What a Remembrance Day. Over at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Site, there’s a history of the battle of Vimy Ridge that’s supposed to be comprehensive, even though it does not include any mention of the victorious general of that battle, Viscount Field Marshal Byng. It’s as if the 1951 scuffle between President Truman and General MacArthur had led to MacArthur’s World War 2 record being blotted out every November 11.

Canada is well known for being less hospitable to excellence than the United States, in large part because of the use of schadenfreude as a sort of political coin of the realm. The explanations proffered from time to time – the current one being Canada’ economy being made much less competitive thanks to the prevalence of favoritism – tend to describe the particular manifestation of this schadenfreude; put the symptom and the cause together, and you’ve got how the favoritism works: resentment of excellence. That’s what’s used to get the special treatment.

Americans are used to lumping resentment of excellence in with political correctness, as this review by Thomas Sowell shows clearly. This is exactly like the “favoritism” fingering above: political correctness is only a manifestation of the underlying spirit of resentment against excellence in the United States. The cause seems to be: “What about my kid?”, and takes the form of moral equivalencing.

That’s how capitalism turns into liberalism, folks. As long as people associate money with reproduction (including the preparatory stages) and reproduction with children, it’s a relatively easy slide from “Isn’t my money as good as anyone’s?” to “Isn’t my Junior as good as anyone?”

The traditional way to deal with this potentially ear-draining issue is to put Junior in a place reserved for him. In the corporate sector, this means a loud title with no subordinates. There are also sectors of the economy basically reserved for Junior, to keep him busy and happy, and writing is very much one of them. The writer that isn’t vain by nature tends to be kicked into the field.

Unless writing becomes a way to seek riches. Then the old American credo – “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you at least trying to become rich?” – kicks in, and the tumult begins, because there’s one thing that the vain man or woman excels in that more achievement-oriented people can’t: dismissing others out of hand. Hence the connection between vanity and the liberal stereotype of Toryism: the vain find it easy to be reactionary.

And you were wondering where Marxism got its moral force, eh?

As far as Canada is concerned, the schadenfreude that’s common here can be very easily explained through geography. As long as winter in a land kills, there will always be that psychological huddle-together in that land, enforced by schadenfreude because such envy promotes survival of the group. The person taking off on their own means one less hauler of logs come snow season, so preparation for the independent life does tend to be resented in snow- ridden nations, unless the mutual dependence is institutionalized by such means as a military draft.

This explains the connection between favoritism and resentment in Canada. As long as excellence requires productive solitary thought or action, and as long as the fear-of-winter element is still part of Canadian culture, there will always be that hostility towards the pursuit of excellence that charm and even eloquence can’t remove. The usual track to special treatment seems to be mirroring a pathbreaker through using a “team effort.”

This is engrained in our winter culture and is not easily eradicated by city life, and never will be as long as children are brought up by parents and not by an uncaring institution. The pass-along of perhaps obsolete traditions is very much part of the care, so the most we can expect is to whittle such echoes away generation by generation through the process of discretion, whose price is a certain degree of insincerity between parent and child. To emigrate from an old cultural set-up to the new, and to assimilate to the new fabric.

A progressive country is very much a nation of immigrants, therefore, because assimilation never ends. Even the tenth-generation American has to re-assimilate when the cultural fabric changes.

Do you know how many Americans with more than five generations of ancestors born and raised in the United States would be embarrassed as hell if these ancestors were transported from their respective pasts to today? Might I say all of them, including the ones whose great-great grandfather was a success?

The above “Dooleying,” illustrated in fictional form in John Brunner’s Timescoop, seems to be what promotes the care and feeding of excellence in the United States. As long as the vain are knocked down to the “sole-proprietor” level – mostly through good- natured flattery – the United States will still be hospitable to excellence. If that goes, then it’s welcome to bottleneck land!

[As far as what promotes excellence in Canada, that’s a state secret. Chance are, the only Americans that know what the yeast is are in the CIA.]