A World of Cheese, For your Pleasure

And later,

All 50 or so students hit the floor, everyone that is, except for a couple of students who continued working at their computers. Were they Asian? ...

Mr. Gill's rampage has resonated through the anglophone community. Although Montreal is a big city, English-speaking Montreal is not. It is more like a small town, where everyone knows everyone else. And because English-speaking high-school graduates must go through the CEGEP system before university, Dawson funnels anglophone kids from across the city into one institution.

And then she continues talking about English this and English that. There is a lot to be criticized here, but let's start with Ms Wong's background. She was a former Maoist who then returned to Canada and began working for the Globe and Mail as a Chinese correspondent. She is , or was, sensitive to cultural and racial issues. Wong is known to be confrontational in her interview styles, but was very popular nonetheless. I remember thinking in the mid-to-late nineties that she was a stuck-up know-it-all, but she has actually managed to create a hell of a good rep in Canadian journalism.

When you read the article, she starts talking about the linguistic struggle in Quebec for no apparent reason. It seems to come out of nowhere. She suggests that the three killers were alienated due to the language problems. This suggests to me that you might want to watch out Franco-Ontarians, or old-world Italians or something. She seems to be making the claim that this "pressure" from the xenophobic and racist French community caused these people to snap. And she should know; she's seen this intolerance in China first hand. Plus, she's Jan-motherfucking-Wong.

Then she asks, out of the blue, "Were they Asian?"

What the fuck? The problem is that if the guy reponding to her is to be believed, most people ask him that question. This isn't really a criticism of Jan Wong, but perhaps a criticism of everyone. This is what they would expect. Stereotypes exist partly because these things were observed in certain people, but they persist because of you and me. This is a rather telling example of this, if the guy is not exaggerating, and I won't say that he wasn't. It was, after all, a spectacular day, and there were a thousand exaggerations that day.

Here is where I will defend Jan Wong. She says: "the perpetrator was not pure laine, the argot for a "pure" francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial "purity" is repugnant. Not in Quebec."

This requires a bit of explaining. I am not thrilled about siding with this deranged fool (or infamy-seeking snob) , but here goes. The term, as I am told and understand it, is a term used to describe the burgeoning new kind of people, the new nation (in ideology at least) developing in North America. Today it is used simply to describe descendants of the French settlers from hundreds of years ago called the québécois, and it has no more value assigned to it than the word métis (although originally it may have, for example, pure laine is better than whatever epithets they used to describe the Native population; it connotes a unique goodness not found elsewhere). I view it as a silly and cute little term. However, what if you are not one of them? What if you are a black, anglophone from the much-derided Ontario that just got here? You know a little French and can translate those two words: Pure Wool. Well that means something else to you, and it should not necessarily be the same meaning as it would for of them. It certainly looks like they are talking about a certain kind of cultural, lisguistic and, for the guy mentioned above, racial purity, which he will never attain, nor will his descendants. Furthermore, there are laws that say that their language and way has precedence over yours in all aspects of life whenever you step outside the home (although he will learn that he can live perfectly well in English, depending on where you live and work). For that guy, pure laine could certainly sound like a special, higher distinction for a group of people that he can't ever be a part of.

I would expect more from Jan Wong than to (in)cite this kind of cultural divide. And yes, she's the one inciting it. There is often enough an undercurrent of a language issue in the province, and you come to live with that. But I can tell you that there was none that day. NONE. English and French alike shared the same experience of disbelief, shock, disgust and rage. They shared the same call to action and support. English people spoke French, French people spoke English. Everything cam together that day. You know why, Janfuckingwong? Because the massacre had nothing to do with language.

I cannot answer the question of why these things have happened in Montreal only. But you would have to do a lot better than to suggest that the bigotry against minorities is what caused it. Have you seen how native people are treated in Winnipeg and across the country? EVERYONE feels entitled to shit on them. Perhaps Manitoba society needs to be examined before there are any incidents, since prevention is better than a cure.

I suspect that someone was given too long a leash at the Globe and Mail and forgot how to write opinion articles with large scope that make sense. I wonder what the fallout will be if any.