RE: [pf] elephant in our living room

by Ronald Hands

13 December 2000 22:05 UTC

"David MacClement" <davd@ihug.co.nz> wrote:

        (ii) I believe The US Democratic Party has an elephant as its
symbol.

  Speaking of elephants, there's a new book just published in Canada,
Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America, by a Toronto academic, James
Laxer (Viking/Penguin, ISBN 0-670-88641-6.
   It's an attempt to take a fresh look, from an outsider's viewpoint, at
"what in theory is not an empire" but "in substance turns out to be the most
far-flung  and advanced of all the empires in history."
   Rather than a dry, academic tome, this is written as a series of lively
vignettes -- an anthropological examination of characteristic samples of the
American population in their native haunts: at a Buffalo Bills game, or
outside on execution site in Texas, for instance.
   There's one chapter that might strike a special chord with PFers, the one
titled "Greed, gluttony, God and the American dream."  Laxer remarks: "I
can't get over the capacity of Americans to shop, shop and shop some more,
to go home and arrange their acquired treasures and then plan for the next
outing."
   I was fascinated by his look at the gun culture in the U.S.  Most of us
here in Canada are probably aware of the astonishing carnage caused by guns
south of the 49th parallel -- almost 36,000 deaths in 1995.  What I didn't
know was that more than half of these were suicides.
   By the way, although I'm aware the elephant is the symbol of one of the
U.S. political parties, ask any Canadian for the connection and he will
likely mention the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's speech to the
Washington National Press Club in 1969 when Trudeau remarked on the nervous
feeling Canadians have about living next to an elephant, affected "by every
twitch and grunt."

-- Ron
Hamilton, ON