Swompdonkey

I have rather consciously neglected my blog of late. It's been pretty tough to keep up the writing with work being what it is. I have been exceptionally busy. Today, however, I am prompted to write. I have been watching a TV special on Mordechai Richler, who is probably, by critical consensus, Canada's most talented author of the late twentieth century (although some would give that title to Atwood) and the quintessential unrepentant Montreal anglo. He is known not only for his fantastic novels, which so eloquently captured the soul of the city he loved, but for his forays into polemic writing. Richler fought the nationalists in Quebec relentlessly, dragooning his formidable talents into service to ridicule their pretensions and point out the inherent contradictions of their credo. In the late eighties and early nineties, while the Feds were flirting and unwisely pandering to the separatists, Richler railed against the injustices he saw around him. He saw beneath the surface of "civic nationalism" and exposed the "siege mentality" and the paranoid and obsessive nature of the sovereignty movement, which sought to limit the rights of others in order to safeguard their own way of life. As a French-speaking Anglophone with many nationalist friends who has lived in Montreal, I have my own perspective on the "Quebec question". Simply put, you can dress it up in the garb of "civic nationalism", but the heart of the sovereignty movement is ethnic identity and the duty of minorities to conform to the wishes of the ethnic francophone majority. It is an attitude that proclaims "You may live here, and you may associate with us, but unless you adhere to our philosophy, unless you adopt our language and our ways, you will never be one of us". This is a view entirely at odds with the fundamental beliefs of most Canadians, and it manifests itself in many noxious forms: separatism, anti-semitism, xenophobia. I recall Parizeau and Landry post-referendum eructations on the eve of their defeat ("Money and the ethnic vote"?)and more recent indiscrete remarks, glimpses into their dark hearts. When one reads
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec, one sees that Richler, as so few others did, understood the nature of the fight for the soul of his Province in the late twentieth century.