Margin Notes: Mutts, Women, Fox and Coupland

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I found it interesting that Canadian commentators have seemed to take more notice of US President-Elect Barack Obama referring to "mutts like me" during his press conference on Friday. By invoking the concept of a mutt, or a dog of mixed or indeterminate breed, Obama may have been trying to move toward a truly post-racial view. Almost all Americans are mutts of some kind, even if they identify with a race. It's rather hard to deny I'm Caucasian, for example, but when I once tried to articulate the various nationalities of my ancestors a friend in college summed it up by saying "okay, you're a mutt." If the United States can adopt a "mutt" identity much as Mexico has adopted a "mestizo" identity, perhaps it can move beyond racial distinctions someday. Of course, there is an alternate etymology of the word--if we're all mutts, it could mean we're all muttonheads.

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The 24-seat New Hampshire Senate now features 13 women, making it the first legislative body in the United States to have a female majority. As notable as this might be, no less than former President Bill Clinton pointed out that even New Hampshire has not achieved the level of female representation as Rwanda, where the parliament is 56% women. That's right, Rwanda leads the United States of America (and Canada, for that matter).

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If you'd like to learn more about the Masked Avengers who pranked Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin during the final week of the campaign, check out this week's C'est la vie from CBC Radio One. This program provides weekly insight into francophone Canada for anglophones, and this week's show is especially amusing. Listen to the show to hear them compare their various pranks, including Britney Spears, Bill Gates, and Jacques Chirac as well as Palin. The contrast between Gates and the other pranks was particularly revealing.

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The cable television network may be a different story, but I actually had a hard time detecting any bias in the Fox News web site during the campaign. They tended to provide a raw live feed of the debates that had no commentary whatsoever, and their news stories--as opposed to their commentaries--actually used quite balanced and accurate word choices. On election night, I noted the headline "Momentum Builds" and text clearly describing excitement amongst Democrats after Pennsylvania was called for Obama. Could it be that their on-line staff takes a different attitude than their on-air staff?

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Film-maker Spike Lee's interviews on election night were especially amusing. To any question, his answer would be "Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama. Obama, Obama. Next question?" It reminded me of a commentary by CBC Radio One's then-Sunday Morning host Ian Brown during a certain trial in Santa Monica, California in 1994--"O.J., O.J., O.J. O.J., O.J. O.J., O.J in my car. O.J., O.J. on the wall..."

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Apparently Canada is feeling so worried about revisionism in the United States that we're now getting defensive about the War of 1812, which just in case you've forgotten, Britain won. Author Douglas Coupland is concerned about "creeping revisionism" surrounding the War of 1812, and has dedicated a new monument in Toronto to specifically tweak US revisionists. Perhaps Coupland is on to something--read the Wikipedia article on the War of 1812, which currently describes the conflict as a draw. In terms of territory, this is accurate, but generally when a nation sets out to take over territory and fails to do so, this is considered a loss, not a draw.

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This week, what I believe to be the last physical reminder that I lived in Massachusetts, save for photographs by a Cambridge-based photographer on my walls, disappeared as a Market Basket-branded carton of cotton swabs finally ran out, three years after I left Boston. I tended to frequent the downscale Market Basket while living in New England, never feeling fully comfortable about Star Market and successor Shaw's--the irony is that now that I live in a place with many downscale markets like No Frills, Price Chopper, and Food4Less, I most often shop at Loblaw's, which is more like Shaw's than Market Basket.