by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

When I was a kid we were so deprived that we had to play in the mud. Barefoot. We couldn't afford popsicles and only got discarded popsicle sticks thrown over the fence by the rich people.

It's untrue, of course. But it's a handy fib that I lay on my four young'uns to make myself look noble and to maybe remind them to be thankful for what they get. The kids find such stories annoying, unfortunately.

And similarly, Quebec's thinking class's relentless retelling of the same dull stories about the bad old days in Quebec is getting tired fast.

Take the Michel Tremblay play I saw last week at the Centaur. No, really, take it please. Tremblay is said to be a genius. He looks like a nice guy and he might've written some good stuff, but from what I know of him he's wa-a-a-y overrated.

His latest ongoing play at the Centaur, Past Perfect, features, as usual, women squawking about their problems. This one revolves around a mental case wallowing in misery because her sister stole her boyfriend. It's set in a rooming house in the East End during the Depression, which follows the great The Tin Flute tradition set by Gabrielle Roy, who got off a train from Winnipeg and wrote about how awful life in industrialized St-Henri can be. Since then Quebec's scribblers have gone monkey-crazy by relentlessly portraying the old-time era as one of non-stop agony and suffering.

A major chunk of the Quebec artistic political orthodoxy involves slamming those days, the worst of which are called la grande noirceur, the "Great Darkness," a Halloween-style name denoting the bogeyman oppressive world of the Catholic clergy, anglo industrialists and Maurice Duplessis, all working together to suck the fun out of people's lives. This awful time was heroically ended by today's self-congratulatory intellectual class who launched the Quiet Revolution, which isn't so quiet because they really never shut up about it. I bet they're having a panel of intellos on Radio-Canada right now discussing it.

In another recently-produced Tremblay play, À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou, two very angry and sad sisters bicker while their grande noirceur-era parents moan about everything. The headache-inducing scenario only ends when their parents thankfully kill themselves. Ain't no chuckles here. You won't mistake this for Dollaraclip on MusiquePlus.

Indeed, injustice existed during the Duplessis years - witness strikebreaking, the Padlock Law and rigged elections. But every industrialized country on the planet went through a nasty period of trauma after farm hicks moved to urban factories. They worked hard, didn't get paid much and didn't get much education.

And maybe in our age of privilege those years look bad, but it's relatively light stuff. We have no mass graves. Belgian colonialists never came here and chopped off people's hands. The biggest scandal I can think of from those years is the institutionalization of children into mental hospitals, but the chattering classes have glossed over that one, preferring instead to get all steamed about their great-uncles having to shop at Dupuis Frères instead of Eaton's.

Rather than the pathetic losers they're portrayed as, the Quebecers of those years lived hard-working existences - emphasizing reliability, piety and loyalty - all without 200 channels or reliable plumbing. That makes them pretty exceptional.

Instead of getting Dickensian stories that salute the charm of the resourceful, industrial-era characters, our writers consistently show this old generation as doltish proletariat with major psychological problems.

In the States, Tom Brokaw recently wrote a couple of books in tribute to the American generation that lived at the same time as our Duplessis-era losers. He called them "The Greatest Generation" and sold a kajillion billion books. Meanwhile our intellos treat the local equivalent as depressed, dysfunctional layabouts.

It's quite alright if our boomers are happy to be able to be nationalists rather than Catholics, or take drugs or do whatever our enlightened people are supposed to be doing. But when they consistently portray good people gone by as humourless, navel-gazing simpletons, it seems pretty galling.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca