SHEILA COPPS, THE CANADIAN HERITAGE MINISTER, has an outstanding sense of timing. While Americans are still in the healing process after the Sept. 11 tragedy, Copps has seen fit to announce that the American nation has no heroes.
In a mind-boggling statement uttered last week, Copps asserted that Americans are "hungry for role models" and that they have no choice but to resort to Hollywood to find their heroes. With great self-satisfaction, Copps boasted, "When we created Canada, we didn't need a revolution – we had an evolution."
In spewing this historical ignorance and ugly bigotry, Copps clearly prides herself on the fact that, in 1776, Canadians didn’t have the backbone to stand up for themselves against British economic exploitation.
How anyone that knows anything about the American Revolution could possibly think that not participating in it, when the chance was available, was a good thing is simply laughable.
America has no heroes?
Did Copps somehow miss the myriad stories of sacrifice and bravery in the Sept. 11 tragedy? What is Copps actually saying about the New York firefighters and police officers who gave their lives as they battled to save thousands of innocent people from the burning WTC towers?
What is Copps saying about individuals such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln – as well as everything they stood for?
What is she saying about former President Ronald Reagan? He fuelled the disintegration of the most evil regime in world history by shrewdly forcing the Soviets to overextend themselves and spend themselves into bankruptcy. Anyone who is familiar with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago could easily attest to the fact that, in helping to put communism on the ash heap of history, Reagan became one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century.
Has Copps never heard of Martin Luther King Jr.? Has she never heard of any of the individuals that could be placed on that long list of American heroes that anyone who knows anything about American history could compile?
What Canadian heroes could Copps point to that could even equal American heroes in number – or in feat?
Let me say this: because I was interested in one dimension of Canadian foreign policy, I had to study all of Canadian history for years. In doing so, I stumbled into the most effective cure I have ever found for insomnia.
In the end, it is obvious that Copps’ bizarre statements are a reflection of Canada’s continuing and pathetic infantilism. The Canadian nation persists in trying to define itself by insulting Americans. Canadian nationalists continue to announce how they are not like “those Americans" because they have absolutely no idea who they are themselves.
Trapped inside this self-made prison, people like Copps try to perpetuate the psychotic delusion that Americans regret their Revolution and desperately long for the Monarchy. This hallucination stems from the agonizing humiliation that Canadian nationalists must suffer when facing the reality that their nation has never produced anything close to something as sacred, wise and unique as the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.
And it is obviously no easy thing for Canadians to endure the lingering sense of embarrassment that comes from waving a flag that is devoid of any real meaning.
It must also be excruciating to look upon a neighbor that is the most successful country in the world – and that has nurtured a profound respect for a flag that actually possesses serious and meaningful themes.
No wonder Canadian politicians like Sheila Copps foam at the mouth when they talk about Americans. And it is simply hilarious, in the most tragic sense, how these individuals pride themselves on their “tolerance” and "multiculturalism," when they simultaneously engage in anti-Americanism – a disposition that, as sociologist Paul Hollander has demonstrated, can easily be related with racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism.
In the end, it is clear where Copps and all of her politically-correct and anti-American Canadian nationalists belong: in the company of Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and all others that swim in the putrid swamp of hate.