Reply To: Over There cover – now posted to YouTube!
Funny Quebecois satiric piece, JoAnn! I wouldn’t call it anti-Canadian as much as anti-AngloCanadian or something.
When it comes to American stereotypes, it’s sort of hard to see my own country in those terms, because I’m not outside its giant cultural bubble enough to get the viewpoint. But there are certain things that make me embarrassed to think that people from other places see in America:
* Flagpin-wearing jingoism that acts as if it invented the colors blue, white, and red
* Guns. Gun shows. My neighbor’s kid playing with his dad’s AK-47
* Health care for the relatively wealthy only, with the poorer folks waiting in crowds in emergency rooms
* Vigilante borderism (Let’s build our own Berlin Wall!)
* Acid rain, exported from our power plants & cars to kill Canadian forests
* Consumerism
* Corporations putting their products in schools — coke machines in every school hallway; school tv channels full of ads pitched at teens
* The overkill of giant housing as reflected in tv and movies — baristas living in big apartments, MTV Cribs, HGTV big homes, etc.
* The wealthy/sexy starlet thing that pushes people like Lindsay and Britney and Paris onto the cover of People Magazine every other week
* All the waste conveyed by NASCAR & giant SUVs & Hummers in a time of a gas shortage/price crisis
* Our political leaders participating in the thuggery of attack politics
* Basically, all the food one can buy in your average convenience store, from Ho-hos & twinkies to supercolossal drink cups
Those are my own beefs, (beef jerkies?) encubed, if you can use them