So Canada’s gone and done it again. This closet nation of only 34 million moderately-socialist quietly-unassuming people has stolen the world stage once more.
Not like they haven’t done it before, with TV actors William Shatner and Pamela Sue Anderson. Boldly going where no man has gone before, with a rack of Olympian proportions…
Music awards across the category spectrum – Neil Young, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Leonard Cohen, Céline Dion, Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne and Michael Bublé. Hitting the high notes in hard rock, alternative, country, pop and jazz …
Comedians, actors and directors: Jim Carrey, Donald Sutherland and James Cameron. Thinkers and writers: Marshall McLuhan and Margaret Atwood.
Let’s not even talk hockey players. Wayne Gretzky and his Canuck cousins have always owned the ice. They shoot, they score… endlessly…
So what is it with this bedroom community of America, this frozen backyard of moose people? They’ve already taken top awards for everything worth doing on earth. Couldn’t they have left space alone?
This past season, it was like some cheap B-grade series smoked up to fill a slot on the Space channel. Oddities in Orbit. Next thing you know there’s Chris Hadfield, whom nobody knew from a quasar, suddenly all over the internet, playing guitar in space, twittering and hosting videos, getting kids excited about astrophysics, for god’s sake!
Chris Hadfield, Canadian über-astronaut
Why did he have to be Canadian? Are they so good they can have anything they want, so long as it doesn’t require the world’s biggest military-industrial complex and a debt so deep you could drop a trillion into it and wait all day without hearing the thud at the bottom?
Where does he get off being so damned clever, singing David Bowie’s Space Oddity as his swan song before coming back down to Earth? With the nerve to change the lyrics from depressing to uplifting… Does he have a real Indian guru for a life coach or what?
Anyway, it’s just really sad that Canada keeps churning out interesting and intelligent people who seem to have a real heart under that winter coat they wear most of the year. If they’re so smart, why don’t they rule the world?
Alan Annand is an astrologer, a writer of mystery thrillers and a quietly-proud Canadian.
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