Continental Breakfast – Blazingcatfur

Quillette⁚ Watching My Great Nation Lapse Into a Cult of Self-Abasement

For more than 20 years, from the mid-’80s to the late-’90s, Morningside, a three-hour daily broadcast that mixed current events with human-interest stories, reigned as the flagship program on CBC Radio. The host of the show during its most successful run was Peter Gzowski, a veteran journalist widely embraced as something very much like Canada’s favourite uncle. On air, Gzowski was affable, chummy, his exchanges with guests routinely punctuated by his signature moist, ingratiating chortle. He was, in fact, that rare man who deserved his very own adjective: avunctuous.

During one broadcast, Gzowski recalled an incident that had occurred at the annual invitational golf tournament he hosted to benefit adult literacy programs across Canada. As one participant, standing next to Gzowski, leaned thoughtfully on his club, another drove a golf cart over his toes. Although it was unclear from the telling whether the cart-driver was American, the first golfer was obviously Canadian, since, shifting gingerly from foot to aching foot, he could only plead, “sorry.” Gzowski shared this anecdote with evident delight, since it struck him as so endearingly, because emblematically, Canadian.

But Gzowski’s soaring contentment with this view of his country and countrymen was no less emblematic. To Canadian nationalists of Gzowski’s era and ilk, the representative Canadian is no hewer of wood or carrier of water, no builder of bridges, roads and railways, no stormer of barricades or keeper of the peace, but a hobbled guest on a verdant fairway, eagerly apologizing for the pleasure of having his toes crushed. “That is what I like about you Canadians,” says Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot in Robertson Davies’s novel The Lyre of Orpheus, “you are so ready to admit fault. It is a fine, if dangerous, national characteristic. You are all ashamed.”

The Media, your moral and intellectual superiors (tm)

Virtually everyone who ends up having first-hand experience with the national media realizes they're amoral liars and smear artists with no scruples, who publish and broadcast things constantly that have no relationship to the truth. And the public knows this, too 🤷‍♂️. https://t.co/VaseIM89jV

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 17, 2021