What in the goddamn hell has happened to my country since I was born that has made me completely cynical and indifferent to the ol’ Blood and Bandages (our sanguinary flag). At one time I think we were a country to be reckoned with in terms of ethics but now….our moral compass lies shattered on the deck with the pointer bent and the spirit dribbling away. I thought I would offer some things that are driving me nuts about the “false north weak and enslaved”.
1. Our country essentially invented peacekeeping during the extremely dangerous Suez Crisis in 1956 when the world hung on the verge of another world war…that one would have been fought with nuclear firecrackers and would have saved me the job of having to write this…I never have any luck 
I didn’t know much about Lester Pearson , our then foreign minister but he came up trumps by engaging in diplomacy and mediation to help end the possible lethal blow-up that might have occurred. Fast forward to today and we have the bellicose prattling of John Baird stoking the fires of misunderstanding with Putin’s Russia over the murky situation in the Ukraine…where have all the good diplomats gone? I could gas on for a long time about the cut and thrust of the Ukraine crisis but suffice to say…no one is Satan and no one is Yaweh….and the problem needs mediating NOT CHEERLEADING!!
2. As I type the contest for Stanley’s Bucket is ongoing….yay. Why does Canada define itself by a strange game with weird equipment (what the fuck is a puck?) that is played by citizens and foreigners alike on teams that have few, if any locals? I was in a lounge in Vancouver when a young man yelled out “we scored” as Vancouver potted a goal on their way to ultimate defeat. What this college student had to do with this event which was happening in Boston, some 4000 miles away is incomprehensible to me. Insanity. Another time some nonce was trying to say that the Olympic Hockey win in 2012 was “the defining moment in the new Canadian millennium”. Holy shit! Nothing more important than that is going to happen for the next 988 years?! The one thing I have no problem with is hockey salaries and hockey revenues. If the idiotic fans are willing to pay the freight then I don’t care if they pay hockey players a billion dollars each per season…the wages are only grotesque because the fans interest is grotesquer (not a word but it sounds cool). Watch your local team of any type (hockey, baseball, roller derby) or better still go DO SOMETHING…..but stop worshiping the false god of icy, skaty, pucky, bullshit.
3. Like it or not….we live the way we do because we have a big bully bodyguard living just to the south of us that treats us okay….get used to it. I am getting soooo tired of Canadians climbing up on pedestals of beaver shit and bellyaching about the US. The Yanks are our biggest trading partners, they speak the same language, they have similar values and are great fun to visit. I admit that their foreign policy is surreal in its ignorance, their general international ethics are that of a spoiled 6 year old child and they spend on their military like “Independence Day” was a documentary….but we are not different enough from them to wash our grubby paws…especially not since Mistah Harper. To our American friends I say “thanks for your friendship but could you gradually become a little less crazy”.
4. Canada does not need the useless F-35 multi-role fighter (jack of all trades so it can be shot down on a wider variety of missions). Back in the day we chose the inferior F-18 Hornet over the superior F-16 Falcon because……the Falcon only had one engine and in the vastness of Canada you needed the redundancy of two powerplants. It must be noted that Canada must have shrunk as we now are looking to acquire the F-35 (I think its called the BumbleBee…sure looks like one) which of course has ONE ENGINE!! That progression would seem to indicate that our next military jet will have no engines….it’ll just run on pure hubris. I do think a bit about our military needs and I can’t see a meaningful role for this aircraft in Canada’s national defence other than as a prestige mount for our fighter jocks….I mean who the hell are we supposed to use them against? Lichtenstein? Al Qaeda? Tie fighters?
Ok so…that’s all the complaining I have time or energy for now….laters 🙂
George Benwell
Cutting Remarks 