The Moose Question.

[agoodwinsmith]

I was reading the Tyee, and came across this article by Michael Fellman about what the election of the US president means to Canadians, which he calls “The Moose Question”.

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/07/25/ObamaCan/

 

This is an interesting article, to Canadians, but not what I want to talk about.

 

What I noticed is that the first paragraph of the piece contains a phrase that makes me slightly uncomfortable.  And, I note, it seems to have made the editorial team at the Tyee uncomfortable as well because they used the second paragraph as the teaser for the article on their home page.

 

This may be simply because the second paragraph contains the word “moose” – which is always more funny than “elephant” – or because “elephant” has a different connotation North and South of the border.[1]  Or it may be because it contains the phrase that makes me uncomfortable.

Please note: this essay is about my perceptions and my phobias – and not about Mr. Fellman and what he should/shouldn’t could/couldn’t would/wouldn’t have done.

 

The phrase that raises my caution lights is “my people”.  The reason I am only uncomfortable about this phrase is because “my people” is usually used in fairly benign ways these days, as example, the way it is used in Fellman’s article.  The problem comes with the unspoken echo of “and your people” which can rapidly become “you people.”  Strangely, I am okay with the next paragraph that talks about Canadian in the third person without any “my” or “your”.  This is probably because the unspoken echo here is “us” and “our” which I automatically feel part of and so not excluded.  The “my people” may exclude me, or worse, be a prelude to including me in a category considered to be undesirable by the speaker.

 

I was thinking that somehow “my family” would not have made my skin nervous, and I was wondering why.  I suspect it is because of scale and paradox.  I personally know of probably less than a thousand members of my extended family.  Also, my family is composed of at least two sides that are equally interesting and embarrassing but in such totally diverse ways that “my family” can never be seen as a single unit.  Somehow, saying “my family” establishes that the group under discussion is as much a burden as a blessing (and me to them as well, of course), and so not a threat.  “My people” seems more monolithic – regardless of the fact that I know of no “people”, no “race” that can be identified as a unified group and who agree on anything about anything.

 

So, is it the specter of race?  I know that often people who identify with one or another race have to do so by suppressing all the other links their family brings them to other races.  Sometimes the suppression is willing and sometimes not, and also what needs to be suppressed can be big or small.  But to identify with a family is to identify with all the warts and all the beauty marks.  Some families (like mine) have family mythologies that pivot on the suppression of some heritage or past indiscretions.  If we got powerful, those mythologies would be debilitating to all of us and to everyone we had power over.

 

But most people’s families do not become powerful enough to create broad dysfunction.  “Peoples” do.

 

Does using the phrase “my people” imply an acknowledgement of power that a racially similar group of people share or suffer from?  Is it an invitation to the exercise of power?  Is it passive-aggressive reminder of past power structures?  Is it an unconscious bid for power – or perhaps a bid for exemption from the power of others?  I don’t know.

 

I do suspect that my comfort with the phrase “my family” is misplaced.  If Trudeau had used it, he wouldn’t have been including me, and it would have been a conversational marker that he belonged to a group that had different standards/ideas from the family I belong to.  The phrase would have still been tainted by the odour of power relations.  It is probably because my family has no power that I feel it is an innocuous phrase to use.  Perhaps Mr. Fellman feels the same way about “my people”.

 

I am also probably delusional in thinking that I can discuss the use of a phrase of language without discussing the user of the phrase, because each use of language is always the choice of one individual for one specific purpose (collective works notwithstanding – one person makes the first pick of a phrase and then the final choice is still the decision of one final person at the end).  So, I suppose I am objecting to the power exercised by Fellman in choosing his own words.  I want to substitute my power. 

 

Regardless, moose is still funnier than elephant.  

               Moose.  Moose.  Moose.

[1] – South of the Border, one of the two political parties is represented by an elephant (I can’t remember which one without looking it up, so that tells you how much it means to me (a Canadian) in that context.  North of the Border, use of the word reminds us of Trudeau’s speech.  ‘ “Living next to you,” Trudeau told an American audience in a speech to the National Press Club in 1969, “is like sleeping with an elephant; no matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” ’

http://www.international.gc.ca/department/history-histoire/canada9-en.asp  This has become encapsulated in various forms of the phrase “mouse sleeping with the elephant” in popular discussions here.  Perhaps, then, Fellman really meant “The Mouse Question” except that “moose” is always funnier than either mouse or elephant – which may really be why the Tyee teased with the second paragraph.