not going to let on yet just what these people were saying that actually pushed me over the edge. Could be it was a coupla effete, latte-slurping, sensitive-weenie types, burbling their typical knee-jerk pieties about this country’s systemic, long-standing and entirely irredeemable racism/sexism/classism/lookism, etc. Or it might have been some of them there mouth-breathing, crimson-necked troglodytes, denouncing “immig’ants” and “Kweebecers”—you know, the kind of backwards-ass, cousin-diddling, “it blowed up real good,” hairy-knuckle draggers that make the hillbillies in Deliverance look like assistant professors from U of T. Doesn’t really matter much either way—suffice it to say that the boneheads in question were, for their own reasons, busily badmouthing our home and native land as if it were the third circle of frigging hell, or some kind of 1970’s-science-fiction-B-movie-dystopia or something.