I hadn't really thought enough about Canadians to have the notion that they were bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players or even to have noticed that they might feel sensitive about our thinking of them like that, if, in fact, we do think about them much, which, as I just said, I did not. Mostly, we — I, anyway — think about Canadians on an individual basis, when one of them serves up some excellent artistry and hand delivers it to us. We're not distracted by second-rate Canadians. In that light, they seem quite great. Take heart, Geddy Lee. Don't have an inferiority complex based on how other people think about your country. And, by the way, what's wrong with lumberjacks? It seems to me, America loves lumberjacks. I invite people to think of Wisconsin as full of lumberjacks. And hockey players. And sensitive artists.
३ मे, २०२३
"He sent a message to the world that we’re not just a bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players up here. We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry."
Said Geddy Lee of Rush, in a 2019 documentary about Gordon Lightfoot, quoted in "Gordon Lightfoot’s 10 Essential Songs/The Canadian singer-songwriter, who died on Monday at 84, brought his rueful baritone to memorable, melancholy material" (NYT).
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Diversity disclosures. However, not everyone exercises liberal license to indulge color judgments, class-based bigotry.
When I think of Canada I like to think everyone there is like Geddy Lee...
Here's a public service announcement from Officer of the Order of Canada Geddy Lee
He's a real goer..
As part of my job I frequently come across "job satisfaction" surveys. Lumberjacks are almost invariably at the very bottom of the list. I guess it's not all catchy tunes and merry cross-dressing like Monty Python would have us to believe.
Smoked meat… back bacon… Molson…
What’s not to like, eh?
No one looks at Geddy Lee and thinks of lumberjacks and hockey. Ever.
I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay
I sleep all night and I work all day
I cut down trees, I skip and jump
I like to press wild flowers
I put on women's clothing
And hang around in bars
Canadians are so diverse.
America would be stronger, in many respects, with more lumberjacks and hockey players.
Gordon Lightfoot - Cool sounding name.
As a person of lived Canadian experience, I can confirm that our lumberjacks are poets, our hockey players are philosophers, there are among us no second-raters, and we bear our culture proudly, eh?
Geddy Lee embraced the Bob and Doug MacKenzie Great White North Canadian stereotype with the song 'Take Off.'
https://youtu.be/8Jm4LoOaAWI?t=8
And, by the way, what's wrong with lumberjacks? It seems to me, America loves lumberjacks.
Monty Python anyone?
And no, Professor, not everyone in the US loves lumberjacks. Eco-terrorists have pounded large, thick spikes into trees in hopes of injuring or killing lumberjacks and/or millworkers when their saws hit the spike. Fortunately only one person, a millworker, has been seriously injured by tree spiking, and that was back in the 1980s.
Even when he's arguing against stereotypes, Lee falls into the stereotype of Canadians being passive-aggressive complainers.
I want to see how many before me say that the classic phrase is "whores and hockey players."
Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, farm-state people like President Eisenhower, and others have often revealed a preoccupation with and sensitivities about their provincial origins. They tend to hypercorrect for self-perceived weaknesses and deficiencies -- as a documented scientific process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection_(psychology).
This is how Canada ended up with the goofy little boy Justin Trudeau as its Revered Dear Leader. They say "We are not the US" even though they are 80% to 90% like the US and have no hope of standing alone due to heavy geographic, cultural, and economic overlaps. World cultures are routinely dominated by a handful of Great Powers.
I wish Lightfoot, just once, had sung "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay."
As far as Canadians go, I used to have a very romanticized view of them. A bunch of ice road truckers, basically. A nation of individualists. I even thought about Canada as a refuge if the U.S. continued its decline. The last few years, and little boy Trudeau, have rid me of that notion. You would think the Arctic weather would have a protective effect. But nope.
I don't mind poets like Lightfoot. Quite the contrary. I do mind a bunch of legislators walking around in pink high heels, and thinking that it means something. The nation is further down the crazy road than we are. And for the most part, the people are subservient conformists to whatever the government imposes on them.
Same with Australia, dammit.
And, by the way, what's wrong with lumberjacks?
You mean apart from them being "second rate" people?
"I hadn't really thought enough about Canadians "
Pronounced aboot.
It's fun to imagine a Rush album cover with them dressed as lumberjacks and hockey players.
"I hadn't really thought enough about Canadians to have the notion that they were bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players"
Ouch. You do realize that, from a Canadian point of view, that's even worse, right?
Anyway, it tells you something about people's sense of insecurity that they have to attribute nonsensical nonexistent stereotypes to other people.
So many great Canadians in the arts. In music alone, you have Neil, Joni, Rush, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen. A recent fave is Godspeed, You Black Emperor. Prominent in other arts, too. Some greats seem to be specific to Canada for reasons that puzzle me. The Tragically Hip were one of the best bands of the last 40 years, and the novelist Robertson Davies was a one of the best post-war novelists. Both never really gained traction outside of their own country.
I don't think of Canada as a place that's known for lumberjacks and hockey players, but nothing wrong with having that reputation.
I feel really bad because I didn't know Gordon Lightfoot was Canadian. I guess I just thought he was from the Great Lakes region.
I no longer think of Canadians as burly lumberjacks and Royal Monties. Now, I think of them as guys who play chick songs on the guitar and Politicans that dress up like Indian Rajas and do blackface.
Well done, Canada!
Felling a tree
Is pure poetry.
The CBC was upset when Musk tried to put a "State funded media" label on them. The CBC was not "state controlled" the CBC stated, even though they support Trudeau 100 percent, and get 70 percent of the funding from the Liberal Government.
Canada is also home of some of the strictest censorship laws in the world regarding political speech. :Writers and organizations get hauled up before "Human Rights commissions" and punished. However, you can take cocaine and heroin in the privacy of your home in BC, while getting a free a sex change operation. Oh, and no one loves the Ukraine more.
That's what Canada means to me.
If you have ever heard Geddy sing “the trees” you could hear all of maple Canda’s inferiority
I visited Canada several times before you needed a passport to get in; a driver's license was enough. Since then? Not once. I figured the lumberjacks had taken over.
I'm going to have to go back and look at how he spoke about his bandmate Neil Peart when he died. Peart may not have come across as "soulful," and I'm well aware that the excesses of prog have been many, but he was a great lyricist. (To say nothing of his unbelievable drumming.)
"And, by the way, what's wrong with lumberjacks?"
To me, they've always been okay,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRdur8GLBM
Rush and Gordon Lightfoot are awesome. Great music from both. Iconic musicians.
If I was Geddy Lee, I wouldn't worry about the world, or the US thinking Canada is filled with Lumberjacks and Hockey players.
I would worry about the world watching Canadians elect and re-elect a totalitarian globalist hypocrite like Justin Trudeau, and capitulating to his dictatorial totalitarianism. The cultures in Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa that put this asshole in power have screwed the rest of Canada's "fly-over" country. Just like how Madison, WI and the US Metropolitan areas do to America's fly-over country.
Rush's 2112, Tom Sawyer & Red Barchetta from "Moving Pictures", and many other songs were Neil Peart writing about liberty, freedom, and the power of the individual. Opposing a totalitarian thought control state is the entire theme to the first side of 2112. Rush's biggest album.
Hey Geddy. When Trudeau used strong arm tactics to crush the convoy protests, and forced poison vaccinations on your people, you abandoned the 40-year message put out by Rush and your friend Neil Peart.
The people who get stepped on by Justin Trudeau and globalist Canadian liberals are the lumberjacks and hockey players. Now...my favorite Canadians.
Most Americans don't think much about Canadians or are even aware of Canadians who have had success in the US. In music, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen are Canadian musicians that have the have had greater accomplishments than the Gordon Lightfoot, who is also great, but lesser so than the above mentioned. I guess Lightfoot has more of a Canadian identity because he chose to live mostly there.
The field where Canadians have really excelled is comedy. Some names on a long list, Norm MacDonald,Jim Carrey, Martin Short, Mike Myers, John Candy, Dan Ackroyd, Phil Hartman, Leslie Nielsen and Eugene Levy.
Speaking of Neil Peart's commitment and poetry regarding liberty and respect for the individual (now completely absent and crushed in Canada under Trudeau)...
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill
Freewill - from Permanent Waves - 1980
Obligatory: I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK...
Is this an invitation to post a link the The Lumberjack Song? NTTAWWT.
We might also consider Leonard Cohen was certainly capable of sensitivity and poetry. "His themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, and sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss." [Wikipedia]
Wisconsin would be full of millwrights and football players and sensitive artists.
“Take heart, Geddy Lee. Don't have an inferiority complex based on how other people think about your country.“
It’s not a complex. The degree to which Americans look down on other countries including Canada is real and immense. Although there are also Americans who just don’t think about other nationals at all, as this post attests. But that just further illustrates the point.
I, too, rarely think about Canadians. I also couldn’t name a Gordon Lightfoot song to save my life. I just listened to a few and had expected to recognize one or two. Nope. Did he even play hockey?
Canadians are very sensitive about what Americans think of them. There is a general belief that Americans have some negative stereotype in their minds about the country when the reality is that 99% of Americans don't care at all.
Part of being Canadian is having this little sibling mindset to the big bad neighbor to the south. And compensating for nonexistent inadequacies.
ya hoser.
Interesting that nobody mentions Jordan Peterson. He came out of Nowhere, Alberta, and now owns the Internet.
As a year round resident of South Florida, I've regularly come into contact with the French Canadian snowbirds who populate our area in large numbers 6 months of the year. I've encountered a good number who accurately fit the widely-held stereotype of pushy, loud, miserly dickwads.
But many are great people, if you get to know them. So, treat everyone as an individual and you may be pleasantly surprised.
I, too, rarely think about Canadians. I also couldn’t name a Gordon Lightfoot song to save my life.
@Jake, there are thousands of wrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes, but we remember the Edmund Fitzgerald.
hpudding said:
“Take heart, Geddy Lee. Don't have an inferiority complex based on how other people think about your country.“
It’s not a complex. The degree to which Americans look down on other countries including Canada is real and immense. Although there are also Americans who just don’t think about other nationals at all, as this post attests. But that just further illustrates the point.
You sound like you're one of them Canadians yourself, eh? Would that be a lumberjack or hockey player? Not that I, as an American, think about it at all, or even care.
As long as people are praising Canadian musicians, let us not forget Bruce Cockburn, Barenaked Ladies, and Kate and Anna McGarrigle (writers of what is in my opinion the best song Linda Rondstadt ever recorded: Heart Like a Wheel). Granted a significant number of people have never heard of Cockburn and the McGarrigles. The theme song for The Big Bang Theory helps Barenaked Ladies in that regard.
Owen said...
Interesting that nobody mentions Jordan Peterson. He came out of Nowhere, Alberta, and now owns the Internet.
5/3/23, 10:49 AM
And there I was, thinking Alberta was nothing but cowboys.
I see mentions of Rush and other musicians, has anyone mentioned Triumph? I like Rik Emmett in particular. Midsummer's Daydream
"I like to think of Canada as America Jr."
This blog is fun. Love the Monty Python references. What about South Park, "Blame Canada," "that bitch Anne Murray"? I think it's generally true Americans don't know or think much about Canada. Australians are identified with the Outback, despite being a largely urban people living near the ocean; for Canadians it's the Arctic despite being largely urban, living about as close as possible to the U.S. border. Are Canadian cities pretty much like American cities, not much for a tourist to see? I guess. Quebec City and Old Montreal are different. Vancouver is not necessarily beautiful as a city, but it's in a spectacular site--surely one of the best sites for a city in North America. The spectacular landscape we lack is the true desert. We have more surviving West Coast rainforest than the U.S. does. Are the falls at Niagara partly in Canada? Yes. Which of the Great Lakes are partly in Canada? All but Michigan.
I'm not the biggest fan of Margaret Atwood, but she has delivered some good delphic lines over the years. One is something like: it's part of the definition of an English Canadian that it's easy to move to the States. Also: Canadians aren't that impressed at any of their own unless they have had success in the States. Lightfoot was kind of borderline compared to (I guess) Atwood and Peterson, left and right.
I've encountered some trans-border marriages, although I don't have one myself. My theory: Canadian woman and American man = likely to be very successful. Canadian woman likes somewhat aggressive man, inclined to defend his own rights and by extension the rights of his family. Getting good places to stay, live, or camp; sending food back in restaurants. American woman, by contrast, likely to be disappointed by Canadian man. You lack something, sweetie; I may even call you by your first name, let's say Lloyd. Ambition or something. Can't you find a caribou to kill or something? Maybe even a reindeer?
I recall eating at the Paul Bunyan restaurant years ago when visiting the trashy WI Dells. It was god awful food, but my small children loved the giant Paul Bunyan. We went twice and that convinced us not to waste our money going to the Dells, despite the Duck rides, the Indian show, and the water skiing show.
"but we remember the Edmund Fitzgerald"
We?
In Rolling Thunder Review there is a scene at Gordon Lightfoot's house in Toronto where Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Roger McGuinn were playing a song together, and a guy who looked like Lightfoot, with unkempt hair, wearing a wife-beater, was in the background closing the windows, maybe to protect his neighbors from the noise, or maybe he was opening them to get some air into the room.
Prolonged exposure to Canadians will leave you convinced that they are some of the most smug and insufferable people on the planet. Their reputation for niceness is totally undeserved (as anyone who has ever dealt with their border crossing folks will tell you).
Another Canadian rock group/artist recognized Gordon Lightfoot's artistry way back in 1969, via a song appearing on a record album: "Lightfoot" by The Guess Who - Wheatfield Soul.
Lightfoot
Forty-three comments related to Canada, yet somehow no one has mentioned the greatest of all Canadians.
Shatner.
What's the difference between a Canadian and an American?
An American doesn't care about the difference between a Canadian and an American.
If it matters, am Canadian.
@who-knew:
Nice to see both Bruce Cockburn and the McGarrigle sisters mentioned! Lots of amazing songwriting there. Barenaked Ladies were a great band but got seriously overexposed in the late 90s/early 2000s so that I cringe every time I hear one of their songs.
I've never been familiar with a whole lot of Canadian lumberjacks but more than a few hockey players who come to mind... Patrick Roy, Mark Messier, Wayne Gretzky. If you grew up anywhere near the US/Canada border it was less a foreign country than the place where your grandparents/cousins lived and popped down at Christmas or summer vacation.
When I was a boy and my Dad was in Viet Nam, my mom would play us to sleep at night on the piano. She told me later it was her therapy.
“If you could read my mind” was one of her favorites, and mine. She asked me if I knew what it was about, and in my little kid way I answered, “yes, it’s about this ghost who haunts a castle!”. She said, “well, not exactly…”. Now of course I know it’s a poignant song about a breakup. Can’t listen to that song without being taken back to that time. I always tear up.
“Carefree Highway” actually reminds me of my Dad more. His call sign was “Cool Breeze.”
The other songs she would play were “Both Sides, Now” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”. She must have played more, but those are the ones I loved and remember the most.
As far as Canadians go, I do think of those hosers since I live in WA state. When I think of their history, I think more of the RCMP, and of the voyageurs. We have our own lumberjacks in WA, and my namesake great great grandfather was one of them.
I agree that their comedians are gold, and I agree that it’s a sad state of affairs up there, politically.
Canada producing Gordon Lightfoot provides a huge deposit of goodwill to be drawn against its infliction of Rush upon the world.
Nicely said, Geddy, but your music still sucks.
I have it on good authority that Dave is from Wisconsin, eh.
Most of The Band were/are Canadians. BTO. Neil Young. The Guess Who. Ian Tyson.
A musically gifted nation which also somehow vomited forth Rush. Oh well.
Ooh boy. Second-rate Canadians? Let’s try second-rate Americans (the USA ones). Since we are making judgements. Loved Gordon Lightfoot. Guess I know one second-rate Canadian… my former boss who was a schemer and a cheat, but those types are universally around.
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