Subject: Re: NQOOU
From: Paul Kennedy (kennedyp@toronto.cbc.ca)
Date: Wed Aug 01 2001 - 15:17:25 GMT
>the freer & more advanced the culture,
> the greater the encouragement of individuality & tolerance
> of eccentricity. The more tyrannical & monolithic
> the system the more the citizen is pressed to conform as
> 'one of the guys'.
I guess it's getting pretty plain, Scottie, that you've never been, and
probably never wanted to be, one of the guys.... And maybe that's why you
just don't seem to get it. Most of the guy gangs that I've experienced,
here in the tyrannical and monolithic federation of Canada, exhibited NONE
of the conformity that you so rightly despise. To take an example from the
misty past, I played up to 72 holes of golf, every day, for seven or eight
mis-spent summers of my youth with some combination of the same five or six
golfing friends. It would be almost impossible for me to imagine five or
six more distinct and disparate human beings....
Or, to take a more recent example from more mutually-familiar turf--four of
the bananafish (all of whom happenned to be guys, although it felt to me as
though Cecilia was there in spirit, since I'd lost contact with her
corporeal presence only a week earlier at Wrigley!) convened earlier this
year to take in a game at Yankee Stadium. We were four utterly unique human
beings (if I were to try to describe us individually, it wouldn't make sense
that we'd intentionally convened there); each of whom had no problem
whatsoever with being "one of the guys". In fact, I, for one, found some
sort of warm and fuzzy affirmation of the very civilization that you so
rightly cherish.
> Believe it or not, I've lived (fleetingly) in small town
> Ontario & (at much greater leisure) in small town
> Buckinghamshire. I know in which one the crazy
> professor & the batty old maid will feel more at home.
Though I bow to your infinitely more extensive experience, I confess that I,
too, have had the pleasure of living on both sides of the ditch. I know
that folks from all walks of life, from all over the world, in various
states of sanity, now feel MUCH more "at home", and safe, and welcomed in
Toronto than they ever did in London. (And, as an urbanE Canadian, who
sometimes used to share your distain for my country cousins, I'd advise you
to have a local introduce you to the locals--with all their quirks and
pixilatedness--before I passed judgement on small town Ontario homogeneity.
Or just pick up a book or two by Alice Munro.)
Cheers,
Paul
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