The way we learned it in AP US History (IIRC) was that you could really divide the belligerents into four: the Canadians, the British, the Americans, and the Indians. The Canadians definitively won, the British and Americans came out in more or less a draw, and the Indians lost big time.
In general in the US, the completely irrelevant and useless victory at New Orleans makes people think of the war as a victory, conveniently ignoring the massive fail that was the Canadian Campaign. Nobody really got what they wanted out of the war other than Canadians, whose only real goal was to repel a foreign invasion.
To anyone seeing this who’s from another country: beleive it or not, in Canada we actually do have solemn and dignified ways of remembering wars, and this monstrosity is not typical of Canadians in general.
Could be worse, like the Atomic Eggbeater at the corner of Yonge and Queens Quay, or the canoe suspended up in the air in pincers at the Queensway and Windermere…
No, he’s saying that we can act solemn and dignified if we have to.
This memorial doesn’t surprise me much; the public art I’ve seen various places is, well, the word “ridiculous” comes to mind. Here’s a nice statue of Louis Riel.
All hail our Rielian alien overlords? It looks like it would go well in that picture I once saw of the Pope giving a speech in front of a gigantic wall-spanning sculpture that could only be described as “The Resurrection Of Cthulhu”.
I never got Gumy out of that. I always got “Luftwaffe Uber Alles.” You have to admit that bird at the top sure does look like the Nazi eagle, and the 30s-modernistic feel of the edifice really hearkens back to the Nazi-heroic architecture Hitler was so fond of.
My grandfather risked his life 35 times to bomb those fuckers, and the statue they put up to honor him looks like the shit he was blowing up.
To look at a real Canadian war memorial, check out this:
Between Nov 4 and Nov 11, the names of every Canadian who died fighting in the First World War will be projected onto the war memorial in Ottawa, Toronto City Hall, and other locations, in letters big enough to be seen from far away.
*Originally Posted by spoike
I’m embarrassed to say that I had no idea that Douglas Coupland is also an artist. Methinks I’m going to spend time this morning educating myself.
*
Bizarre story from last month - in the midst of packing and moving (don’t ask!), I rented some movies for the kids. Through some weird error at the video store, I got something called Souvenir of Canada in place of the Lassie disc I’d asked for. Instead of taking it back, I did the archetypical Canadian thing, and watched it anyway. It was a really cool film of Douglas Coupland’s Canada House project. Highly recommended, though it’s full of stuff I can’t imagine anyone not from Canada getting.
That’s cool, but there were Canadians in the Revolutionary war English forces too. So couldn’t Canada’s army got it’s ass handed to it by some rowdy farmers and the french.
