And the White N*ggers Have Their Black N*ggers and So on

A good comeback from our new Governor General to Pierre Vallieres, as recorded by Colby Cosh.

As for the rest of the post, it seems to me Cosh's got his cultural stereotyping backwards. I always thought the French were supposed to be Cartesian rationalists, always demanding that the social order abide by the law of the excluded middle, while we Anglos were empiricist muddlers. Cosh's vision is of Gallic dialecticians, laughing at linear Albertans, who apparently really mean it when they tell pollsters they want to secede.



In fact, it was Preston Manning who was the Great Hegelian phenomenologist of recent Canadian politics. From "The West Wants In" (which would have made Roland Barthes green with envy at its multivalency) to his constant tendency, documented by a frustrated Tom Flanagan, to see his own peculiar populism both as a synthesis of the false antagonisms of left and right, and the distillation of the Volkgeist.

[Pictures under Crown Copyright. Reproduction authorized for non-commercial use.]