Canada is pissed off!!!

[AlpineK]

Both Canadians and Americans love

[murraysovereign]

I suspect this thing would have blown away without anyone noticing, were it not for the timing. People heard about this a day or two after it happened. That means Canadians were hearing about this "satire" at about the same time we were hearing the news of 4 more combat fatalities in Afghanistan. Now, in the grand scope of things, 4 combat deaths is not big news, but in per-capita terms, that's about the same as the US losing 37 troops in one day. And that's a lot - that would make the news. So imagine that, on the same day you heard that 37 US troops had been killed in Afghanistan, you also heard about some brainless troglodyte slagging the men and women of the US armed services as a bunch effete pussies. How would the US public react? Probably much the same way Canadians reacted under the circumstances.

 

Personally, I think the reaction was overblown - do TV shows airing at 3AM have any measureable audience at all? - and the whole story was over-reported in no small part precisely because of the coincident news of our most recent combat fatalities. Prior to this little outburst, I had never heard of the program in question, nor had I heard of any of the cast, and I suspect very few people anywhere else had ever heard of them either. Would that it had remained that way...

[JayB]

Thanks for that clarification, Murray. Makes quite a bit more sense after hearing that it came on the tails of more Canadian soldiers getting killed in combat.

 

I have to say that I don't necessarily agree about the scalability of deaths (e.g. the death of an only child is something different, both in degree and kind, than 1/3 of Europe perishing in the Black Death), but can appreciate relationship between ripples and the size of the pond.

 

I also still feel like there's a degree of sensitivity up there that doesn't make much sense to me in light of the fact that Canadian troops have always distinguished themselves in the fights that Canada has participated in, and the host in question would likely have second thoughts about sharing the said monologue with the male patrons of just about any bar north of the border.

 

Anyhow - I have suspicions that the whole thing is rooted in what folks north of a border is feel is a broad and longstanding mischaracterization of policy choices that Canada embraced somewhere between the end of WWII and the advent of the Trudeau era as "soft, the response to which rises from low-grade annoyance when applied to national policy to outrage when it's festooned upon Canadian soldiers that are fighting and dying on the front lines in a conflict that (I suspect) more than a few Canadians feel they have very little at stake.