Archives for posts with tag: North America

Bigger better faster stronger. When I’m teaching I’ll often make fun of this idea because a) it’s not an idea, and b) it only gets embraced as an idea by people who wouldn’t know a good idea if it came up to them and introduced itself.

I make fun of “bigger better faster stronger”-type thinking because it’s so very (North) American; it pre-supposes that more is better. It does so by way of crafting seemingly sensible truisms: Bigger is bigger than smaller; faster is faster than slower; stronger is stronger than weaker. The “better” is the glue that holds this somewhat silly premise together. Because the word “better” is in there, some erroneously believe that this notion makes sense. Except it doesn’t.

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NB: It’s a general rule of mine to not write anything meant for public consumption when I’m mad. I am very consciously breaking this rule right now. Right now, I am so angry I can barely see straight. If you can make it to the end of this diatribe, you’ll find out why.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I was talking to Art Threat‘s Rob Maguire about racism. I told him I wanted to start a blog called Canada Is A Racist Country based on comments I’d seen in response to pieces on cbc.ca. I was just going to take screenshots and put them up there for people to see and comment on. He thought it was a great idea. I never did it in part because I didn’t want to have to get into conversations about race and racism all the time. Those conversations hurt my head in part because they’re so predictable.

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