Secretly Canadian

by RAF KATIGBAK

So I was getting wasted on cider in the parking lot of a Berkeley Safeway last night when I realized, “Most Americans really know almost nothing about Canada.”

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Why am I here, in Berkeley, California—the bastion of North American liberalism—getting tanked in front of a supermarket on what tastes like the alcoholic equivalent of a green Jolly Rancher? Well, let me tell you, if you’re looking for a place to get krunked in Berkeley, there really are few other options. This town is run by nerds.

In fact, my Montreal friend and I just spent over an hour wandering the streets looking for a liquor store or watering hole to get our drink on. Instead we found blocks and blocks of organic cafés, organic Thai restaurants and stores catering to every geek’s desire: comic books, Dungeons and Dragons chart booklets, pewter figurines of Middle Earth Orcs in battle armour... It’s a place where a store named The Other Change of Hobbit is considered cool. Where grown men could walk into a store and ask for three 20-sided dice without fear of wedgied reprisal. It was a town where the Revenge of the Nerds had already taken place and the winner was clear. In other words: my kind of town. Except for the whole no-obvious-place-to-get-wasted-thing.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one bar we passed, but it was so bright (presumably to allow the 80 per cent of patrons locked in an epic chess battle to see their next move) that we dared not enter.

So here I am, feeling half like a kid after eating too many Halloween lollipops and half like a drunken teenager with no place to go, when it hit me: “Americans know almost nothing about Canada or Canadians.” This thought did not come out of nowhere, but following a 20-minute dissertation with the Safeway cashier on how to read the birthdates on Medicare cards.

In fact, this was the subject of conversation over dinner last night with a friend and former Montreal Mirror contributor in town for the evening.

“It’s crazy the responses you get when you introduce yourself as a Canadian in some places,” he said. “I once had a guy in New Orleans say to me, ‘Oh, you’re Canadian, I heard you guys put mayonnaise on everything, even in your hair.’ This probably would have been more shocking if he didn’t follow it with, ‘I ain’t racist; except against Chinese people and Canadians.’”

Of course it would be foolish to think that all Americans are ignorant of us, their northern neighbours, but it’s tough to see past the strange feeling you get when you give them your Medicare card as ID and they look at you as if you’re from outer space.

Not only does it seem like Americans don’t know much about us, it seems that they don’t even want to try to learn; they’d rather just file us away as “some crazy foreign place that talks like us but does things weird.” This can sometimes work to our advantage. Another friend told of how he had once forgotten his driver’s licence at home while visiting California and managed to convince the car rental clerk that his Medicare card—whose picture was almost completely worn out with age—was actually a “Canadian driver’s licence.” “Well, I guess that’s how you all make ’em up there...” shrugged the clerk as he typed in the cryptic alphanumeric code. “You sure there ain’t supposed to be no address on these things?”

Perhaps it’s the fact that we, as Canadians, have that battered wife syndrome/can’t-live-with-’em-or-without-’em dependence on their economy (or at least, their entertainment industry), but we seem to be so forgiving that Americans seem indifferent to our existence.

Maybe it’s time for that to stop. Maybe it’s time that every person, when asked a stupid question about Canada, insist that the person asking grab a book or at least Google the frickin’ country sometime. Maybe next time we can yell out, “No! Manitoba is not a city, we don’t have a president, we don’t overdub all of their music CDs into French, and we don’t speak American—we speak English (or Hinglish in Quebec) and French, eh.” Maybe it’s time we stick up for ourselves! Or maybe we can just be quiet and content in our little country knowing secretly that we rule.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca