Everyone Hates Toronto?

An amusing/interesting editorial over here, in response to a documentary released this week about the virulent hatred the rest of Canada bears for Toronto and its denizens.

It's amusing because anyone who's spent time in any of the true metropolises of the world has somewhat of the same perspective on Toronto that Torontonians have on the rest of Canada. Toronto's a nice city, don't get me wrong, but compared to New York, London or Tokyo it remains somewhat quaint and provincial.

It gets interesting near the end, when the writer mentions:

Post-colonial studies teaches us that citizens of colonies (or, in Canada's case, former colonies) suffer from a psychological condition that causes them to constantly perceive themselves as being outside the centre, as living on the margins.

In the 20th century, it's interesting to note that a number of the more infuential Western cultural critics have been Canadian. Marshall McLuhan, Naomi Klein and John Ralston Saul are all fairly well known in those circles. In some ways, I think you can count comedians as cultural critics as well; most stand up comedy these days depends on some aspect of a common culture. Canada, of course, also seems to produce an inordinately large number of talented comedians. At the time, I found it odd that Canada could produce such a disproportinate amount of such critics, and tried to fumble my way towards a reason. Tying it to the colonial experience was something I hadn't considered, and yet it seems to make a fair bit of sense.

The dominant news story today is, of course, the shootings at Virginia Tech. When more details start coming out, I wonder what, if any, ramifications there will be politically. At this point it's silly to make any inflammatory statements about policy (not that that'll stop any news media outlets, I'm sure), but you would think that at some point, Americans might stop and ask how many such killings they will tolerate before legislating some sort of effective gun control, even if it's just a knee-jerk reaction to such horrific violence.

Of course, I suppose another way of looking at it is that the death toll in Virginia is like any given day of the week in Baghdad. But that's a whole other kettle of fish, and, to be fair, things do seem to have settled down some since Petaeus was put in charge.