On Canada, Family, Et Cetera
Sorry I haven’t posted all week. The US Curling teams’ horrible failures really bummed me out. I just came out of my room this morning after four days of being curled up in a dark corner sucking my thumb.
The US-Canada men’s hockey game on Sunday was great, and I don’t even particularly enjoy hockey. I do feel bad though, because after we won on Sunday I said something to the effect of “Sidney Crosby can suck it! USA! USA!” and then after Canada’s women’s team beat us today for the gold medal their fans were like Air Force Academy football fans at the medal ceremony, all cheering loudly and enthusiastically for the US players as they got their medals. Canadians are better winners than Americans, I guess. Then again, maybe they just haven’t won enough things to be bad winners. Being gracious in victory is something that gets tiring after a couple hundred years of awesomeness. Canada may discover that someday. And in all honesty, if we can’t win something I guess it’s okay if Canada wins, unless Australia can win instead.
I was wondering the other day why I always find myself rooting for Australia if the US isn’t a contender to win something. In fact, I’d rather see the Aussies win than Canada, New Zealand, OR the Brits. We’re not even going to discuss anyone else because I don’t root for people who don’t speak English as a first language. I know, I know, I’m a xenophobic bigot racist, but what are you gonna do? It’s not like I can go back in time to last year and vote for Obama, can I? Of course even if I could, I wouldn’t. Because I’m a xenophobic bigot racist. Also, I prefer a President who can do things other than talk about how awesome he is. If I wanted to hear someone go on and on about how awesome he was, I’d record myself in an everyday conversation and play it back through some headphones.
But I digress. Why do I root for Australia at the expense of the other Anglophones in the world? I think I’ve figured it out. The Brits are like our snotty older brother who used to pick on us when we were little but stopped once we hit puberty and beat their ass a couple of times. Now they’ve got a PhD in sociology or something useless like that and always kind of look down their noses at us, but we know we could always call them if we really, really needed anything. We’d just kind of hate ourselves for doing it, and they’d probably never stop complaining about it, even if we’d bailed their ass out of jail a few times ourselves.
The Canadians are our little brother. They’re always there, sleeping in our room, making annoying clicking sounds when they eat, and getting all the praise from our parents. Of course, we can’t really blame them for resenting us a little, considering we do stuff like set their stuffed animals on fire and “accidentally” push them through plate-glass windows, not to mention that we rarely fail to jump on the chance to mock them when they do something stupid. But we’re so close that we kind of get sick of the sight of each other, and when we fight, we don’t mess around. Hell, we tried to invade them twice and that didn’t really work out. They retaliated by inventing hockey and being really good at it, and we responded by stealing their hockey teams and putting them in places like Phoenix, which is like the opposite of Canada. Anyway…
New Zealand? They’re like a distant cousin who lives across the country and is into weird crap like the Dalai Lama, patchouli, and organic food. They’re nice enough, but we don’t really know them all that well, so we don’t give them much of a second thought. Also they’ve never really done anything with their lives other than make their own bio-diesel and learn to play the acoustic guitar.
But Australia? They’re our cousin who’s pretty close to our age and does all the cool stuff we WISH we could do. You know, they were roadies for Metallica (Speed of Sound Tour) and ride around in bad-ass motorcycles and sports cars and seemingly have hot chick in bikinis around them all the time. We don’t get to see them too often, but when we do we have a damned good time. And we usually end up hung over. And when they’re gone we look in the mirror and ask ourselves why we aren’t as cool as they are. Never mind that they’ve been working as bartenders for the last fifteen years and still live with their parents. They’re still kind of our heroes in a way.
And that’s that. I think I captured the gist of international relations within the Anglosphere pretty handily, don’t you?
Racist