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I do but I'm not aware of any programs that have characters chanting patriotic stuff and waving flags.
The most I see is the occasional flag in the background and USA t shirts but that's about it.
I do but I'm not aware of any programs that have characters chanting patriotic stuff and waving flags.
The most I see is the occasional flag in the background and USA t shirts but that's about it.
I edited my post I think probably after you posted with links. I see it on American news, by regular people and by politicians.
Who are all these chest thumping patriots waving flags and stuff? i very rarely even hear the term "usa is the best country in the world" or people chanting "usa usa usa!"
Agreed..
Most of what i see in the media,forums and social interaction is how much Americans hate their country,starting with their duly elected President and the democrat voting majority that put him there,(Twice)
Hate his administration.
Hate the government,
Hate all social programs.
hate the poor,
hate visible minorities,
hate environmentalists.
ETC.
its so bad theres even Talk of some states ceding from the collective.
And all the while a rightwing media dedicated to ramping up/fomenting the attitude of hate.
As for the view of many Americans when it comes to Canada?=Commie pinko nanny state to the north.
From my own experiences, I too have noticed this oddity about many Canadians in a plethora of forms. As some others have mentioned, I've seen it manifested in the media, in books, in ordinary people, etc. There is an almost cult-like obsession or natural tendency for Canadians to compare themselves to Americans in a multitude of ways. The US is the standard (higher or lower) that Canadians hold themselves to. It's evident in examples such as the article provided in the OP. The odd/ funny thing is, this couldn't be further from what is happening in the US. The overwhelming majority of people in the US simply do not care about Canada whatsoever, and it is extremely rare that the country or its citizens are ever really thought or talked about in day-to-day life. Now, I'm not saying that this is never the case and that Americans never compare themselves to Canada. That is simply false as well, and other posters have pointed out some examples too. However, it doesn't happen nearly as much as the other way around. It is so incredibly one-sided that it's basically a big joke. I think that this is less true of those who live near the border (Buffalo, Seattle, etc.), but for the rest of us, I think that what I say is pretty accurate. When looking abroad I think Americans more look at the likes of China and European countries as a source of comparison.
I think that Canada struggles with forming its own identity apart from its enormous and powerful neighbor to the south. When it does have some semblance of an identity, it is almost as if it is defined by a negative instead of a positive. It's kind of like, "we're Canadian...a.k.a. we're not American".
I remember being in Canada during the 2010 World Cup and eating lunch at a restaurant. The match that was being shown was the US and Ghana. I remember that whenever Ghana scored (and also when they ultimately won the match), that the vast majority of Canadians watching would enthusiastically cheer and root them on. To be honest, I was really taken aback by this. Not that I have anything whatsoever against the nation of Ghana or its people, but I would have surely thought that our Canadians friends would be cheering for the US over Ghana. Again, nothing against Ghana, but I thought that surely most Canadians would identify more with and feel more kinship with the US than Ghana. Like I said, it just kind of shocked me, because I know that if I had no skin in the game and it was Canada vs Ghana, then I (and I think most Americans) would have been cheering for Canada.
Overall, I think that these things that I've been describing seem to have less of an effect in Quebec however. I think that Quebec (for obvious reasons) has its own strong identity separate from Anglo Canada and this helps to separate it from the US as well.
For the whole post, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to 'bash' Canada and I'm not anti-Canadian by any stretch of the word. On the contrary, I like Canada a lot and have many Canadian friends who I keep in touch with regularly and care for. I don't think that I'm alone either, I think that most Americans have very positive sentiments regarding Canada. 96% of Americans viewed Canada favorably according to this 2012 poll (Love thy neighbour: Americans love Canada more than any other country... and no prizes for guessing that Iran is the least popular | Mail Online). Thus, I think that given the overwhelming warm feelings that most Americans have of Canada, I think it sometimes comes as a bit of a shock when we see some of the vitriol that is thrown at the US from north of the border. Again, just because, while it happens unfortunately on both sides sometimes, it seems to be a far more common occurrence from Canada to the US. I've lived in 6 countries on 3 different continents (not Canada, though) and I've never really experienced anything like this in other countries. It just comes off as some kind of inferiority complex or something; very odd imo.
P.S. For those who say that Canadians are constantly bombarded by US products and TV, etc. While this may be true, it wouldn't be if there wasn't a market for it in Canada. Don't buy/watch/ consume American products and then they'd go away. However, obviously that's not the case and Canadians seem to be eating up more and more American exports all the time. Seems a little hypocritical on some levels.
Just my $0.02.
Last edited by CityLover9; 04-06-2014 at 08:26 AM..
You're posting to hobbesdj as though he/she knows nothing about Canada, but he/she has lived in both countries. Have you?
I have also lived in both Canada and the US, and I agree with everything hobbesdj said. Without question, ignorance exists on both sides of the border, not on the US side only. The difference is that MOST Americans will concede they know little about Canada, whereas MANY Canadians honestly believe they know everything there is to know about the US (the fact is that most Canadians know far less about the US than they've convinced themselves they do).
I know which of these two scenarios I find more annoying.
And Canadians have got to get over the whole Americans don't know anything about Canada thing. I love Canada, and I'm probably a more proud Canadian after 17 years in the US than I ever was when I lived there. But the fact is that Canada is a little-known entity in much of the world. Why does a beautiful, wealthy, modern, dynamic country like Canada not have a more prominent global role/identity? I have no idea. I've never understood it, but it is what it is. And that's not the fault of the US or of Americans.
Do you honestly believe that the Canadian media don't spoon-feed crap to 35 million of you?
Do you not realize that Americans "confront" similar questions and comments (often sermons, really) from Canadians about the US? The irony, of course, is that most of these questions/comments/sermons come from Canadians vacationing, shopping, or wintering in the US. Go figure.
How would you feel if tens of thousands of Americans descended upon Canada for 6 months every year (as they felt was their God-given right to do), and then proceeded to complain endlessly about Canada to Canadians?
I've also lived in three different provinces, and I know that Canadians are every bit as misinformed and unknowledgeable about other provinces as (they bitterly complain) Americans are about Canada. Go ahead and ask a Canadian who has always lived in one province what they know about province X. If you don't immediately encounter blank stares, you'll at least get some pretty entertaining responses.
As far as I'm concerned, unless you've lived in both countries, you're underqualified to make well-informed judgments about the important differences between them. I say this to Americans, as well, though in my experience, Americans are far less likely to criticize Canada (to me, at least) as Canadians are to criticize and insult the US (in front of my US-born and raised kids).
I have lived there for 6 months of the year, in states ranging from California to Florida, for at least the last fourteen years now and before that travelled frequently there due to business and yes I'm assuredly most qualified to perform a comparison.
Canadians would be more than happy to get over the whole Canadian versus U.S. thing if such as yourself would simply stop assigning a condescending attitude towards those who choose to address perceived slights with characterizing them with that patronizing crappola of having an "idenity crisis".
You are way off the mark and refused to address my points about the Leadership down there yakking about Canada to the extent that nearly every American I interact with has had at one time or another those stupid ideas about Canada. Now answer my question about where do they get those ideas and WHY do they pass them around like fallen fruit off the gossip tree UNLESS they agree with them?
I hail from a time when travelling throughout Europe on business and pleasure it was not uncommon to come upon touring Americans claiming to be Canadians and can tell you've never once been faced with the conundrum of them claiming to be us for matters of convenience and expediency but at the same time claiming to be better than us in all things from military might to freedoms extended. You have never had to sit through a discussion of debating the political decisions made by Canada to remain out of the Vietnam conflict in disparaging tone with my answer simply being to reach over and tap his Canadian flag patch on his back-pack.
The immediate neighbour on both sides of me in small town Ontario in the sixties were Americans and I can tell you I learned a lot about incorrect assumptions from them and remain close friends with both of them to this very day. They have told me many times in the interim 50 years or so of knowing them that they still wonder at the ignorance of their brethren as regards Canada.
Canadians are far and away better educated about all things American than the opposite and if you are hypothesizing the reverse you and I are at loggerheads from the get go because that is just simply not the case.
As to the snowbirds, of which I am one; Canadians offering up UN-SOLICITED derogatory nonsense about the U.S. are being ignorantly rude, but I would caution putting that into a perspective where it might be compared with a senile idiot like McCain and an opportunistic political hack like Napolitano claiming before the WORLDS press those terrorists responsible for killing over 3500 of your innocent people, entered through Canada, a subsequent apology for that egregious accusation, when confirmed that was not the case, is still to be forthcoming. U.S. citizens may have learned through information in the interim that lie as fostered by hacks was floated seeking cheap political traction but it still remains to this day, believed by many of your compatriots.
My history being what it has been will tell you about the northern lakes of Canada virtually being bought up by Americans for all things from private cottage ownership to huge old resort lodges being built for companies like GoodYear and General Electric etc.. Canadians of all walks of life have been subjected to large numbers of visiting Americans comparative to their small town northern populations for far longer than the reverse.
A neighbouring American to a cottage we owned on the Burnt River used to pattern his visits so he could avail himself of our universal healthcare so denigrated by your leadership by the simple expediancy of him having a Canadian address and proof of property ownership. I think that common fraud trumps snowbirds perhaps insulting while spending thousands of dollars in the U.S.
A more recent example of this stuff would be a senate hearing where a Canadian doctor invited to participate regarding your ACA was immediately set upon by some Congessman or Senator in an attempt to blindside her with the query "how many Canadians die each year on waiting lists for healthcare in Canada". He got schooled in no uncertain terms but imagine that nonsense about Canada coming out of a senior representative in a very public forum for all of your citizens to listen to and compare it to Canadians in officialdom discussing the U.S. in public and I defy you to come up with a parallel type of denigration.
Your population has been inundated with Canada being used as insult fodder by your elected leaders for decades. The reverse is simply not the case. We know better
When you live in the US you rarely see Americans talking about Canada - let alone bragging about anything in relation to it. No one thinks about Canada very much. But live in Canada you see the US brought up constantly in an almost neurotic fashion. .
I really hate to burst your bubble but I'm saying this with all honesty! Day to day the topic of the U.S rarely comes up in conversation. There are cultural influences through TV and obviously we shop at many U.S big box stores but I can't remember the last time I talked about the 'U.S' to family and friends in day to day conversation. So I think you are grossly overstating how much the U.S is brought up in day to day Canadian life. To say it is brought up in an almost neurotic fashion is laughable really.
Perhaps you as an American notice this coming up in conversation with Canadians because when you are or were here they knew you were American so the topic just came up. As soon as you were or are gone, they just don't discuss the matter anymore.
It is the same if I go down to the U.S and people would know I'm from Canada - the topic would come up because well I'm Canadian lol...
I've seen several threads on this forum where the sole purpose seems to be to create some sort of animousity between Canadians and people from the US. Baffling, to say the least.
I think we can all agree that people in the US believe that they are the greatest people from the greatest nation in the world. I don't think that anyone minds that people in the US are so proud of themselves. I would hope that everyone is proud of their own country.
Canada is a multicultural country where 20% of the population is a visible minority and 20% is foreign born (link). New Canadians choose Canada because they embrace the values and quality of life in Canada, not because they envy the quality of life in another country, such as Syria or the US. There is no rivalry between Canadians and the US, Mexico, or Russia. Canadians don't care about people from any one country more than another. Today, they are talking about the Ukraine because they care about the political shifts in Eastern Europe.
Canadians know that they have the second largest country in the world, one third of the world's fresh water supply, that oil flows like water, that Canada's popuation is one tenth the population of the US, that the number of people living in poverty in the US is equal to the total population of Canada ... you get the picture. Canadians, like people from the US, are also proud of their country and wouldn't trade it for anything.
From my own experiences, I too have noticed this oddity about many Canadians in a plethora of forms. As some others have mentioned, I've seen it manifested in the media, in books, in ordinary people, etc. There is an almost cult-like obsession or natural tendency for Canadians to compare themselves to Americans in a multitude of ways. The US is the standard (higher or lower) that Canadians hold themselves to. It's evident in examples such as the article provided in the OP. The odd/ funny thing is, this couldn't be further from what is happening in the US. The overwhelming majority of people in the US simply do not care about Canada whatsoever, and it is extremely rare that the country or its citizens are ever really thought or talked about in day-to-day life. Now, I'm not saying that this is never the case and that Americans never compare themselves to Canada. That is simply false as well, and other posters have pointed out some examples too. However, it doesn't happen nearly as much as the other way around. It is so incredibly one-sided that it's basically a big joke. I think that this is less true of those who live near the border (Buffalo, Seattle, etc.), but for the rest of us, I think that what I say is pretty accurate. When looking abroad I think Americans more look at the likes of China and European countries as a source of comparison.
I think that Canada struggles with forming its own identity apart from its enormous and powerful neighbor to the south. When it does have some semblance of an identity, it is almost as if it is defined by a negative instead of a positive. It's kind of like, "we're Canadian...a.k.a. we're not American".
I remember being in Canada during the 2010 World Cup and eating lunch at a restaurant. The match that was being shown was the US and Ghana. I remember that whenever Ghana scored (and also when they ultimately won the match), that the vast majority of Canadians watching would enthusiastically cheer and root them on. To be honest, I was really taken aback by this. Not that I have anything whatsoever against the nation of Ghana or its people, but I would have surely thought that our Canadians friends would be cheering for the US over Ghana. Again, nothing against Ghana, but I thought that surely most Canadians would identify more with and feel more kinship with the US than Ghana. Like I said, it just kind of shocked me, because I know that if I had no skin in the game and it was Canada vs Ghana, then I (and I think most Americans) would have been cheering for Canada.
Overall, I think that these things that I've been describing seem to have less of an effect in Quebec however. I think that Quebec (for obvious reasons) has its own strong identity separate from Anglo Canada and this helps to separate it from the US as well.
For the whole post, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to 'bash' Canada and I'm not anti-Canadian by any stretch of the word. On the contrary, I like Canada a lot and have many Canadian friends who I keep in touch with regularly and care for. I don't think that I'm alone either, I think that most Americans have very positive sentiments regarding Canada. 96% of Americans viewed Canada favorably according to this 2012 poll (Love thy neighbour: Americans love Canada more than any other country... and no prizes for guessing that Iran is the least popular | Mail Online). Thus, I think that given the overwhelming warm feelings that most Americans have of Canada, I think it sometimes comes as a bit of a shock when we see some of the vitriol that is thrown at the US from north of the border. Again, just because, while it happens unfortunately on both sides sometimes, it seems to be a far more common occurrence from Canada to the US. I've lived in 6 countries on 3 different continents (not Canada, though) and I've never really experienced anything like this in other countries. It just comes off as some kind of inferiority complex or something; very odd imo.
P.S. For those who say that Canadians are constantly bombarded by US products and TV, etc. While this may be true, it wouldn't be if there wasn't a market for it in Canada. Don't buy/watch/ consume American products and then they'd go away. However, obviously that's not the case and Canadians seem to be eating up more and more American exports all the time. Seems a little hypocritical on some levels.
Just my $0.02.
Interesting post. I notice an oddity in many posts coming from Americans on this topic. A lot of posts are at pains to tell us that you never even think about us, and for some reason you seem to think that is a good thing. You seem to think it odd that we think about you as though you were just any old country in the world - hobbesdj gave an example of Denmark, I believe.
What's funny about this is that you interpret that as a lack of identity on our part, when it can just as easily be turned around to show that we know who we are well enough to know what we are not. It could also be turned around to show that Americans are too self-absorbed to notice who is on their borders, and that is something that has caused empires to fall in the past.
During so much of the years since 9/11, there was so much "why does the world hate us" stuff coming from south of the border (check how many Google searches have variations on that theme), you would think that Americans were having an identity crisis. But you (collective you) seem to slide right over the answer when it is presented to you in the form of your northern neighbour. There is an implied mind-blowing arrogance in the notion of a world power not knowing a thing about the people on your northern border and assuming that they are just like you. Not that we're important. And no one said that we wanted to be important in the way that the US is important. But take that kind of ignorance and arrogance combined and translate that over to Iraq, Afghanistan and troubled regions of the world, along with the assumption that everyone wants freedom and democracy, American-style, and well, what do you end up with? Terrorism within your country, which is then, far too often chalked up to jealousy of your 'freedom and democracy.'
Ignorance, however benignly meant, is dangerous not just to you, but to the rest of the world. And that is why we think about you. You leave us no choice. Why did you think, back in the Cold War, of the USSR and communism, so obsessively, that it lingers today in it's antipathy for what you call 'socialism?' A lack of identity or on the basis of know-your-enemy?
You know so little about us and yet for some reason you assume that we think we have more in common with you than with Ghana, no offence of course to Ghana. But at the same time you say you never think about us, except, vaguely, and in oh yeah, there are people up north and without knowing a thing about them, we're generally fond of them. Sort of like we're friend-zoned.
I'm not a sports fan but what I've observed around my husband and his friends, is that Canadians cheer for the little guy in a game where they aren't involved. Canadian sports fans may correct me if I'm wrong.
my 2 cents and for the record, I also like you back just fine.
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