The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1967, Blaðsíða 28

26
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Summer 1967
THE SPIRIT OF A NATION
by Caroline Gunnarsson
Is it true that the Centennial Com-
mission is recruiting a work party to
whitewash the Rockies?
It’s really not a bad idea. We’re neat
and tidy people, respectable, modest
and pure, but we needn’t go about
promoting the image in a colorless way.
The paint job might take some of the
glory out of the mountains, but it
would add a splash of color to the
people, for it takes courage to tackle
the job. Since we have never learned
the art of embroidery, we might as well
play for real and show the world what
puritanical zeal can amount to.
So far we have applied our energies
mostly to our history. We have pruned
and whitewashed that within an inch
of its life. Ours have been lies of
omission rather than those of creative
commission.
Other nations do otherwise. They
garb the men and women who have
touched their history in fantastic
fabrications. They hold halos over
their heroes and revere their rascals.
With us it’s a matter of conscience to
scrape the salty crust of folklore from
our history; to serve it up bland and
unspiced.
We seem to have lost sighft of the
fact we are the folk. We’re the stuff
of the nation, and the legends that
grow up around the proven facts of hi-
story are part and parcel of us. Some-
thing within us inspired them in (the
first place and something within us
responded to the grain of .truth in them
that made them ours.
Legends that hit us in the heart are
the very essence of a culture that unites
people in a mutual chuckle or tear.
They should form part of the crest of
their nationhood.
But have we ever felt as close Ito the
Father of Confederation as the Amer-
icans, say, feel to the father of their
country? We have not. Is this partly
because of a guilty feeling we have
about Sir John’s drinking? He is cer-
tainly not all there without his bottle.
Yet history books tend to leave it be-
hind when they introduce him to our
children. This may be better for his
dignity, but it somewhat robs him of
the color and ruggedness a hero needs
for survival after death.
Could we not have learned to cherish
a debonair Macdonald riding the
hustings with the demon rum on his
back—achieving the impossible in
mighty defiance of the demon’s evil
designs? This took moral muscle. Let’s
admit it. No mean Character could
have tackled ithis sort of gremlin every
day of his life and managed to father
Confederation despite the interference.
But so far we haven’t woven any
glitter out of the wanton legends about
Macdonald. Yet look what the Amer-
icans did with George Washington.
They made him a president who never
told a Me. This would be a political
sin nowadays. Things are so compUcat
ed in our day that no good party man
would dare confess to so uninventive
a campaign.