Call It Revenge for Shipping Us Celine Dion

Matt Labash pens easily the funniest analysis I've seen of Canada, the Canadian obsession with thumbing their nose at America (politely) and Americans who are heading across the border in droves to get away from our horrific Jesusland. Here's a brief excerpt, but it's worthy of a complete read...

WHENEVER I THINK OF CANADA . . . strike that. I'm an American, therefore I tend not to think of Canada. On the rare occasion when I have considered the country that Fleet Streeters call "The Great White Waste of Time," I've regarded it, as most Americans do, as North America's attic, a mildewy recess that adds little value to the house, but serves as an excellent dead space for stashing Nazi war criminals, drawing-room socialists, and hockey goons.

Henry David Thoreau nicely summed up Americans' indifference toward our country's little buddy when he wrote, "I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada. . . . What I got by going to Canada was a cold." For the most part, Canadians occupy little disk space on our collective hard drive. Not for nothing did MTV have a game show that made contestants identify washed-up celebrities under the category "Dead or Canadian?"

If we have bothered forming opinions at all about Canadians, they've tended toward easy-pickings: that they are a docile, Zamboni-driving people who subsist on seal casserole and Molson. Their hobbies include wearing flannel, obsessing over American hegemony, exporting deadly Mad Cow disease and even deadlier Gordon Lightfoot and Nickelback albums. You can tell a lot about a nation's mediocrity index by learning that they invented synchronized swimming. Even more, by the fact that they're proud of it.

I think my favorite part of the article is when the soon-to-be-expatriate American tells Labash that he's "too f------ tired" to stick around and fight for his vision of this country, when there's a better one 30 miles away. Are we really losing anything, except petulant whiners?