National Dreams by Francis Daniel;

Author:Francis, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS006000, Canadian History
ISBN: 544613
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 1997-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Divided We Stand THE MYTH OF HEROISM

Growing up in the 1950s, I enjoyed a fairly typical Canadian boyhood. In other words, all my references were American. My family acquired a television set quite early and my favourite shows included Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, and The Honeymooners. Each Sunday evening we gathered to watch Father Knows Best, followed by The Ed Sullivan Show. In my mind, my own father and Robert Young, the star of Father Knows Best, were basically the same person. I learned to dance by watching American Bandstand. My favourite rock star was Buddy Holly. I read about the world in The Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. Every autumn my friends and I huddled in groups in the schoolyard listening to the World Series on our portable radios. A Davy Crockett coonskin cap was for a time my most prized possession. We named our cats Ozzie and Harriet.

I was sixteen years old when President Kennedy died. Like everyone else I knew, I idolized him: his apparent liberalism, his sophistication, his hair, his wife, the whole Camelot myth. It was a Friday morning. The principal announced over the public address system that the president had been shot, then some time later that he was dead. We were released from school and I spent the weekend rooted in front of the television set watching the awful story play itself out: the details of the assassination over and over again, the body being flown back to Washington, the endless lineup of mourners snaking past the coffin, Lee Harvey Oswald being shot down right before my eyes, and finally the funeral cortege to the cemetery, the grieving widow, the riderless horse, the volley of rifle fire at the graveside.

That weekend was the most compelling time in my life. Nothing equalled it until the political kidnappings and murder in Quebec in October 1970. I watched those events hour after hour on television as well, and I recall vividly Pierre Trudeau’s “just watch me” comments on the steps of the Parliament Buildings, the open trunk of the car which contained Pierre Laporte’s strangled corpse, another cavalcade of cars, this time ferrying the “terrorists” to the airplane which would carry them to exile in Cuba. In a real sense I began taking Canada seriously that fall and a large part of the reason was that we had finally made prime time television with our own act of political madness.

In the universe I inhabited as a boy, there were no Canadian stars. There was no room; the skies were filled with the super novas of American history, politics, and pop culture. How could Bobby Curtola and the Plouffe family compete? Canada was a subject you studied in school because you had to, like biology. It was not a place which commanded your attention in real life. When I was looking for “role models” (we didn’t use the term then) to admire and emulate, I found them on American television or in the myths of the American West or the comic books about U.

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