Patriotism · 22 August 2002
Someone asked what I, as a Canadian, thought of this. The short answer would be not much. While it catalogues some legitimate – and widely held – complaints, the piece is forged of such wan rage and humourlessness it might have been stapled together from back numbers of another putatively Canadian entity – Adbusters – a wincingly earnest magazine whose calls to arms regularly fail to rise above nuzzling the bellies of those already there.
Amusing, though, were the inevitable snarls from the online crypto-patriot camp after the letter was published; from those who daily chant via anecdotal, decontextualized evidence that Arab mens iz bad and that America is the Greatest Country in the World; from those who glibly claim victory (for the women and children!) for fights in which they took no part; from those who’ve mined a massive vein of ‘content’ under the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside; from those who, in the face of extremism, take comfort drawing extremists close to their side; from the ‘recovering liberals’; from those so fully infused with the language and gestures of marketing that it no longer matters what the zeitgeist is, only that it is tapped.
They call themselves ‘warbloggers’, a term just slightly more tuneful than ‘idiotarians’, the leaden, easy sobriquet pasted on those who read history and/or feel unsatisfied forming opinions solely from White House press briefings and CNN. It’s a featherweight word, warbloggers; it already drips with cliché (those last two syllables, oy).
I’ve been trying to think of a better term to describe these angry men and women – these armchair warriors – something that would fit, something with an eye to the future. I think maybe I have it.
Cannon fodder.
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