That Dammed Beaver, page 26
I have never in my life seen such a good goaler as Brother Isaiah, and I have seen everyone from the Chicoutimi Cucumber to that tall slender fellow who looked like a schoolteacher and played so well for the Montreal Canadiens. Yet I am convinced to this day that Brother Isaiah was blind as a bat, though he denied it. Isaiah might occasionally admit to being “a tad shortsighted,” but you’d have to catch him walking into a brick wall. The other monks couldn’t get a shot by him. Isaiah would just reach out and grab them in his glove (and gloves back then didn’t amount to much), or else he’d get the toe on them, or the chest in front of them, or bang them away with his stick. Brother Simon the Ugly tried to jimmy one by him, dancing right up to the goal crease, flipping the puck off his backhand as he made one of his ballerina twirlabouts. Brother Isaiah flicked it away with his wood. Then Andrew the Fireplug comes barrelling along the wing, taking out a couple of bystander brothers just for style, and he unleashes a slapshot even though the damn thing isn’t even invented back then! Brother Isaiah the Blind raises his left shoulder maybe a quarter inch and the rubber is dancing harmlessly behind the net.
But there was Brother Theodore the Slender standing in the centre of the huge silver circle, and his eyes were popped open all the way and his mouth had ceased working. In front of him was a puck. Brother Theodore brought his stick back real slow, and then, with a motion that cut the air like a knife, Brother Theodore whacked the rubber…and it didn’t even look like he was trying.
Theodore the Slender gave me the gam on shooting, which is this: shooting is more mental than physical. You just practice so much that you can feel the puck, like the blade of your lumber was the palm of your hand, and then you just inner-eye that puck into the back of the net. “See it there first,” Brother Theodore was wont to say, “and then put it there.” In other words, wham, bingo.
"Metaphysical Beaver" by Gustave Morin
AFTERWORD
CANADIAN WRY
BARRY CALLAGHAN
I live in a perplexing country, a country that is a hotbed of rest. I find it hilarious, an exercise in deadpan slapstick at an undertaker’s convention.
The first thing is this: Robertson Davies said, “Our condition is stuporous; dully contented and stuporous.” Wrong. Absolutely. We Canadians are never who we appear to be. Deception, sometimes self-deception, is our genius. We may appear to be stuporous, we may appear to be boring, but in fact, we’re zany and make no sense at all.
I came to understand this several years ago, in the days of Leonid Breshnev, when I was in Leningrad trying to get to know a woman. She was watched by the secret police. I was watched by the secret police. It was grim. It was impossible. So I came home, and at the airport in Toronto, I had an epiphany. There, in front of me, was a Mounted Policeman, all in red and blue and yellow stripes. Like everyone in this world, we have our secret police, but suddenly I thought – what other people would dress up their secret police in scarlet coats, put campfire boy hats on their heads and have them ride around on horses wagging lances at the wind, calling covert action a musical ride? Then I thought, what other country’s serious ideologues on the radical left would call themselves the WAFFLE, a word that means a total inability to take a position and hold to it, so that absolutely no one would take them seriously? What other country’s serious ideologues on the radical right would form a new group and call it the Canadian Reform Alliance Party – CRAP – meaning pure shit – so that no one could take them seriously? Then I looked at the roots of our history. What other country could dissolve into a duality – French and English – after a nineteen-minute musket skirmish 200 years ago on a ratty field outside Quebec City and make both inept generals who got themselves killed into heroes? Such heroism is a deception. In fact, the whole land as it lies on the map is a deception: huge, bigger than the United States, but almost empty because the mass of the few million folk who live in cities strung like a necklace along the 49th parallel, cling to the border by their fingernails, as if the parallel were a window ledge on America, on the world.
So, that world on the other side of the window likes to think we’re boring, likes to think we win more bronze medals than anyone else on the face of the earth. But here’s the trick. Here’s the laugh. We love people to think we’re boring. We’ve raised being boring to a wacky art form. And why? Because it pays off.
Take our most successful prime minister, William Lyon MacKenzie King, our leader through the Second War. King held power longer than any other Western politician in the past century. How did such a pudgy, mundane-looking little man do it? And he was pudgy and parsonish. And little. The truth is, he did it deliberately. He was shrewd and self-effacing, and he told one of his friends in Cabinet that the secret to holding power was to make every speech as boring as possible because then no one would ever remember what he had said and hold it against him. Almost twenty-two years in power, droning on and on over the airwaves, leading us through the war and the only phrase that stuck to him – a slogan thought up to define a domestic crisis – was “Conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription.” Seemingly balanced, nobody knew what it meant, so our soldiers went off to die. King smiled. Meanwhile, he was crazy as a loon.
He talked about economic policies to his dead mother, consulted his dog on matters of state, sought signs from Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his shaving cream in the morning mirror, and in the evening he did missionary work with local street prostitutes, trying to convert them to Christianity, and then – confronting mortality – he built his own little garden temple to himself from the stone remnants of old bank buildings. He was a choice one, fol dol di die do, but not so rare; after all, we’re the only people anywhere who ever took the radical right-wing Social Credit economics of the poet Ezra Pound so seriously that we’ve elected several Social Credit governments – and we knew clearly what we were doing. We called them the Funny Money Party because when they went broke they just cranked up the presses and printed more dollars. When we grew tired of them we elected radical socialists, or rather, faux radicals, because they betrayed socialism by imposing wage controls on the very civil servants and teachers who had elected them.
So there we are, WAFFLING like mad one day, full of CRAP the next, droning on in the middle of the road, telling the world that this is our special gift, a gift for the middle, a gift for compromise, a gift for running while standing still. What can anyone make of our chief droners and men of the middle over the years – moving as we did in Ottawa from a prairie populist prime minister, John Diefenbaker, whose national dream was to “green” the Arctic as the Israelis had greened the desert, to the lisping internationalist, Lester Pearson who – it’s true – won the Nobel Peace Prize, but it’s a good thing he never had to go to war because on the one day the Red Phone rang in his office, he couldn’t find it. He was watching a baseball game and didn’t know where the war phone was. He’d hidden it away in a desk drawer. Only to be followed by an expert canoeist, the ascetic and acerbic Pierre Trudeau who, after dating Barbra Streisand and Margot Kidder, took a flower child in tow to the marriage chamber. All seemed to be bliss, there seemed to be a fine monkish air of decorum in Bytown, until his wife showed up bra-less for supper with Fidel Castro, her nipples bare through a sheer blouse, and then she took to dancing at Studio 54 in New York and hung out for a weekend in a Toronto hotel with all the Rolling Stones. To inflict even more pain on the proud Trudeau, we tossed him out of office, making a man called Joe Who our prime minister – a man who’d never in his life had another job – but then, cruel as we are, we let him keep the job for only nine months. Then we put Trudeau back in office. Before he quit, Trudeau the disciplined intellectual, the man of exquisite taste and manners, had actually given the Western part of the nation the finger, had told French taxi strikers to eat shit, and had told parliamentary back benchers that they were “nobodies” and one of them to fuck off (“fuddle duddle”), yet when he died, the people went into a paroxysm of praise and lament, even in Quebec (where else but in Canada could you have a Revolution that was Quiet? Where else but in Canada would a federal government support a séparatiste party – the Bloc – whose only policy is to destroy federalism? Where else but in Canada would the leader of such a séparatiste party be treated as if he were a Right Honourable member in good standing and not Benedict Arnold?)
As for Quebec as a whole…well, not even the French from France understand the Québécois, so scrupulously determined to preserve their pure laine culture – especially the pure woolliness of it all. They have enacted laws to guard their language, so that inspectors with measuring sticks go from store to store to make sure that the lettering on signs in French is larger than the lettering in English on English signs by at least a centimetre, and when the oh-so-secular Québécois cry vierge, hostie, ciboire, tabernacle, they seem to be chanting tidbits from the old catechism. In fact, they are cursing along the lines, in English, of bugger off, suck this, my sweet ass. The scatological is hidden inside the sacramental.
Who knows this? Do they want anyone to know? Not necessarily; who else in the world can walk up to you and, as far as he’s concerned, call you a suckhole to your face and smile as you cross yourself, believing you have just been blessed? Clever, we’re clever as we cling to the ledge of the world, muttering that we have no identity, that we have no history. Again, so that no one will blame us, or hold us to account for anything, we never tell the Americans that they have tried to invade us twice – and tried through their whiskey merchants and cowboys to steal our West. But we gunned down their booze merchants and defeated their federal armies. We chased those armies back across the border – and the second time (during the war of 1812) we marched south and burned their capital city. To make things look good, like nothing had happened, Washington painted their charred government house white – and we have refused to rub it in – or give ourselves a belligerent history – by telling them that we’re responsible for the White House.
Our determination to show a flat billboard face to the world marks our musical culture, too. None but a Canadian rock band – the greatest of all – would have called themselves – with simple, splendid, self-deprecating arrogance – The Band. Not surprisingly, the second greatest, as true Canadians, called themselves The Guess Who. No one but a Canadian would have carried on like Glenn Gould – the silver bullet among interpreters of Bach and Beethoven, a musician who was a great natural showman – seated on a dilapidated chair as if it were the edge of the abyss, wrapped in his scarf as he played with mittens on his hands. He was the toast of the concert halls, but what did he do? Dismissed it all as vaudeville, dismissed public performance as if it were as irrelevant as the appendix, and refused to ever play in public again, a recluse tinkling to no one but machines in closed recording studios, a true Canadian, a powerful presence, a studied absence.
So, what’s the advantage of all this dodging, all this disdain for the glitter, let alone the glitz, of stardom? Well, we have – for all our need for law and order (and we have cities like Calgary in which brawling and free-booting businessmen will not cross against a red traffic light even in the emptiness of 3 o’clock in the morning) – a remarkable freedom.
In the United States, upright citizens suffer through a House Un-American Activities Committee because they not only know who they’re supposed to be – good homogenized patriotic, hand-over-the-heart Americans – but they insist on it. Such a committee in Canada would be laughable. If anyone ever suggested a Senate Un-Canadian Activities Committee, the nation would fall on its face laughing. We still refuse to agree on what the words to our national anthem are. We don’t know who we are and we don’t want to. That way we don’t have to be anybody’s anything. It is a terrific freedom. People can curse us for being wrong, or vulgar, or stupid – but not un-Canadian. In fact, since we don’t have to be anybody’s anything, we can pretend to be everybody else, and if we make a mistake, they take the blame.
Our largest corporations got very rich during the Viet Nam War, several got rich in South Africa (do those Canadians who supported sanctions against South Africa and the Afrikaners know that the architetcs of apartheid took as their model for control and oppression our brutal system of “homeland” reserves, do they know that many Afrikaner intellectuals believe that the only people in the world that they share a vision of righteous isolation with are the Québécois? Does anyone among us ask why that might be so?). Know it or not, many of our corporations are still getting profoundly rich in South and Central America, but when is the last time you saw or heard of an anti-Canadian demonstration in the streets of Santiago? We’re so clean we squeak, the sound the sullen mouse makes beside the lumbering elephant. Haw! The Americans are our whipping boys, we blame them for our economic failures and cultural woes – while, if they think about us at all, it’s to assure us that we are lucky to be out mingling among them.
And actually, we are: not so much lucky, but among them. We’re insidious infiltrators inside their system. Do you know – do they know – that nearly 40 percent of their major television reporters around the world and commentators at home are Canadian? It’s true. Every night we tell millions of Americans how to see the world, how to see their wars and their movie stars and heroes and bums, their dreams achieved and broken. And if Americans ever laugh at their own insanity, Canadians control the scripts. On the loneliest night of the American week, the television program Saturday Night Live is a joke conceived of and produced by Canadians. Think of the Canadian comics – Jim Carrey, John Candy, Dan Akroyd, the SCTV McKenzie brothers, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Tommy Chong, Samantha Bee and the Atomic Fireballs…the list goes on and on, Canadian laughter at American expense. As for expensive performers, think of the singer Céline Dion – who speaks French, who sings in English, who has become the Queen of Las Vegas with the Cirque du Soleil, the most imaginative circus in the history of the world, as her Court – and who knows or cares that she’s Canadian, let alone Québécois? To the world, she’s a nobody from nowhere except that she’s a star, a celebrity, and if celebrity is now the opium of the people, then she – the perfect Canadian – is a citizen of the world.
As such, this archetypal Canadian – no matter how public – is invisible – he is that no one who is everyone from nowhere, a man like Rich Little…the most skilled show-biz impersonator in American history. Having no voice of his own, he has had everyone else’s – male or female – and he “did” everyone else, as they say, perfectly. Patrons in Las Vegas and the power folk in the White House preferred him to the real thing. In half an hour, when he performed in the intimacy of the White House, they got John Wayne talking to Richard Nixon, Sylvester Stallone talking to Ronnie Reagan, Bill Clinton talking to the Pope.
“Boffo,” as they say in Variety, the American showbiz bible, because you see you pick up a few tricks while clinging to the ledge of the world. You learn how to amiably draw no public attention to yourself while secretly having your own way. Canadians (those Mounties, never forget those Mounties) could be the world’s greatest secret agents. Who knows? A secret agent is secret. But remember our man in Iran during the Carter years, during the Iran hostage crisis, the biggest story in the world – and our ambassador, Ken Taylor, actually freed American hostages and got them out of the country. He explained to a flabbergasted and thankful America – when asked – that to get the Americans out of Iran he had only to “disguise them as Canadians.”
Sound and fury behind a bland face.
We take pride in our Blue Beret peace keepers ( how bland in the theatre of war can peacekeeping be? ). But that role is actually long gone, ever since the Serbian-Croatian War, gone since the battle of the Medak Pocket (1993) in which our boys, after days of ferocious fire-fighting, drove the Croat troops back into their own territory. Fierce. Many Blue Berets came home emotional wrecks. Who knows? Who has heard of the Medak Pocket, a battle that changed entirely our fighting sense of ourselves in this global village we call our peace keeping home.
It was that global villager, Marshall McLuhan (what a perfect Canadian - the secret conservative adored by a New York advertising world that he abhorred), who came closest to the point about our nationally (psychically) divided selves when he said that English Canada leapt directly from the eighteenth century into the twentieth century, skipping the romantic assertion of self so central to the nineteenth century, while Quebec – as counter culture to the nation – lives in the self-aggrandizing nineteenth century as if that century were an arrondissement, dreaming of an independent national orbit, knowing such a state can never be. It’s hilarious in its contradiction. Deadpan. Slapstick. We stand astride life as if it were a seesaw, balancing, waiting.
The prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, who forecast that “The twentieth century shall be the century of Canada”, was wonderfully Canadian in that he was right when he was wrong – and absolutely so. That is, he was right if Samuel Beckett touched any chord in the contemporary heart, and we know that he did. Being two cultures in one country, both waiting for the century to be ours, we are like Beckett’s two tramps by the side of the road, watching in amazement as the Pozzos and Luckys of this world pass through our lives, and we wait. Bland-faced, we wait, and wait, and shrug and make self-deprecating jokes and sly probes – as McLuhan would have it. The probative Trudeau’s most characteristic gesture, after completing a comic pirouette behind an august person like the Queen, was a shrug. You can’t get any more contemporary – any more tragically comic – than that shrug, a shrug we take to the grave.
The defining saint in our history is the Jesuit, Jean de Brébeuf – who shrugged as he was tortured and burned to a crisp at the stake. His skull, saved from the ashes, is now an object of worship – but worshipped in a way that accommodates our divided, duplicitous Canadian mind. There are two Brébeuf skulls on display – one Brébeuf skull (right half bone, left half wax) in Quebec, and another Brébeuf skull (left half bone, right half wax) in Ontario. Who’s to know?
