Beautiful Cynicism III

Je suis le seul enfant de ma mère; je suis le quatrième enfant de mon
père. Et je suis sa seule fille. Depuis mon enfance, j’ai entendu des
histoires de mon père et moi: qu’il ne savait pas trop quoi faire avec une fille! He needn’t have worried too much; he loved being outside, and I loved accompanying him. We used to go into the forest on the mountain at the edge of our property to fetch wood. As my dad cut down trees, I’d help load the logs into the back of the truck. When I got tired or bored, I would run off in search of wild berries and flowers. We’d ride back to the house in the old truck, me sitting atop the wood piled in the back, perilously close to falling off. I’d arrive home with moss and mud on my clothes and bugs and twigs in my hair – and a smile on my face.

My father has his own faults and issues (as do we all) and I am
well-versed in them: an awkwardness when it comes to expressing
emotions, a certain cowardice, a passive aggressive streak. Nous sommes
en désaccord sur plusieurs sujets. Pourtant nous pouvons également
trouver un compromis assez facilement. L’insolence et la rudesse de sa
famille, tandis que souvent difficile pour moi, quand même m’a fait plus
fort et capable de me défendre. Mais mon père a tant de qualités, aussi. An avid naturalist and sky watcher, it was my dad who taught me the names of all the flowers and wild grasses in our yard and in our garden; it was he who taught me the names of so many constellations and stars; it was he who taught me how to identify birds based on their plumage and songs; it was he who taught me how to differentiate between the five varieties of salmon. Whether watching him work late at night in my family’s bakery, seeing and smelling and tasting the wonderful breads and pastries he produced from scratch every night; or being woken up at 6 o’clock on a Sunday morning by Strauss or Dvorak or Vivaldi blaring through the speakers as he cooked a humungous family breakfast; or revelling in the sense of complicity as we ridiculed idiotic celebrities and politicians appearing on television; while my childhood and adolescence may not have been all roses and sunshine, much of it was lovely, and these are some of my most vivid memories.

How proud I am of Canada
The country of my birth
Described by other Nations
As the greatest place on Earth

First of all, anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York. Second, anybody who sides with Canada internationally in a debate between the U.S. and Canada, say, Belgium, is somebody whose opinion we shouldn’t care about in the first place. Third, Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head. You know, he’s nice, but you don’t take him seriously. That’s Canada. -Tucker Carlson

Soviet Canuckistan. -Pat Buchanan