Everybody wants to be the next Silicon Something, Silicon Up North, Silicon Up North and Over, Silicon aux fruits du mer, with live rain forest in shiny black halter tops and those godawful platform shoes that Auntie won't even try to rationalize. They're ugly and you've only yourself to blame if you buy a pair.

The keyboard is my shepherd, I shall not want for high paying consulting jobs and three martini lunches and a briefcase full of mystery printouts engineered to make one look Competent. Image management, as always, is at the front. Get a haircut and get a real job. Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us...

Ohhh Canada, not immune by any stretch of the imagination, after all, aren't we Silicon Up North with our rivers running with mineral oil and every pot plant a techie tree.

Canada is in the position of Alexander's Egypt - a gigantic free granary waiting to be taken over by whomever can afford the mercenaries to send up the Nile or the Fraser River or Hudson's Bay to grab our best people like so many scalps to hang off a kilt. Our doctors curing California diseases; our scientists building surgical lasers; our fingers on the mice that defoliate the landscape...

Our Pharaoh, Jean Chretien, matched with an aged wife, he metes and doles unequal laws upon a socialist race, that eat and live indoors and have free health care and knows not the me of the Sumerians What a head to wear the red and white Double Crown. Master of the House, keeper of Two Lands - comforter, philosopher, and you know the rest. Puncher of protestors, avoider of funerals, apologist, apologist, apologist. A man who clearly doesn't know that his greatest natural resource - Canadians - is being funneled into the Yankee abattoirs.

But the odds are that if you're reading this, you're an American, and it's good news for you that you can bleed off the best talent off your upstairs neighbor and know that if we get uppity, you'll just hire some Thracians or some of those blondes from Bactria to come smack us into complaisance. Good news, isn't it? Isn't it great that you can rape our universities and pillage our professionals?

So Auntie got a haircut and bought the stylishly ugly platform shoes and drafted a short list of her massive skills, both of them, and tromped through Silicon Up North. At the back of her throat, hissing with each breath, the spectre of the Tong, sweating in the British Columbia fog and swearing revenge for hubris. Shoes covered in tire scars from where they were run over in the half-dead of day. Sunglasses makeshift held together with silver wire. The shoes stayed, the sunglasses came, stuffed into her breast pocket, while she swindled travel agents into sending her far away. Then was the feverish midnight drive down from the international airport, landing in the golden morning traffic in the coldest capital on Earth, somewhere too cold for the Tong in their flimsy raincoats and greased snub-nosed black revolvers to match their hair, my British Columbia driver covered in welts and bruises. Entrepreneurs as well, though differently, bringing another kind of culture to map onto ours.

Like Egypt, Canada will persist, though we could stand to look at what was once the fertile Nile delta - our Mount Allison Universities or maybe our Simon Fraser Universities - and wonder when they're going to turn into sand if we decide that adopting the warrior code of resource strip mining to make a buck today is better than having grain tomorrow. We'd love to blame the capitalists, particularly the Americans, for "doing this to us". But the reality, boys and girls, is that we have to take a little personal responsibility, and look at the economic desert that we're going to leave in our Red and White Lands if we don't clean up our own damn acts.

Same song, isn't it? Personal responsibility? Isn't much wonder it sticks in the throat after a while.

Auntie had a brutal terrorist experience in the Pacific Northwest recently, so forgive her otherwise unforgivable absence. Mother and baby doing fine.

Back to Pandemonium

Email Auntie Dynamite

The Auntie Dynamite Archive

Join Auntie Dynamite's Mailing List!